NVIDIA & the US Government Just Bailed out Intel, Sending the Stock Soaring w/ Dave Blundin, Salim Ismail & Alexander Wissner-Gross | EP #195

27:53Visit Blitzy .com to schedule a demo and start building with Blitzy today. It's jumping to the AI Wars. Okay, here we go. Deep -mind and open AI achieve gold at the coding Olympics over to you, Alex. Gosh, this is such an exciting development. If you look at the past six or so months of developments from the Frontier Lapse, on the International Math Olympiad, IMO, Golds, which several American and Chinese labs claimed credit for with their models. With the International Olympiad and Informatics IOI, I was on once upon a time, I was on the US Olympic team for the IOI, and now for the ICPC, which is a collegiate coding Olympics.

28:44It's absolutely incredible to see. If you remember the think back to the original Q -star model, this was this reasoning model from OpenAI that was then renamed Project Strawberry and renamed from Project Strawberry to the O class of models, O1 and O3, that was like the, in some sense, the last major overhang to collapse, that the last major jump in capability from the Frontier Labs, that's the jump from models that couldn't reason, to models that could reason. And this smells to me like the next major leap after reasoning models, which is to say, models that are able to reason without the ability, without having been trained on easy to verify problems.

29:32If you're solving a math problem on the IMO, you don't have the luxury of being able to take a partial result, a partial solution, and go up and ask a judge, am I correct? And similarly here, in these coding Olympics, we're starting to see AIs that are strictly superhuman, that do better than all of the humans in the competition on problems, on tasks that are difficult to verify in the middle of the contest. So my prediction here is, sometime, perhaps by the end of this calendar year, we're going to see the next major strawberry -cute star O -series moment when some of these models start to get broadly deployed generally available.

30:17And Peter, my modal hypothesis regarding the future is first we solve superintelligence and then we use superintelligence to solve math, science, and engineering. I think this is solve everything. I think this is like the key building blocks for solving everything. That's the war cry. That's humanity for cry. It is. So Alex, a question for you. So Darryl, I don't know, six months ago, went on record, saying he expected we'd be at 90 % everything being coded by AI in 2026. We'd reach 100 % of all coding being done by AI. Your thoughts on that? A depending on which rumors you believe coming out of the frontier model developers, the frontier labs, it seems like we're very much on trajectory for that.

31:03You read stories of, Now that almost every frontier lab has its own agent code generator. You read stories about people in these frontier labs yelling at their agent code generators to do their work for them, rather than writing code at this point themselves. I think we more or less found our way into that part of Dario's future. Incredible. In that photo, a metaphor here, Alex, and tell me if you agree with this or not? Sure. When we started having AI's create art, they were very much poo -pooed at the beginning, and then over time, if there were anonymous, they started winning art competitions.

31:44And when art is really generative at its core, when you're a high functioning software developer, you're essentially an artist, you're pulling together libraries, trying to figure out how you're going to solve particular problems, it feels to me like that same tipping point has been achieved in coding where they're using constructs of most people's peak human beings wouldn't consider, but they're bringing it to bear on a particular problem solving it very, very elegantly. Would you agree with that metaphor? It's an interesting question that I want to construe as a question about benchmarking. So with the early generative art arguably other than binary taste tests between competing models on various arenas, to my knowledge, there wasn't really a benchmark for superhuman art generation, whereas for coding, for math, for some of these other relatively straightforward to verify problems and tasks, there very much is a goalpost, a benchmark that one can waterline, if you will, that one can say, this is superhuman versus subhuman, which is why we've talked in the past about how we just assumed right by the touring test, even though the Logan her prize, you know, Rest in Peace isn't even active anymore.

32:58We just assumed right by superhuman conversational agents. Why did we do that? Arguably because we didn't have a strict rigorous benchmark in place to be the red flag sign that we've just passed it. It's just our earlier conversation. We're like, the little benchmarks are all gone now. So now we need to be on. Right. We need harder benchmarks. And we'll talk about that. I think benchmarks give us targets to shoot for and they allow us to measure our progress. and we humans do our best work when we're competing against each other. I'm going to say perhaps future agenda AI's are going to do good work when they're inspired to motivate to compete against each other too.

33:37We'll see. All right, other breaking news, just in the last 48 hours, new meta -rayband -powered display glasses and a neural band. So this is the first ever private in lens display controlled by a wristband where you're using basically finger movements and you're picking up the EMG, electromagnetic myographic signals coming out of your forearm drill to type silently, right? So you're talking to your wife or girlfriend or boyfriend and you're having an in -depth conversation and you're responding in your text at the same time. What could possibly go wrong? Let's take a look at this video one moment.

34:23So we can see here the graphic. You see the person's hand basically manipulating the display. So you're looking off into the distance and you're typing at the same time. I thought, first of all, let's talk about, you know, how's the fashion statement here? What do you think of the glasses a little bit too thick on the rim? Good enough. Good people are going to wear them. They're close enough. I mean, the prior, you know, look through goggles. No, it was never going to happen. They're close enough. Actually, you know, if you think about how your phone got smaller and smaller and smaller, and then somebody said, you know what?

