Open AI's Head of Product on the AI Race, Google & the Reality of AGI w/ Kevin Weil & David Blundin | EP #189

24:56That's a great place to be building, because two months from now we're going to launch a new model and the thing that you've been just barely getting to work is going to sing and that's going to be awesome. If instead what you're doing is like covering, you know, patching a problem with the current model and you're afraid of the next model launch that we are going to come out with because it's going to, you know, it's going to, it's going to like, like, obviate the need for the thing you're building. Like, don't do that. It assumed that the models are going to keep getting better at a crazy pace and build something that's just at the edge.

25:30So you're excited about the next model because it's going to make your thing awesome. Yeah, Arvin Shenovas over at Proplexity Talks. He calls that AI complete when he was designing the Proplexity Business Plan. It had to be AI complete, which I think he just made up, nobody. But it means that exactly what you just said, it rides the wave. It doesn't get swamped by the wave. Yeah, that's a much more concise way of saying what I was saying. I have a question in Dynask you. As the Chief Product Officer, what does AGI look like as a product? That's a good question. Is it just like the chat GPT, but it can do anything better faster?

26:10Well, I mean, chat is such an interesting format because it, I mean, it mimics like how to, how to humans communicate. We, I can text you, we can write on the keyboard, but I can also talk and we can, you know, look at each other and, and tech, like a chat interface kind of gets at that full generality. So it's really powerful as a backdrop, but it's not the only interface. I think when you have AGI, your model is going to be in real time creating UI on the fly to build the most economical, sensible solution for the thing that you're trying to accomplish. And you're going to have all kinds of software being created and like being thrown away because you can just produce it again in an instant.

26:57Yeah, that's the division when you're just talking to it. It's really obvious that it's going to be super empathetic It's going to it's going to be just but then you know you start to see the video generation like oh wait Yeah, now my mind is blown because it can create scenes for me in real time create images You can create yeah, you know like entertainment but also if I'm designing something it can like Jarvis You know create the design and thin air and so now I'm thinking okay, Johnny I was gonna be working on something Well, let's talk about this talk about the one second I always come back by the way to the if you've read Ender's game.

27:27Yeah, you know like the jewel in your ear Yeah, it can see what you see it can hear what you hear But it also is super intelligent and connects back to you know the information across the galaxy Yeah, like that's kind of I think where we're going. Yeah, they lost that in the movie actually Yeah, you got to read the book. Yeah, they so I think we're gonna you know in this multimodal world where there's video capturing Everything and you're always being seen in your environments and where where AGI becomes anticipatory and knows what you likely want. And it's making the world automatically, is the term I use for that.

28:01So I'm just still trying to dig into what does AGI as a product from OpenAI look like? Is it fully anticipatory? Is it just like doing things that you don't expect it to be doing? I guess you could turn that feature on. Yeah, and I think it's also, I don't even know that we need to be fully at AGI for this, but I think you want the product to be taken every day. Whatever it knows about you. Whatever AGI is. Yeah. And just doing, I mean, you think about the number of things that you do every day. You wake up in the morning and you have a whole bunch of emails. A lot of those are mechanical. Probably some of them are like ones that you really want to type out every word of response.

28:41Most of them are mechanical. They're scheduling, they're responding. I want my AI to have already done all of those for me before I wake up. Yeah. Maybe every once in a while I need to say, yeah, that's right, or I'm going to edit that sentence, but mostly it's just like, be done. And you're going to have that across. How much of your browsing is semi -mechanical? You've got to get the thing done, but you actually don't care about reading the words on the page and waiting for things to load and clicking links. You're just trying to get a job done. All of that should be gone. What do you think about the future of media?

29:14One thing that's really interesting about media in general is that everything competes with everything else. So you don't really think of sports as competing with news, but it does because it's all competitive in the day. And clearly AI is going to take a huge amount of our mind share. It's just so engaging. And so, you know, that's got to come from somewhere. That time and that mind share has to come from somewhere. Do you guys think through like how is this going to affect internet media, TV, movies, all of that attention economy? I mean, a probably because hyper personalized, right? I know.

29:43Today, and there are good and bad things about that. There's something magical to every single person in the US watching the same, you know, two new shows at night. And we don't have that anymore. There's something cool about the shared experience of we can all, you know, the same movies and the theater for all of us at the same time and we can talk about it. But there's also something pretty cool about it. This movie is, you know, totally personalized to me and I'm the only one that matters to. So, I mean, you got to think that kind of thing starts to become possible. Also, probably though, there's always a sort of you go to extremes.

30:15The other extreme is then you value the thing that was created by humans that much more. It's like sports are the last thing on the last business model in TV that still really works well. You're an ultra marathoner. You'll still be doing that. What's not going to change in the next 10 years? I mean, we can list so many things that will. Yeah. Well, I think humans are still going to be humans, right? We're still like us connecting in person is really going to matter. The feel of this is very different us doing it here, sitting around a table relative to us doing it through Zoom or something. So that's still going to matter.

30:52A handwritten note is still going to matter. Personal connection is still going to matter. I would think it's going to matter a lot more actually. The way things are trying, you mentioned earlier, you just love having everybody here in the building. It's just different. Yeah. And since you have so many AI force multipliers, you actually don't need regional offices all over the world. And so the relative importance of communication inside the team is probably higher than any company you've been in before. I got run my abundant summit virtually through the year, but we're five days together in March.

