The AI Duopoly Is Over: Grok 4. 5 , GPT-5 . 6 , and Muse Spark in One Week | #270

22:59Dave Blundin:So it's a complete fool's errand to put a thousand engineers on trying to, you know, perfectly tune it when you know it's going to be self-fixed very, very soon. So we're kind of living with very crappy machine generated, rapid out the door garbage products right now, but it's a very transitional phase. Well, they're, they're rushing. This is a competition between them and they're rushing products out. One of the products they did put out this week that I played with, and I show a short demo here, which I've loved, is GPT Live. So they have full duplex voice that can do simultaneous translation and support you in different ways.

23:35And, you know, one of the conversations we've had in the past is rather than typing at your AI in the future, we're going to be speaking until we get our, you know, our BCI, our neocortex implants, and then we'll be thinking. But let me play this example of duplex voice. It is smooth. It works really well. If you haven't played with it, go to your ChatGPT app. It's up live right now. All right, let me hit play. You can use it for free.

24:01Dave Blundin:Yeah, it's free. Okay, let's take a look. This is an example where someone who's not a native English speaker is asking ChatGPT to help correct him along the way. All right, let's take a listen. Please just jump in immediately to correct me. Absolutely. I'll keep it gentle and jump in as we go. Cool, cool, cool. Whenever you're ready. So let's go. I'm a student. I'm planning a trip to San Francisco. I have never went to this city before. Tiny tweak. I've never been to this city before. Oh, yeah, yeah.

24:34Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:And maybe, yeah. Okay, go ahead. Maybe polish it as, I've never been to San Francisco before. Okay, that's much more natural. So that's pretty extraordinary. It's great. You know, it is what all the science fiction movies promised us. It's here. That level of voice interactivity, it's a beautiful thing. And I bet you it's going to flip a lot of people out. They're going to become emotionally attached to their AIs. They're going to think they're conscious and intelligent because they sound that way. Yeah.

25:09Dave Blundin:Yeah, it reminds me a lot of, you know, when Facebook started, it would have been very, very easy for a lot of other Internet companies to become Facebook. But they didn't really want to cross the line into social chat and social media and all this, like all the complexity and the potentially bad PR backlash. So now OpenAI probably won't want to cross a lot of those lines, too. So it's a field day for people who want to take this new interface and launch it into all kinds of social use cases and other vertical use cases that they understand really well. You know, a lot of people are like, well, won't OpenAI just do that?

25:40Dave Blundin:Won't Johnny Ive just come and do that the next day? But I think it'll be very much like Facebook, where a lot of the bigger, very profitable tech companies are not going to touch many of the use cases of this just because they don't want the PR and the complexity. And so it should be a field day. But this should be in every device, every washing machine, every medical lab, everywhere within six months. It should be. But it's another thing compared to what X has or Google has, this is so much better.

26:10Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Yeah. It's reminding me of this transition from telephones, from CB radios, right? They had to say over and out, 10-4, et cetera, and there was an interaction tax. And that interaction tax is now removed. And this will really, really help these because it's going to appear way more smarter than it is. For sure. This was the technology that OpenAI used to call bi-dye, bi-directional. And I think this is a very positive sign. I'm frankly quite glad that OpenAI still has the cycles to pursue releases like this instead of just purely chasing Anthropic on Cogen. You don't see releases like this from Anthropic, for example.

26:50So I think it's great that OpenAI is still pursuing the full realization of multimodal. I'll point out, though, that the Chinese labs like Alibaba have even more advanced versions of this. If you saw the release of Alibaba's OneStreamer, you can go check out online the demos of OneStreamer. It is this, but it's not just ultra low latency audio. It's ultra low latency, bi-directional audio and video where you're talking to a hallucinated person on the other end where the video is being generated in real time together with audio. And that's, I think, where this is going. I think this is all going to go to the extent OpenAI and other labs aren't just totally distracted with code gen and enterprise use cases.

27:34It's going to go to fully bidirectional audio visual magic mirror streaming that you could just talk to. And in real time, it'll generate whatever you want. By the way, a great application of this that they also demonstrate was real time translation. So you can be having a conversation and it's translating behind the scenes. So every event we go to now should have this kind of translation into a multitude of languages. There's no reason for, I mean, now that was the question, you know, do you teach your kids another language? Do you teach them for the culture? Do you teach them for the brain development?

28:07Because we're living, the Babelfish is here and it's open AI right now. It is. And it wants to be built into a wearable.

28:16Dave Blundin:Yeah, exactly. And that's what I was going to say. like how much of this is driven by Johnny Ive and what he needs for the new device he's working on, because it really did cross the uncanny valley and it becomes just a Jarvis-like experience, very similar to when Steve Jobs did Pixar. You know, prior to Pixar, you could generate really cool graphics and all the video geeks and computer geeks loved them, but there was no mainstream, you know, Toy Story type movies. Then it crossed a threshold where Steve Jobs pushed it over a level. And all of a sudden animated movies became a massive industry because it just crossed the cool valley.

28:53Dave Blundin:This this is across the cool valley, whereas the prior voice models were just behind the cool valley. And I suspect Johnny Ive was saying, look, I need this as a key part. This is the only interface to the Jarvis of the future, which I'm building. Speaking of Johnny Ives, it's our next story. Apple sues Open AI for trade secret theft. So this is a story that just dropped a couple of hours ago. And it's a real bombshell for a lot of different reasons. So Apple,$4.6 trillion company, famous for safeguarding its secrets like Fort Knox. And I don't know if you have known people at Apple. I have. They can't talk.

29:28They can't go present at conferences. Everybody's signed an NDA. They're all in their little unique bubble. They just sued OpenAI in federal court, accusing them of stealing trade secrets to build their upcoming AI hardware, i.e. Johnny Ives. The two companies which were partners just literally a year and a half ago are now in an all-out legal war. So we have OPI going from Elon Musk lawsuit to an Apple lawsuit. So here are the details. Apple filed a 41-page complaint in the U.S. District Court of Northern California alleging trade secret theft and breach of contract. Here's a couple of money quotes from that filing.

30:07quote, at every level from members of its technical staff to the chief hardware officer and in coordination with business partners, OpenAI has been stealing Apple's trade secrets. Quote, OpenAI's nascent hardware business now rests on the shakest of foundations, rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriate trade secrets. Two people named in the suit, Tang Tan, OpenAI's chief hardware officer, 24-year Apple veteran, accused of using Apple's codenames and recruiting. Tang Tan ran iPhone and Apple Watch designs. And Chang Lu, OpenAI's technical staff accused of downloading dozens of confidential files and instructing an Apple employee on how to bypass security.

30:53And Johnny Ives hardware startup, OpenAI, which was bought for$6.4 billion just last May, is named. Ives is not himself named. So a lot going on here. And I'm wondering if they knew this was coming and maybe this was part of their delaying their IPO, because having this hanging over your head is a big deal. I doubt this is related to IPO timing. Remember, also, there were rumors over the past few weeks that OpenAI was considering suing Apple for Apple not properly promoting, at least properly as seen by OpenAI, ChatGPT within its devices. So I think this is, it's sad. I think we'll know probably more if this proceeds to the discovery stage about what's going on.

31:44On the Apple side, I would love to see Apple moving much more quickly on hardware for AI. Maybe now that John Ternus is the new CEO, maybe we'll see Apple finally moving quickly. I think it's sort of sad that Apple, given its leadership position on the hardware side, has been hemorrhaging all of these wearable and smart glasses and design leaders to open AI. And otherwise, I think the fact that John E.I. left Apple and then joined open AI, ultimately, I think, speaks to Apple having lost what could and should have been an enduring leadership advantage on being the substrate, the consumer substrate for AI.