35:07I actually want more screen space, and now they're getting bigger. I think the glasses will do the same thing, because as people get used to them, they're like, well, I want a little more battery life, and they're actually gonna, they'll be fine. At the abundant summit, I don't know, five years ago, I had a company called Mojo Vision there that had basically created a display on contact lenses, which I think would be super cool. And I think we'll probably get there eventually, but Zuck is predicting that these glasses We'll replace phones. The challenge I have is I lose so many, my sunglasses all the time, I'm concerned about losing $1 ,000 piece of equipment.

35:46I know what they're really opening for me is if you want to grab a picture, I didn't quite get this until somebody showed me. If you want to grab a picture, you just hold your fingers like that and that takes the picture instantaneously and then it files it. It's like, oh my god, these gesture controls are going to get really ornate. you'll see people at the airport kind of wave in their hands around it like what is going on there Let's like take that picture file that picture whatever But it's a great way to control the machine. Yeah, it's so it's like wow I can now suddenly see where this is going Uh, so I have two glasses buddy These are the meta AI glasses you handed out a few years ago to abundance Peter the first generation of which I was surprisingly useful Uh, really great to have conversations with and walk around etc as long as you're in the sun if you're in the dark It gets a little harder.

36:32I've got a prediction that this is a very temporary thing. I think we'll get so many more efficient ways of getting signal from noise out of the body, like those that recent development where you could mouth, mouth what you're trying to say, and we just speak it for you. But I think this becomes irrelevant before you get straight to that. You're saying that the EMG on your wrist, the neural bad is going to become relevant. Yeah, I think we'll find much more elegant ways of getting straight from the brain to what you're trying to do. Yeah, these are both through physical manipulation, et cetera.

37:03Alex, what are you thinking about these glasses? Yeah, I tend to think that the glasses are lovely, but they're also a bit of a red herring. The input methods, I think, are far more interesting. So it may start with these metanural bands, wrist bands that look like a smartwatch that is effectively directly interfacing, albeit non -invasively, with the peripheral nervous system. But this here in plain sight is the beginnings of, I think, a brain computer interface. You start with the peripheral nervous system interface around the wrist. It's going to work its way up to some sort of extension of smart glasses, probably, or a headband that does a non -invasive brain computer interface.

37:47And the future, Werner Vinci wrote about this extensively in rainbows and other novels. We're finally living in the future where silent messaging that results from non -invasive peripheral nervous system computer interfaces is a reality and this probably ends up being the first mass market effectively BCI. Yeah, you know what I find exciting. I just, I'm just visual in my head of it slowly crawling up closer and closer to your brain as it gets smarter. I don't know if you, it's like a great horror movie with you. Jack, injecting mannights through the ear to connect to your temporal lobe. What I find fascinating here is a future in which we are constantly uploading our visual input.

38:33So imagine that we have enough memory, enough bandwidth, which we do, where we're dribbling bits all the time, and whatever we've seen, whatever we've heard, every interaction we've had is available to your AI and available for a full recall on the cloud. But, you know, how many times have you had a conversation with your spouse in which you said, you said, no, no, no, I didn't say that. I said this. Well, you're never going to have that argument again. It's all going to be unrecorded. But people are all, also, I think even putting aside the various sort of black mirror -esque scenarios enabled by that, this is going to be amazing, amazing for fleet learning and training of human art robots.

39:20Imagine the world. Yeah, imagine a world where a billion of these plus are deployed and now you can do fleet learning at scale of every sort of long tail Occupation manual labor task just off of first -person video data coming out of these smart classes and that's what Elon said about You know training up Optimus 3 we're no longer no longer to do it in you know full -body suits where we're we're tracking the movements and 3D position of the fingers and hands, we're going to be doing it from just visual learning the same way that self -driving always picked up from visual learning. This is also going to be a massive value to the elder population, people who have degrading memory.

40:03I simply wanted so that when someone's approaching me, my AI does facial recognition and calls up the last conversation. I remind me to ask, you know, how is your son or daughter's birthday? I mean, it's going to create a very rich social interaction. In the independent of the gesture of stuff, the broader implications of this are so huge, right? It's like to all those stuff that you talk about Peter, the cognitive enhancement, the memory enhancement. I think the, it's just the interface that needs to be solved. Just a humorous memory here. I remember coming back from, you were talking about marriage Peter and trying to recollect conversations.

40:41I remember coming up from one of my business trips and I was a bit disheveled and a bit jet lagged and literally looks at me, goes, the user interface around you right now is really bad. I forgot to let. I love that. So this is a, I mean, for those listening, this is a window into what's coming rapidly. We've been saying for some time that the form factor of the phone is gonna disappear. It's gonna come into headwear. It's gonna become, yeah. Go on, Dave. Just occurred to me, well, based on what Alex just said, I was wondering, why do I look for this podcast so much and canceling all my meetings to do it?

41:17But what Alex just said just made me realize something that I hadn't realized before, which is, you know how when the laptop first came out, everybody wanted to attach a mouse to it, because you're used to using a mouse. And then the trackpad, you know, on all the iPhones came out and everyone's used to swiping. So then they backported the trackpad to the laptop. Now everything works the way it does on your phone. You swipe left, swipe up, down, whatever. So now the new interface is going to be waving your hands in the air, because that's the only way to control the glasses. And then people are going to fall in love with that.

