Opus 4.8 Beats GPT 5.5, the $220B OpenAI Foundation, and Hassabis’s 2029 AGI Prediction | EP #260

17:23Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:bunch and i was like who is this and it's like oh it's skippy and i'm like you kind of need to identify yourself uh dude but it does it does now but it yeah it does it's great its answers are excellent it will like just interact back and forth and i i look at my whatsapp and it's like oh it's had a nice conversation with salim or a nice conversation with my other friends um but it's it is fascinating uh and it's i can i please i can't i can't let this go here's the rant okay we we don't know what intelligence is okay we the iq test measures two aspects of intelligence. Do that eye roll again, Alex.

17:57Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:That was awesome. Well, look, you've got to take this into account. There's physical intelligence, there's spatial intelligence, there's emotional intelligence, there's spiritual intelligence. If you're a business leader, you're using emotional intelligence a great deal of the time to make judgment calls. That's not even in the equation. Raw brute forcing power of speed of thought processing and the ability to match concepts across frameworks is the IQ test, but that's a very limited aspect of intelligence. So I call bullshit on this until we can have a clear definition and a test for what we mean by even intelligence, forget artificial, forget general.

18:34Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:So that's my rant.

18:36Dave Blundin:You know, Salim, I started in cognitive science at MIT originally, actually. And what's amazing to me is how much we're learning about human intelligence as we watch the artificial intelligence punch through different barriers. And to me, it's incredible. Remember on the pot about six months ago, we said when it can do 50 % on humanity's last exam, that's got to be AGI. I mean, and that's the closest proxy to self-improvement that we could possibly specify. And now we're at, what, 60, what are we at, Alex?

19:04Peter Diamandis:We're at 57.9 with tools by Opus 4.8.

19:10Dave Blundin:Okay, so that's what we set up internally as like, wow, when that day comes, holy crap, look out.

19:15Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I mean, we're outvoted on that one, but I don't remember signing up for that.

19:18Dave Blundin:Well, it wasn't because that's superhuman, that's Einstein. It's because that's the closest proxy for self-improvement. And then the acceleration from there is going to be near instantaneous. So we've crossed that threshold. But my agents do the stupidest things.

19:34Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:But acceleration towards what? I mean, what are we accelerating towards? Well, that's what we're going to learn. We have a clear idea about this.

19:41Peter Diamandis:Well, some of us have the conceit that we know where we're going, myself included. I think we know where we're going. We're going to hashtag solve everything.

19:50Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:That's fine. But you could argue that that's not really intelligence.

19:55Dave Blundin:I hate the debate in the sense that that will solve all disease, that will get us to Mars, that will do everything we ever wanted in life. We don't want it. We should be cheering for it not to be.

20:06Peter Diamandis:The irony of your position, Salim, is we'll have colonized the solar system, we'll have uploads on star wisps traveling to other star systems, and you'll still be arguing Searle's Chinese room. Oh, well, it's not really intelligent.

20:20Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:No, no, no, no. I'd rather we just solve cancer. I'm totally, I think the debate is the noisy part and the messy part. Look, Paul Graham and Steve Wozniak are two very, very smart people. And each of them has such a bizarre definition of AGI. One has the, I can't remember which of which, one is the coffee machine test. Give a coffee machine and can it grind up a bunch of beans and make me a cappuccino? That's Woz, I think. That's Woz. Like that, and then you have, and we'll talk about that in a bit. And then Paul Graham has, I'm going to give it a box and can it build an Ikea box and can it build a shelf?

20:56Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I mean, those are two really bizarre different things. And those are just robots doing things. That doesn't seem like AGI to me at all. So anyway, we've talked about this before. My beef is that we're spending a lot of time on AGI and whether we achieve it or not. And I think it's just noise. We like benchmarks. We like goalposts. Then define the damn benchmark.

21:18Peter Diamandis:There are a whole bunch of different benchmarks that don't fully agree, but also are quite correlated with each other. So to your earlier point, Salim, I would construe your earlier point as, well, emotional intelligence is quite different from mathematical, is different from embodied intelligence, etc. But these are all correlated. And I think if you follow the benchmarks closely, you're seeing that you pick your arbitrary threshold of success of, quote unquote, intelligence in each of these benchmarks. And AI will pass all of these thresholds within a period of a few years. I will make a prediction.

21:51Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I will make a prediction here.

21:53Peter Diamandis:OK.

21:53Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:We're going to keep moving the goalposts on AGI, AGI, AGI. And then we're going to go, oh, AGI sentience. That's what's going to happen. You know, it's interesting. We'll get into a bit on what do we mean by sentience and we'll continue this thing.

22:06Dave Blundin:What I absolutely love is that the two remaining people on the planet who tell you exactly what's on their mind are Demis and Alex. Everyone else now, you know, I love Dario. I love Sam. I love Elon. But all the they all have agendas now. And after after Sam's IPO agendas, IPO agendas, also, you know, firebombing of my house and shooting at the door agendas. And everybody's now like, oh, my God. And talking to the Pope, you know, I got to actually reposition a little bit here because I'm going to be talking to the Pope. So the two remaining people that just tell you exactly what's on their mind are Alex and Demis.

22:39Dave Blundin:I'd like to think, I'd say what's on their mind. I was on a couple of panels with Alex last week and he didn't pull any punches at all. It's worth noting, Demis' mission has always been to achieve AGI, right? I'm reading The Infinity Machine right now, which is sort of his biography. and from day one, that was his goal. Well, we're moving in that direction. All right, speaking of superintelligence, let's talk about the shopping industry. Amazon just did something really smart. Their AI voice shopping assistant, which runs on Alexa, and now is converting shoppers at three and a half times the rate of the traditional keyword search is being made available to all of their retailers.

23:23So Amazon is turning its competitive advantage into an AWS-style platform for retailers. Their goal is to become the operating system for all commerce. If you guys remember, a couple of pods ago, we did our special episode on Google I.O. Google announced three different parts to their agenda commerce play. The Universal Cart, an AI-powered shopping hub. Their Universal Commerce Protocol, UCP. It's an open standard that gives AI agents a common language to interact with merchants. And then their agent payment protocol, which lets AI agents make autonomous purchases. Can't wait to implement that.

24:03The contrast between Amazon and Google is what's important here. Amazon is selling its AI shopping to all of its retailers. Google is building an open protocol layer between retailers and AI agents. So Amazon's play is vertical, right? Own the customer relationship. Google's play is horizontal, own the infrastructure. Both are trying to like, you know, just undo traditional e-commerce websites, make them irrelevant. And the brand is going to be caught in the middle here. They have to pick one side or the other. Have you guys any thoughts on this one?

24:38Peter Diamandis:This is a really bizarre story in my mind, because remember, the original business model that Amazon was hoping for with Alexa oriented smart speakers was that they would convert people, basically persuade people to buy things off of Amazon Marketplace. And that didn't work. It turned out that people really didn't want to have conversations with their smart speakers about purchasing products from Amazon. And yet, all of these years later, well after the launch of Alexa smart speakers, Amazon has now tried the opposite embedding. Rather than trying to embed shopping skills in Alexa smart speakers, they're now embedding Alexa conversational agents inside the Amazon marketplace.

25:19Peter Diamandis:And that's working. And Amazon could have done this years ago. They could have tried the exact opposite. Without the hardware play, yeah. Yeah, like without the hardware, just embed the conversational agent directly in the Amazon marketplace. That's working. So I would view this as maybe better late than never from Amazon's perspective, but they could and should have been doing this years ago. But I love their AWS play, right? In other words, take their secret sauce, make it available to everybody and then build revenue on top of that. Well, that's the Amazon model. If you've read the everything store, Like that is that's sort of the bread and butter of Amazon taking your own internal surfaces and being your own being the world's best consumer oriented company, which which I construe as basically looking for anything that remotely looks like a consumer and then wrapping yourself around it, including your own internal customers.

26:07Peter Diamandis:So that is the play. And I'm sure this will get externalized pretty soon as an API for anyone else with an external marketplace that wants agentic shopping. Dave?

26:16Dave Blundin:I don't know if you know, Peter, but Jeff Bezos was my first really important big customer way back in the day. And he's just a brilliant visionary leader. And so they were very early to market with Alexa. And they took, I don't know if you remember, but they took 60 % of all product search away from Google. And Google freaked out about it. So, you know, Google still owned almost all search. But when somebody was doing a product search, which is huge revenue, 60 % of the time they would start their search on Amazon search, not on Google search. And Google tried to fight back with frugal and failed.

