The Man Who Invented Prompt Engineering on AI, AGI & The Future of Humanoids w/ Richard Socher & Salim Ismail | EP #152

25 Feb 2025 · 1 h 15 min

Ask about this episode

Ask anything about it. ChatGPT or Claude reads this page and answers with the times it was said.

Connect VO and ask about every podcast you hear, including the moments you saved. Add to ChatGPT · Add to Claude

In short

Moonshots Podcast Episode Notes

Podcast Details

  • Title: Moonshots with Peter Diamandis
  • Description: Tracking the future of technology and how it impacts humanity.
  • Guest Speakers:
  • Richard Socher - founder & CEO of you.com, co-founder & managing partner of AIX Ventures, former Chief Scientist at Salesforce.
  • Salim Ismail - serial entrepreneur, founder of ExO Works & OpenExO, former Executive Director of Singularity University.

Episode 152 Overview

  • Title: The Man Who Invented Prompt Engineering on AI, AGI & The Future of Humanoids
  • Date Recorded: February 24, 2025
  • Main Topics: Latest advancements in AI, the LLM (Large Language Model) war, Grok’s updates, and a discussion on the future of humanoid robotics.

---

Key Points Discussed

Richard Socher's Contributions to AI

  • Prompt Engineering: Recognized as the father of prompt engineering, Richard Socher has significantly influenced the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP).
  • Research Impact: Over 205,000 citations in his research, instrumental in bringing neural networks into NLP.

Grok3 and AI Developments

  • Grok3 Launch: Discussion on the rapid development of Grok3, which outperforms competitors like ChatGPT and Gemini.
  • Comparison of AI Models: The panel discussed the varying performance of different AI models, emphasizing that not all users require PhD-level intellectual capabilities in their interactions.
  • AI in Programming and Science: Mention of Grok3's potential in tackling programming and scientific research challenges.

AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)

  • Definition and Understanding: Salim and Richard debate the definition of AGI, with various interpretations including the ability to automate a significant portion of work.
  • Sample Efficiency: Discussion on how AGI should reflect the ability to learn and adapt quickly from minimal data inputs.

Humanoids and Robotics

  • Current Innovations: Overview of advancements in humanoid robotics and the potential applications in daily life.
  • Critique of Human-Like Robots: Salim raises concerns about the necessity of humanoid robots, advocating for more specialized robotic forms instead.

Open vs. Closed AI

  • Trends: Open-source AI is gaining traction, with Richard predicting that it will ultimately dominate due to community involvement and innovation.
  • Comparison to Historical Software Trends: Discussion parallels between the rise of open-source software and current AI trends.

Future of AI in Science and Medicine

  • AI-Driven Discoveries: Enthusiasm about the potential for AI to accelerate scientific breakthroughs, including medical research and drug development.
  • Personalization of Medicine: Mention of technologies like personalized mRNA vaccines and advances in combating diseases.

Data Infrastructure and Energy Needs

  • Concerns about Overbuilding: Discussion on the AI infrastructure and energy needs, with Richard arguing against the notion of overbuilding data centers.
  • Jevon's Paradox: The idea that increased efficiency in technology usage leads to an increased overall consumption of those resources.

Crypto and AI Integration

  • Bitcoin Discussion: Insights into the cryptocurrency market and its relationship with AI, highlighting the complexities and potential for AI-driven financial transactions.

Final Thoughts

  • Rapid Progress: Richard notes how quickly advancements are occurring in technology and AI, encouraging a sense of optimism about the future.

---

Conclusion This episode of *Moonshots* delves deep into the implications of AI and robotics on future technologies. It encapsulates the rapid advancement of AI models, the potential for AGI, and the evolving landscape of humanoid robotics, alongside an insightful discussion on the balance between open-source innovations and proprietary systems. Richard Socher's expertise and Salim Ismail's strategic insights provide a comprehensive overview of the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead in the tech world.

For further updates, listeners are encouraged to subscribe and engage with the podcast community.