41:44And then the keyboard and the trackpad will go away. Because we're like, well, why can't I use my gestures on my laptop? It's got a camera. And so I totally didn't dawn on me till just now, based on what Alex said, that that's how it's going to evolve. Yeah. Well, and it's going to be, this will be a driver for increases in BCI. So at the abundance summit this year, I've got two of the top brain computer interface companies coming. One is invasive and one is non -invasive. But I think our ability to get this signal out of the noise is going to enable us to think and to say, click picture or pull up my schedule for the day.

42:25I think that this form of user interface is what's going to ultimately drive a need for rapid BCI capabilities. I don't think you're going to want to use your hands for the long run. I think you're going to want to think and Google. It's only a phase. To the extent that you're a technological determinist and you think there's sort of a pre -ordained sequence of technologies that's likely to happen, I think the consensus among the perhaps futurist community is we go from smartphones to smart glasses to BCIs to some sort of human machine symbiosis or workloads in roughly that order. So if you believe in that sequence, then this is right on the money for where we're supposed to be.

43:13Unless you know that this is the other eye opener. Let's note this is a long progression that's been going on for, you know, hundreds of years, right? Dave, you sometimes wear glasses like we would call you a transhumanist because you're augmenting yourself with technology. The minute you get a vaccination, you're a cyborg technically. So this has been a long thing. We're just accelerating the pace of it very rapidly. And we're allowing ourselves to utilize more and more extreme variations of this. The other insight comes out of this brainstorming we do together as well as a lot of people that I talk to say, look, I don't need my computer right in front of my eyes all day and I don't need, I need to disconnect from it.

43:56And that's true, but as soon as it's super intelligent, and it's giving you crazy great advice about where to stop and eat, where to drive, what to do next, how to live your life, then you get addicted to it so quickly. Because right now, anyone under the age of 20 has iPhone separation anxiety or phone separation anxiety. If you try and take away their phone for a weekend and they go camping in the woods without it, they're just like in shock. But once the thing is super intelligent, having being disconnected from it will basically make you naked. And so people are going to wear these glasses for sure.

44:29For symbiote is gone. You know, we made a decision in our family to not get our kids who are 14 now phones until at least age 16. And you know, it's so strange because when I go to a birthday party of their classmates, age 14, they're all heads down in their phones, ignoring everything else that's going on. And I just hate that. So it's been tough, but you know it's harder than not giving your kids phones. It's taking it away after you've given it to them. So I'm hoping the kids will jump instead of a phone they'll go directly to a BCI. We'll see. Well, I think this is so wise, Peter, because at this age their brains are just finalizing their final kind of construction of the Neo Cortex and to have a diverted way is just very, very damaging.

45:22I mean, just to be clear, they're not saints, right? They're on Roblox and Minecraft and all the games on there. They do have Macbooks, which they like, but I just, you're not carrying the Macbook around during social interactions, during a baseball game or during a birthday party. So there's some level. So to other parents out there, if your kids don't have a phone yet, consider not giving it to them. The data is so strong about mental health. I think that's the key point. There's so much strong evidence, right? And I think one of the things we are really deep on in this podcast is evidentiary -based framing of discussions.

46:03Yeah. All right. Let's move on to our next topic here. And this was a tweet that went out this morning that I flagged. It's the US risks losing to China in chip wars. This comes from our US AI and crypto's our David Sacks. Let me just read it. Huawei just launched a new AI chip and China has ordered firms to stop buying certain and video chips. China is not desperate for our chips. It's producing its own and intends to compete globally and the semiconductor marketplace. If US firms are blocked by excessive controls, we risk forfeiting the AI race to China. The hawkest position to help American companies win, not help Huawei, build a digital silk road is so critically important.

46:54So we've talked about this. As soon as you make anything illegal or you stop trade, you're incentivizing the other side, in this case China, to develop capabilities and then compete directly with you. And this is about who's going to buy, you know, throughout Europe, through Africa, throughout the rest of Southeast Asia. What chips are these companies going to buy? Is it Intel and Nvidia or is it from Huawei? Alex, your thoughts here? I think it's instructive to look at what happens to computing during the Cold War. And in particular, there was so much siloization in the Soviet Union of their computing stack.

47:36They were inventing all sorts of exotic architectures, like turnery computers in the West, and ultimately the world we settled on a binary architecture, zeros and ones for computers, the Soviet Union, because in part of the Iron Curtain was experimenting deep, deep in their tech stack with all sorts of exotic architectural options that the West wasn't considering. If the situation does play out in a way where there is effectively competition deep into the tech stack between great powers, then I would expect based on history that we're going to see ironically greater diversity deeper in the stack.

48:19Maybe not quite at the level of binary versus turnery computing systems, but certainly I would expect to see more experimentation deep in the stack. Does this ultimately help America by having a great, capable competitor out there? Well, I think there are different sides one can take in the broader discussion. I know Peter, you're a fan of the alternative reality television series for all mankind's that explores what What would have perhaps happened if the Soviet Union had been the first to land a person on the moon rather than the United States and all of the follow -on consequences is that our original event ripples throughout the decades.