31:21Yeah. And then those five days are, you know, just magical in terms of the energy. Yeah. So what do you guys think? What stays the same and what is the idea? I think one thing that after that GPT -5 launch that occurred to me, you know, up until this point, you think about, I had my kids working with GPT -2, writing content, and then GPT -3 and then GPT -4, and they've been watching this crazy progression. Now it's pretty clear that the AI community is going to try and not change too many things too quickly. Like let the AI become super intelligent, let it solve healthcare, let it solve, but don't go rampaging across San Francisco tearing down buildings because actually that's creating more problems than good.

32:01and it's now becoming clear to me, the AI community is really small as a fraction of the world, and the last thing it needs to do is change everything tomorrow, even though it potentially could. So it's starting to feel to me like, you know, the physical world won't change as much as people might think, while the virtual world will change at warp speed. I think the importance of purpose is still good. Totally agree. Right? Because one of my biggest concerns about the future of, you know, the endpoint here is when everything is being done for you, it can be done for you, and you can just sit back and be, you know, a couch potato.

32:39The thing that's going to make you live in a Star Trek universe, not a Mad Max universe is purpose. Yeah. So that importance. Yeah. I completely agree with that. I always have a hard time with the futures that people paint when it's like, oh, we're all just going to sit back and, you know, eat grapes and write poetry and receive our UBI, because I just, I don't think that's what drives us as humans. If you go back and look at, we don't have to like, you know, cross the United States on a covered wagon, we don't have to to hang our laundry on clotheslines as, you know, very much anymore. There's probably if you go back a hundred years ago, people look at our lifestyle today and they're like, oh my god, everything is done for you.

33:18What are you talking about? But of course, we take those time savings and and go do more interesting stuff with it. It's all about time savings, right? One thing that's true is every single human, eight billion of us have seven days in a week, 24 hours in a day, 365 in a year. And it's what you can do at that time that defines wealth, success, impact, everything. And AI is the greatest time multiplier period. And I think it's one of the most powerful parts of human nature that we all strive for something bigger than ourselves and you want to leave the world a better place than you found it. Yeah, that's so innate to humans.

33:58AI is not going to change that. It's just going to supercharge it. So without, you know, I want to ask you now to tell me what Johnny Ives is building for you. Okay. But we are going to interact with AI in different ways. How do you think about that future besides, it's been typing and now void. voice. Voice is amazing. Yeah. I mean, the the the joy in your ear thing is is the model in so many ways because you don't want to take Chattichypt, right? It's just one of many AI products that will all use, but you don't want Chattichypt to just like sit inside of a phone app or a browser waiting for you to go there.

34:42You want it to be wherever you are. You want them to effectively see what you see and have all the context that you want to give it so that it can be smarter and more proactively for you. And it shouldn't wait for you to open a phone app to do stuff for you. It should be just sort of constantly chucking away behind the scenes speaking about GPUs. But it should be constantly chucking away behind the scenes, taking action for you and saving you time. So that's going to be much more the future than today where you like go to a website and you know asking questions. Can we come back to GPUs for just one second?

35:14Yeah, so So, it's so much target too. Yeah, it's target. So, Chase Lockniller is walking around. He's our MIT classmate alone. And he's walking around Abilene, Texas with Sam, and there's concrete and pipes and stuff everywhere. Yeah. And but it's not up and running, right? None of the functionality is delivering yet. It's getting closer. Is it getting closer with it? Yeah. Is it very soon or is that all secret? Yeah, I don't remember what's public and what's not, but we're very excited for that to come online, because we could use all the GPUs we can get. I'm sure. And all we know is in the Oval Office, because there's a $500 billion budget.

35:46So it gives us a sense of the budget. why stop there? Why stop there? I mean, I don't think we will. No. It was about 18 months ago that I partnered with one of my closest and most brilliant friends, Dave Blundin, to start Link Expansion Ventures. At Link, we manage about a billion dollars of seed stage money based at a Kendall Square in Cambridge right between MIT and Harvard. When Dave and I both graduated from MIT, each of us immediately started companies. But at that age, everything is working against you. You have an idea, your challenge to raise money, and you can't afford rent, and even with all the accelerators out there, you're competing against thousands of other startups for the same pull of investors.

36:25Both Dave and I have spent a big chunk of our lives focusing on how do we inspire and support founders to knock down those barriers, to go big, to create wealth, to impact the world, to build and scale as fast as possible, especially in today's AI Everything World. We're seeing so So many companies reaching multi -billion dollar valuations in just two to three years faster than ever before. Some companies are adding millions or tens of millions of dollars of value in just weeks. So we started asking ourselves, how do we help these founders go faster and not skip a beat? As an example, a couple of months ago we bought an apartment building adjacent MIT where a graduating entrepreneur can move in immediately without slowing down their tech build while they search for a place to live.

37:08And so we're doing everything we can to accelerate builders and their super smart teams. Of course, funding is part of it, mentoring is part of it, connecting them with my personal network of abundance -minded CEOs and investors is part of it. We house 66 ,000 square feet of purpose -built incubator space, and 26 AI startups call LinkXPV their home. And the returns have been amazing. I have nothing to ask, but if you are building a company in the AI era, check us out at linkventures .com now back to the episode. So I just got back from Brazil. So I was there delivering five keynotes, talking entrepreneurs, builders, and they're all asking how what will A .I.

37:51what will what will sovereign A .I. look like for us? How do we make sure we're not passed over? Right? Same question being asked probably in India and other places in the world. Speaking to those entrepreneurs and they're extraordinarily passionate, what's the advice to the leadership in those regions south and central America? I mean, apart of this is why we try and offer everything. I mean, A, H, I, G, P, T is a free product. Yep. Download it from the App Store or on the web, you don't even need to sign in. You can just go and get access to the greatest intelligence the world has ever seen for free on your phone at all times.