26:48Dave Blundin:And they tried to fight back many, many times and failed and failed and failed. But it feels like AWS started a long time ago. And it's just been like Apple since then, incremental, incremental, incremental. And the byproduct of that is why is there no foundation model team at Amazon, just like there isn't at Apple? Why did Google do it? And Meta do it, but not Apple and not Amazon. And I think it's just a question of leadership and incremental growth, huge revenue and profit growth through incremental add-ons, but no pivot, no vision, no fundamental shift, no product line change. It's just incrementalism.

27:27Dave Blundin:So I think they had, as Alex is pointing out, every opportunity to be by far the leader today in voice-driven agentic shopping and navigation of pretty much any product. And now they're just kind of adopting other people's technology and plugging it in. I mean, this kills Google's original advertising model, right? There's no page one listing of the product you want to click on and go buy.

27:54Peter Diamandis:I'm less worried that this somehow kills Google. I mean, how is this competing with mesothelioma ads, for example? There's quite a bit more to AdWords. No, but seriously, there's quite a bit more to AdWords revenue than just consumer products. There are professional services, lawyers, et cetera, that this does not compete with. But I do think for consumer products, yes, of course this competes. But then again, Amazon, to Dave's point, has for many years very successfully competed with product-oriented search ads. You know, where I think this goes in the final result is your personal AI, your version of Jarvis or Skippy, whatever it is, actually knowing what you need or what you want better than you do and making those recommendations before you even know you want them.

28:39I think that's the next layer here. Hyper personalization coming out in front, making it automagical again. Salim, what do you think about it?

28:47Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:um this is kind of like you know we'll keep nudging towards that kind of that framing that you talk about peter but this it's i think the big shift is that this the retail war is not now shelf space it's it's agent preferences and can you market effectively to somebody's ai and that's

29:02Dave Blundin:what's going to happen yeah well peter you know the the voices and also the avatars are lagging really badly now versus what they could be because you remember two years ago at abundance 360 that's when you had Socrates and Plato debating on stage, you know, the AI versus the AI. And on that day, that's over two years ago now. And on that day, if you said, where will we be in two years with voice and with avatars, you would have said, just perfect, like perfect, seamless, perfect salesperson. When in reality, we don't have the compute, even though the technical capability is there, all of that compute is getting redirected into code generation, self-improvement, and the business use cases, which are now dominating the revenue.

29:43Dave Blundin:So I think what's possible on this side of Amazon is lagging what they'll actually do because AWS is so much bigger than shopping at Amazon now. And they need, you know, they need to work very closely with Anthropic to roll out the business use cases. I think the other thing that's going to be coming is persuasive AI where a particular figure, maybe it's a construct that looks like a movie star that's your favorite because your AI knows what movie star is your favorite, sort of pops up and tries to convince you to buy a product over another product.

30:16Peter Diamandis:Well, this has been a historic problem with Amazon. You know, the infamous acronym from Amazon, CRAP, can't realize a profit. So if you have crap, can't realize a profit products, then one of the best ways to help realize a profit is, again, I mean that acronym only in the acronym sense. One of the best ways to do it is to have an AI assistant that's steering users towards, on average, more profitable products. Yeah. Let's turn to another story that is a big one. I don't think people realize this. It's the OpenAI Foundation story. So after OpenAI restructured, right, with the Public Benefit Corporation, the OpenAI Foundation now owns 26 % of OpenAI PBC.

31:10And amazingly, this puts the value of the foundation at somewhere between$130 and$260 billion. And it makes it the largest foundation in the world. I looked this up before this. Novo Nordisk, now out of Denmark, is$150 billion foundation. The Tata Trust in India is$100 billion. Gates Foundation is$75 billion. So imagine that. OpenAI now has the largest nonprofit philanthropic war chest in the world to do things with. So they've given away three basic grants. Their first one was to People First AI Fund, which was launched in 2025, was$40 million, distributed to about 208 nonprofits around the United States.

32:00Then they gave out$25 billion, a huge chunk, back in October 2025 across health breakthroughs and AI resilience. And then this particular story is a new$250 million grant on economic futures. So they're funding research on public wealth funds, worker ownership models, and AI dividends. And it's basically, I mean, you think about it, as they're about to go towards an IPO, they're trying to ask, how do we prepare society for the job apocalypse? And this comes at the same time that in our last episode, we talked about Sam Altman saying, you know, we're not going to have a job apocalypse. So two stories here.

32:48The first is their recent grant of$250 million. The second is the fact that this is the largest foundation in the world. Salim or Dave?

32:56Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Two quick thoughts. One is, you know, it's incredible the size of this, right? It's like unbelievable. My thought immediately goes to the abundance X prize. And can we drop the cost of health care, education, housing, food to, was it$200 or$250? There's$1 ,000 for a family of four. Can you give all the basic needs? And that seems achievable. And we should be pushing for that very fast because then everybody can live a better life of dignity or more people can. But I think the bigger issue here is the economic question is not job loss or any of the social contract. Is value accrual. Where does value accrue in this future economy?

33:37Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Does it go to labor, which is what it had been before, but that's not going to be the case. Does it go to capital? But as we demonetize, that may not be the case. Is it consumers? Is it governments? Or is it different, like, kind of some sort of public ownership model? This is going to be the big question. And I think there is a huge conversation that needs to be had as to how do we navigate this, because this is the fundamental question of how we're going to navigate the next 20, 30 years.

34:03Dave Blundin:Well, just a reminder, you know, Salim and I are on the board of XPRIZE founded by Peter. This should be the absolute mandate of XPRIZE. There's no higher priority in the world right now. And the amount of money that Peter just described, you know, people really struggle with million, billion, trillion. And now quadrillion is coming into our lexicon. But especially between billion and trillion, they're like, oh, that's a lot of money. But if I say, Peter, here's a dollar. And I say, Peter, here, I'm going to be giving you a thousand dollars. you obviously know the difference between a dollar and a thousand dollars.

34:34Dave Blundin:But when you say, hey, this charity is a quarter of a trillion, or if I said it's a quarter of a billion, people are like, oh, big. There's a big difference between a quarter of a trillion and a quarter of a billion. And so I think that the mandate and the mission of all that money is global, calm, peace, prosperity. And it matters tremendously to Sam. I mean, tremendously to Sam. And so how many people have actually gone to open AI with a proposal and said, here's an idea. And I'll bet it's, you know, you count on one hand the number of people who've come to them with a practical idea. And so it's, it's just an immense opportunity for people who rather than rants, you know, online come up with ideas for how to deploy all that capital to create global, you know, a transition to AI.

35:24Dave Blundin:Abundance. Smooth and abundant. And because it's entirely possible. You know, it's interesting. You're chomping at the bit. I'll go to Alex one second. You know, Brett Taylor, we have in the photo here, is the chairman of OpenAI. People need to realize the OpenAI Foundation, which controls only 26 % of OpenAI's stock, controls the board. The foundation votes on who's on OpenAI's PBC board, 100%. Alex?

35:51Peter Diamandis:A bit of numerology. When OpenAI was running its super alignment effort, which was subsequently shut down, but nonetheless, super alignment, the originally publicly stated plan was to allocate 20 % of OpenAI's compute to the super alignment safety effort. Switch gears. Social security is approximately 22 % of the US federal budget. Someone, somewhere, I'll make a prediction, is going to be asking the question as OpenAI, Anthropic, maybe one or two other frontier labs asymptotically converge on the total GDP of the world. Someone somewhere is going to probably ask the question, if you have a nonprofit foundation, that's 25 % of the value or 20 to 25 % of the value of the overall organization, why isn't the foundation itself supporting UBI or UBS?

36:47Peter Diamandis:I think you're right. I think we're going to go there. I think there's going to be sort of a call for the hyperscalers and the foundation labs to provide a percentage of their value back to, we talked about this in the equivalent of the permanent fund in Alaska that issues dividend checks to all of its, all the Alaskan residents. I think we're going to see this in the United States too. Something is going to need to underwrite some version of UBI that leads to UHI in the future? I think it will be irresistible, whether it takes the form of UBI or UBS or UBC or UBE. If the frontier labs, the top two-ish converge toward most of the global economy, I think there will be probably irresistible pressure for these 20 % to 25 % foundation arms to themselves support the UBs.