49:05It's difficult to have a crystal ball to know what happens decades from now, depending on how the great power competition over the semiconductor tech stack plays out. It's difficult to know for sure without a crystal ball. It's hard to predict the future. I get that. But what I'm just saying here is, you know, if the US was so overdominant that it was the only player, the incentive to continue innovating is there, but still so much slows down when you've got Huawei sort of leveling up to that of Nvidia. I think you're going to see the White House, you're going to see Capitol United States really tripling down.

49:45Is this another, in some way, is this move? Is this It's sort of reality about Huawei and China going to become additional fuel for the US government and the US industries to align. I mean, again, we're in a war footing here. This is a war cry that we just heard from David Sacks. Yeah, and I think what is new and interesting to me about what David's saying here is the digital silk road. We're not going to lose to China, if it's like the US versus the Soviet Union. But if the whole world ends up partnering with China and it's the US versus the world, you know, it's a meme when he got back from India and you said, hey, what's the attitude like in India and Selim says it's like, it's like America.

50:31Like what? Where's that coming from? So, you know, if Huawei becomes the open and friendly partner to the world and the US gets isolationist, that's what I think David is warning us against here. And so, you know, what is Europe going to do? What is India going to do? And that 1 .4 billion people. I have, I think this is more about the politics rather than a innovation race, just because the, there's so much incentive in the world to turn away from the U .S. right now, given the tariffs and other things that this is a, that's the forcing function rather than the chip wars themselves. It's a pretty bad situation right now.

51:14It's you know 40 years of US diplomacy tried to it was trying to keep India and China apart and now that's gone And so I think there's a bigger Game of play here. There's also and I will love your comment this Alex the whole open source Movement right so When you look at different countries everybody wants their sovereign AI everyone wants data centers Who are they going to use who's whose AI engines, whose chipsets are going to use. I mean, the world is going to split between Huawei and Chinese open source models and Nvidia and US models. We see in the last few WTF episodes, we've talked about OpenAI going aggressively into India, into the UK, into Greece, into other places, right?

52:05Because if you embed yourself there and people grow up with your models, they're likely to stick with them. I think this is a land grab in a lot of different ways, at a very critical time over the next two or three years. Alex, you're going to tell me I'm wrong or do you agree? I'll have a agree. The world is hungry for intelligence in general and maybe super intelligence in particular, but I also think there's a sense in which this being accelerated compute is the geopolitically significant scarce resource of the moment. If we were having this discussion 10 years from now, maybe we'll be belly -haking over Mars colony is running out of resources or lunar colony as a lot of competition on the moon.

52:51So I think in some sense it's important to jump up a few levels and abstract out the principle that as long as we're in a pre -general abundance world in civilization, there will always by power -lost statistics alone tend to be a one maximally geopolitically important and scarce resource at any given time and at the moment, it's accelerated computing. Everybody, there's not a week that goes by when I don't get the strangest of compliments. Someone will stop me and say, Peter, you've got such nice skin. Honestly, I never thought, especially at age 64, I'd be hearing anyone say that I have great skin, and honestly, I can't take any credit.

53:29it. I use an amazing product called One Skin OS01 twice a day every day. The company was built by four brilliant PhD women who have identified a 10 amino acid peptide that effectively reverses the age of your skin. I love it and like I say, I use it every day twice a day. There you have it. That's my secret. You go to oneskin .co and write Peter at checkout for a discount on the same product I use. Okay, now back to the episode. I hope you guys all appreciate these conversations. I want to take a moment and just say to our subscribers, thank you for subscribing. If you want to hear about our WTF episodes, when they come out because the speed at which we're putting them out has increased, take a moment to subscribe to this channel.

54:15Let's us know you love what we do and allows us to really keep you up to date because we're starting to record these WTIP episodes when there is breaking news rather than just once a week. Sometimes we'll have this twice a week. So, and again, thank you for that. Our goal here is to make my two boys proud, which they've said will happen when we reach a million subscribers. So, what the hell? All right, here's our next piece of news.

54:43It's fascinating. it's part of our solid everything. Alex, I'm going to ask you, so AI discovers new solution to century -old fluid dynamics problem. How critical is this? How valuable is this? Why should people care? Oh, it's incredible. So we've spoken in the past Peter about this notion of AI solving everything in math science and engineering, and there are million dollar prizes for solving particular problems and math science and engineering. And this development, which was launched literally a few hours before we recorded this episode by Google DeepMind, is one such task. So this is progress towards a general solution to a million dollar problem.

55:30It's one of the so -called clay millennium prize problems. It's referred to in math and mathematical physics as the Navier Stokes problem. And the problem is basically if you have a fluid, it does the fluid ever have infinite densities or other unnatural properties. Is it possible to stir a fluid in just the right way that a singularity appears in it? And the approach that Google DeepMind has taken is really, really interesting. So for those who haven't followed the Navier Stokes problem, which I would say parenthetically, this is a key signpost. I think that we're on the verge of solving math when AI is taking these grand challenges in math and just knocking them out It's a constructive approach.