38:27And like you said, we launched GPT -5. We cut prices dramatically. If you look at prices today relative to what GPT -4 costs when it came out, even as models have gotten way more intelligent, they've gotten like a hundred X cheaper. So you're on this crazy cost curve and we want to keep going because the more intelligence we can put in people's hands, the more they can do with it. Do you feel like that ever would have happened if OpenAI hadn't forced the timeline? because you've been at Metta, you've been at Twitter, you've seen, like if this stuff had stayed inside Google's labs, and OpenAI hadn't come into the world and said, hey, we're gonna make this available right now.

39:06Because right now, Google is throwing it out there the same way OpenAI has, but that's because it's a reaction. It's a reaction, right? So you think, where do you think we would be if OpenAI hadn't existed in this? Would it all be hidden somewhere? So we wouldn't even have access to that. I mean, we wouldn't be where we are, right? Competition is great. as a friend of mine likes to say capitalism is undefeated. It's amazing to have competition. By the way, Google is competition for us. They're moving very quickly and building good models. So is Anthropics or a bunch of other players. It's motivation for us to also go faster.

39:40Do you remember the consumers and businesses benefit? It's great. Do you remember the moment in your life when you first said I want to go work at OpenAI? I need to go get in that building and meet Sam and get there. Yeah, so I've known Sam for a bunch of years, not super close, but just, you know, we were friends, we could text that kind of thing. And I would call him whenever I was like thinking about going from one job and, you know, doing something next, because he's such an incredible thinker and futurist and, you know, connected. Yes. highly connected, but he's also just involved in interesting things.

40:14So I'm a physicist by background. And before my previous job, it's like four or five years ago, I called him and he introduced me to some companies building fusion. And I almost went and worked at one of those companies. So I just, you know, periodically, would talk to Sam. And this last time I called him, he said, well, actually. And so I, you know, I hadn't even really thought about it. And then I came in, met a couple people, It's just like this is the most interesting thing I have ever seen like I will work for free Please just let me in the door. So you could literally be working on magnetic containment for a fusion reaction somewhere completely unrelated I mean, it's pretty easy right like like like 37 venture -back fusion companies.

40:56I would have never met other 37 Yeah, that's I mean, I love hearing that by the way I'm so glad it's like it's been a Renaissance and deep -tack investment Yeah, I it's like you know their venture back rocket companies and fusion companies It's like, you know, okay, this stuff is becoming real. Yeah, we need more of it. Exactly. How do you, how can you possibly keep up with the speed of change? I mean, I think in your role trying to keep up with how rapidly the tech is progressing, how do you think about that? Part of it is staying disconnected to our research teams as we possibly can. How big is the research team here?

41:34I don't know. Order of magnitude. a few hundred, something like that. It's a very independent, what you're saying before, it seems very independent, right? People can work on a project and begin to launch features. There's a spectrum. Parts of the research team are super academic and they're doing novel research that may or may not work out, may or may not see the lead a day for a while. This is such a new field. There's a lot to discover. or you're not just productionizing things that somebody else figured out. You got to figure out this stuff from scratch. And then there are parts of the research team that are much closer to product, where you're taking a model in helping to post train it and making sure that it's good at certain things that are really important for our customers in various shapes.

42:23And you kind of have everything in between. So one of the things that I think differentiates open AI is how closely product and engineering and research which all work together. As I said, there are parts of research that are very separate, but the parts that, when we work closely together, and we get a tight iteration loop from like building model capabilities, turning that into a product, getting feedback, taking that feedback, back improving those model capabilities, and iterating that way. Like that's how we built deep research, that's how we build agent functionality. Like the best stuff comes from that.

42:57So in your role, so here's research, ultra science, and then here's product features and functions, you know, this voice, this button, then over here you got data centers. Now, do you span all of that as a CPU? No, no, just the products that you use. So I think the API, I think, Mark Mark, this is a product that's overseenable. Yeah, Mark Mark leads research, Greg leads everything, sort of data center, infrastructure, scaling, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, there's a lot going on. So, so we divide and conquer. I know the feature I'm looking forward to is my BCI connect. Oh, yeah. So a friend of mine has involved in, you know, merge that was just announced leaked, I guess.

43:43So, you know, we have 100 billion neurons, 100 trillion synaptic connections. Yeah. And being able to have a feature set that lays on top my Neo cortex, do you actually do you think that our head in the conversation is merged? By the way, is merged doing, are they going invasive? or is it sitting on your scalp or how they're doing? I know the details of the company. I don't know what I can say about it. But there are multi -heter companies that are invasive and the number that are external and there are those that are sub -cranial but above the dura brain. So watch it if your player is there. I'm super excited about that too.

44:22I would do it in a heart. Would you? No, no, absolutely not. But that's only because we'll look. I use AI literally six, seven, eight hours a day. And it's getting so far ahead. There's no, the original vision there was I need to increase the bandwidth of communication between my brain and this really slow laptop. But now the AI moves so fast that it's clear that I can give it a concept and it can just run with it. And I haven't had the next concept yet. Like the increasing the bandwidth between my brain and the laptop no longer matters. The AI is just way too fast. So, listen, Alex Wieser -Gross, who's one of our friends and partners, was on my stage at the abundance summit, and he was talking about the importance of coupling.

45:04Like if AI is taking a real takeoff, and humans are linear, can we couple with them, right? And that coupling is going to need to have this kind of an interface. So here's the question to you. Would you do a BCI coupled to open AI? I would personally do it. I would personally do a BCI. Yeah. So, like, when it's safe, I'll do it in the heartbeat. I tend to do experimental things in the first place. Yeah, I was going to say, says the man with a RFID chip in his hand, but no, I would totally do it. I think it'll be amazing when you can access the world's information, not by typing into one of these things, but the speed that you can think.