37:39Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Can I just mention something very quickly? Please, of course. For all the people that are new to this podcast or whatever, and I've not heard some of these terms before, be very careful. A lot of people conflate UBI and UBS and whatever as socialism. It is not. It is libertarianism because you actually dismantle government services. You double click on that, Salim, please. Well, because people think of it as, oh my God, government giving out money. Remember the section we wrote in the 2.0 book, Peter Coen by Harry Clore, which was technological socialism? Yes. Right? Government socialism always fails.

38:15Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Why? Because allocating assets from a centralized model is inefficient and invariably leads to corruption. And that's where the government is taking care of you. That's right. And government, it always fails. But think about Uber. Uber is a collective sharing of assets across a large group of people. It's actually kind of a socialist application. But when an algorithm hyper-efficiently matches demand and supply, you get all the benefits of the sharing economy without the downsides. So we put that section as tongue-in-cheek. What we've seen when people properly implement UBI is you dismantle government because you don't need it.

38:51Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:The market forces can drive it. The individual can decide where to put their money and the market takes care of the rest. And this is a profoundly important point that a lot of people miss. So I just want to highlight that. And technological socialism is where technology is taking care of you, right? Which is a very important point because we're heading in that direction in many ways. Please, Dave.

39:12Dave Blundin:Well, just to support Salim's differentiation there between socialism and libertarianism, the town I live in, in New England, when you cross into the town line, it says incorporated in 1649. So way, way back in time. And if you landed in the US in 1649, land was free. You just needed to use it. You put stakes in the ground, you grab it and you use it. And that's where we're going with compute and with AI. And that's not socialism. That's the exact opposite of socialism. It's like here is a here's your UBS. We're giving it to you in the form of... Universal basic services, right? Here are your services.

39:47Dave Blundin:It's your ability to thrive in the post-AI world is like the land was in 1649. Without the land you could do nothing. Without the compute you can do nothing. So here are your services you get for free. Now build on top of it. And just like in 1649, you didn't need a huge amount of government. You just needed, you know, some basic policing and some military and you were done. And this is very similar to that. It's like homesteading for AI. Alex, take us home. Yeah.

40:16Peter Diamandis:In my mind, to Salim's point, I'm not convinced, A, that socialism always fails. It's ironic that I'm arguing that. But I would also say, to my mind, if just conducting, playing out the thought experiment, this thought experiment looks more to me like privatized socialism rather than libertarianism. If I had to pin an ism on it. If you have an enormous sort of economy-swallowing nonprofit that owns a PBC that's under political and other pressure to distribute UBI, UBS, UBC, UBE. What's UBC, UBE? UBC is universal basic compute or universal basic capability. We use it as capability in our book, Peter.

41:03Peter Diamandis:Others define it, like Sam, as universal basic compute. And UBE is universal basic equity, so basically dividend checks for everyone. Thank you. Regardless of which form it takes, to my eye in this sci-fi scenario, this looks more like privatized socialism where we have a handful of frontier labs that are just dominating the economic output of the economy. By the way, I don't actually think this is how it's going to play out. It's just a thought experiment. But in this thought experiment, it looks more like privatized socialism to me. I think the final point to be made here is for most of societal history and let's say the last couple of hundred years, the government has been the backstop.

41:45And here we see potentially these frontier labs and hyperscalers being the backstop for society, making sure that people are able to survive and thrive. And I don't even say earn a living, have a living. It's an interesting transition, but we're seeing the fundamental transition of societal structure. Salim?

42:08Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:There's a broader conversation here that we actually should do a better treatment on, which is governments tend to centralize, and you can't achieve abundance via centralized structures. You need decentralized structures because they scale. And so there's a huge tension right now between this. The formation of the U.S. was to break apart having a king and having everything centralized. And now look at the government trying to centralize everything again. So there's this tension that goes back and forth between centralization and decentralization. But we have to figure that decentralized future out.

42:46Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:And that's not a trivial comment or problem.

42:50Peter Diamandis:If I could just add one more point on this, Peter. There's one more ism that we so rarely talk about on the pod, which is Fordism. So in the sense of history, perhaps rhyming, recall that Fordism, named after Henry Ford, is a socioeconomic system in which you have mass production and mass consumption, and the two are matched. So you're mass producing via moving assembly lines, and you have extreme division of labor, but at the same time, you're paying workers high wages so that they can buy the products that you're making. So if I squint at some of these OpenAI Foundation nonprofit scenarios, there's a world that looks a little bit like UBC, but also looks quite a bit like Fordism, where everyone is receiving handouts so that they can purchase the tokens so that the virtuous cycle can repeat itself.

43:40Peter Diamandis:And you see this playing out, for example, possibly in SAM or OpenAI giving$2 million to YC companies so that they can purchase tokens again or in the form of just-in-kind token donations.

43:53Dave Blundin:The biggest difference versus Fordism and the Industrial Revolution is just the raw scale of abundance that's suddenly possible. The backdrop behind all of this is we're going to be splitting hairs on how to share the wealth, but the amount of wealth is like nothing the world's ever seen. And also, there's no real upper bound. There's nothing that technically prevents it from going to infinity. Enter Elon's prediction on triple-digit GDP growth. Yeah, exactly. So it's a great, great, great tailwind. And yeah, all this complexity layers on top of that.

44:24Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I know. GDP worst economic measure ever. But the point here for everybody is to inject a little optimism in the picture here. We're about to see the global economy just skyrocket.

44:37Dave Blundin:Well, that's another reason why approaching the foundation with ideas is like the biggest no-brainer. There's so much abundance to go around. There should be this litany of ideas flooding into Brett Taylor's office. Just a hundred, a thousand times more ideas than we're currently generating. So it's kind of a call to ours. If you're listening, we're ready to talk. XPRIZE has got - Call us. Yeah, call us. One of my next conversations with Elon is going to be, I know you funded$100 million XPRIZE for carbon extraction. let's fund$10 billion X prizes for the 10 most important, you know, not gigascale, terascale challenges in the world.

45:16And I think if we had those benchmarks, those 10 sort of shining stars, it would guide where graduate students do their research, if graduate students are still a thing or where companies go and focus. You know, these are targets to shoot for. Everybody, welcome to the health section of Moonshots brought to you by Fountain Life. You know, AI is impacting every aspect of our lives, how we teach our kids, how we do our business. But one of the most important things that AI can deliver to us is health. And one of the things I think about when shooting for 100, 120 is, am I going to have the cognitive health to be able to think clearly and keep my wits about me for the next 50 years?

45:52I'm joined here today by Dr. Don Musalem, the chief medical officer of Fountain Life and a member of my Fountain Life medical team. Don, a pleasure. So, Don, talk to me about brain health.

46:02Dave Blundin:Brain health, you know, you're right. This is the number one concern people coming into Fountain Life have is, will I remember the name of my child and the face of my loved one? 45 % of dementia cases are entirely preventable with lifestyle. And what was really intriguing to me, Peter, is that a quarter of our members had advanced brain age. But over 13 months of us really helping them live healthier lifestyles, eating healthier, moving their body regularly, and optimizing sleep. People overlook that so often, but that sleep optimization is critical for our brain health. What we showed is that we were able to improve the brain age in 46 % of those individuals.

46:43Dave Blundin:That's a powerful number. That's amazing. You know, one of the things I love about Fountain is we're constantly searching the world for the most advanced therapeutics and bringing them to our members. So for me and all of you, I hope that you appreciate the fact that you can become the CEO of your own health. You can make sure that you've got the cognitive clarity for the next 50 years. Come and check it out. Fountainlife.com slash Peter to learn more and become the CEO of your health. Now back to the episode. Let's talk about the next story here. The U.S. just made its biggest bet on quantum computing ever.

47:15IBM and the Department of Commerce announced Anderon, America's first full purpose-built quantum chip foundry. It's a$2 billion play. A billion dollars is coming from the Chips Act money from the government. A billion dollars is coming from IBM. They're building it in Albany, New York. It's a 300-millimeter manufacturing process. They can produce quantum chip devices 30 times faster than current methods. the foundry model means ibm becomes equivalent to sort of the tsmc of quantum other companies in the space google inq regetti d-wave could potentially manufacture their quantum devices on anderon in the same way that fabulous companies like apple nvidia use tsmc for classical chips um i'm going to go to you first alex on this are are you excited about this is this uh I think this is actually a smart bet.