---

Links

  • [Follow Peter Diamandis on X](https://x.com/PeterDiamandis)
  • [Get one year free of you.com Pro](https://you.com/moonshots)
  • [Join Salim's ExO Community](https://openexo.com)

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Hear the part that matters, and keep it.Open this episode in VO. Double tap your headphones to save a moment as you listen.
Get VO free

Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:00If you were given a couple of billion dollars, you'd be able to build a digital superintelligence. How quickly? I think probably like year and a half to two years. Richard Socher. Richard Socher. Richard Socher often called the father of prompt engineering. He's one of the top five most cited researchers in AI. Former chief scientist at Salesforce. A co -founder of the AI -powered search engine. You. Come. You're too late to explore the oceans and the world. We're too early to explore maybe different galaxies. We're right on time to expose to intelligence. Why haven't we seen yet a kind of an agentic version of a Jarvis that just watches your tasks?

0:37Programming science research, that's where the next frontier is for a lot of these amazing odds. I cannot believe that we're alive right now. It's like people should realize how extraordinary and lucky we are. Uneniable. Now that's the moonshot ladies and gentlemen. Everybody welcome to moonshots another episode of WTF just happened in tech this week here with Seleme Ismail, I'm Peter D. Amanda's and we have AI royalty with us today. Richard Socher is the fourth most cited individual across AI and Richard what's the proper way to phrase your domination and being cited. I have over 200 ,000 citations invented one of the most popular word vectors.

1:26Got neural networks into the field of natural language policy. Invented prompt engineering. That's right. That's incredible. And Richard is the founder and CEO of U .com. We'll get into that a little bit later. He was acquired by his company. Metamined was acquired by Salesforce. and he was the chief scientist and EVP at Salesforce. And a lot more. Selim, welcome as well, buddy. Good to be here. Yeah, so a lot happening this week in the field of AI and I wanna dive into that Richard, get your extraordinary point of view here. I wanna start with the launch of GROC3. If I had to sort of like tear all of the activities that have just occurred And I want to contextualize it on the notion that it wasn't very long ago that Elon raised $6 billion.

2:19I was you know full disclosure an early investor in in XAI and he announced is he's gonna create the largest GPT cluster on the planet make it coherent and he does at 122 days and blows people away. Were you shocked Richard on how fast he built what he did? You know, and executes and with six billion dollars, you know, you can do a lot of damage in AI I mean we've seen companies like deep seek and that hedge fund built amazing models with much less so In some sense it's amazing and it is surprising how quickly they got out of that far But in some ways you can expect some of these were exponential technologies like AI But enough resources you can go hard pretty fast Yeah, my standard phrase is don't bet against Elon.

3:07I just saw him last week in Miami. I was there at the FII Summit. And the guy does execute. He's got an incredible team. So I'm curious about how you're benchmarking GROC3. Apparently it's outscoring Chatchy PT, Gemini Deepseek. How do you rank it a gas and AI engine? So we actually have croc 2 already within U .com 2 and it's a popular model, though there are others that are even more often chosen by our users. I think what's interesting is Sam Altman also talked about how the next generation of models are going to be almost the level of a PhD student. But what we notice is that not many people are PhDs and have PhD level questions in their lives.

3:51It's full for more and more people, I think, we've reached a level of informational needs and knowledge needs that is good enough for them. So now you kind of push harder on really hard tasks, like programming. We've seen some exciting announcements today. And for topics to you, 3 .7 model, like I think programming, science, research, that's where the next frontier is for a lot of these amazing alls. Celine, what have you been hearing on the ground? I'm hearing Grock 3 is incredible, but the outperforming all other AI models seems to be a little bit more hype than reality. I think it's coming in as far as I can see when I scan Twitter or X a little bit lower than them, but still unbelievable that he's been able to achieve this in such a short period of time.

4:40I'm fascinated Richard, because you guys do like federated AI, because you've access to many models, right? So I'm really interested in hearing more about your model and what your guys are doing. But just on the GROC 3 thing, I think the, for me the biggest thing is the his ability to achieve coherence across such a large cluster that part through my mind, because as far as I could see every AI expert said you can't do it. And I'm richer, I love to get your kind of take on that piece of it. Yeah, I think not many people have been set, like being able to set up a big cluster that quickly. I think in many ways that is a combination of hardware and software and a lot of folks like me are more software people.