56:17So Mathematicians like Terry Tao and others have been knocking on the door of this problem for a decade plus and And the proposed solution to this problem which it peers is going to be a construction of a way to create synchial herdees out of out of fluids could as Terry and others have pointed out enable us to build nano machines and computers out of just pure fluids. Imagine if you could stir a glass of water in just the right way such that it formed circuits and those circuits performed general computations and even more exotically imagine you could stir a glass of water in just the right way such that it It created nanomachines out of fluid flow patterns of turbulence in that glass of water that created copies of themselves.

57:09So imagine creating self replicating fluid nanomachines out of a given fluid if you could just position the initial velocities and densities of the fluid in just the right way. If there's a constructive solution for navier stokes that results in singularities as Terry and others have studied this, it could literally unlock our ability. and granted this is on the more exotic and under applications to build self -replicating fluid nano machines. Wow. I know that sounds far -fetched, but this is why. It's, if you go to Alexwg .org, there are a whole bunch of essays that Alex has written on computing substrates.

57:49And people used to think about this a lot. And Alex mentioned back in the Soviet era, when computing was new, people thought about this all the time. Now everyone takes for granted that it's all gonna run on in video chips, but the neural algorithms, the new algorithms that matter are just a couple hundred lines of code. They're very simple and all the complexity is in the parameter file and the self -organization. So the idea of computing substrates that are self -organized is very viable with these new algorithms. So it's not as far afresh as it sounds at all. And then to Dave's point maybe just to build on that, at the moment we build our GPUs based on silicon CMOS.

58:27maybe at some point in the future, if Navier Stokes and other problems, related problems, have constructive solutions, maybe we'll be building our future accelerated compute out of Plasma's or out of Fluid's even, you know, cup of coffee might be more powerful computationally than in off the shelf in video RTX. So, one of the first computer -computer -computer -mium here. And it reminds me of the exactly hit truckers got to the galaxy of the whole world is essentially one big organic computer Key is asking the right questions. Yes. Ah Love it. All right Next item here on our docket today studies shows AI model can forecast a thousand plus diseases researchers built Delphi -2m that can predict how a person's health changes over time based on medical history AI models can forecast risks for over a thousand different diseases and simulate what someone's health might look like in 10 to 20 years, shaping how doctors and health care systems plan to treat and prevent illness.

59:34So we're reaching this singularity in health. We've seen Demisis Abbas predict the end of all disease within the next 10 years. We've seen Daria Amadei talk about doubling the human lifespan. And again, all of this is happening, not because we humans are becoming smarter, or that our biology is getting simpler, it's just that we're able to use, you know, advancing AI and soon ASI to understand what's going on in your 40 trillion cells, running two to five billion chemical reactions per second per cell. Who wants to jump on this? Alex went and jumping again? Yeah. I'll take this one. I mean, this was a lovely paper in this week's nature from a German team that I think underlines that these foundation models that we're training aren't just about text.

1:00:25It's not just text models or image generation with nano -bananas. We've discussed previously or even video or audio. Now this paper is widely popularizing the notion of literally disease as its own modality for foundation models that can be changed with disease token sequences. Just like a sentence is tokenized into a sequence of almost word length tokens and then fed to a frontier model like ChatGPT. This is a model that tokenizes the electronic medical record history of many, many patients into disease tokens and then can reason over a person's entire history of health an illness as if it were a sentence in some language.

1:01:08And the upshot of all of this is you can, as with a conventional frontier model that does next token prediction in text, it can predict the next disease token that a person is likely to incur. And at some point, you get sort of a medical time machine that's able to extrapolate out entire contingencies and contingency trees of a patient's future medical history. And as they say, if you tell me where I'm going to die I'll make sure I'll never go there. If you can extrapolate out a contingency tree of a person's entire Future history of health you can make sure to avoid branches that you'd rather not spend time on that's incredible You know that just the sequence of words you put forward here If you went back in history five years and spoke them like, you know Disease token sequence People go in the world are you smoking?

1:01:57You know, there are two things that struck me here. One was the tokenization of not just textbook the disease medical history with what Alex is referencing. The second thing that struck me was this was done on a population of like close to 1 .9 million people. It's a big number. And it suggested diseases can be modeled across large populations in a really powerful way. It's a gas month, baby. Yeah. And it did. It's incredible. And I encourage people not to be intimidated by it either. We're seeing more and more business plans of people that are building topic -specific foundation models. The funding is there and the people who jump in are succeeding wildly because it sounds really intimidating because it sounds ultra complex.

1:02:44But the AI is such an incredible assistant and the underlying algorithms are just very understandable if you're willing to jump in and study. This seemed to be one of those kind of things. is like, if you look at the previous conversation about, you know, computational structures and the glass, if we solve that problem, it's a little bit down the line. This seemed to me like immediately usable because any single person could take their medical history, throw it into this thing and say, okay, project out where I'm going to be, right? Is does it, am I wrong on that? No, you're not. Can I encourage folks?

1:03:15One thing that you can do is if you want these slides from this episode, we make them accessible if you go to deamandis .com slash WTF, you can download the slides from this episode or other episodes and go to your Gemini 2 .5 voice AI or go to open AI's GPT -5 voice AI and have a conversation and say, on the WTF episode there was this notion of Delphi2M about forecasting disease. And then have a conversation with AI and go deep. It has this data in it and ask, what does that mean and what's implications for me? I think your ability to have follow on conversations after this podcast to dive in deep on a particular element.