48:09Peter Diamandis:So even though normally I would probably complain about quantum being a solution in search of a problem, at least quantum computing, not quantum sensing, which I absolutely love, but quantum computing being a solution in search of a problem, and probably refer back to previous comments about how the likeliest problem to justify the CAPEX is going to be something AI in nature, either quantum accelerated AI training or quantum accelerated AI inference, I think it's actually a pretty smart move because it's going to take a few years to build out this Andron foundry. So we're talking maybe late 2020s.

48:43Peter Diamandis:And I'm pretty optimistic that sometime in the next few years, probably by the time this foundry is ready and at scale, we will have quantum accelerated AI advances, in which case we really do want the superconducting qubits that provide infra for those quantum accelerated AI advances to be right here in the U.S. and not, say, on Taiwan. So I think in that scenario where we get AI quantum acceleration, pretty brilliant move to get ahead of the ultimate geopolitical conflict rather than play catch up again. We're going to have Michael Kratios on the pod very shortly. We'll talk to him about this.

49:24You know, I love the fact that the government is taking these moves and that IBM is stepping up. Salim, you've been tracking this area?

49:32Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I have. I think this is, you know, there's a huge inflection point. Once you have quantum devices moving from like bespoke lab systems into foundry production, the innovation curve changes completely. This is still a long ways away just because we still, I think we're still at a ratio of about needing a thousand physical qubits per logical qubit. Yes, correct. Right. And we've not been able to break through that for a while. There's so many errors. You need all these but if you drop the cost of creating the logical qubit, in this case by 30 times, that's just the devices forget the actual qubits.

50:11Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:You radically change the game and you just can flood the system with just a lot of physical qubits and then you can get to the benefits of quantum computing. I think this is still a few years away, obviously, but the power of this is going to be really exciting. Dave, any thoughts?

50:27Dave Blundin:Yeah, I was on a panel with Alex earlier this week and this topic came up and Alex really, like I said earlier in the pod, he says exactly what's on his mind. And so he stepped on some people's toes by saying exactly what he just said, quantum computing is a solution.

50:43Peter Diamandis:I'm not here to prop up the quantum computing industry. I don't have any conflicts of interest.

50:48Dave Blundin:Well, I think we need to put a pin in a future conversation about the difference between quantum computing, quantum photonics, and quantum sensing. Because two out of three are extremely exciting. So we should come back. Jack Hittery, friend of the pod, back on. They've done some extraordinary work with quantum sensing, quantum navigation. And it's not using quantum chips. They're basically using all the quantum equations basically on an AI infra. We're going to start to see quantum begin to play. All of our systems, material sciences, biology, chemistry, is quantum in nature.

51:25Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I have two quick thoughts. One is, I remember spending some time at the Perimeter Institute of Waterloo, which has been funding quantum stuff for a while. And they did what David is talking about, where they broke it up into networking, computing, and sensors. And they're having lab work on all of those three, and then thinking we'll bring it together at some point, which I thought was a great way of breaking it down. The second I can't resist throwing out the Hartmut Nevin comment, who is the head of Google's quantum AI computing lab, who said, when we build a quantum computer, it will be definitive proof that we live in a multiverse.

52:01Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:And then everybody's brain just explodes right there. Okay. All right. Let's go from the sort of the esoteric to the real functional here. So here's a milestone I've been waiting for for a while. For the first time ever, wind and solar generate more electricity globally than natural gas. Obviously, we've blown through coal. In April of 2026, wind and solar hit 22 % of global electricity, surpassing the 20 % from natural gas. That's nearly 530 terawatt hours. And it looks like the growth rates are across the board. China increased by 14%, the EU by 13%, the UK by a staggering 35%. This is energy abundance curve.

52:47That's what I've been talking about for a while. Solar and wind aren't just the future of energy. They're here now, and they're still on an exponential curve. You know, we've talked about this. The Earth is bathed in 8 ,000 times more energy from the sun than we consume as a species. You know, Elon's been just harping on this for a while. We don't need anything else. We just need to continue to tile the planet in solar and, of course, gain access to all the solar coming from the sun, you know, heading toward a Karthage F1 scale planet. Dyson swarm, Peter, a Dyson swarm.

53:18Dave Blundin:Yes. That was a great quote, Peter. Wind is blown through coal. We got to make a T-shirt of that. And solar outshines gas. Do you guys remember Google had RE greater than C as a motto? Renewal energy greater than coal. Well, we blew through that and now through natural gas. And it's so true. I still don't understand why the US isn't accelerating this in the same way China has. China's gone 10x past us in solar. Salim, your thoughts on this one?

53:52Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I want to just step back one level and do two kind of comments, broader comments here. One is we talk a lot about exponential thinking, and it's really important to kind of just frame that back to root first principles, which is that when you have a doubling pattern like Moore's law, Ray identified that that doubling pattern doesn't stop. And we have a tough time with this cognitively because you can't have infinite growth. It has to level off. And Ray, after researching this for 10 years, came up with that orange diagram that we show a lot where you had vacuum tubes and then you had before that relays.

54:26Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Then we had transistors. each one is an s-curve vacuum tubes take off we can only fill so many put so many in a room but if you have an information-based environment the next technology takes over you get to the next s-curve and it keeps going we reached we're reaching the end of integrated circuits now but we have now matrix style architectures we have 3d chip design we have optical computing we have quantum computing one of those or more will take over that curve and the curve just keeps going this is such a powerful and important thing it's the foundation of everything we taught its singularity and everything to do with exponentials.

54:59Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:People can't get their head around the fact that solar is on an exponential curve. It's been doubling every 22 months for 40 years. This is not a new thing. So at that doubling pattern, and we're reaching, yes, we're reaching the end of the life cycle of silicon-based panels, but now we have perovskite, and then at some point we'll have something else. And that curve will just keep hopping up and across so you can bank on that yes uh and when you can bank on that you can see the curves going the problem with the exponential it looks it looks flat when you look back and it looks impossible when you look forward and so people go well that's impossible uh just like our energy secretary says solar will never be more than 10 percent of uh energy supply which is completely insane this is uh shows you that we're getting there and we're getting there faster than anybody thought ramez keeps, Ramez Nam, our favorite energy guru, keeps saying every time I was super optimistic, I was too slow to the curve.

55:56Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:You have to be radically optimistic to watch this. And if you want abundant intelligence, whatever we call intelligence, you need abundant energy, right? So the winning countries will be the ones that can connect cheap electrons to compute as quickly as possible. And, you know, the other thing, Salim, we've talked about this before, and Ramez Nam does an amazing job showing all the international agencies like IEA, you know, all their projections are wrong over and over again. So over and over again. IEA. And in the next, in the next part, I'll bring those slides. I'll come with, come with the data.

56:30Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I want to show those. IEA's 2020 model didn't expect wind and solar to surpass gas until the mid 2030s. And here we are in 2026. 2047, I think it was when they said. My favorite one is they predicted that there will not be more than a million electric vehicles by 2040, electric vehicles. That was their prediction. They put that prediction out in 2015. By the end of 2015, we had more than a million electric vehicles. It's just like how, you know, if you made predictions that were that wrong year after year after year, you should literally lose your job. You have no business. It really shows this is not a math error.

57:08Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:This is a cognitive error. We have to overcome that, which is what this pod is all about. And God bless our listeners for kind of taking on this new paradigm.

57:17Dave Blundin:Dave? Yeah, it's Peter, Salim, and I. You know, we like to think of our kids in the back of our minds when we're doing these podcasts and think, what should you be saying to your own kids? This one, there's a whole generation of people that I know who said about 10 years ago, I'm going to dedicate my life. To green energy and to global warming. This is the greatest problem of our time and this is what's going to drive humanity forward. And I was thinking in the back of my mind, I've heard that before over the decades with other topics. And this is an engineering problem that might get solved. And the phrase, I'm going to dedicate my life to blank, is a big mistake in the age of AI.

57:55Dave Blundin:A big, big mistake. instead think like i'm going to have a constantly changing life and treat this like an engineering problem not a political this became such a political garbage topic when it's really just a get it done engineering topic and so get out of the politics and don't get trapped into the into the politicization of all of these things and never say i'm going to dedicate my life to blank Instead, be nimble.