45:41And then you have like this, I mean, we will be a different species. It'll be super cool. Yeah, and we are going to speciate. And there'll be those who decide they want to, you know, I like it the way it is. I don't want that in my head and others that I want to see this I want to understand quantum physics I want to have infinite knowledge. I want to be able to be I don't see it. I'm sure I don't see it being that for like Yeah, you understand what you're saying completely like you got the omnishoever here and you got the technophiles over there That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that when you surround me by monitors Yeah, and it's creating things on those monitors at the speed of AI right now There's no there's no bandwidth increase beyond.

46:20Well, I can't absorb any more information than that anyway. I'm at the limit of what I can think about. But maybe not with your eyes and not maybe not when you have to type it into a thing and then, you know, the effect of it's jamming. But it's really hard to be. But we've talked about the fact that it isn't visually. Visually you can you can look at an image and get whether the data is correct or not, right? Versus it in a text you have to read every line. So anyway, we'll see. We'll get to find out. Yeah, well I guess you and I will be the A, B test, or we'll be there and he'll be the B, the A.

46:52If it's still alive, you'll be able to believe him. If I'm still alive, yeah. Peter's having it done tomorrow. I might wait a year and then we'll see how that goes. Yeah, as long as you can upgrade. You don't get version one and that is true. So, you've worked at some amazing companies. I love what Planet's doing as well. Putting a layer of imagery on top of the planet. But I can't imagine that the speed of iteration of products is any place faster than it is here. Yeah. Nothing in my experience is compared to OpenAI. Yeah. I thought Facebook, Instagram when I was there moved quickly and they do.

47:31Yeah. But nothing compares to OpenAI. Do you feel like, so you're doing about a $10 - $20 billion capital raise at $500 billion? Something like that? I'm just reading the news. I don't know. No, you're just reading the news. You tell me. Okay, but do you feel like you know, Google's got about a hundred billion of free cash flow, you know, Amazon's huge and they have massive data centers in advance. Do you feel like there's a vulnerability at the raw compute and budget level? I mean, it's why we are so focused on building out our own capacity. They've got big data centers. They've been doing this for a long time.

48:03They've built great technology. They also support a whole host of things. They also, you know, they, they, the Google builds a lot of products that we all use. We build one product, we have one mission, you know, building AGI as a potential product. I love that that's an advantage. I love that simplicity, right? It really goes back to Google's earliest routes where they were just, just a search engine, just a box on a white page. Mm -hmm. Right. There's something, you know, if you're a researcher, there's lots of places you can go work, it'll pay you a lot of money. But if you want to work at a company that is Monopoly focused on getting the AGI, you work at OpenAI.

48:38Yeah, I asked GPD how many core researchers are there at Google? You know, just in the AI team core, Jeff Dean, and Demis Asabis, and it's like 5 ,6 ,000, roughly, assuming GPD is right out. So it's a much bigger force, but it then it feels like they're working on protein folding. They're working, they're very dispersed in what they're working on. and it wasn't clear to me how many just like right down the fairway working toward AGI, they were relative to it because it feels like you know with that GPT -5 launch, the coding completely caught up or passed everything else out there at a fraction of the price.

49:17So the momentum seems to be great and so but you know the headcount is got to be smaller. Yeah, but that's I mean that's every startup's advantage right? agility. Yeah, it's all about agility. Yeah. We've had some conversations on the Moonshot's podcast about benchmarks. How much do you think about benchmarks? Because it looks like many of the benchmarks are getting saturated and reinventing benchmarks. You've created a healthcare benchmark that you use. And one of the questions we talked about was creating some benchmarks that are around AI's ability to solve grand challenge, solve fundamental problems.

49:53Yeah, I love that idea. Yeah, and so we call it a series of abundance benchmarks. Is it, and measure all of the AIs against something, like it's a proof of work instead of proof of stake? Yeah, it's a really interesting thing. It's a really important too, because we've had all of these different benchmarks that we've used for the last bunch of years in AI. And they're almost all saturated. Yeah, crazy. It shows how good the models are getting very quickly, but it also means that we need harder benchmarks. There are a bunch of these things that are frontier math and arcade GI and some of these.

50:32But increasingly, we're also looking at these sort of, I'll call them softer benchmarks, which is a challenge in itself, but the health bench, we've got benchmarks that are around, can you build a financial model for a company? You know, can you do because when you talk about a GI, one of the ways that we define a GI is or can you do can you do economically valuable tasks? Sure and You look at what people are doing every day if they're a doctor or a lawyer or banker etc. And you're looking at can you do those tasks? But they're also they're also sort of softer. It's not it's not obvious. There's not one way to build a model for a company like a financial model There's, you could do it in a bunch of different ways.

51:17For you're doing a math problem, there is one right way and you can grade it very easily. So at the same time, as models are getting smarter, we're saturating the things that are sort of easy to grade, we're off in these harder problems that are also a little bit tougher to grade. And they don't have to be deep science or anything. You can also look at creative writing. How do you grade creative writing? There's way more than one way to write a story about any particular thing. So true. So true. And you play increasingly important. Yeah, like yeah, this stuff is running wild in areas where the e -vails can be built and then you know It can't run wilds in areas where there's no e -vail because it's just unable to self -improve But any place I was I was I wore yourself.