5:20A lot of AI folks have been spending most of their time in software and so I think it kind of speaks to his ability to work in both hardware, just sort of where he comes from much more of Tesla and SpaceX and such. But now moving into scaling it up and actually getting all the software components. The same time, of course, there are companies like any scale and others that are making it easier to deal with massive clusters. Any scale allows you to upscale from five GPUs to 5 ,000 GPUs within a few lines of code. And so the layers of abstraction are going higher and higher. And we're all, thanks to AI, partially, are operating at higher levels of abstraction.

6:03I'm curious about how people can evaluate these against each other. At the end of the day, I think about human IQ tests as an interesting metric to evaluate them. I was fascinated when Claude III came out in IQ of 101 and then was it GPT -01 or GPT -03 came in at IQ of 120. and I've been wondering about when we'll see something coming out at IQ of 150. Is that a relevant measure? You know, IQ has a lot of different dimensions. I think intelligence overall has a lot of different dimensions, which we briefly talked about our FII conference conversation. I don't know if it makes sense to just boil it down to this one number.

6:50I think even the Turing test is essentially broken in the sense that the best way to fail the Turing test is to answer questions so much better than a human could like write me an app in 30 seconds. And then if it can do it, it's an AI. If it can't do it, it's human, right? So it's like there are many ways that we measured intelligence that are broken and I'm working on helping the well kind of structure that measurement a little bit better by understanding sort of what the dimensions are of intelligence. And if there are upper bounds to some or if it can just keep on growing. So you know, it's interesting, right?

7:20So you're providing access to large corporations across most of the AI models. How many AI models do you have on U .com? Right, 40 plus. 40 plus, amazing. If you were going to just for people to get a sense of the largest and most powerful models out there, what's your list of the top five thereabouts? You know, you can ignore OpenAI still. A lot of folks want to use OpenAI and especially O1 and O3 are quite popular. We have a lot of fraud too. People are trying to trade accounts and then like just make us into a free API and then make Like 10 ,000 calls in one hour and you like no one can be dead This is clearly a bot attack and that happens all the time Sonnet is still very very popular true son 3 .5 and Yeah, and thropics model is probably one of the best models for programming still So we are we actually we have our own models which we just find you in open source models And then we also federate and ask different models depending on where people give the most positive feedback given the intent that they have.

8:27So we classify the intent. Is it a programming intent? Is this, you know, a history or a medical intent? And then we route to different models and it changes. Actually, the most surprising thing maybe is how often it changes? And how much mine share deep seek also got in such a short time with not much of a marketing budget, right? So that was a very popular model for Pights and Time. Everybody, Peter here. If you're enjoying this episode, please help me get the message of abundance out to the world. We're truly living during the most extraordinary time ever in human history. And I want to get this mindset out to everyone.

9:02Please subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcasts. And turn on notifications so we can let you know when the next episode is being dropped. Alright, back to our episode. Let me head to the next slide here. So Grock three benchmarks versus the competition. And here are the numbers. So these benchmarks are they relevant and invaluable? I'm curious because everyone wants to know how fast they're progressing. This is on reasoning and test time compute. Richard, how do you view this? Yeah, I think they're two interesting insights here. Is indeed like most normal people don't have crazy hardcore coding signs and math questions every day in their life.

9:41So this is where we push signs forward, like I just mentioned earlier. And that's where that fontos re exciting. The other really interesting bit here is that we're looking at test time compute. And so it doesn't even make sense anymore to think about a single model's intelligence. Because it turns out there's some fun research that came out where you just say, wait before you answer this and give it some more thought. The same model actually does better and gives you more accurate answers. So speed is becoming kind of a type dimension of intelligence, obviously overlapping with a lot of other kinds of intelligence.

10:17And the faster you have to be, you know, the less intelligent you are, the less intelligent your answers are from these models. And so what that also means is we may not have to worry about sort of AI running away and open source, because you're going to have to have a lot of compute even at test time if you want to get the smartest possible answers from these models. So lots of interesting insights. Sleem, any questions, Richard? I want to have got a good one, which is, you know, as we move towards AGI, I struggle massively when people say AGI. And what the hell does that mean, even? And so I'd love you're one of the few people that I think could give a cogent answer on how do you define AGI?