58:22Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Constantly nimble. There's one rational understanding for what the U.S.'s reticence for solar, which is that because China is so far in the lead in making the panels, until the infrastructure in the U.S. is ready to make solar panels, whatever they look like, it's hard to push it because you have to go to China to get all the panels. I'm kind of surprised Elon hasn't doubled down. When we met with him back at the Gigafactory, if you remember, he said he gave the edict to both Tesla and to SpaceX to increase their solar production. But we still haven't seen – we saw one machine that was sort of laying out solar panels in the desert and doing it fully autonomously.

59:06I'm surprised we haven't seen more. Alex, you want to close us out here?

59:09Peter Diamandis:It may be just a comment on Elon, the Elonverse and solar. So something I talked a bit about in my newsletter was the pivot by Tesla away from their SolarCity acquired rooftop solar tiling toward more conventional solar panels, which they're now producing out of their facility in, I think, upstate New York. I do expect, given the amount of demand that one can reasonably anticipate sun-synchronous orbit-based Dyson swarms from SpaceX will need, that SpaceX or SpaceX plus Tesla, if they end up merging in the next year, will end up probably in the short term importing cheap Chinese solar panels, combining that with their own native production facility in upstate New York.

59:51Peter Diamandis:We're going to need a vast scale up of domestic or sun-synchronous orbit or lunar production of solar panels. And I expect Elon's SpaceX or SpaceX Plus entity to end up being forced to do that and not Tesla, which was never a perfect fit. All right.

1:00:08Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:And just to bring out the importance of this, China has already a structure where they have robots building solar panels to generate the energy to build more robots. Yeah, exactly. We call it the intermost loop for a reason.

1:00:24Peter Diamandis:That's the interloop.

1:00:25Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:And that's already started. Physical recursion. You cannot fall behind on that. Yeah, really important.

1:00:31Dave Blundin:Well, really important also that Elon always does fundamental physics and what's fundamentally possible. And Peter just mentioned that we get bathed in 8 ,000 times more sunlight than all of the energy we consume. And I think Elon said a little corner of Utah would power the entire United States. So those are the fundamental metrics. And the solar panels we already produce, the cost is just purely related to that automation of the construction. The fundamental materials going into the solar panels are basically near free. Literally dirt cheap. Dirt, literally sand and dirt cheap. All right. This next story here gives me the chills.

1:01:07The federal agencies have created a new brand of threat. It's called anti-tech extremism. They've logged over a thousand pages monitoring threats against data centers and tech executives. This comes after the attacks on Sam Altman, you know, the Molotov cocktail, the firing of guns. We talked last week about the potential of organized pushback against AI. Well, the government is now treating it as a domestic security concern. When the FBI creates a new category for something like this, it's time to take it seriously. I want to link this to also a recent video, Dave, you and I watched about Mr.

1:01:45Wonderful talking about what might be sort of Chinese funded, anti-data center protests. Thoughts on this, Dave?

1:01:54Dave Blundin:Well, I think the data or the evidence on the China involvement is pretty irrefutable. And so this has always been America's Achilles heel, right? Voters can get whipped up. And this is what the Soviets tried to do during the Cold War as well, trying to whip up demonstrations and votes to stop progress so that they could bypass the U.S. technologically. So it's kind of history repeating itself. But democracy has this as a major, major Achilles heel. And I think the, you know, the violence part of it would also freeze all the scientists from trying to work on these things. And that's very real, too.

1:02:32Dave Blundin:I don't know if, yeah, I don't want to, I actually don't want to dig up history on this. But they have to take it very, very seriously. Otherwise, we're just going to stop working on it and then China will run away. I mean, it's much easier for, in theory, I don't want to say this is happening. I don't have evidence myself, only what I read. But in theory, you know, this is a super, you know, efficient way to put sand in the gears, you know, get the public. And it's doing, you know, how many data centers have been killed? Like half the data centers have been either canceled or slowed down. Alex, what are your thoughts?

1:03:05Peter Diamandis:I'd like to see much stronger federal law enforcement of preventing threats by anti-tech extremists against technology. I think at this point, it's potentially a national security threat. And I'm not at all thrilled that there is a group of extremists out there who may be hand-wring over ways to destroy any AI initiatives that might actually radically grow the economy and grow the pie for everyone. I think it's a zero-sum or negative-sum mentality that we as a civilization and as a country and as a democracy, we really need to grow past. So there aren't that many areas where I just sort of hang my head and cry.

1:03:55Peter Diamandis:This is one of them. Salim?

1:04:02Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I, to the extent that there is external influence whipping up this frenzy, that really has to be stopped. We already suffered from this. We've already suffered from Facebook kind of training all our kids in the wrong way and having all sorts of media. I mean, something like 70 % of people radicalized on Facebook because of its algorithms and people doing injections of negative things. And this goes back to the human brain, Peter, that you and Stephen Kotler identified. Your amygdala is 10 times more likely to pay attention to negative news than positive news because of that survival factor. Back in 10 ,000 years ago, if you heard a noise in the bushes, you ran.

1:04:47Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:And so we're so triggered by negativity. and it's very easy to incite this type of stuff. And therefore, it's very cheap. And overcoming that impedance mismatch is a really, really big challenge. Well, look at the data.

1:04:59Dave Blundin:You know, Salim, in China, 80, 85 % of people are optimistic about AI, but the state controls the media. In the United States, it's like 25 % are optimistic about AI, but the media thrives on controversy. And the more controversy, the more clicks, the more ad views, the more revenue. So there's your dichotomy. And so China's going to have a very easy time keeping the data centers constructed because everyone's optimistic about it. And the U.S., if we grind to a halt, it's going to happen anyway, but it's going to happen in China. I had a conversation two nights ago. We had an event for our Future Vision X Prize with our friends at Google and Range Media.

1:05:34And there were two young guys there, Josh and Jack. And if you guys are listening, they were 21 and 22-year-old in college and just graduated. and they were telling me how much pushback they get from their peers, that their peers just think AI is the worst thing. And they were so happy to be in a room of people who were, you know, excited about and supportive of AI. And I hate that notion that on college campuses in particular, and we saw that with, you know, the booing of Eric Schmidt at the commencement address. that that truly scares me that the single most important technology that our 20-something year olds need to be learning how to use and you know utilizing to make their lives even bigger up upscale their ambitions in life are culturally now being pushed back on and oh my god I can't

1:06:31Dave Blundin:believe you like AI what's wrong with you yeah well you're 100 right that's exactly what's going on, Peter, because my son Jack at Northeastern is running into that headlong with his, he's got a hackathon, AI hackathon going on. And the subset that are into it are super excited about it. But there's this other big subset that's just, you know, you remember how the jocks used to beat up all the computer geeks back in, you know, the 1980s and 1990s. It's that happening all. Yeah. It's that all over again, except it's now, oh, you're an AI person. Yeah, you geek, get out of here. So it's terrible.

1:07:06Dave Blundin:It's really, really, and, you know, you look 10 years in the future and you know who's going to be thriving and who's not. It's just, you just got to talk some sense into the rest of the class, but it's hard. Our next story comes out of California. Governor Newsom just signed a first of its kind executive order to study how AI affects California workforce. This is big because, you know, California is the fifth largest economy in the world. The state is building a public dashboard to track AI related job losses in real time. identify vulnerable industries and explore retraining programs and UBI models.

1:07:42This is the most concrete government action being taken. It's not a white paper. It's an actual infrastructure and measurement play. You know, I actually, assuming that the data is correct, it's not biased, I'm interested in seeing this. You know, it's still so murky about what will AI do to the job market. You know, we've heard both sides of the equation. We heard Sam saying, no, I was wrong. We've seen also in the data that the group out of work the longest is 22 to 28-year-olds. It's not that people are being fired. It's that they're not being hired. They're hiring freezes. Dave, do you want to jump in on this first?

1:08:23Dave Blundin:Well, 300 ,000 jobs have been lost to AI at most. That's less than people have died in Ukraine. So this is not a crisis yet. It's just the fear of a future crisis. And like we were saying earlier, the tailwind is much, much stronger than the headwind. There should be massive, massive abundance as a byproduct of what's going on. So I think studying the actual data is a great first move because like, you know, everything you read online is inflated like crazy. And Sam reversing course on it, you know, maybe he doesn't want to have his door shot at again. Or maybe it really is. Like in my personal experience with Vestmark, I was worried about about half the jobs being automated away.