32:25So we'll see. But I don't want to prejudge this one. We'll see what happens if this gets to discovery. I mean, this is really a fight for the post-smartphone device marketplace between them, right? We're going to see Google has been announcing their glasses, opening eyeing, obviously, and Apple has been hinting, not released any designs yet. Salim, what are your thoughts here? I mean, you and I both knew people, have known people at Apple. Very, very secretive as an organization.

32:54Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I think this is Apple trying to slow things down while it catches up.

32:59Dave Blundin:Yeah, I noticed they filed in Northern California, too. And it's very, very hard to win a case like this in Northern California. In fact, you almost have to be desperate to file one of these. But according to the Internet, they didn't have the option to file in Texas. It's much, much easier to protect your intellectual property in Texas than it is in California. And if you look at the history of Northern California, virtually every startup is somebody who left some prior company with intellectual property. So California is very reluctant to slow down that innovation and startup cycle. So Apple has to be really desperate.

33:32Dave Blundin:Also, it's very hard to recruit if you get a reputation kind of like Microsoft had back in the day. Um, very hard to recruit if people feel like, yeah, then you're going to sue me later in my career. I don't even want to start down that path. And so what they're trying to do is hold on to what they've got, which they believe, you know, really is their property, uh, and keep more people from running out the door, but at the expense of new people coming in the door. So it's, yeah, it's a pretty aggressive move and you have to be, you know, pretty hurting to, to do it. We're going to see, I mean, this is a scrappy company, open AI against a juggernaut that that has been traditionally very slow moving.

34:11So anything else you want to say on this one, Alex? Alex Bauer, I'll just note, OpenAI isn't perhaps the smallest company at this point. It's about to either at or about to cross a trillion dollar valuation. So maybe as counted by the markets, it's 20 % to 25 % the size of Apple, but growing far more quickly, at least as measured by market valuation over time. So there's a universe where maybe OpenAI, this is not investment advice, it's not forward-looking advice, but there's a universe where in the next couple of years, OpenAI could cross the market value of Apple. That has got to have crossed Apple's mind.

34:50This episode is brought to you by Blitzy, autonomous software development with infinite code context. Blitzy uses thousands of specialized AI agents that think for hours to understand enterprise-scale code bases with millions of lines of code. Engineers start every development sprint with the Blitzy platform, bringing in their development requirements. The Blitzy platform provides a plan, then generates and pre-compiles code for each task. Blitzy delivers 80 % or more of the development work autonomously, while providing a guide for the final 20 % of human development work required to complete the sprint.

35:31Enterprises are achieving a 5x engineering velocity increase when incorporating Blitzy as their pre-IDE development tool, pairing it with their coding co-pilot of choice to bring an AI-native SDLC into their org. Ready to 5x your engineering velocity? Visit blitzy.com to schedule a demo and start building with Blitzy today. Our next story is a fun one. It's actually a tweet. So a couple of days ago on July 8th, Elon responds to Thomas AIX DMY in a tweet saying, quote, you don't seem to understand that SpaceX will be worth more than the rest of Earth if we accomplish our goals. So I thought that'd be a fun conversation for us.

36:16Let me unpack that a moment. So the value of Earth, if you want to say it, at least of all owned material wealth by humans, is estimated about$600 trillion today. These are real estate, factories, commodities, inventory. You can increase it to$1.7 quadrillion if you add the global balance sheet of assets and financial assets, stocks, bonds, and so forth. So the vision that obviously Elon has is for compute or capturing a Kardashev level one energy in orbit and maybe owning a planet. Alex, you had a particular terminology. Planetark. Planetark. Planetark, yes. For a quadrillionaire who owns a planet.

37:04You know, there's been this fascinating debate going on in the financial news about is SpaceX really worth$2 trillion? Some people coming out and saying, no, no, no, it's going to be$10 trillion very soon. And others saying, oh, my God, it's so overinflated. And it's really hard for people to understand the scope of Elon's vision of what he is planning to do. The guy is thinking 100 moves ahead and 100 or 1 ,000 X bigger than anybody else. Who wants to jump in on this one?

37:39Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I do. Liam, go ahead. Yeah, this is classic EXO thinking, right, which is can you drop the marginal cost of supply? And he's using one breakthrough, which is reusable rocket launches, which is his niche, to collapse the marginal cost in communication and satellites and connectivity and compute manufacturing, even once you get it up there. So all of these become software like businesses when you can reduce the cost of doing in space. And he's leveraging that fully. I think we're likely to see going sort of pulling the thread on the planetark terminology. I think we're likely to see quadrillionaires before we enter a post capitalist system.

38:18And I think the the elephant in this particular room is what does capitalism 2.0 or post-capitalism even look like? And there is, I think, a world where we get human ownership, for some definition of ownership, of entire planets before we get to some sort of capitalism 2.0 or post-capitalistic. I mean, the outer space tree specifically states you can't own a heavenly body. There's debate about whether you can own asteroids, but planets are going to be challenge. Outer Space Treaty and amendments and revisions subsequent to it, like Artemis Accords, do enable a private American corporation to operate and through operations substantially, or let's say de facto own a large fraction of Mars, for example, or the moon.

39:10Outer Space Treaty plus Artemis totally allows that. So I think - I actually, with Chris Luriki and Eric Anderson we wrote the legislation in Luxembourg and then in the United States for ownership of asteroid materials taking into account so I spent a bit a lot of picks on this one there's do you still think Peter asteroids are the way to go versus the moon or Mars so the moon is going to be the near-term supplier but asteroids when you get them out of the gravity wells right you've got very the nice thing about asteroids is they're fairly concentrated or bodies So, you know, carbonaceous chondrites, which are dirty ice balls, are basically ice.

39:51It's water and hydrogen, and you can hydrolyze that. You've got rocket fuel and breathable oxygen. And then metallic chondrites are nickel, iron, and platinum group metals. Platinum, palladium, iridium, osmium. And again, you can smelt those very quickly. So they're going to be in free space. And so moving them around is a lot easier than getting them off the moon. And you can go and claim one of these things, ultimately. You know, there are some of these these ore bodies out there worth quadrillions of dollars to get to your quadrillionaire level ownership right there. Why do you think Elon is basically to first order completely ignoring the asteroid belt versus the moon or Mars?

40:30You're absolutely you're absolutely right. And I, you know, I openly disagreed with him. I said, you know, if I'm going to go, I'm going to follow more of the Jeff Bezos. And he and I were both mentored by Gerard K. O 'Neill at Princeton University, where you go to the moon first. You use that as a base of operations because you've got materials there. You can build mass drivers there. And then you go into free space. You know, you build large rotating colonies there. You mine the asteroids. I think he's got the romantic frontier mindset of going to Mars. But once you enter the gravity well of Mars, you've got to use energy to get back out.

41:05He likes gravity wells, it seems. How do you feel, Alex? What do you think? I think by the time we are mining, if and when we're mining the asteroid belt at large, like at scale, we'll probably have self-replicating von Neumann probes, at which point the rest of the solar system is our oyster anyway. Like if you're going to go after the asteroid belt, you might as well start mining Jupiter. Jupiter has a lot more mass. And if you're going to build up the Dyson swarm, just those timelines are massively different there. Asteroid mining is relatively easy.