10:57And if we achieve it, how will we even know? And you just put out a tweet, Richard, that I found interesting that said something like if you were given a couple of billion dollars, you'd be able to build a digital superintelligence. How quickly? I think probably like year and a half to two years. Was that a call for funding? Everybody listen, give me two billion dollars and I'll give you your digital superintelligence. Yeah. I mean, I missed going on the research side going hard. When you're built the products and you make revenue, it's amazing. It's very meaningful. But I think there's still a couple of ways that the community is stuck on in terms of research where we can really push it forward.

11:37I think in terms of AGI, indeed, the definitions are so broad, right? Some folks say, well, it's 80 % of work can be automated, and that's a very pragmatic way of just like, you know, sort of financially defining intelligence. Of course, I would say that maybe 80 % of all digitized work can be automated, and then, you know, maybe 80 % of all those workflows, and that's already a huge amount of GDP, and that could be a reasonable financial definition of intelligence. But of course, if you're sort of more academically inclined, you have to acknowledge that there's certain kinds of intelligence and types where you want to really get faster at learning too.

12:25Like humans are able to just, with one or two examples, learn something. So we call this sample efficiency, right? And if you're really that intelligent, you should be able to learn, reflect much less data along certain dimensions. And so I think as we want to define it really properly, we're going to have to go into the different types of intelligence, visual intelligence, language, reasoning, mathematical reasoning. There's some type of social intelligence to even among AI is like, what actions could I take to modify your internal state in order to influence your actions, right? So there are these different dimensions of intelligence, knowledge is a good, like dimension and two, which is quite unbounded, right?

13:01We can learn more and more about the universe. You end up hitting sort of physics -based boundaries of how much knowledge you can accumulate based on the speed of like cone around the different senses that you may have. So a full definition is probably takes too much time here. But a financial pragmatic one of just like we automate a lot of digitized work, seems reasonable. And what's your view of going to the physical realm? For example, a wasniac his test is, can you make me a cup of coffee? And now you're getting into robotics or the other one I've heard is can you put and I take an Ikea box and put the piece of furniture together Right now you're getting the physical manipulation which is really is one of the core rationales for intelligence Do you go into that world or do you stain the digital side because it's just and you can boundary it more easily I actually think that physical manipulation is another definition that dimension of intelligence or group of dimensions and at the same time A deaf person can be very intelligent, a blind person can be very intelligent.

13:58None of those abilities, a person as paraplegic can be very intelligent even though they can manipulate matter. I think we have to accept the fact that these are not necessary capabilities to have a superintelligence. You can have a superintelligence that I think is purely digital. It's just different to our intelligence. I think people who require to say, oh, you've got to have a bunch of fingers and move around, They're just like not never read enough sci -fi maybe or not like Sort of creative enough in their definitions of intelligence at the same time I'm loving the Humanoid robots the tricky bit is that oftentimes we use robots when we can do certain things We want when we want to do certain things many many times very efficiently and very quickly like wash like wash the dishes or Vacuum the carpet exactly which then has like a simple robot about Rumba or dishwasher, right?

14:51And then we could then call it a dishwasher and then we call it a vacuum. We give it a specialized name. I am, you know, Selim, you and I have had this debate a bunch and I'm curious about your opinion still and Richards, which is the whole open versus closed AI debate. And do you feel like open is gaining on closed and is that a definitive future? Undeniable. Undeniable open source is gaining. When you have this much excitement around something and it is a product and experience that any normal person can appreciate There's so much energy that goes into open source that it is very hard to compete with that in the long term The more niche you are the more technique that is the fewer people can appreciate using that technology Like they'd say you do I own thrusters for you know satellites like no one's gonna build an open source model for that for with millions and millions of dollars in that excitement.

15:47It's undeniable of deep seek that it's been catching up and I'm hoping we can build one system eventually where almost like we could pdf people can contribute to it. No one does that. I'm going to have to do that at some point. I have the same view. We saw this in the software world when you had Microsoft running its internet server and then you had open source web servers and the open source web servers just absolutely took over is 99 .9 % of all web servers are now open source. And therefore, over time, that will always win. So my question then is, okay, we're going to be heading towards open source.

16:23Got it. We have still a number of close source companies. Are they eventually going to go open source? Are, you know, is there a winner take all scenario here? I think there's a good chance that if you're a purely foundational model, a purely foundation small company, you're going to look more and more like a telco, like huge cap acts, very expensive to build, creates a ton of infrastructure that creates value, but it's unclear you can capture all of that value yourself. Thank you for using that analogy, and I think that's the perfect analogy here. So we're commoditizing and demonetizing all of this stuff.