1:09:02Dave Blundin:it's going to be zero now. We're growing so quickly and the profitability is going up so quickly. There's no point, there's no need in doing, to do job cuts. And so if that's true in other companies in the financial services sector, then there'll be no job cuts at all. Doesn't, doesn't mean the fact that nobody's hiring, you know, that it's definitely true. The college hiring is at an all time low, but if you're starting a new company and you're an entrepreneur, it's the best time to be recruiting at a college that I've seen in the last 20 years. So there's good news on that front if you take your entrepreneurial lens and shine it at this.

1:09:37Alex, do you have a thought here?

1:09:38Peter Diamandis:Yeah, I think this is a case of federalism giveth and federalism taketh away. I think if you juxtapose this with movements by California to institute so-called billionaires tax and wealth tax and driving away sort of Atlas shrugged style, driving away many of the key technology leaders who've created so much of this wealth, one half of the split screen and then in the other half of the split screen experimentation with dashboards and tracking AI losses and UBC experimentation. I think there's a case to be made that we really do want each of the United States experimenting with different proposed solutions.

1:10:19Peter Diamandis:I happen to favor the UBC or AI dashboard model versus the wealth tax model. But I do think it is at least positive that we're seeing some sort of experimentation by at least California and presumably soon other states regarding how this transition to AI automating or solving or cooking most of the services economy will ultimately look. And it's far better to have it at least the future of unemployment programs or similar handled at the state level rather than the federal level. On the other hand, I would argue we really do want federal protections for AI technologies so this doesn't devolve into one fully balkanized set of regulations that make it impossible to advance AI capabilities.

1:11:05Dave Blundin:That's exactly right.

1:11:07Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Salim, some final words here. I'll take the positive view here, given that I started out with this pronoia monstrosity of a word. You know, at the negative, you can look at this as the state trying to control and oversee and protect labor, right? But if you take the positive side, this is government as censor, where the dashboards are trying to time things and figure out what's happening in a more shorter timeframe than 18-month labor statistics. So when you have those early warning systems, you can react more quickly because obviously dashboards aren't enough. You need rapid reskilling. You need different ownership models, et cetera, et cetera.

1:11:50Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:But the potential here for government, which is always lagging way behind to be able to sense things more quickly, I think is an enormous positive. And so I think this is like the first primitive of like a post-labor state where you're tracking things. And also look at the idea that you're moving from like all government is organized around a labor economy. We tax labor. We try and protect jobs. And we're moving now to like as you sense what's coming, you'll be able to start moving to a post-labor economy, whatever that looks like. But because labor is collapsing, therefore the state has to change.

1:12:28Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:And so that has to, that's a structural challenge. And I think I take the positive here in doing this early warning sensing and real-time sensing. It'll push the policy side to move that direction. That'll be the positive rather than the negative. Oh my God, hunker down and protect labor even more. I'm excited about getting the data. All right. This is a fun story. Researchers at Westlake University in China just built a handheld device that can detect early stage lung cancer from a single drop of blood at a near 95 % accuracy. It's published in Nature Photonics. It's 10 ,000 times more sensitive than standard labs.

1:13:07The core sensor just costs five bucks. I mean, this is the abundance play. It's demonetization, democratization of cancer screening. You can imagine seeing this in rural India and sub-Saharan Africa. Alex, any thoughts here?

1:13:21Peter Diamandis:And it's optical and it's not coming from Theranos. This is such major progress. N years after Theranos, leave it to Chinese researchers. It's sort of an interesting on-chip technology using metamaterials to look for very small changes in refractive index from blood, so from light passing through blood used to detect early-stage cancer. I think in general, putting aside all of the drama around Theranos itself, there's a sense in which there was always going to be an opportunity for radical new diagnostics from relatively de minimis volumes of blood. But in some sense, it was, I think, just a matter of time for technology and in particular for optics to catch up with this.

1:14:12Peter Diamandis:and I'll make a forecast. So if you remember a while back when Alphabet was first formed, Google transformed into Alphabet, and as part of the Alphabet transition, Verily was carved off as sort of the big biotech play within the Alphabet ecosystem. At least for a while. For a while, rest in peace, for a while. There was a lot of early interest in non-invasive wearables for cancer diagnosis. And in particular, I think one of the most absolutely fascinating Verily projects was going to be sort of a smartwatch that would use purely non-invasive optical change detection, shine light at various frequencies through your wrist, combine that with an edible or injectable, but I think it was originally supposed to be an edible tracer that would enable some optical change to be detectable from your wrist non-invasively through optical changes, I think we're going to actually realize that.

1:15:14Peter Diamandis:It looks like it's not going to be Verily that implements it, but I'll make a forecast. I'm not going to provide a particular timetable, maybe say next five years or so. I think we will get to non-invasive, wearable, optical cancer detection, and it's not just going to stop with metamaterials ex vivo with a single drop of blood. It's not just cancer. It's going to be your physiological state in the moment, right? At-home testing where you can know exactly what's going on. It's uploaded into your AI. You're catching disease at inception when you can cure it most accurately. And this compares to sort of like a refrigerator-sized ELISA machine, and it's being done in minutes instead of in hours.

1:15:58It's extraordinary progress.

1:16:00Peter Diamandis:But I think critically, why do we care that it's$5 versus$5 ,000? If the chip is$5 ,000, but it can do high-throughput screening, you can still, sort of in the style of the company or the project Grail, you can still completely transform preventative cancer screening. Where I think this gets really interesting and why I would argue we care about making the hardware for cancer detection so cheap is because we can make it wearable. As long as we can figure out how to do this non-invasively, we can build it into a smartwatch or a smart wearable. Or if not wearable, it could be at home, right? It's like every day you brush your teeth and you check your blood and, you know, it's keeping you in health optimization.

1:16:40Peter Diamandis:Consumers can own it is the transformative outcome. Yes, yes, exactly. And it's available to 8 billion people. You know, it's at a price point that almost everyone can afford. It's true. It's true abundance. Salim, Dave, any thoughts?

1:16:54Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I have a couple of comments. This is the bellwether and poster child of everything we talk about on this pod and everything we all talk about, which is that technology is a major driver of progress in the world. It might be the only major driver of progress in the world, as Ray Kurzweil says. Now we have a dozen technologies moving. We're democratizing and demonetizing things. This was a$10 million machine 15, 20 years ago. And now it's like$5. this should get everybody incredibly excited because there's thousands of this type of thing coming along in the next few years. In every domain possible, where we're going to crash the potential, the previous cost by orders and orders of magnitude.

1:17:36Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:So important. And you think about the idea, the diagnosis of healthcare now, of any condition between AI and tests like this, become near free. Diagnosis becomes free. And now you just have to worry about the treatment protocols, which is much easier once you have the diagnosis accurate. And your AI can analyze all of it, right? Yeah. I mean, every single tech watcher should get very, very excited about this and trumpet this type of thing through the rooftops because this is the future. This is why we get so excited. We can cure so many amazing things in the next few years with all this stuff.

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1:19:14Let's move us on to robotics. So Andreessen Horowitz just put out a serious warning. They're saying that America needs a wake-up call on robotics. Alex, you've been saying this for a while. Their argument is that China's output in the world in solar and 5G is the exact same pattern being played out in robotics. So Marc Andreessen's quote is blunt, quote, the U.S. must work with allies to build a defensible AI robotic stack. This is the time, but, you know, there is time, but not much time. Alex, you've been pushing on this for a bit.

1:19:50Peter Diamandis:I've been pushing. And this is one of the reasons why I helped form company ProRL to get humanoid and non-humanoid robots out into American streets and to juice the American supply chain. I think this is a very real problem. The Chinese Communist Party has a five-year plan for, they call it AI plus, not just foundation models and not just training infrastructure, but physical integration of AI throughout the economy, including more than 100, I think now more than 150 humanoid robotics companies that are coming out of China. So I think I completely agree with Mark. I think this is a very real problem.

1:20:28Peter Diamandis:I would like to see leapfrogging capabilities, not just parity or peer competition with China to see if we can also start 150 humanoid robotics companies. I'd like to see much, much deeper integration of general purpose robotics capabilities into all facets of the U.S. service and physical labor economy. and I think government has an important role to play there in juicing demand, in creating favorable regulatory regimes to put robots everywhere. But again, being in Boston, although I'm in Chicago ironically right now, in Boston, we're still struggling to get Waymos and that's something I've been pushing on as well.