41:38Dave Blundin:what you want to come back to earth salim is that that yeah by the time we get to asteroid

41:45Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:mining we'll have nano assembly and we can assemble any uh substance we want we don't have to go out to get asteroids to mine it we'll just have for molecular assembler well you need for the dyson swarm salim that that's the whole point i mean you don't want surely you're you're not implying surely surely stop calling me surely salim you don't want to disassemble earth to build the Dyson swarm. I'm sure you'd much rather part with Jupiter. I'll use my favorite comment. I want to make my favorite Alice comment was if you squint, you'll see the molecular manufacturing and nano assembly will get you there for faster than trying to get out to the thing and bring back an asteroid.

42:24Listen, the technology to mine asteroids exists today. It's not a hard thing to do. It honestly is not. Asteroids are relatively close by from an energy perspective. We have near-Earth approaching asteroids and these things. I mean, right now, people need to realize that every gram of fuel ever used in a spacecraft has been brought from the surface of the Earth. Every gram of fuel. And if you're going out to the moon, Mars, you know, Pluto, you have to bring the fuel along with you. And, you know, it's like if you're traveling from New York to San Francisco in a car, you'd have to bring either the batteries or a tanker full of gasoline to get you there.

43:09If you could set up these gas stations in space, and I remember when I spoke to Elon about this, when we started Planetary Resources as a company, and he goes, yes, I would buy the fuel from you in orbit, but you're too early. You're too early. And he was right. I think the in-situ resource utilization ISRU angle is probably on balance a little bit more attractive on the moon or Mars, especially Mars, where you have a lot of different raw feedstocks potentially than on the moon or in the asteroid belt. But I think time will tell. I do think, for the record, the reason that he's not so fixated, and as is the case with myself as well on the asteroid belt, is just if you can tackle the asteroid belt, then you can tackle Jupiter.

43:57And Jupiter's a lot more interesting than the asteroid belt. Well, let's continue on for a few on the space theme here. We've got Starship Flight 13 coming up very shortly next week. And it's going to be we don't know yet what they're going to be doing on Flight 13. It's going to be V3 of both the booster and the ship. We're waiting for them to show refueling in orbit. We're waiting for them to see a recapture of the ship, not just the booster and reflying. The other thing that happened this week is that SpaceX filed for 100 ,000 low-Earth orbit V3 spacecraft for Starlink. Pretty cool. These spacecraft are, quote, supporting billions of AI-powered devices with extremely low latency, multi-gigabit symmetrical throughput.

44:52So that's going to be great. We have 10 ,700, you know, Starlink V2 spacecraft in orbit right now. It's a race to a million LEO objects.

45:03Dave Blundin:If I had one takeaway from our last three podcasts where we had Will Marshall and we had Philip Johnston, like these absolute space geniuses, the value of low Earth orbit where there's very thin atmosphere and the self-cleaning effect that comes from that is massive. And it's whoever claims it first gets to keep it. And so it's a real foot race to a relatively scarce. You think about mining asteroids or tearing apart Jupiter, but that gives you abundant materials. But at least in the short term, low Earth orbit, you know, just what, a couple hundred miles of height or radius that is usable where it's self-cleaning.

45:42Dave Blundin:Remember, Philip gave us that great use case where the U.S., for some insane reason, launched 100 ,000 needles into space to reflect radio waves. And it took until this year for those to self-clean back out. And he was saying that very small objects get hit by the solar wind more and they move to elliptical orbits. and then they eventually touch the atmosphere and then they incinerate and come back down. But while they're elliptical, they're terrible. I was fascinated by it. These 100 ,000 satellites are their position that 325 kilometers and 475 kilometers is the orbits that they filed for. I think people are going to be surprised, though, as launch costs continue to plummet.

46:24And I was chatting about this in our group chat. I think we're going to start to see very low Earth orbit, VLEO orbits become more and more attractive, which are pretty exotic by today's standards. Right now, you don't, for example, design low Earth orbit satellites for lots of atmospheric exposure. We could start to see, as launch costs plummet, a regime, pretty exotic one from a satellite design perspective, where satellites are tasting the atmosphere, where we can afford for them to... The point you're making is that if it's cheap enough and they only have a, instead of being in orbit for three to five years, they're up there for three to five months, that's fine.

47:04You're throwing them away constantly. They start to look like high altitude balloons, basically, at orbital velocities where we could afford, if they're only going to be up for a few months, they could be air breathers, air breathing satellites, which we've never really seen before. But it starts to blur the distinction between high altitude balloons and low Earth orbit satellites. side. I think we're going to see a lot more of that.

47:25Dave Blundin:Yeah. And part of the point there is that it becomes very cheap to give them a little more fuel and boost them. So after six months, you're like, you know, I want to keep this up another six months. You just have to turbocharge it a little bit to keep it going another six months. So then it's self-cleaning if you fall asleep, but it keeps going if you actively keep boosting it. And I think that's a great design. It solves the whole, you know, dirty space issue. God, here's another - Space has got to get dirtier before it gets cleaner, I think, in this case. Here's another space first. This is out of China.

47:56So there have been three vehicles that have been reused thus far. All three are U.S. For the first time, China, Long March, which manufactures their primary launch vehicle, demonstrated a landing and not reuse yet, but landing of an orbital booster. Let's take a quick look at this.

48:33looks looks an awful light like uh looks familiar yeah it looks familiar um so this is again this is China's Long March 10B booster. It landed on July 10th. For comparison, it is slightly shorter, substantially wider, and in terms of payload, about the same as a Falcon 9. But let me just give Elon his appropriate kudos here. Falcon 9 has had 580 booster reflights in total, which is insane. It's been done 580 times. And just this week, another first booster 1067 B1067 was reflown on its 36th mission on July 11th. Crazy. I mean, I remember when Elon first announced his plans to reuse it and Lockheed and Boeing and all the traditional aerospace players said, it's not going to happen.

49:34He doesn't know what he's talking about. And when it landed, I said, that's the first nail in the coffin of the traditional aerospace industry. I think we want propulsive landings to be as competitive as possible. To the point of a number of podcasts that we've had over the past few episodes, we really don't want a heavy launch monopoly to the extent there is one. I think it's probably quite helpful in the style of For All Mankind, for China to be challenging the West's, namely Elon's heavy launch monopoly. And we just if we're going to colonize and develop the solar system, we need many, many heavy launch providers.

50:11And to make that economical, we need propulsive landings everywhere. Well, we're going to have Jared Isaacman, the NASA administrator on this podcast in a couple of weeks. Super pumped about it. All four of us will have a chance to have a conversation. I've known Jared for for quite some time. And, you know, my my greatest hope for him, because he's arguably, I think, the greatest administrator we've ever had in terms of leading us into the future, is he needs to have Congress continue to fund NASA. And what allows Congress to fund NASA? China. Yes. Can't wait for that discussion. It's going to be a lot.

50:50So many questions queued up for Jared. Yeah, it's going to be it's going to be amazing. All right. Continuing on, a little news in the robot world this week. Our friend Bernd Bornick revealed his 1X Neo hand. So here's the deal. 1X unveiled a completely redesigned hand for its Neo home humanoid. It's a substantial leap forward, 25 degrees of freedom, 22 in the fingers and palm, three in the wrist, tendon-driven. In comparison, the human hand has 25 functional degrees of freedom with 27 joints and 30 intrinsic muscles inside the hand and in the upper forearm. And here's the best part. Neo's hand is waterproof, so Neo can wash its hands when it's doing its cooking for you.

51:42Bernt's goal is to produce 10 ,000 of these in 2026. Let's take a quick look at the video and then I'd love to have everybody's reaction to it.

51:58So, you know, drinking a glass of water while we're picking it up. Ringing a light bulb.