16:59I mean, if you look at the demonetization curves in terms of the cost per transaction, it's like just this rapid deescalation. So how do you rationalize? So in the telco space, folks need to realize, we had a massive amount of bandwidth being built out in terms of fiber, in terms of cable, in terms of 3G, 4G, 5G. And all of the value was captured not there, but captured on YouTube, captured on Netflix, captured on apps on top of that. And so how do you think about that, Richard? Yeah, you can't build a new bird without internet everywhere, But Verizon doesn't get a cut of Uber. Yeah, so I think that is why at U .com, we haven't spent a ton of money on training models from scratch.

17:46And we've built a trust layer on top that sort of professionalizes this so that companies can really use that technology. And I do think more and more thanks to DeepSeek of our existing. And now new customers are realizing, oh, yeah, we should partner with someone like you because the new model comes out in two months and I'm stuck on one year contract with one of the close to those companies. Now I can't benefit from that. makes it makes a ton of sense because there's a continuous competitive in everybody's it's a race down to the bottom. And if they become if you become stuck with a particular model, you have no guarantee that you're going to be using the most efficient lowest cost model.

18:21Yeah, we call it future proofing by organization. So what does a trust layer mean for you dot com? A trust layer is highly connected to data and helping people actually train on how to use the technology. So we do certifications so everyone can become a manager of their AI's and of their agents, and we incorporate not just public data better than anyone else because we've been doing it longer than anyone else, but we're also incorporating company internal data. And so then you can actually start to trust it. And then when you click on citations on u .com, especially in our more advanced research modes, you will actually get sent directly to the quote and the browser will scroll down and highlight, oh, this is where I found this fact.

18:59So you can very quickly build that trust with them. We taught our models to say, I don't know. A lot of models, if they don't find the information somewhere on the web, they'll just make up something. We don't have that. So there are a lot of different moving pieces to making it more accurate and building that trust. Yeah, Seleme, you and I have talked about when we're advising companies and investors about investing in AI. It's like investing companies that have a great connection with their end customers and with data. And then assume that the layer in between is just gonna be constantly, you know, flick over, replace it, get the lowest cost model.

19:44But it's relationship with the customer base and the data sets. Yeah, I think this is going to be key and to success in AI platforms, right? And I think Richard, the sounds like you at U .com done an amazing job of creating that layer of abstraction that protects people from the underlying. I think, because otherwise, we were one of the huge questions everybody has as we talk both Peter and I or yourself, we talk to CEOs around the world. When you make your place your chips, because the minute you put your chips down on a particular model, it's at a date and three months. And so therefore, you really need platforms like you .com to help with that.

20:22And I think it's fascinating to see where you've done that. Here's another article of the New York Times that for those listening to the podcast and not watching it, it says open AI and covers evidence for AI -powered Chinese surveillance tools. So of course, we've had this entire incredible back and forth with TikTok and now we potentially have it as well on deep seek. What's your views here, gentlemen? I'm not surprised. How would it not be the case would be my question that you would ask. And then all these companies have downloaded deep seek and put it into their systems. But it's not, is it, are those, if you download the model and are utilizing it in isolation, is it still reporting back information that it's gathered?

21:14So you can't teach that. You can take the open source model and still force it to take stuff from a prompt and from a search engine back end. So that is possible. and you can actually also find you in the model to get rid of all the CCP alignment. Fascinating. Alright. Our next story here is, and I love this, accelerating scientific breakthrough with an AI co -scientist. You know, I love the fact that we saw the Nobel Prize going to Demis and John Jumper for the creation of AI model able to predict the folding of a protein. My expectation, Richard, and you're both a deep scientist and a deep programmer is that almost all breakthroughs are going to come from AI in the not -to -distant future.

22:09And we'll attach it to a human, so a human can get the Nobel Prize. But it's going to be fundamentally in the materials and mathematics and science and medicine. Am I wrong there? 100%. I'm writing a book on this in my nights and weekends on AI for science. It's called the Ureca Machine, so they're working title. I'm a big believer. Interesting enough also when you ask a lot of folks all over the world in areas where they're scared of AI. Most Most folks are scared that it takes their jobs, but in terms of science and medicine, no one wants more jobs. They just want more breakthroughs and cool discoveries.