1:21:08Peter Diamandis:If we can't get Waymos, how are we going to get humanoid robots everywhere? So I think we have a lot of work cut out for us ahead of us. We need our Shenzen here. Dave, I heard you say something recently that I thought was prophetic. In particular, on how, as the leader of LinkX Penential Ventures, where you're thinking about deploying capital. You know, you've said probably a two-year window on AI software generate companies, and you're going to be directing more of our capital. Just full disclosure, I'm Dave's partner in LinkXPV towards hardware, towards robotics. Can you speak to that?

1:21:42Dave Blundin:Yeah, I think this is going to play out right down the middle of our fairway where incubators and accelerators are going to thrive. It's very similar to biotech where all the ideas come from startups, but the startups need to be part of a larger Eli Lilly or part of a flagship pioneering ecosystem, which has already got the regulatory figured out, the sequencing, you know, all the heavy lifting machinery that takes a decade to develop is already there. And then your idea can inject into that ecosystem. Robotics is very similar where a brilliant team of three people says, I think we can build a robot that does X.

1:22:17Dave Blundin:It's far better to be in an ecosystem where the manufacturing, the supply chain, the actuators, the funding, all of that is figured out. The lab space is all figured out. So that's what we're building now. Because we've had something like 80 consecutive AI deals now. And the returns are incredible. It's like nothing I've ever seen. But the window of opportunity for pure software AI is probably another couple of years. And then the self-improvement loop is just going to take over. I think robotics is a good 10-year theme, just like biotech is a good 10-year theme. So, you know, we've got our first robotics deals already done.

1:22:53Dave Blundin:We're doing a lot of robotic operating system deals where they're reusable across many, many different devices. And then also you notice in the college campuses, a lot of computer science majors are now shifting back to material science, Meckie and some of the hard scientists, sciences, which is an anticipation of this, this wave, you know, being, cause if you're in college right now, you're going to, you're kind of, kind of missed the foundation model wave, but you'll be perfectly timed for the robotics wave. Also, you know, everything we've ever done with robotics needs to be rethought for space, zero G and, and radiation.

1:23:28Dave Blundin:So you gotta, you gotta do it all over again for manufacturing out in space, which is another great, great thing that we want to get ahead of. Yeah. Let me hit on a couple of robot stories and then one in particular for Salim. So this is first Hyundai's robotics company is starting to learn to play.

1:24:10So, you know, in prep for the World Cup here, we see Atlas kicking a soccer ball. It's going to be interesting. Let me show you the next two videos and we'll talk about the robot companies. We'll talk a little bit about figure AI entering, you know, sort of a new record of continuous package sorting. All right. Out of China, we've got the dollar haircut. You heard the dollar shave club? We know the dollar haircut. take a look finally yeah uh so here we see a robot and i i do think this is kind of inevitable but are you going to trust a robot with a sharp blade uh very close to your neck and uh and salim this one's for you a humanoid robot with six arms um you've been you've been asking for this for a while uh and your thoughts salim oh i just love it you know the why limit to two arms

1:25:03Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:for god's sake i always use the example of when you're trying to open a garbage bag you need a third arm to hold it open for god's sake i just want to just thank all the viewers and listeners people have been tweeting things salim here's your robot here's a six wheel thing here's a forearm thing it's so it's been absolutely fun to do it it's just it's just i think it's a great way of adding the taking it away from just the humanoid figure and yes i understand that humanoid robots are used to moving around in human spaces, but an extra arm can't hurt. And we saw figure robotics. How long did it do a continuous package sorting for?

1:25:39Is it still going or did they -

1:25:40Peter Diamandis:For longer than a week. I think Brett ended it after eight days or so. Yeah. Well, we're going to see a lot on the robot space coming out shortly. Of course, Optimus, next iteration of Optimus 3 is expected. And when we were there, what was it? 10 million square feet of Optimus productions capacity, Dave? Something like that. Yeah, something like that. That's huge. All right. One sad story here is Blue Origin's new Glenn exploded on the launch pad. Let's take a quick look at this video.

1:26:16Here we see it in Cape Canaveral. This was during a ground test, a cataclysmic

1:26:28deconstruction. Yeah. You know, it's never easy, you know, it, but, you know, the hardware is hard to Blue Origin had a rough week. New Glenn, Jeff Bezos, his heavy lift launch vehicle exploded during a static fire test at the Cape. You know, this is the rocket development game. You're going to have setbacks along the way. You can't test it piecemeal. You know, SpaceX has blown up plenty of rockets. This time is painful. SpaceX just launched, you know, their Starship V3 last week very successfully. And Blue Origin is going to be hit by this. You know, this is the vehicle that's also planning to launch Amazon's Project Coupier.

1:27:13They're going after the NASA lunar contracts. Alex, any thoughts? Yeah, well, first and maybe most importantly, no one was hurt. So that's great. This was an unmanned vehicle. This is a satellite launch capability right now.

1:27:28Peter Diamandis:Second order impact, Artemis. So this was the main vehicle for Blue Origin participating in Artemis 3. And so it looks seemingly just plain Kremlinologist here on the contracting supply chain. looks to me like SpaceX is very likely to end up being the preferred end-to-end vehicle for getting humans to the moon over the next few years ago. I think the general consensus in the space community now is this could set back Blue Origins, Artemis, Lunar Colony plans or participation by up to a year. So superficially, a good opportunity for SpaceX to shine in getting Americans back to the moon over the next couple of missions.

1:28:14Peter Diamandis:But hopefully Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin are able to rapidly rebuild and reconquer Leo and then Cislunar. Yeah. And I think the implications as well to Coupier is an important implication too. All right, let's wrap up with some quick AMA with the mates. We only have five minutes left here. Salim, do you want to pick the first one?

1:28:37Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:So given China's AI adoption, robotics scale and population, how likely is it that they hit abundance before anybody else? This is from Ad E.D. Plano. So this is very possible, but I would separate the material abundance from human abundance, right? China has a huge shot at reaching material abundance with solar batteries and EVs and robotics and logistics, etc. They have the scale and supply chains and so on. But abundance is not just cheap goods. It includes agency. It includes freedom to experiment. It includes human flourishing. It may get the cheap physical production, but the West may still have an edge in entrepreneurial recombination, open innovation, meaning making.

1:29:20Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:We just have to make sure we don't lose our freedoms along the way, which is my big concern at the government level. Alex, what's your question?

1:29:28Peter Diamandis:I'll pick number one. When do agents start running political campaigns? And this is from Mad Prophet of Waikiki. Well, mad prophet of Waikiki, I think they'll start running political campaigns maybe 10 years ago. We've had AI agents deeply involved, cite to social networks being involved in both local and federal in the U.S. election campaigns. It involved thoroughly end to end. And AI involved for that entire stack even prior to the LLM revolution. We've had agents, an agent being just an AI that incurs multiple sequential interactions with an environment. That's advertising and online retargeting.

1:30:17Peter Diamandis:That is fundamentally an agentic process in nature. So I would argue we've had this for at least 10 years, probably materially longer. Dave?

1:30:28Dave Blundin:I'll take bullet two. Of all the recent layoffs, how many people realistically have actually turned into entrepreneurs? And that's from AI Business in a Box. I did a spot survey of Microsoft. You know, Microsoft and Amazon in Seattle had about 20 ,000 or 30 ,000 layoffs. And then Meta has another 10 ,000 in San Francisco, Silicon Valley. So I just poked at some LinkedIn profiles. Short answer is in that sample, almost everybody has either joined a startup or joined another company that was recently a startup. So it's the best time I've ever seen by far for entrepreneurs and startups. I mean, by far.

1:31:10Dave Blundin:Now, that sample is just covering software engineers from Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta. So that's a very different sample. If we start seeing layoffs in robotic areas like garbage collection, I'm sure you're not going to see anywhere near that number of people joining startups. So I haven't sampled that yet. But at least within the tech community, it's a very, very rosy picture. Again, driven by the fact that the amount of abundance is just massive in scale, so it can absorb a lot of humanity. So not bad so far. All right. Number four, from at Malcolm Mackinnon 6849, if white collar jobs vanish, won't tax rates spike to fund welfare?