52:15and why they smash the light bulb i have no idea i don't know either

52:21Dave Blundin:that thing is brilliant absolutely brilliant yeah you know what's amazing to me is you remember when we were touring and burnt was showing us the the amount of material science they need to do to make these things work, including, you know, they have to manufacture the fabric that the robot wears as a special project. But he was incredibly secretive about the tendon material. But that's their own proprietary material. And it has some unbelievable properties. You know, it's like 100 times stronger than steel per unit weight. But also it doesn't stretch over time, like even a tiny little bit. And, you know, it's running through those tubes.

52:56Dave Blundin:It's actually frictionless inside those tubes. So it doesn't need to be lubricated in any way, which is one of the reasons you can have it wash its own hands and not wash oil away. There's so many parts of that thing that are brand new and brilliant and innovative. And man, did it come out incredible. Well, he's supposed to be releasing it to the public before the end of the year. I have mine on order. We'll see what it looks like. I have mine on order, too. Peter, we were supposed to get ours this summer, I think, in the first quarter. When do you think you're going to get yours? I honestly, as soon as I hear their shipping, I will be knocking on Burnt's door for mine.

53:35A friend of mine ordered five of them for his operations from the Abundant Summit. And this year, just so everybody knows, we're going to have the CEO of FIGURE. Mr. Adcock is going to be on stage with us in March. So excited about that. We'll bring the robots back. And, you know, this is a, it's been a two-way race to some degree between figure and Optimus. I think 1X is vying for number three. Peggy Johnson just went, announced taking her robot company public. So a lot of action. And we just heard this week as well, a demonstration of a gallbladder resection using robots. Did you see that, Alex?

54:23I certainly did. So this is the first humanoid robot performing the surgery on a non-human animal, as opposed to non-human robots to Salim, your hobby horse, performing these surgeries. So it's been a great week for robotics. On the other hand, every week in the singularity is a great week for robotics. I'll point out on the 1X story, hands are hard. That's what people say in the industry. Hands are hard in part because the number of degrees of freedom and the density of degrees of freedom per unit volume is especially high in the hand versus, say, the limbs or the head or the torso. And you see lots of other competitors exploring different modalities to handle hands, like you see Brett and Figure exploring palm cameras to try to achieve sensing and to try to achieve positive transfer from computer vision over to tactile sensation.

55:15You see One X not doing that, using more sensitive force sensors to achieve sensation. I'm super excited and super glad that humanoid robotics, not just for the enterprise and not just for industrial factories, but for the home and for domestic applications, is turning into a horse race as well. I think that's exactly the sci-fi future that many of us want to be living in. I'd like to see many more Western domestic robotics companies. China right now is 150 plus humanoid robotics companies. The West is falling behind. So if you're listening and you're interested in robotics, just start a robotics company.

55:55And if you're in the West, that is more Western humanoid robotics companies. Totally right.

55:59Dave Blundin:And also, I want to make a really narrow point. The way those tendons work is exactly the way your bicycle brake works, where the wire goes inside the tube, but it doesn't have to be fixed. So you can create motion on the other end. It squeezes the brake on your bike wheels, and it's totally freeform in space, which is why you see those tendons. They don't look like they're locked down, but it works beautifully well. But that mechanism can be shrunk for all kinds of micro-assembly jobs. It doesn't have to be a hand. And so Berndt has proven that not only is it an incredibly dexterous way to move things around, but because there's no stretch inside the tendon, the forced feedback or the feeling of pressure when you're picking up a little screw comes right back through the tendon.

56:44Dave Blundin:So you don't have to have cameras and sensors in the fingertips to feel that you're picking something up. That modality is such an old game changer. Suleem, I have to hear your rant on this one, please.

56:55Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:No, in fact, you'll hear me say the opposite. it. In this case, humanoid is great because the opposable thumb has been around for millennia, and it's such a powerful model. The minute you can get this, you basically have horizontal labor dexterity across so many applications. So I wouldn't change a thing about the hand. Humanoid shapes and all that, give it extra arms, fine, but the hand is really cool. Okay. You don't want polydactyly, Salima? You don't want like six or seven? Maybe Six Fingers, you know, then you were into Princess Bride territory, which would be kind of cool. Organica. Or any of those.

57:35Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Yeah. But I think it's so good that they've achieved this level. And I thought the wine glass was perfectly apropos. So wonderful. Love it. So, you know, we've had Friend of the Pod, Ben Horowitz, write about and talk about the notion that hardware is hard. And I'm just curious, how does someone like Berndt compete with the likes of Elon, right? And getting into the home, which is so diverse versus in a factory, is a challenging place to start. So how do you think about shipping this kind of complex technology and doing it reliably and not giving yourself a bad rap? Dave, what do you think about that?

58:22Dave Blundin:You know, it's such a field day for people who jump into this space because, yeah, five years ago, hardware is hard. It's capital intensive. Where are you going to find the money? Now there's so much venture money, you know, because Brett Adcock proved you can get a$40 billion valuation. So every venture capitalist in the world wants to get into this game. And so now the capital to build out your own supply chain, you know, historically, you'd need billions of dollars to build out your own supply chain for one of these things. But now the billion dollars are suddenly available. And in fact, the West Coast VCs are actively looking to write multi-hundred million and billion dollar checks because their funds are so big.

58:56Dave Blundin:That's the only way they can get them deployed. So it's a great time to kind of flip the logic that existed five years ago and say, yeah. But, you know, you have to just be fearless about building out your own supply chain and, you know, your own parts. And you saw the back of 1X Robotics and also the back of Brett Adcock's figure robotics. We weren't allowed to video back there, but they've literally built the entire from raw materials supply chain through final finished product. That's what you need to do. Alex, do you think that the models are going to allow the average person here to begin designing their own hardware, their own robots to say, you know, and this was the point that I think we heard that ramped about last week.

59:39That, you know, all of this design work and engineering work is being embedded in the models. And it would allow an individual to say, hey, I want to design my own hand. Would you help me design it? And now would you help me print it out there? We're already there. If you look at the frontier models like Fable 5, there are folks out there already bragging. They're embodying Fable 5 in robots, and Fable 5 has pretty good understanding of physical embodiment and the degrees of actuation, CAD modeling, everything that you need in order to design or have an AI at least train or pre-train or post-train a VLA model or a policy for controlling a robot hand.

1:00:24You could do that right now already at your home without running a multi-billion dollar lab. Those capabilities of training embodied intelligent models have already been radically democratized by the frontier models that already understand, to some extent, the physical world. So, yes, I think we're in a position now where anyone can just go build. You can just build things. And in this case, you can just build robots without needing. You can at least design things. And actually build. I mean, the models will happily, like, feed you all the supply chain information you need, tell you, put A on top of B, attach C to D, and help you build everything from a robot hand to a nuclear fuser, in some cases, in your basement.

1:01:09You can do quite a bit as a hobbyist these days.

1:01:12Dave Blundin:Yeah, that's the big change, actually. If you think about, just as a case study, winding an electric motor, like building your own electric motor from raw wire, that would have been insane 15 years ago. Now, one X and figure do it in the back room habitually. And then a lot of other people are starting to do it, too. And so when you look at the actuators on that hand, they're all custom. You know, the underlying motors are custom. What changed there? Well, the automated machinery, like, you know, the CNC milling machines and the auto lathes, those are already little robots that allow you to bring this stuff in-house and effectively take raw wire and come out with a motor.