22:47So everyone is alive. Everyone worldwide is alive. Let's just have AI do a lot of science. So there's a lot of positive momentum behind it, and I think we'll see more and more discoveries. First with the help of AI, and eventually you might be mostly guided, right? You need to kind of tell the AI, this is what we care about the most, and then it can go off and do more and more in an automated fashion. This is the area that I'm most interested in because I think there's just so many if you provide it with datasets and go formulate 5 ,000 hypotheses and start testing them. It can do virtual testing of all sorts of things.

23:21And I'm incredibly excited. So what's going to come from this? I love this last bullet here. It says replicated 10 years of antibiotic resistant studies in just 48 hours. Dario was at Davos, Dario the CEO of Anthropic, and he said something which I clipped, which I love. He said, listen, we're going to see a century worth of biomedical research in the next five to ten years. And one can imagine that during that century of biomedical research that we would potentially double the human lifespan. And so it's not unlikely if it double human lifespan in the next, within the next decade. So I'm always listening for the signals because you know that's like I'm in it for in it to win it on the on the doubling the human lifespan And then we'll negotiate we'll negotiate we go from there We saw Larry Ellison When he was on stage on stargate And now I'm seeing the idea that we're gonna have you know personalized mRNA vaccines against your cancer should you have it?

24:21And so for me, this is like one of the most extraordinary areas of reinventing medicine, curing cancer, curing viral infections, curing death perhaps, who knows? Yeah, I think a lot of people who now say, all like Brian Johnson and Lunggevity folks are just like, that's a bad idea. I think one, most of those people are healthy and are in currently battling anything. and two, they're just like people before the baby pill came out, right? They're like, oh, that's not natural. I'm like, yeah, you know, like there's a lot of bad stuff that's natural, like murder and no laws are natural. Like there's just animal kingdom, right stuff.

24:59And so there's like all kinds of bad natural things. And humanity has been pretty good at improving from that natural state. And I think it lacks a certain creativity when people think we can't ever solve aging and health spans and things like that. So, you know, we in 2018 started the largest project for a large language model for proteins. And we actually published that paper when we're still at Salesforce. And we've had incredible success. In fact, we believed in so much. We worked with wet laps and actually synthesized those proteins. And they were 40 % different to nationally occurring proteins.

25:35And just to put that into perspective, fences are known about four years ago, want a Nobel Prize for what she called directed evolution, which was random permutations with a lot of experimental like a science in the loop. And then saying, oh, this random permutation improved this particular property. So let's keep this and then keep iterating. By the end of her very long process, those proteins were 3 % different to naturally occurring proteins. And I was 40 % and what taught us that we actually captured the syntax, the grammar of these proteins was that they folded properly and they had the properties we predicted them to have and we wanted them to have.

26:12And so there's a lot more work that comes from as a bunch of startups have already started and once you understand the language of proteins all the medicine will follow. This goes back to Suley Murpoint about AI interfacing with the physical universe, right? So another friend Alex Zebarankov, the CEO of Encilical Medicine, and one of the things that he's done. And he was very early in generative AI and drug discovery. But he's built a massive robotic laboratory where he can basically have the AI come up with experiments and run those experiments 100 times faster than humans, get the data, iterate the experiment, run the experiment.

26:58And so you literally create a theoretical world in a physical world, I find that extraordinary. I think we're going to see hundreds of examples like this where people now, the only limit is our imagination and how fast we can apply some of these because the speed of the technologies now at a level where we can pretty much go down any avenue we want. Me personally, I'm looking for how do you reconcile quantum mechanics with relativity as a physics major. That's my thing and I think I will be able to figure it out. Yeah, I'm I cannot believe that we're alive right now. It's like people should realize how extraordinary lucky we are.

27:41This I don't think this is you know every every generation feels like they're alive during the most extraordinary time whether it was you know at the beginning of flight and electricity and the internet and so forth but I think it's I think we're I think we're to explore the oceans and the world. We're too early to explore maybe different galaxies, but we're right on time to explore superintelligence. For sure, the other area besides medicine is material sciences. So we just saw a matter, Jen, out of Microsoft. Talk about prompt engineering. My friend, your prompt engineering is now gone and completely different.