1:04:12Alex is our own personal AI on this podcast. That's right. You can use our name to follow. I'm, yeah, for sure. You could also use it to say, hey, why is that episode and tell me where I should invest? Yeah. Not investment advice. I'm going to say that again. Yeah, I think that's, this is really exciting. So at Fountain Life, you know, when I do my upload, I got 200 gigabytes of data. And I have that data on my phone, upload, uploaded into our ZORI AI, which allows me to interpolate on my current medical information. I think what this is saying is it's going to enable me to extrapolate beyond my current medical information.

1:04:55If you take that data from found life here and map it onto this, I mean, right there, you can get instant usage out of it, instant value, right? Yeah. At some point, with these, the ability to extrapolate contingency trees for health, my expectation is healthcare becomes almost like a game of chess where you're playing against an opponent biology or at least uninterrupted biology and the goal is to win. And if you can map out to high confidence the contingency tree of interventions, those would be like game actions and the underlying course of biology without that interaction, the goal of winning is longevity.

1:05:35Yeah, absolutely. I like to move to our next category, which is robotics. A lot of news in the robotics world this week as well. Let's jump in. The first piece is a friend of the pod, Brett Adcock, who's been with us a couple of times. He was on my stage at the Abundance Summit last year. this year are theme at Abundance Summit 2026 is the rise of digital super intelligence and humanoid robots. So I think if successful I'll have five different humanoid robot companies there with their robots where you can play and touch and feel them and see what it's like. Well, Brett just announced this week that he raised over a billion dollars in a series C and an extraordinary evaluation good on Brett $93 billion full disclosure.

1:06:30I am an investor in figure through my my bold capital partners venture fund. The investors include Nvidia Intel capital, Brookfield, Parkway Ventures. And thus far, figure has raised $2 billion over the last two years, making one of the fastest growing startups. And what's interesting enough is that That bread is investing this money really into manufacturing. We'll see that. Another company we did a podcast, Dave and I, we're up in Palo Alto with Burnt Bornec, the CEO of OneX Technologies. It makes the NeoGamma. They're in the midst of their raise right now and wish them the very best of luck, an incredible company.

1:07:15They're going to be investing their capital once again in building up manufacturing. And we're not at the point yet where it's going to be robots building robots, but we'll be there in the near future. But Dave, do you remember the conversation we had with Burnt about sort of the iPhone scaling Go what he had of course of course I do yeah, he had it all mapped out brilliantly in his mind actually And he was he's a phenomenal guy and actually The bread acoccus to the bread acoccus is the most down to the earth, salt of the earth, midwestern, snow -shoveling guy made good. So really, really cheering for both of these guys.

1:07:56And they're both wrestling with the supply chain of parts. The supply chain for robotics parts is terrible. China's way out of us in that front, by the way. But that has got to get figured out really fast. And it just takes capital and focus, and now they have capital. So I think it'll get built out very, very quickly now. Hewinoids first and then, you know, as Selim has been saying, it'll branch out from humanoids very, very quickly. I thought it was kind of funny, you know, burnt made a big, big deal about the soft skin and the friendly... You remember the shirts they gave us? They're really fabric.

1:08:28They're super comfortable. Yeah, love it. Your robot is better dressed than you are. And so Brett is going down the Terminator look here. which is kind of, I don't know what the difference in philosophy is driven by. But if you look underneath, you know, the 1x robots that we saw in Palo Alto, they look just like this. They're very terminator looking under the soft exoskeleton. But it really is, it's built to, you know, 1x robots are built to be soft and approachable. I would say almost hugable in that regard. But you know what I found so impressive about Brett Adcock. he's our consummate engineer, founder.

1:09:07You know, he was running archer aviation, which is one of the flying car companies that went public for multiple billions. And when Brett left Archer to start this, he committed a couple hundred million dollars of his own capital to get it going. And that ballsy move enabled him to hire an extraordinary talent from around the world and really up level, and you know, level after level, and I was lucky we got bold capital in very mysterious. It's so cool to see people like this succeed too, because not a great conversation yesterday with two MIT sophomores that are, of course, six five, which is chips and software meshed together.

1:09:50And they're so excited about the physical world, but for the longest time, there was no way for people who liked physical things to become this successful. You had to do software, you had to do software, and that was fine. You know, American people use the only one. Now, the actual yield has inspired a whole generation. Maybe these sophomores are wicked excited to build physical things using all this AI technology. I think there's something else here though, this worth pointing out, right? Which is that these folks, Brett and others are not interested in the money. They're interested in making a massive difference in transforming the business.

1:10:24Yes, exactly. And when you have that purpose, and then you can have a success and you can deploy that capital back in. The positive feedback loop and flywheel that creates inspiring, as Elon has done, inspiring the next generation and Brett will inspire another of several sets of generations. It's incredible to see. And it's hard to become pessimistic about the world when you see this. Yeah. Yeah, totally, totally agree. I mean, there's just feeling you see it in the posts actually in the podcast, just fear and fear and fear and fear. And a lot of the people that rose to the top, you know, work on a whack jobs.