1:31:52Does an unemployment doctor get paid the same as an unemployed addict? Fascinating way to put the question. So this assumes that jobs vanish rather than getting transformed, which isn't what the data shows so far, right? So Dallas Fed says it's a hiring freeze, not mass layoffs. But I think your deeper question is around differential welfare, and that's fascinating. I think we're heading towards something like a universal basic capital rather than a flat UBI. Instead of paying everyone the same, you give people ownership stake and AI-generated wealth proportional to their contributions or their retraining effort.

1:32:33I ultimately think that we're going to see some base level of UBI, but then people are going to be able to use UBI or UBC to build on top of that. Do you guys have a second for another question round? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, great. Let's do this. All right. Back to you, Salim.

1:32:55Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Let me take question five, the first one. Isn't the real privacy question not what AI systems know about us, but the legal protections on what they're allowed to do with that knowledge? And that's from user at Poetry to Song, which is a great handle. So that's exactly the question, right? Privacy used to mean what data do you have? But the deeper question is what can an intelligent system do with that data? Can it change my insurance costs? Can it change my vote? Can it convince me about stuff? Can it deny me credit? So the new frame is not just privacy rights, it's agency rights. We need to have protections around having access to inference, prediction, manipulation, etc.

1:33:38Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:It's not about what AI knows about me, that I like hiking or red wine. It's if knowledge is used invisibly to constrain my choices. So in the 20th century, privacy was the big issue. The 21st century issue is agency. What can an agent can can AI improve my agency and augmented or reduce it?

1:34:00Dave Blundin:OK, Dave, love number six. Why is taxing tokens a perverse incentive? AI is going to drive the future economy. Taxing tokens to fund UBI makes sense. What we don't want to do is repeat the error from Obamacare. If you remember Obamacare, everyone's going to have a health care card. We're going to have universal health care. First thing we'll do is we'll pass a new tax. We'll call it the net investment income tax. It'll be 3.5 % tax on top of all other taxes. Here we are, you know, 15, 20 years later, we still have the tax and we don't have the Obamacare. So everything got thrown out by the next administration except the tax is still there.

1:34:40Dave Blundin:Solving UBI, the easiest part by far is taxing. In fact, we don't need any new tax. The government has plenty of tax mechanisms already. the corporate income tax should go through the roof with the abundance coming online. So you're going to have plenty of tax collection. That's the least last thing you need to worry about. What you need to do is actually design a UBI that makes sense. So what would happen here is if you tax tokens, yes, that's perverse because now people use less tokens when they should be using more tokens. They should be trying to build things with AI. So get rid of it. Don't worry about that.

1:35:15Dave Blundin:Worry about the UBI and how we're going to design it. We have plenty of ways to collect money. That's not the issue. Alex?

1:35:20Peter Diamandis:I'll pick number eight. Will AI eventually solve data centers and chips in a way that we don't need them at all? And this is asked by Dave Lane for. I love this question. I think the answer is probably yes. I think there are so many ways to compute that are allowed by the known laws of physics that I do think it is very likely that we will ultimately transcend semiconductors and CMOS. And by ultimately, I mean on the timescale of a decade, not like centuries. And I think AI will enable us to do that. I've spoken on the pod in the past about black hole supercomputers on your desktop, about plasma computers.

1:35:58Peter Diamandis:Seth Lloyd wrote about these 25 years ago at this point in the physical limits of computation. I think it is very likely that with advances in physics and AI and AI for physics, that we'll discover breakthrough substrates that go well beyond just sort of the obvious next steps like photonics to maybe maximally ambitiously computing directly using gravity and or quantum gravity. There's a body of evidence in the physics literature that suggests that in the strong gravitational field regime, gravity becomes turbulent for some generalized sense of turbulence. There have been a few papers in the literature on this.

1:36:40Peter Diamandis:And turbulence, a separate body of literature, is in some sense Turing complete. So one can imagine a story sometime in the future, not sure when, maybe 10 to 20 years out, where we're literally replacing data centers and chips with pure energy and stress energy tensor and computing with gravity. I think that's one possible end speaking. I'm glad you answered that one.

1:37:06Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Computing with gravity. Wow.

1:37:07Peter Diamandis:Computing with gravity.

1:37:09Dave Blundin:Black holes. Alex has a paper on that. If you look on his site, you can read it.

1:37:12Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Alex has a paper on everything. Number seven. That's why he can solve everything. Okay. With number seven, with agents costing real money, how can we believe in 8 billion, 8 billion, I assume humans, 8 billion agents when we can't get 8 billion humans free education? And that's from at KiwoonGPK91. So I think the assumption here is at the current cost, but the price curves are collapsing, right? Token prices have dropped arguably 75 % to 90 % in the last 18 months. We talked about that last week at the Jevons Paradox data. Gartner has predicted, I think it's like 90 % cheaper tokens by 2030. So a useful AI agent today, you can buy it at 20 bucks a month.

1:38:03We'll end up costing you two bucks a month in 2028 and 20 cents in 2030. And then I think they're going to be a lot of free services offered by these frontier labs, by the hyperscalers. You know, meanwhile, today, the cost of an education is arguably, you know, in the U.S. at least like$10 ,000 a year. an AI tutor running 24-7 can cost a fraction of that. So I think -

1:38:29Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:It can also personalize to you. Yes. Yeah. And so I think there's going to be, yes, we're going to have AI agents that you'll pay for if you want the top tier service and those will be getting cheaper and cheaper. And I think there's going to be a free variation on these agents for everyone who can afford it. Sort of universal basic compute. We've talked about that before. All right. We have a outro song. Cathedral Builders brought to us. I have a quick thank you. Oh yeah, please go ahead. Peter, thank you for the interview you and I did. Like this, our world is exploding. We have an abundance problem.

1:39:04Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:We've got hundreds of applicants wanting to get into the pilot. So we're trying to figure out how to down select, but super appreciate it, that interview we did. Yeah, I know, it was fantastic. If you haven't watched Organizational Singularity, which is a one-on-one episode that Slim and I did, please do, it's an hour long. and I hope you guys have enjoyed these kind of shorter episodes. Give us your feedback. We're trying to keep these under 90 minutes and as a result of that, we're doing it more frequently. So if you haven't subscribed and turned on notifications, please do. We're dropping these episodes now.

1:39:37Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:My travel plans, thank you. Three times a week.

1:39:40Peter Diamandis:Peter, should we ask the audience whether they'd prefer daily moonshots? Oh my God. Yeah, tell us what you want. I keep on saying we're going to move into an Airbnb together. All right, so this outro music is from Jazz, Cathedral Builders. Again, if you're a creative, please send us your outro. Or if you want it to be an intro song, let us know as well. You can send those to media at diamandis.com. Super excited. So love our community. And thank you guys for putting the time into these beautiful songs. All right, let's listen up to Cathedral Builders.

1:40:14Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Before a breakthrough, it's just a crazy idea. And then, humans living harmoniously with nature like never before. From scarcity, abundance.

1:40:53Dave Blundin:We need not be at the whims of today.

1:41:02We are the architects of tomorrow.

1:41:10Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:The visuals are amazing.

1:41:13Peter Diamandis:We are the architects. I love the visuals. The timeline, I think, is way too conservative. I agree. You think so? I knew you were going to say that.

1:41:20Dave Blundin:Did you see the baboon on the sky bridge in the future? We are the architects. of tomorrow. The best way to predict the future is create it yourself. This is the most extraordinary time ever to be alive. I love you guys. I love our sessions. I got up at 430 this morning recording this on the West Coast at 630 in the morning. So worth it. Can't sleep through the singularity.

1:41:42Peter Diamandis:Yeah. All right, guys. See you very soon. Have a good one. Have a great weekend. Take care, everybody. If you made it to the end of this episode, which you obviously did, I consider you a moonshot mate. Every week, my moonshot mates and I spend a lot of energy and time to really deliver you the news that matters. If you're a subscriber, thank you. If you're not a subscriber yet, please consider subscribing so you get the news as it comes out. I also want to invite you to join me on my weekly newsletter called MetaTrends. I have a research team. You may not know this, but we spend the entire week looking at the MetaTrends that are impacting your family, your company, your industry, your nation.

1:42:18And I put this into a two-minute read every week. If you'd like to get access to the MetaTrends newsletter every week, Go to diamandis.com slash metatrends. That's diamandis.com slash metatrends. Thank you again for joining us today. It's a blast for us to put this together every week.