51:55I saw some recent Metric on its ability to predict the future Okay, so I found that fascinating, right? I mean there's I mean this is going back to sort of azimab's You know work and fountain in the foundation trilogy I like can you is there enough clues out there right? I'd rather to predict what society is going to do in the next 12 hours or 12 days or 12 months. Uh -huh. Yeah. Peter wrote a book that the future is faster than you think. I don't know if he read it. It's my favorite of the Peter Boat. They're many great Peter books. But it's my favorite because it talks specifically about concurrent technology that nobody's figured out how to glue together.

52:37And normally there will be two or three things like oh, we have lithium batteries and we We have control systems, let's make EV toll. Two or three things, but with AI, there are so many things that got cracked in the last six months that haven't been glued together yet into product services or whatever. And it's just accelerating. And there's this flaw in human psychology where something is mind -blowing and then you take it for granted. Three days later. Yeah, totally. And then you missed the center. You missed the mental breakthrough. through that weight, I can glue that together with it. Snapchat is my favorite example.

53:13It's like that kind of interesting. 20 billion, well, John Jarvey from MIT is his favorite story is how Evan Spiegel was a roommate of his son, or a friend of his son at Stanford. And he got first look at it. And he said, that's just too simple. There's no way. And then there's a $20 billion IPO. The biggest mistake of his investing, probably the only big mistake of his investing career. But it was like, look, the phone has a camera, the camera is high resolution, this functionality is just the assimilation of texting in camera. Yeah. That's all you had to realize. But those two things kind of grew in parallel and people didn't stick them together.

53:52Yeah. You've got 40 things you can do with AI that you couldn't do just a few months ago. They can be glued together in all these different ways. All the commonatorics are interesting products waiting to be invented. Yeah. And I think where AI is today, if it just stopped, if progress stopped, where it would be You'd still have a complete transformation of society over the next decade. But it's not going to stop. It's going to keep going and it's going to probably keep going around the same exponential and yeah. Should update the book. Well, the next book that's coming out in March, I'm rusing it, the abundance of it is called We Are As Gods.

54:29And it's a realization that what we do between breakfast and lunch is God -like to our ancestors. Right. I mean, and we take it so much for granted, but our ability to manifest the future to literally know anything anywhere connected with anybody for free. I mean, yeah, you know crazy. AI is one of the first things, the transformation that it'll bring about, and you've got to think it's just the beginning that you kind of grow up and you're thinking back to when your grandparents grew up and you know, you're like, oh, I'm so glad that I'm living at the time that I'm living. Yeah, as you get all the best time to build our own.

55:03But AI is the first time, you know, you look at like what's happening in biotechnology and all these other things, brain computer implants. And it's the first time I've been like, man, I am jealous of my kids. Yeah, because, yeah. Oh, I'm so glad. The year 2060 is gonna be so cool. Well, you'll be here. I mean, I hope I'm here, but. Well, I mean, come on. This is why I'm working on it. I mean, the work you're doing, I hope I'm here in 2100, right? Yeah, I mean, the reason for me was, you know, I grew up passionate about space. I wanted to see space play out. You know, NASA never did it. Elon's gone heads down and you know, Bayesos and others and so it's fantastic.

55:41But when I read Ray's book, the singularity is near. It was like, holy shit, this, this convergent these technologies is going to blow and accelerate, everything will be accelerated. So yeah, I want to see, I want to see the interstellar missions. I want to see what an uploading consciousness looks like. I want to see all of these things. And there is, I don't think there's any limitations beyond the laws of physics as we know them of what we're going to be able to do. So it's going to keep accelerating. Talking about your twins are whole now. Eight. Almost nine. And minor 14. Okay. And so I think about their future.

56:20And I am list list. You know, speaking to the parents listening, how do you think about educating kids today in age of AI. I'm just livid about the schools that are saying can't use AI on this. Oh yeah. It's like, you know, listen, my kids are going to be using it the moment they graduate every place, everywhere. And I think one of my challenges is that if you give a eighth grader, you know, eighth grade homework through with AI, it's meaningless. But if you give them like graduate level work to go and design a starship and figure it out. I mean, that's amazing. That's what we should be doing.

57:02Yeah, like assume that CHENG -GPT exists and use it to make students A, learn how to use the technology, but B, go deeper than they ever would have been able to do in a classroom setting. Like, they should emerge stronger with using AI with their education. Actually, the best book that I've read on this at least is by Ethan Mollock. I've ever read his book. It's called Cointelligence, I think. I think. Okay. Short book. It's like a 90 page read. You do it in an hour. But he's a professor at UPEN. I think he's a warden. Try to enough for you guys. And just a great quick read. Super practical. The way he uses AI.

57:41He leans into it. He's actually a very good Twitter follower as well. Nice. But he's incorporated into his class and has just sort of changed the way he teaches to assume that everyone is using AI. and to use that to take them way deeper into a topic than they would have been able to do and raise the expectations on the final work product. That's the result. Exactly, but I think that's true for all of society. So as we get to, let's forget about AGI, and we talk about ASI, right? When intelligence is a millionfold or a billionfold more capable, what do we do with that? And so I was inspired by Star Trek and Apollo.

58:20Those two things lit my fuse and I you know my first What I call massive transfer to purpose was making humanity multplanetary built a whole bunch of companies built the university in space and then focused on other areas I you know as we start this incredible capability Humanity needs to go for these grand challenges. We need to have these epic. I didn't agree more. Otherwise we will will fade into insignificance. Yeah. There's a... Oh yeah, it's another book that I really loved by Robert Zubrin, the case for space. Yeah, Bob has been a friend for many, many years. He makes this point very eloquently in the book about the human need for frontiers, as one of the reasons why space is so important, because there are...