1:10:58There's no doubt about it, but then you meet these guys that are the new generation and they're so The very best on world good and they're so so they're so inspiring so it does make you feel confident that The good things are coming. You know funny story of a funny story here I remember meeting one of the founders of one of these level two blockchains And I said to him you know He's like 18 or 19 this kid and I go you know Why why would you do this on Ethereum when you couldn't bring your own layer one blockchain? and he goes, well according to your own book, a new innovation has to be 10 times better than market, otherwise the market ignores them.

1:11:34So, you know, and I'm like, holy crap, this little 18 -year -old guy is quoting my own book, it was so impressive, and this whole new generation are all like that, so they're so with it, it's incredible. It's very annoying that I wasn't that alive now at 18 to take on this kind of crazy risk. Don't worry, buddy, you're gonna, we're gonna give you an extra 50 plus years of extra lifespan here. I have to go myself to sound like. One thing that's important here is people are hungry for optimism. People are hungry for a positive, optimistic, hopeful future because they're so decimated. I had two tweets go viral and get like 5, 8 ,000 likes within two days and they were both about optimism.

1:12:21It helped that Elon retweeted both of them. But it's people want optimism. They really do because we got so much negative news on the planet. So you said in your tweet that the only time we're exciting to be alive today is tomorrow, which I thought was great. And he learned that better to live life as a retreat of yours saying, better be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right. I would go further and say even beyond optimism, It's difficult for me at least to imagine a future where real growth, real economic growth and wealth of our planet grow significantly without passing through a humanoid robot or some other substantially similar robotic stage where manual labor is scaled up by orders of magnitude.

1:13:08It's almost an instrumentally convergent goal, I think, for achieving some of the more ambitious futures. And I want to remind people, you know, your mindset is your neuron that, right? You're who you speak to, the way you see the world is constantly shaping the way you react opportunities and challenges. And you need to be surrounding yourself with people who see the world in a positive, can -do, optimistic abundance -minded future, which is why we do this podcast, why we spend the time, why I love, you know, my moonshot mates so much. So hopefully this is helping you shape your purpose -driven abundance exponential mindset as well.

1:13:50All right, you can't talk about robots without talking about what Elon is doing. So he is teased Optimus 3, provides some predictions. So in this image, if you're watching this on YouTube, which I hope you are, there is an image of Optimus 2 Gen 2, or Gen 2 and a vision of Generation 3, much sleeker looks like Optimus went on a little bit of a diet and we're in sort of a trimming. Taking GLP ones. But here's some of the details. The first ever OLED face display for expression and with and having stronger hands. I think one of the things we talked about this Dave with burnt about the whole element of the face and how close to the uncanny valley we allow it to go.

1:14:46Walking speeds are closer to humans with better balance and navigation. Prototypes by the end of 2025 mass production in 26 with a goal of 1 million robots per year.

1:15:05I'm not sure if that's said publicly, he expects this to be the reason that he gets his pay package. Remember, he's got a trillion dollar pay package. If you can grow Tesla to $8 trillion, which is an order of eight to 12 acts of word is today. Thoughts on this, gentlemen. Well, I think colonizing and developing the solar system is going to entail lots of dirty dull and dangerous jobs. So I for one will be delighted to live in a near future where the solar system is populated by lots of humanoid robotics of general AI capacity. I think on the other hand, going back to the discussion we had last time, at some point I would predict the person who discussion is inevitably going to happen.

1:15:56We're just trotting into various sci -fi futures at some point And if we reach some threshold of AGI personhood and AGI is embodied in human form factors or human form factors, someone somewhere will surely want to push on the personhood question. And if the sort of the mature embodiment of these vision language action VLA models ends up becoming more and more human like I think that will push the discussion even more so. I have a question for the three of you. The best kind of conversation around personhood and this that I've seen was Star Trek next generation with data. Yeah. Yeah, several episodes talking about what rights and humanity, emotions, he had a emotional chip and better than has any one of you seen a better treatment of the personhood question.

1:16:52There's bison 10, that. Bison 10, your man did a good job. Oh, in sci -fi? Yeah. Oh, data's, data's gotta be the best, all right? Yeah. That's what I thought. I would say accelerometer by car. Yeah, data's journey of self -discovery. Yeah, so, so. Yeah, actually you should repeat that. Self -Alex, by the way. Yeah, I know everyone should read that. And you also mentioned Werner Vinci, Rainbow Zend. And anything else that comes to mind, you know, the vision and the terminology from those books, please read the book or at least skim through it to get on the same page with Alex. It's absolutely worth making the investment.

1:17:28You put a list of those in the show notes. And just to give credit here, Verniv Ringe was the first person that coined the term the technological singularity. Actually, he popularized it. Is it the... Five -demon? So the notion goes all the way back to IJ Good and Intelligence Explosion as a mathematical singularity. But he, Vernor was the one who first like popularized the technological singularity as such. Yeah. I said my prediction my prediction was boots on Mars by 2030 except they're going to be robot boots. Right. I mean, I hope they have wheels. I hope they have wheels. Now they're not going to have wheels for God's sakes.