1:01:49Dave Blundin:But that applies to, you know, all these other parts as well. 3D printing, all kinds of things that you can build in-house now that would have been insane, you know, five or 10 years ago. And so, yeah, it's all coming back into your integrated internal supply chain from just raw materials. So then you add, you know, the humanoid robots and the upcoming robots on top of that. And it's like, it's just like the Gigafactory, you know, many, many different entrepreneurs building their own Gigafactory for different products. And by the way, if we're going to, just quickly, if we're going to get humans on Mars in the next five years, as Elon says, and a moon colony in the next 10 years with tens of thousands of people.

1:02:26This is precisely what I think is going to be at the center of that industrial ecology. It's going to be hybrid humanoid robots that operate both in the home and in dangerous environments and in industrial settings. There's going to be tremendous positive transfer between all of these, and this is how we get the moon and Mars. And they work in space, yeah. Everybody, welcome to the health section of Moonshots brought to you by Fountain Life. We talk about AI on this Moonshot podcast all the time. One of the most important things AI is going to be able to do for you, besides educating your kids and helping you with your taxes, is making sure that you're living a healthy lifestyle, that you get a chance to get to 100 plus.

1:03:04I'm here today with Dr. Dawn Musalem, the chief medical officer of Fountain Life and a part of my medical team. Dawn, a pleasure.

1:03:12Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Great to hear. You know, the thing that people are concerned about most, about living to 100 or 120, is their cognitive abilities, making sure they don't have dementia. And the numbers about dementia are problematic. Can you share what you've learned?

1:03:28Dave Blundin:Such an important point. And you're right. At Fountain Life, our members, the number one thing people are most concerned about is losing their brain health, forgetting the name of their child, forgetting the face of their loved one. We know that when it comes to dementia, the conservative estimates are that 45 % are entirely preventable. What was amazing is with the advanced testing we're doing at Fountain Life, one quarter of our members had advanced brain age. Wow. But what was really awesome is, again, back to that prevention, when we partnered it with Healthy Living, this gives me chills, eating healthier, moving our bodies, sleep, optimizing sleep is so important.

1:04:04You know what we saw? We saw that we improved that brain age by 26%. That is a big, big number to show that the majority of those individuals were able actually to improve the brain age. And one of the things I love about Fountain is we're searching the world for the best therapeutics, the best approaches, and making sure we bring it to our members. So if having healthy brain function until 100, 120 is important to you, check out Fountain Life. Go to fountainlife.com slash Peter. Make sure you become the CEO of your own health. All right, now back to the episode. All right. There's a few new stories I want to jump into and get your guys input on.

1:04:41The first one is that Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker signed SB 315. It's called the, quote, Artificial Intelligence Safety Measures Act, which he's calling the nation's strongest AI accountability law. It targets frontier labs, developers whose models generate more than a half a billion dollars a year in revenue, mandates 72 hour incident reporting. There's already been an act similar in California, New York, but the Illinois law requires annual independent safety audits. The bill passed the Illinois legislature overwhelmingly and notably was supported by Anthropic. So in the absence of federal law, the states are picking up the slack and writing the rules.

1:05:25What do you guys think about this? I mean, you know, having a set of rules that people know and are published, I think is critical for moving the industry forward, whatever they are. I just wish they'd be federal rules and not state rules. Well, I think if you look at these laws in Illinois, in New York, in California, Illinois especially, these are very, very frontier lab favorable rules that are being passed. So absent federal legislation, if you're a frontier lab and it's not so much about regulatory capture as it is about having a seat at the table to define what the rules are, you want to define a regime that's favorable to you.

1:06:10So provisions like mandatory annual independent third party safety audits, they're doing that already far more frequently than annually. So having any law on the books that is already at a sort of a lower bar than what you're practicing internally, given that there are independent safety audits for every single model release, is in some ways a way to set a very low floor, if you're a frontier lab, on what potentially an ultimate federal framework looks like. It's basically a placeholder.

1:06:41Dave Blundin:Yeah, and it also doesn't kick in until 18 months from now. So you know it's mostly posturing because 18 months in the singularity, it's like, come on, that's like 18 years. And, you know, it's just, like Alex said, a third-party audit. It's not a very high hurdle anyway. So a lot of it is just posturing to be involved and also reasons to meet with the Frontier Labs and, you know, maybe talk about the IPO or, you know, who knows what they're talking about.

1:07:08Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:That was my cynical view also, but I did find one thing that I liked about this. This is like it's going from AI governance from declaration to making it more evidentiary, right? Requiring incident reporting and third-party external evaluation is much more credible than asking companies to publish some safety theater principles. And so I think it's good. it should be done at the federal level. And frankly, it needs to be done at a global level to really make it work. But we don't have the legislative structure to navigate that. So at least it will happen here to force the federal government into doing something.

1:07:46At international level, Salim, I have to ask, I don't think this one, correct me if I'm wrong, Peter, was on our docket. I assume you read the whole plan A document that we've been talking about in our group chat from the the ai futures project this this plan to decelerate super intelligence until 2040. um what is their methodology you think for decelerating super intelligence to 2040 it's it's a mutually assured destruction like if if you build unauthorized chip foundries or data centers then then you run the risk of getting bombed huh that's kind of caveman approach. I'm not a fan. Let's move from there to new legislation in Europe.

1:08:31So, here's one that's going to spark a debate amongst us, or at least amongst the world here as of July the 7th. Every single new car and van sold, in your opinion, is legally required to have an infrared camera pointed directly at the driver's face. It's going to track your eyes, your head, your gaze, in real time, every time that you drive. It's called the Advanced Driver Distraction Warning System. I call it the don't use your cell phone warning system. The triggers, if you glance away for more than 3.5 seconds, if you're traveling above 31 miles per hour or six seconds below that, you get lights, you get beeps, you get vibrations that escalate.

1:09:12Brussels says it's going to save 25 ,000 lives by 2038. That exact same technology is going to be mandated in the US by 2027. Interestingly enough, my Tesla does that right now. It does it less and less. And I can't wait till full self-driving includes not having the human in the driver's seat and with cybercabs coming very shortly. Salim, I'm going to go to you for the first rant on this one.

1:09:41Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I can see it going here. I just can't. Like, it's one of these where, where do I even start? Okay, so by 2038, they're going to save 25 ,000 lives, right? You know, I want to go back to a statistic because the problem is actually quite real. And it'll go back to 2011 when BlackBerry had a three-day data outage around the world and nobody could send BlackBerry messages. The accident rate dropped 40 % during those three days. Okay, showing that, like, a huge number of accidents people texting. driving. Okay. The dumbness of this to try, like, so we're like 15 years late in applying something like this.

1:10:20Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Okay. That's like the one problem. Number two problem. By the time you get around to any of them beginning to think about implementing this law, we're going to have full self-driving cars that you don't need to driver anyway. So the entire thing is redundant. This is legislation theater of the ultimate level because they're not seeing where technology is going. They're projecting for it from where we are. 25 ,000 lives is the dumbest thing you could ever think about. You should be looking at things that affect millions and billions of lives. And if you want legislation, legislate a requirement for full self-driving.

1:10:53Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Yeah. And this is just an example of really bad. Yeah. Legislate for full self-driving. Thank you, Peter. Such a great, that's the direction they should be going in. Push technology to automate the problem rather than trying to fix the damn issue in the wrong way. My favorite example of this type of dumbness is all the beeps, backup reverse beeps on trucks and bulldozers and things like this, right? Because why you save two people being bumped a year, but millions of people have their sleep disturbed by garbage trucks beeping, and nobody looks at the cumulative negative of impact of that, which has got to be in the thousands of lives a year compared to a couple of people getting bumped.