59:10You know, the bottom of the ocean is kind of still a frontier on Earth, but there aren't many of them left. And when there's a frontier, no matter how you screwed up wherever you live on the frontier, you can start again. Yeah, yeah. Space for innovation and a refreshing renewal and like, yeah, so when do you think that we will be multi -planetary? So I listen, well, we'll see. There's a hopefully a Starship 10 launch this Sunday. Starship will get us to the moon on a recurring basis by hopefully end of 26, definitely 27. and then Mars, you know, my guess is boots on Mars by 2030, but there'll be Optimus robot boots on Mars.

59:49And then you have limited your iteration speed there because you only have a, you know, you are but you're going to send robots in advance. You'll send the robots to the surface of the planet, you'll send robots to asteroids to go and mine materials and the way I think about it, right, everything at the end of the day is one way or another driven by economics and everything we hold the value on earth, metals, minerals, energy, real estate is in infinite quantities in space. And so, you know, the earth eventually will be a crumb in a supermarket filled with resources. Right. And that's a beautiful thing.

1:00:26That's not going to long because you know, Mars is an obvious target now. I've been working on it. And then why do you go in better personally? Yeah. I mean, I was like stepping into the owners of place to set up. No, go start a city. You know, there's these lava caves under the surface of the moon where you get protection for radiation. If you fill them with air at 1, 6 gravity, you can strap on wings and you can fly. That's awesome. I think it's awesome. How big are the caves? A massive cave system? There are huge caves, yes. You can lava caves. You could build thousands of millions of people in there.

1:01:01I don't know that. I mean, I can imagine easily imagine thousands or 10 to thousands. And then of course the recent announcement that NASA's plan to go put a nuclear reactor on the South Pole of the Moon So cool right in order to literally hydrolyze the ice that's on the South Pole and create water and oxygen and yeah, so yeah I mean, we're finally living into that science fiction future and it's accelerating Yeah, and hopefully fusion soon and hopefully fusion so solve a lot of problems here and open up new vistas first -based So it's like what 2028 for helium, I think is the current current target dates and and and Cambridge is coming on in 2030 thereabouts.

1:01:44So it's amazing how you know a lot of these things bust loose when there's a single person that's just got an idea and they're incredibly passionate about it. And now with AI as a force multiplier, the odds of those passionate people becoming empowered and actually achieving that mission is so much higher than it was two years ago. Yeah, and then you get the right density of startups and you have competition, you have different approaches, the ability to learn from different approaches and the probability of success grows. And just trying to outdo each other and have fun, and you can be... And in this future, like, we're really as a start -trick future instead of a Max future, it's like, what ambitious super cool thing can you go for?

1:02:21Mm -hmm. Yeah, and it used to be just small number of people. It used to be just the kings and the queens and the robber barons could do anything impacting people. Now it's anybody using these tools. Yeah, it's amazing. So a question. As a cheap product officer, who names your models? Oh, that's like, okay, I'm trying to understand the logic and the rhyme and reason. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We take a lot of well -deserved plaque for the naming of our models. Sorry, give it a big one. Yeah, by the way, no, totally fair. We lean into it. The fact that we had both O4 Mini and 4O Mini at the same time is something to be proud of.

1:03:03And then make the user choose those if they have any. And then on the other side, there's just chat GPT simplicity. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, you know, in all seriousness, because I, by the way, we deserve all sorts of flack for that. So totally, totally acknowledged. But one of the reasons that you have that is the philosophy of iterative deployment. We could have waited, you have some new capability, like reasoning, for example, up until we launched the PT4O and it could do a bunch of new things, you could speak to it rather than just type to it. It's amazing. We'd been working on the ability for models to reason, to not answer right away, but to actually think through the problem, try a bunch of different approaches, is test them out, you know, just the way you would if I asked you to do a crossword puzzle or a Sudoku or something, right?

1:03:56You would, you don't just like spout out the answer, you've got to try things. You're like, okay, if that was a, that was a, you know, six letter words starting with A there, but it's got to have a B in this. Okay, it could be that. No, not the A, right? And you're, you're testing hypotheses, refuting some of them, accepting some of them, and then kind of moving on. We, they took a while to teach the models that was one of the big, you know, breakthroughs from coming from OpenAI, the first model that could do that was O1. And it was easier for us and faster for us to launch a model that just did that.

1:04:31And like wasn't an ideal model to ask for a relationship advice or to ask who was the third, or a Holy Roman Emperor or whatever, like all the sort of normal things that you can ask to LGBT. It was easier for it to be a very specialized model. It was very good at thinking hard about scientific problems in particular. And launching it as a separate model allowed us to iterate faster and to put this thing in people's hands and see what they did with it and what they wanted to do and what its shortcomings were and where it excelled. So then we iterated a bunch that way. So you have GPT -4, you have O1 and then O2 and all that.

1:05:09And then you have the mini models which are smaller, faster versions of those things. And GPT -5 for us was the moment where we kind of brought all of this stuff together and had one experience. So elegant, but I expect in the future that we'll have other things that where we have some new capability and we want to test it out faster than we can like integrate it into one massive thing. So I wouldn't be surprised if we have these kind of offshoots again in the future and then we integrate them as they work and we kind of gain mastery over them. Eric Schmidt talks about learning loops. Right, the speed of innovation is the speed of which you get learning.