1:18:08They're climbing on rocks and across, you know, Martian Martians. Both of them have both have them have both. You can have the optionality for God's sakes. Nope. Nope. They're going to do and they're going to help us do what humans do best explore. But here's what's interesting, right? So you send the robot fleets there first, and they build the habitats. They get everything ready. They, you know, us squishy carbon life forms don't want to end up in a harsh environment, let the robots go set it up for us, and then we'll go join them. But this is a core hybrid. Or hybrid solutions, tell the robotics, the problem is, of course, latency, but there are there are various compensations for that.

1:18:50Yeah, you know what, I totally, the one thing I totally don't get, and you can explain it to me if you can, and Peter touched on this a second ago. So I had this feeling in my chest the other day of just this raw enthusiasm that I don't think I've had that actual feeling since I was playing high school soccer and you're about to win a game like this, it's like this physical enthusiasm vibe. And I was working on a neural net, and it's a neural net that's designed to build other neural nets. And it just freaking worked. It just flat out, you know, cracked the code and worked. And this is all part of this new quantum company that I'm working on with Alex.

1:19:26And so you take that same thought process and you say, well, within robotics, all three of these companies are working on these humanoid robots. But wouldn't the first thing they want to build be what Peter said a second ago? The robot that's manufacturing the robot is far more important than the robot itself because of the self -improvement effect. And I don't know if they're doing it, just doing it very quietly and not showing anybody, or if that thought had, because when you talk about 1X figure and Tesla, I haven't seen them talk about that at all, but that's the first thing I would do is build a robot that's manufacturing the robot.

1:19:59Well, for what it's worth, I mean, I think Elon has made several comments about the importance of the machine that makes the machine and has said on several occasions that some of the earliest deployments of Optimus will be in Tesla factories. So to the extent that Tesla factories are turning out not just cars, but also robots. I think that's sort of self -looking ice cream cone or recursive self -improvement cycle is either already started or about to start. Yeah. Well, for everybody listening, the important thing here is to realize that recursive self -improvement is now happening in AI and will accelerate and we'll soon be happening in mechanical systems and we'll accelerate.

1:20:41And this is where we have this intelligence and exponential explosion that I still feel like Ray has it wrong on the singularity. I think it's too far out there. I don't know. It depends on the reality every moment of the day. It depends how you define it. I'd like to throw in the following comment that when you think about recursive self -improvement, that's actually the fundamental basis of evolution. So we're just continuing the true trajectory this been asking for billions of years. Just a billion times faster. Yeah. And accelerate. To me, to me, the singularity is like it's a nuclear reaction.

1:21:15It's pretty much happening or not happening. It's not like, you know, strong AI needs a definition and AGI needs a definition, but the singularity, it's obvious when that's happening. But there is because the rate of self -improvement is just crazy. It's spirals, you know, that feeding itself. It's amazing. I don't think so. I mean, that obvious. I'm going to have to go right now, right? I'm just going to learn just like the training of an exponential vertical in the future and it looks horizontal behind you. And we're kind of there now and I think I think what we're going to see the singularity is very soon and you're going to see an immediate 1000X step up in performance of neural network software.

1:21:55And the results of that are going to be unmistakable. instant solving of diseases, instant solving of impossible math problems, it's all gonna happen within, say, a 30 -day window from self -improvement to the other side of that. With no change in the chips, just purely software advances. But then you have a distribution problem, right? This is where the William Wood Scripps Innocort, the future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed. We talk often about Mad Max and Star Trek as two framings for the future. And in an ideal will, you end up with one, rather than the other, but we can see them both happening.

1:22:30Ukraine and Gaza are a mad maxim. We've star trek in many other parts of the world. And so I think it'll end up with that uneven distribution, which was going to cause a lot of stress and chaos. I don't want to end on a negative note like that. No, no, I'm just fundamentally optimistic, because the positive will drag along the negative, right? We talk a lot about the fact that if you can lift the bottom billion, and now most of that has smartphones with AI built in. I mean, the potential for humanities is like the incredible. I think the important note here is that in a world in which every mom knows her children have access to all the food, water, energy, health care, education, right?

1:23:09You have more to lose by, you know, by warring than you have to gain. If you're, if you're, no, seriously, if you're a population that has nothing to lose, I think that's where we get this. That's great. So everybody listen, if you'd like these slides again, please go to dmandis .com slash wtf, pull up your favorite LOM, have a conversation with it, drill down deep into any of these. We spend a good 20 hours a week prepping for this episode. I love my moonshot mates. I hope that this helped you see the extraordinary world in the pace of change and that you walk away with a hopeful compelling and abundant vision of your future.

1:23:57For our subscribers, thank you for those you haven't yet. Join us. Get the news that comes out. But just to echo Dave's comments, I always feel so much smarter after this hour and a quarter that we spend conversing about this than before. So it's great. Yeah. Hi guys. See you very soon. Big hug. Take care everybody. Big hugs. Every week, my team and I study the top 10 technology metatrends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from human under robotics, AGI, and quantum computing to transport energy, longevity and more. There's no fluff. Only the most important stuff that matters, that impacts our lives, our companies, and our careers.

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1:25:10Alright, now back to this episode.