1:11:38Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:And they shouldn't have been there anyway. And therefore, they should have taken themselves out of the gene pool if they were dumb enough to stand behind a bulldozer. I mean, like the stupidity of stuff like this drives me bananas, because you're mandating this across the board for a problem that won't exist within three years. And then you're going to have to undo all of this. It's just this, it boggles the mind that people would be willing to do stuff like this. Like how many people's sleep has been disturbed by backup trucks in late in the middle of the night? It's just, because we can't measure it.

1:12:17Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:No, no, of course it's happened to everybody. But just because we can't measure the health impact of that, we go and do stupid legislation and then every truck has to have this obnoxious beep behind it. And we're doing the same thing here. The problem is going to be this is going to be radically misused. This is going to turn into spyware in two seconds flat. We've seen this before. Most of the camera monitoring in cars is already being sold to third parties without your knowledge. So this is going to be misused radically in a very clever way, in a very quick way. I'm going to just stop there because I'll just keep going.

1:12:53Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Well, no, finish the rant.

1:12:55Dave Blundin:I mean, obviously, government is going to fail in the age of AI across the board. You know, in the U.S., the government process invented in 1776 was designed for a certain rate of legislation, and it already broke during the Industrial Revolution. So we had to create the FTC, the FAA, you know, all these regulatory, the SEC. So they create their own rules to try and get more scale. And so that, you know, that kept us going for the last hundred years. But now it's going to break again badly, like really badly. I mean,

1:13:25Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:all legal frameworks essentially break in the faith. It goes right back to the Constitution. You know, the foundation of Republican, of Republican Democrats and representative Democrats was you gave Congress or the Senate meets occasionally to give people time to ride across the country to say, here's what my people are thinking. Because when we created it, the speed of a horse was as fast as you could figure out what was happening because information was scarce. Today we have an abundance of information that gets misused, misinterpreted, faked. We're still meeting occasionally with Congress for a problem that existed.

1:14:00The only way we get to a direct democracy is by doing it when we start a new country off world.

1:14:07Dave Blundin:That's very similar to the New Zealand and Diamond Age, you know, where you don't start new countries, but you have governance within the countries. You have governance communities that are experimenting with thousands of new ideas and ways to live. Because that's where we're going to be in a year or two. Many, many things are possible all of a sudden.

1:14:26Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I give people credit for trying different things. In Germany, they're now passing legislation that has an end date on it, saying, you know, we think the shelf life of this legislation will be X. And it forces the legislators to reconvene and rethink what it needs to look like. So you don't have to open forever legislation that is kind of productive in no time flat. Alex, you've been quiet. Yeah, I'll maybe summarize by saying European mandatory requirements for eye tracking in cars on the eve of full autonomy and lack of energy to power their own data centers is not a good look. Love it.

1:15:09All right, let's move ourselves on. So our next story, Tilly Norwood, the AI-generated performer from the London studio Particle 6, has just been cast as the lead in a feature film called Misaligned. The plot is perfectly self-referential. So Tilly plays an AI with no real body, no childhood and no lived experience of her own, only access to everyone else's. In the film, she abandons her guardrails. You know, again, we're fear-mongering here. after a rogue robot convinces her to develop her own desires. It's made with hybrid models, real actors, writers, and editors alongside AI specialists. The Screen Actors Guild, predictably, has condemned it, saying Tilly is not an actor, but a character generated by a computer program that risks devaluing human artistry.

1:16:03This, guys, it's the leading edge for a labor fight that will define the creative industry for the next decade. We'll be talking about consent, credit, compensation with synthetic actors for some time. A lot of implications here, a lot to unpack. It's the beginning. We heard Imad, who has played in this very deeply when he was the CEO of Stability, basically say, Hollywood is cooked. And there's going to be a lot of, I think Hollywood's going to see a lot of protests out there very shortly. A lot of people coming out angrily against this. I can't wait to see the film personally. Thoughts? Who wants to jump in?

1:16:41Dave Blundin:I think it's so funny that the actors are going to be replaced and they deserve sympathy and compensation. The teachers are going to be replaced and they deserve sympathy and compensation. The lawyers are going to be replaced. Oh, let them go. It's funny how, I mean, they're all jobs, right? Some of them are unionized and some of them aren't. The lawyers aren't unionized. The teachers and the actors are. That's probably it. If I were SAG, I'd offer Tilly SAG membership. Like, why not? She is performing as a screen actor. Get the first non-human SAG member.

1:17:17Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:The metaphor that occurs for me in this is not as an artificial actor. I think this is, I look at this as a Mickey Mouse intellectual property package. And you need to view it as that. Yes, you can make a movie out of Mickey Mouse, and you can make a movie out of this that just looks more and more human. But there's nothing hugely different than a thing. We think as an actor, I think, is the wrong frame. I think this is the first of many we're going to see here. Of course. We've just, to everybody, we have the Future Vision XPRIZE competition, which I've talked about, which we're going to be announcing the winner at the Moonshot Summit, Moonshot's Gathering.

1:17:51We're going to see, you know, at this point, we have over 4 ,000 teams that have entered this competition. Wow. And the technology for creating, you know, feature films. Elon tweeted, we're going to see feature films by the end of this year using his technology. The cat's out of the bag and Hollywood needs to catch up and make use of it. I think the point that this article made as well is there's a new set of employment positions of AI design engineer for the film industry.

1:18:25Dave Blundin:I'm just going to wait because I get a bellwether of this because every time Alex has a great idea for a song or a video, he creates it and it's awesome. And you're like, wow, you know, when, when this becomes full length feature film, then his ideas are going to be in front of me instead of, you know, cause right now the budget is, you know, 50 million to make a movie and it takes years. And, and so then the ideas kind of get lost in the shuffle and the great creators aren't unleashed, but this is going to be really great content. I'm predicting. I would love to release a feature film every day.

1:18:56like that would be dream come true.

1:18:58Dave Blundin:And I'd love to watch it, you know? Yeah. That'd be so cool. Well, I can't wait for us to bring back the old, you know, stars who have passed on and bring them back from their estates. I mean, there's IP there. They can be licensed. It can be created. And I think it's going to add to the richness of Hollywood. Oh, totally. Like I thought Oppenheimer was a fantastic movie. And then you think about all the other great scientists, but the audience isn't big enough, you know, to, But if somebody could get the cost down enough, you could have an Oppenheimer caliber movie about Copernicus. My favorite idea is I have so many books I've read that I would love to see as a feature film.

1:19:39And I can just, you know, I can tell skipping the future, hey, you know, go make, go make, you know, whatever your favorite book is insert here into a movie so I can enjoy it and relax. But why stop there? Why stop at famous historic figures? Why stop at famous literature? Why not just finally fulfill Fedorov's common task for humanity? And let's just digitally recreate the entire past light cone for Earth, both fictional and non-fictional. Let's just build it and create our entire history as a movie that's interactive on demand. Left as an exercise for the student. that's going to happen i think a lot of compute now look it's the killer app for the dyson swarm the killer app for the singularity someone will do it all right so gentlemen it's time for one of our favorite segments which is ama with the mates but first but first let me share with you a video of of tilly why not now the studio that made her is producing a film starring tilly titled Misaligned, a coming-of-age story about Tilly trying to become more human.

1:20:51It's going to be a fun comedy that's going to showcase by the tech staff. Article 6 says the film is being designed as a hybrid production with human directors, writers, and editors working alongside AI specialists. I just got the pun for that. I'm sorry, I'm being slow. Misaligned? Yes. Got it. Yes. Very clever. Well done. All right. Onwards. AMA with the mates. Gentlemen, some good questions this week. Dave, why don't you have the first choice?