1:05:42We put it out there, see how people think about it, give you feedback. Yeah. And especially with these, we're all kind of uncovering what these models can do. Yeah. So it's especially valuable for us to get it out in people's hands and let them build. Yeah, the reasoning was just shocking. Actually, I don't know if it was that true here too. Like nobody prior to 01 would have thought that chain of thought reasoning was going to be such a huge unlock. Yeah, I mean, it's just he starts with iterative reprompting which just worked far better than anyone ever would have guessed Mm -hmm, and that evolved into O1 and then O3 and I guess O2 was oxygen Oh, two of that.

1:06:17Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but yeah, I'm sure there'll be other offshoots because it because again the Capabilities are always surprising like even even the best researchers in the world don't know exactly what's gonna come next So I'm curious. It's interesting right we we just cruised through the passing of the Turing Test and didn't notice. Isn't it amazing? It's crazy. It was held up for like 50, 60 years as this pinnacle. It's not just like a wolfed by it. What is the effect? People can talk about it. We don't talk about it. It's so quickly. They missed the implications because they're already on to the next though.

1:06:50I took it for granted. No, you got to think about what the Quasile is. It's like right here in our hands. Will we pass through AGI the same way? It was like, oh yeah, it happened. I think so. I really think so because arguably AGI is here. It's just unevenly distributed. Yes. Right? And there are lots of ways where the model is way smarter than me already. And I would never choose myself over the model. And then there are lots of places where the model is definitely not smarter than me yet. And I would choose myself. But over time, I'm kind of staying, you know, I'm improving a little bit, hopefully.

1:07:23But the model is getting better a lot faster. The level of water is rising. So I just saw GPT -5 Pro was measured at an IQ of like 148. Okay, just writing on the MENSA, on the MENSA, Nory MENSA scale. Wow. That's impressive. Yeah, I mean, it won a gold medal at the IMO, right? Congratulations. It was second at the... But one of the programming competitions, I mean... I have to... So, yeah, I was interested in writing... I looked at the IMO, the International Math Olympiad stats, and the US came in second, and I think it's out of 36 points. Yeah, 36 points. And a 42. And the US had between 32 and 36.

1:08:11The Chinese team that came in first had perfect score across all six Olympiads. Wow. That was impressive. So our podcast mate Alex was in her gross who's total genius He's been tracking that IMO score as the benchmark for self -improvement Because you know that solving those problems is very very correlated with with also iterating through the algorithm Yeah, so I think there's a lot of belief now that we're gonna go into this really rapid acceleration of capability because of self -improvement Until the GPU is run out. You know some yeah, yeah, some but but the electricity will be your electricity run to out for it Well, I think, yeah, interesting because the GPUs are constrained.

1:08:49The electricity won't run out quite yet because we can't make the GPUs fast enough to keep up. But the software improvement is unconstrained, right? There's this period of time. I think it's coming right now. The algorithmic improvement. Algorithmic improvement that we swagged it on the podcast between 100 and 1000X. But recently there's some new news coming out that indicates maybe it's even higher than that. Yeah, I don't know if you guys have a theory on that internally or not. Well, there's now, there's two dimensions now that we're scaling intelligence, right? One is via pre -trained, which is kind of the traditional thing, and now it's test time.

1:09:21How long are you willing to give the model time to think? And how long can you kind of keep it on track as it does? So with 0103 in chat GPT, you kind of get, you know, the model will think for like 60 seconds, and then it'll come back and give you an answer. Most people don't want to wait too much longer than that. Deep research, though, will take sometimes 20, 30 minutes to go do a bunch of research and iteratively compile everything that it gets, figure out what it's missing, go back and get more. But there's no reason you can't have a model thing for two days, two weeks, two months, two years.

1:09:52Andrew Wiles didn't solve for Maz -Lasthera, and by thinking for five minutes, he worked out after seven years. And we see continued evidence that the longer the models think, the smarter they get, the harder the problems they can solve. So, I mean, there's this other dimension of scaling But today at least we don't see any Do you have a whole like we see a lot of continued growth there? Yeah, there's a lot of work going on for a custom chip design this design by AI to oh yeah specifically I don't do you have a whole strategy around that are you working with with you know? Yeah, that's I mean that's one of those areas where Where you can let the model think and it's a pretty well constrained problem.

1:10:29Yeah, right? There's like there's not a great simulation that you can help climb on and you can run tests and understand if your layout is better than the previous layout. And the more time you give the models to think about it, the more breakthroughs they make. So I actually, I'm with you. I think that's one of the areas where we're going to see, I mean, we already are seeing real innovation, right? I believe Google has been public about the fact that they've designed their TPUs and improved them with AI. You know, we're doing similar things. But if you talk to Shizier or anybody over there, the historically the TPU team has been way the hell over here and the algorithms team is way the hell over there and trying to translate your algorithmic idea into something that hardware guys understand is just a nightmare.

1:11:10So that's been a very slow process. But now because the AI will do it for you, it'll do the chip design right off your software design. That's going to be the big unlock. I don't know if it's like this month, it's not, it's not more than way that. Oh, I think it's already happening. Yeah, and it's already happening. And you have a, do you have a team here doing specifically that? Yeah, we're working on own chips. And it's hoping it would be crazy if we weren't also using an eye to improve our chip design and lay out everything. Do you have all the manufacturing and fab all figured out too? We're working with partners on that for sure.

1:11:40But yeah, there's this class of problem where you have a fairly well, it's a specific problem and you have a way that you can grade it, in this case, speed of the chip that you design. And in problems like that, that you have these well -specified problems. You can just iterate, and iterate, and iterate, and apply arbitrary amounts of GPU. And so far, I think we're going to see arbitrary amounts of improvement. I totally agree. It's crazy exciting. Is that fertile area for startups? Or should they stay away from that? Because it's just where the big boys play? And I totally think it's fertile area.