28:16Please build me, design me a material that is superconducting, that includes these elements that is this cost that can be manufactured, you know, it's like crazy. It's like designed. If we can take room temperature, normal pressure, superconductor from that, it would be world -changing, and I'm very excited for that. The nice thing about chemistry is that unlike biology, you can iterate even faster, right? There's no living tissue, or you don't have to run FDA trials and so on. You can just iterate even quicker in that loop. And, you know, Selim Yunai, but we said, material sciences is at the foundation of everything else.

Read the full transcript

28:54And, you know, we consider material scientists heroes in our world. All right, Selim, what do you think about this one? Satya Nadella on Quantum Breakthroughs, quote, we believe this breakthrough will allow us to create a truly meaningful quantum computer, not in decades, but in years. I think this is... I think this is... No, Microsoft. Yeah. Yeah. I think this is beyond huge. I think as we get to this, we have to keep in mind the limitation of quantum computers. They're only good for certain classes of problems. So there's that limitation. But the fact that you can create stable environments is really something huge.

29:32I go back to Helmitz comment that the existence of quantum computing, the heart is in the world of the heart. Yeah, his comment that the exist it gets very kind of metaphysical very quickly because he said the existence of a quantum computer may be proof of a multiverse and your head kind of just breaks right then as I So Richard I love to get your take on this because you're The only way quantum computers can do all of the calculations as rapidly as they do is that they're borrowing resources from a near infinite number of universe, Jason universe. Yeah, we're doing the competition in parallel universes and bringing the answer back.

30:10Love it. Richard point, they're going to be pissed when they found that we're stealing resources. So there's that to think about as well. Hey, Richard, what's your view on all of this? I'm super excited. I think anything you can simulate any domain you can simulate, AI can solve pretty much every problem that domain. It's just the matter of time and whether humans want to put that effort in. So you can simulate, go, you can simulate chess. like so, chess is obviously solvable by an AI, because you can, no, AI can learn through two ways, right? Either imitation or exploration, aka, you know, supervised and fine tuning and supervised training or reinforcement learning.

30:46And so, when you can allow a simulation to just train and try billions and billions of things, it can get smarter over time. What quantum computers will enable us to do once we scale them up is to simulate much more in the physical reality. My favorite science influencers have been a Haustenfelder, put a little bit of a damper on this particular announcement, saying, oh, we'll see if they really can scale it. But I'm very excited. I'm excited that there are different ways of approaching that, like the trapped ions, the neutral atoms. It's interesting. You hear a lot of quantum scientists kind of diss the other approaches and think their approach is the best.

31:25And then comes like this total left field one of these topological qubits that no one had been working on. And I just love the fact that there's this energy. And that in some ways, we have companies that have such a massive monopoly in their space that they have all these extra resources to do 17 years of research before something comes out. Amazing. And it's honestly, thank you to Google and Microsoft for investing in this direction, because there was no immediate return. You know, we saw Hartmut Nevin's latest, remind me what his breakthrough was a few months ago. You know, it announced that the larger the number of qubits, the more stable it became.

32:12And Majorana. Is that pronounced as Mejorana one? I drew on that. Yeah. Yeah. Incredible. It was about 13 years ago I had my two kids, my two boys, and I remember at that moment in time I made a decision to double down on my health. Without question, I wanted to see their kids, their grandkids, and really, you know, during this extraordinary time where the space frontier and AI and crypto is all exploding, it was like the most exciting time ever to be alive. And I made a decision to double down on my health. And I've done that in three key areas. The first is going every year for a found upload.

32:54You know, a found is one of the most advanced diagnostics in therapeutics companies. I go there, upload myself, digitize myself about 200 gigabytes of data that the AI system is able to look at, to catch disease at inception. You know, look for any cardiovascular and cancer or neurodegenerative disease, any metabolic disease. These things are all going on all the time and you can prevent them if you can find them at inception. So super important. So found is one of my keys. I make it available to the CEOs of all my companies, my family members, because I help this in you wealth. But beyond that, we are a collection of 40 trillion human cells and another 100 trillion bacterial cells, fungi, a viarite.