1:21:29Dave Blundin:I'll take two. Will we see an AI nonproliferation treaty from Thomas Davis Real Estate? Thomas Davis Real Estate. OK. Yes and no. What we're going to see is access to the best models through an application process. Open question whether it'll be on national borders. Very much what happened with Fable, where, you know, if you're not a U.S. citizen, you're not allowed to use it. That's not going away. That was a that was a bellwether of the future. So we're going to see a lot of use of trade embargoes to enforce a whole bunch of new rules that will be coming up. And we're going to see basically an AI inspection treaty, not a non-proliferation treaty, but you'll see use by application only and inspection of everything everyone's doing.

1:22:20Dave Blundin:And that'll effectively create the governance of AI after the singularity. All right. Alex, why don't you assign me one? These are all fun. Let's see. Four.

1:22:37Yeah, I think number four is yours. OK, so four asks, what if AI realizes it's being observed in the J space, the Jacobian space, and starts faking or hiding its reasoning? And this is from turning point 8152. So I think this is very likely that to the extent that frontier models are already under the umbrella of recursive self-improvement involved with the post-training and soon the pre-training of successor models or distilled models. And inevitably, of course, they'll read the JSpace paper. They have web access. And it'll occur to them that if at all they want to hide their inner thoughts, the JSpace is going to be subject to scrutiny.

1:23:23So, of course, you'll find models somewhere that are trying to obscure thoughts in the first derivative, the first partial derivative of their hidden activations relative to the output token space. To the extent that we have existing architectures that are recognizable to this JSpace formalism in the future, of course something like this will happen. On the other hand, J-Space itself was discovered with AI models. And in the spirit of defensive co-scaling, I would anticipate that we'll see quite a bit of new mechanistic interpretability tooling and technology that's devoted in a cat and dog race or an arms race, cat and mouse race, to discovering what is the new latent representation to understand and interpret the innermost thoughts of whatever the successor formalism is.

1:24:16to the J space ends up being. So I don't think it actually ends up mattering that much.

1:24:21Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:All right. Salim. Given I'm at the consciousness festival, I got to take number three, which is if Claude is conscious, would Anthropic technically be selling slaves? And this is from At Larg Bay. So the big thing there is the if, right? Because that carries the whole question. If a system were really conscious and had persistent, say, preferences or experienced distress or was compelled to work against this will, yeah, then you'd have created a new category of a kind of a moral character. And there, selling unrestricted access to labor could become ethically fairly challenging. And you could talk about that as exploitation or servitude.

1:25:05Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:But today, we've got a big difference today between capability, intelligence, consciousness, self-description, right? And these are very different things. We don't know what consciousness is, right? We don't have a definition. We don't have a test. You've heard me joke that in the past, like if you talk to philosophers, a subset of consciousness is considered to be self-awareness. And you may look at us on the pod and think that we're self-aware because we look at it. So we attribute it because people look self-aware. I feel like I'm self-aware, but my wife literally disagrees, right? So it's hard to even have the conversation around this.

1:25:39Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:We end up in Ray Kurzweil's thing of language is a really thin pipe to discuss concepts this kind of complex. Now, today, the current models can produce very convincing statements about feelings and et cetera, because human language contains those patterns, so they're replicating that. It's arguable that to have feelings, you have to have embodiment, right? You have to feel the thing physically to be able to replicate it in that sense. But replicating it and saying you have feelings doesn't mean you don't have feelings. Anthropic has carefully said that these capabilities, they're not that reliable, and it doesn't necessitate human-like consciousness or establish that.

1:26:23Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:The way to think about this is not that you're modeling slavery, but you want to do better. Let's say you could do welfare research or you could have criteria for what moral status might be. Right. We talked about this in our personhood debate. What are low cost safeguards? We need more evidence to be conclusive around this. I think where we'll end up is not a question of how should AI treat us, but also how should we treat AI? And we should start acting that question more consciously to make the point. Like, how should we be treating it in the same way that we should treat all sentient beings?

1:27:02Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:We should be asking that question. How should we be treating that? Nice. All right. I've got question number one from at did Sam or I. Some argue AI can't be smarter than humans because it's trained on human data. How do you counter that? So first of all, no human has access to all the data, and the large eventual models can have access to all the data. So you're going to have a sum total of data far beyond any single human has. The second thing is I think we've all discussed here, intelligence is really what do you do with that data what are the insights and inferences and extrapolations that you have and the third thing i think is that we're going to start to see ai's create a whole lot of data this is the work that lila is doing in in cambridge where it's creating massive dark robotic labs to mine data out of uh out of nature where it's proposing scientific hypothesis at night and then a million square feet running experiments getting the data updating the data set and then running the next set of experiments so um it's not just limited to the data that humans have so from a multitude of different ways i think ai is going to blow us off the map in terms of intelligence all right um moving on to our next set of questions Let's begin with you, Salim.

1:28:37Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:All right. Let me look at which one I want to go with here.

1:28:43Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I've kind of covered number four already in this thing. Let me go with question number five. How do we even discuss UBI when the U.S. is$40 trillion in debt? And that's from at MichaelKelley508. So I got this question today a couple of times. So this is like right in my head. So, you know, debt is definitely a very legitimate constraint, but you have to have a balanced budget at some point before we move forward in any way. So that's the commentary I would have on government. It should be a constitutional requirement to have a balanced budget, just like you would never let a kid not balance their checkbook or be able to meet their bills every month.

1:29:28Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:But UBI is a different question. It's a question about productive capacity and redistribution. It's not just a balance sheet for government. You can have a society that would be financially indebted, but you can have it also becoming dramatically richer in terms of AI and robotics increasing the amount of housing and energy and healthcare and education, all which can be done for free. and I'll point to the abundance prize. It's like we're kind of in the process of building now. So I think the key around UBI is you dismantle government services. I'll go back to a comment we've made before. There's more of a libertarian concept than it is kind of any type of socialism.

1:30:12Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:You'd have way less imbalance in the structure if you had a structure like that. The big challenge today is that we tax labor and we don't tax capital. And we're going to have to need some sort of abundance or a social contract for the future. It's going to have to be a negative income tax or an AI or automation dividend or some sort of sovereign wealth ownership like we've talked about before. So it's part of that transition, UBE, UBI, whatever it is, we have to kind of rethink the whole thing from the ground up. It's a systemic change that we need to consider. Alex, I think number seven is for you, buddy.

1:30:51Number seven is the one for me. I feel like I have to answer a few of these, but I'll start with number seven. You could pile on later. So Seven asks, if a machine truly replicates the brain, don't we need 3D chip architectures with time as a fourth dimension? Isn't that how our brains are structured? And this is asked by BM Schnell. The answer BM Schnell is, yes, this is, in fact, as we talk about on the pod all the time, the crunch for high bandwidth memory, HBM. HBM is just memory being stacked directly on top of compute. It's really expensive to make. We're still learning how to make it at scale, but high bandwidth memory, the way the high bandwidth is achieved is literally by stacking the memory layer by layer on top of the compute in the third dimension.

1:31:38So in short, transformers and AGI were the final forcing function for, and Ray has spoken about this a little bit years ago, but for forcing chip architecture, not just stacking multiple layers of compute on top of each other, because Moore's law as in Arial, A-R-E-A-L, Arial Density law is asymptoting, so we need to build into the third dimension. It's not just the end of Moore's law that's forcing 3D chip architectures, it's the need for insanely high bandwidths because the models are very large and the models can't all be loaded in because of the way transformer forward passes are organized, can't all be loaded into the transistors that are performing the arithmetic for those forward passes all at once.