1:12:15It takes a lot of technical talent to do it. Yeah. But I think that's an interesting spot. I know some startups doing some exciting stuff there. Material science and others. Yeah, I'm a true science unsung hero and it will be huge unlock. Yeah. Yeah. 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 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 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.

1:13:00I 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 1skin .co and write Peter at checkout for a discount on the same product I use. Okay, now back to the episode. Oh, it's amazing. Yeah. And 10 Lieutenant Colonel Wheel. Yes. So I June 13th, you're inducted into the army. Yeah, I super excited about it. Super excited. Did you go through Army basic training? We did a version of basic training. It was kind of an accelerated version Me or ultra marathoner. So I mean probably not probably. Yeah, so but you know, we went and we've we've all passed our army fitness tests So tell us about it for bending how did that materialize you get a call one day?

1:13:42Yeah, I got a call from shahm who, Sean Sankar, who leads CTO Palantir, has been there forever. And he and some of the folks at the top of the army were taking about this program. I mean, it's really smart. I mean, I was impressed. Yeah, and Kudos to the army for being willing to take a risk on some crazy people like us. But I think it's awesome. You, and by the way, I hope it exists. There's four of us today. Yes. So it's myself. It's Sean, it's Baws, it's the CTO meta and then Bob McGrew who used to be the head of research here the idea is to bring us in and basically to create a group like bring tech and the military the DOD closer together Take a bunch of expertise that you get from you know working in the tech industry a bunch of expertise that you get from being in the DOD and and doing all the incredible things that the army does and and merge them together so that because we will be better together.

1:14:42I mean, I have to... I imagine the Navy, the Air Force need to do something very similar. Yeah, and there's a huge push across the DOD to integrate AI as their very well -shed be. Like, does us no good to have the best models in the world if they're sitting on the shelf? Yeah. Well, the PLA uses inferior models, but integrates them everywhere. Yeah, and I know that. So it's super, super important. The idea here was, is there's lots of efforts to bring AI across the D -Mit. The idea here is like he's a friend and he's been doing an amazing job. Oh totally. Yeah. Thank God for them. But you know, you could have done this as a consultant, but I think getting us in on the inside, first of all, I mean, wearing the uniform, you feel a responsibility, you go hang out with people who are literally giving their lives.

1:15:30But also just it's such a incredible institution that you wouldn't get that sense on the outside. I didn't have that sense before, and I respected it, obviously. But being on the inside is a different thing. Obviously, I have a ton to learn. We're just getting started. But I think us being on the inside will allow us to be more effective. And when we go to wherever they would like us to go to help, we'll have that much more of a sense of how everything works and will be a part of the team as opposed to being a consultant from the outside. Yeah, so if you have to go very excited top secret clearance process all the background checks all that was at a I had one already Yeah, it'll work.

1:16:14We have it already and not all of us but Yeah, they have to go through so then once you're inside, you know on base whatever just access to everything is it has that work? I mean it's still very you know when top secret stuff is pretty heavily compartmented So there's a there's a need to know basis for most things. Yeah, so they certainly don't just you know but not everything. But it's weird, because you get important for us to know we can know, and we can help in deeper ways than if we didn't have that access. Is there a schedule where you go once, whatever? And it's a little more ad hoc than normal reserves do to you, or kind of like a weekend a month and two weeks in the summer.

1:16:49And this is much more, just because of the jobs, it's harder to be a weekend a month, but it's also we can go maybe deeper longer for specific things. We're also each going to take our own kind of focus. Obviously, we have to watch out for conflicts. And so they've designed our focus areas based on that. What's your focus? One of the things I'm going to focus on is physical performance. Because you can imagine a lot of ways to use AI to monitor and improve physical performance. Sure. I've got an aura. I've got an Apple Watch. By the way, which gives you better sleep data you think or a You know they disagree I never quite know I know I've got my I've got an eight sleep as well I got one of my best night sleep last night.

1:17:39I got a 94 score. Oh wow. Yeah, so it's great That's amazing the one thing mine agree on is I need to sleep more And deep sleep more yeah, yeah Let's let's wrap with advice for entrepreneurs right now. So a lot of entrepreneurs a lot of builders here as a cheap product officer and they're building products, how would you, what would sage advice do you have for them? Oh man, I think lean into the AI in every way possible and assume that it will continue on the super sharp steep curve that it's on. And if you're building, just imagine things that should be true and are not possible today. And I think a lot of them are going to be possible to build six months from now a year from now to years from now And the people that see that and are building for that future counting on the models to get there Like that's going to pay off because the models are going to get there.

1:18:38Yeah. All right. I do have I do have an important last question for you and It's this has Open AI I reached fully reached AGI and what is Johnny Ives delivering for you? Oh man, I've been waiting to talk about this since we started. Really? Okay. Alright, so.

1:19:05And that's a cut, ladies and gentlemen. So that's a wrap. Obviously, we didn't get information from Kevin that's exclusive on Johnny Ives or AGI as much as I would love to. But hopefully if you're a builder and entrepreneur at home, this was super useful for you I know it was for me Every week my team and I study the top 10 technology meta trends 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 If you want me to share these meta trends with you by writing newsletter twice a week, sending it out as a short two minute read via email.

1:19:49And if you wanna discover the most important metatrends 10 years before anyone else, this reports for you. Readers include founders and CEOs from the world's most disruptive companies, and entrepreneurs building the world's most disruptive tech. It's not for you if you don't wanna be informed about what's coming, why it matters, and how you can benefit from it. To subscribe for free, go to demandis .com, slash metatrends. to gain access to the trends 10 years before anyone else. Alright, now back to this episode.