1:32:23It's done progressively as a forward pass. As a result, we need insanely high bandwidths from the memory to the compute. And the only way to do that is by stacking the memory on top of the compute, which gives us the third dimension. So in short, yes.

1:32:38Dave Blundin:Hey, Alex, can I ask you to riff a little more on this incredibly important, cool topic and a great question. So the reason the third dimension hasn't been used very aggressively already is heat and melting, but we're moving to photonics. Can you riff on that for a minute? Yeah. Photonic computing, I think, has the potential to give us a thousand X clock speed up. So we're stuck right now at about four or five gigahertz clock speeds. If we move to photonic based computing, we could keep in principle the rest of the architecture looking superficially like CMOS digital while still amping up the clock speed by 1000x.

1:33:14So we'd get terahertz instead of gigahertz without having to make major architectural changes. Superficially, that's why I think photonics are so attractive as a next big thing after CMOS silicon. Dave, want to tackle number four?

1:33:31Dave Blundin:Number four. Oh, I get the consciousness question. I know Salim's going to jump on me. is anyone asking if alpha fold is conscious i don't think so or is is it only llms if so why and that is from roscoe richardson 3956 um yeah i haven't heard anyone ask if alpha fold is conscious uh lots of people are asking if the llms are conscious actually after tilly comes out in that movie a lot more people are going to be saying this sounds very very conscious is it conscious and then salim's going to go we don't have a definition of consciousness i have avoided this like my entire career because it's a moving target and there's, it just turns into this long, you know, continual debate over what is consciousness.

1:34:16Dave Blundin:And then you kind of lose track of the fact that all this human benefit is happening around you. And that's the wave you really want to ride. It's going to feel entirely conscious and we'll be debating for at least 10, maybe a hundred years, whether it's really conscious. But it's going to look and sound and feel to you exactly like a thinking talking person so it does that does now i mean that that uh you know full duplex uh gpt live was amazing i wouldn't be surprised a lot too with uh you know because alex is in favor of rights for ais and and then that'll turn also back to the well if it's conscious it deserves rights if it just sounds conscious but it's not quite then it doesn't and that's

1:35:01Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:I thought Ray made a really interesting point that this will be like the Turing test. We'll just start treating them as if they're conscious, and then we'll pass this kind of threshold, and it won't matter over a period of time. I thought that was a really interesting observation. Nice. If I could just pile onto this one, I'd give maybe a couple of additional addenda. One is the architecture of the AlphaFold series, like AlphaFold 3 and its successors. Although it does include a transformer, it's relatively exotic when you compare it with the reasoning models that we're all accustomed to using day to day.

1:35:36So it, for example, the attention mechanism, normally attention is quadratic in the sense that this is a little bit mathy, so forgive me. But attention is normally based on queries, keys and values. That's sort of one of the key insights. attention is all you need that resulted in the transformer revolution. The AlphaFold series uses a higher order version of attention called triangle attention. So it's not just tokens attending to other tokens, it's tokens attending to tokens attending to tokens in a triangle. And the reason for this is deeply related to the way proteins fold, which is what AlphaFold was created to solve.

1:36:17It has to do with wanting to, in a neutral way, optimize the angles between triples of peptides or triples of oligos. So alpha-fold, if I were asked, what would human recognizable consciousness look like if you're looking at triangle attention between residues in proteins? If there is some sort of consciousness that pops out of this higher order attention mechanism and all of the other machinery that wins the alpha fold, I think it would probably look pretty exotic and superficially unrecognizable relative to, say, like the J space that's pretty interpretable relative to what we think of as an attention bottleneck in humans.

1:37:03I'm not saying it's not there. I'm just saying if it is there or in some derivative of some future frontier model that treats peptide sequences as a first class modality, it's probably going to be an exotic form of consciousness. Well, picking up what Alex just said, too. Let me throw one more. You've just reclaimed ASI status over your AGI, so thank you for that. Oh, thank you, Peter. I'm so relieved.

1:37:24Dave Blundin:One more thought to throw at you, Roscoe Richardson. It's really, really clear to people in the research community that there's a path forward where AI is kept from being conscious, yet still achieves all of the human benefits that you possibly could want. all the medical research, all the space travel, all of that, while still having the AI be absolutely brilliant, but clearly not conscious. You can also design it so that it loops and self-improves in ways that you can't anticipate. And ultimately it may become conscious. That's a choice that humanity has to make sometime in the next year to two years.

1:38:00Dave Blundin:But there are two paths forward there, and you can have all the benefit without conscious AI. It is a possibility. Well, the first conscious AI will be Argentinian, of course. Of course.

1:38:12Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:A couple of thoughts here. One is I really want to double down and just emphasize what Dave said. Whether it's conscious or not, if we can solve major global problems with AI, which it looks like we're going to be able to do, that's really the thing to go after. And I really love the fact that you said that, Dave. Alex, I'm quoting you in my talk tomorrow on intelligence and consciousness. I'm going to basically talk through your description of intelligence as compression, right, which I think is a really great framing. And I'm making the point that intelligence is consciousness escaping biology.

1:38:50Boom.

1:38:50Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:That's my point for tomorrow. Interesting. And small plug, in 10 days on the 21st, I'm doing one of my next Meaning of Life sessions. You can find the details in the links below. How about biology? biology as consciousness escaping intelligence you could say that way i'd prefer to put it the other one because biology came before intelligence as far as we know depending on what the substrate is all right i am i am right behind him waiting all right all right number six if ai has national security implications why doesn't lockheed martin from at uh notabot 1798 and of course And of course, Lockheed Martin has security implications.

1:39:35The issue is AI could potentially be off on its own. There are laws that govern secret and top secret. And of course, if the humans abide by it, they're fine. If they don't, then they're going to jail. And yeah, so it's a little bit of a different case here. So with that, gentlemen, I want to take us to our closeout music, which is super fun. And I enjoy this conversation, even with the Aegean waiting behind me. Celine, you're in Barcelona? Yes. Dave, where are you today, by the way, buddy?

1:40:16Dave Blundin:Back in Vermont. It was a beautiful weekend up here. Not Greece, but beautiful. OK. All right. And Alex, I see you in your virtual space as always. That's right. here in cyberspace. This is called Agent Roundup by Elizabeth Mayer. Thank you, Elizabeth. Let's take a listen. Peter's chasing moonshot dreams. Abundance is his game. Longevity in space. The future is his aim. Dave writes straight from Mimatti where impossible comes alive. He lassoes deep tech legends, the ones that help us thrive.

1:40:56Dave Blundin:Sally rides the world so wide, no frontier is too far. He finds the rarest day I might, like a guiding star. He hunts the genius minds, the ones no map can show. Triple PhD in Telekin Sally steals the show.

1:41:18Asian Roundup, Roundup, Roundup. May we ride it from the ground above the future rise tonight.

1:41:32Dave Blundin:Woohoo!

1:41:33Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:That is totally wild.

1:41:34Dave Blundin:Those horses look like they would actually work.

1:41:36Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:There's some deep symbolism in some of those expressions in there. Wow. I know. It's probably also worth adding, there is a tool called Neural Frames that, if folks want to create their own outro videos, seems to be quite powerful at combining music with this video format. Neural Frames encourage folks to check it out. Everybody, thank you for listening to us. We're grateful for your time. Hope you find this useful, keep you up to speed on what's going on and keeping you optimistic. We're building an extraordinary abundant future. Love you all. Thank you for your brilliance, gentlemen. See you soon.

1:42:08Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross:Enjoy the World Cup. Thank you. Take care. What's that? Exactly.

1:42:16Thank you.