33:40And we don't understand how that impacts us. And so I use a company in a product called Viome. And Viome has a technology called Metatranscriptomics. He was actually developed in New Mexico at the same place where the nuclear bomb was developed as a biodefense weapon. And their technology is able to help you understand what's going on in your body to understand and which bacteria are producing which proteins, and as a consequence of that, what foods are your super foods that are best feed -a -eat? Or what food should you avoid? What's going on in your oral microbiome? So I use their testing to understand my foods, understand my medicines, understand my supplements, and viome really helps me understand from a biological and data standpoint, what's best for me?

34:35And then finally, feeling good, being intelligent, moving well is critical, but looking good. When you look yourself in the mirror, saying, I feel great about life is so important. And so a product I use every day twice a day is called one skin, developed by four incredible PhD women that found this 10 amino acid peptide that's able to zap senile cells in your skin and really help you stay youthful in your look and appearance. So for me, these are three technologies I love, and I use all the time. I'll have my team link to those in the show notes down below. Please check them out. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that now back to the episode.

35:19All right, let's go on to our next topic here. So Microsoft dropped some AI data center leases. So, cancelation of US data center leases raised concerns about AI infrastructure, over capacity and shifting partnerships, move sparked industry reactions with European energy stocks. So there's been a lot of build -out. This ties directly to energy as well. I keep on hearing and Richard, I'm curious and it's a mere point of view that there's an open checkbook for building out capacity and building out energy. We're seeing small modular reactors, SMRs, this is fourth generation nuclear setting up next to these.

36:06To these we're seeing, I mean, I don't get to politics here, but Trump is like drill baby drill. You know, it's like we need as much energy as we can in the US to support this industry. Are we are we over building or are we not even close? I believe we're over building. You can't over building. Yeah, I believe we're I tell you why. Because we're you know you look at say deep seek and the massive breakthrough for much smaller cost right the incremental effort to create the next generation is dropping 10x every time we go through this. And therefore, we should get to a point where training can be done very inexpensively, and then you've spent a lot more time on inference.

36:55And therefore, the amount of buildout is exaggerated, because it's aiming at the time, aiming for a model or size of model that was there six months ago when you started the building. And that will not be the case when you finish the building. So that demodidization aspect of it, I don't think is being taken into account, They're building for the capacity. They think they'll need given the projections without realizing that those projections will be wrong That's my that's my general complaint Richard you may have some more specific Mostly disagree. I mostly disagree. I think I've been talking yeah I've been talking for over a year and a lot of other folks have recently picked it up about Jevon's paradox right when we make things more efficient.

37:40We actually will use more of that resource. And I think we're seeing that play out with intelligence. And so we'll just use intelligence in one more places. Everyone will have a personal assistant, a personal health team, a personal tutor, and we'll just use all of that on top of that. There's sort of so many things on the eye and I can talk about that for every but a lot of human problems are related to not enough energy. So even like when people say, oh, there's a shortage of water. There's obviously no shortage of water Just happens to have to more salt in it, which is an energy problem, right?

38:10So all these water fights that are going on is like well if you have more energy just De -salinate ocean water and problem salt, right? You can like there's all these deserts that you can't live in right now because there's not enough water Well enough energy that those problems go away too So my hunch is we're gonna find a lot of uses for that energy now where I do agree with you on that one small bit is When you build a lot of data centers, you also need to have data that actually goes into those data centers. And you don't want to have like a real estate crisis where you build a lot of buildings, but people don't move into them.

38:38And so I do think, you know, I have some ideas on how to fix that, but my hunch is data will increase, energy needs will increase, and intelligence will get cheaper and cheaper, but we'll still just use more of it everywhere. So let me distinguish between energy needs of which I think we need lots of energy, right? And specifically data centers, which apply that energy in a particular way, I think we need less than people think of that, but we definitely will use all the energy we can for desalination of the things. So yeah, we're kind of just generally coming to agreement there. Before we get into thinking machines here in this article from TechCrunch about mirrors and you start up, I am curious.

39:15I mean, over the last year we've seen this constant flow of the leadership of OpenAI out of OpenAI, which is concerning. I mean, I mean, I'm not an investor in OpenAI. If I were, I'd be very concerned. What do you think is going on there? I'm curious. Open question, either of you guys. I think the doors are very open. I think that the basic general thing is if you get to that level and you're suddenly the hottest property executives or deep researchers in OpenAI, you can essentially go follow your passion and go find your MTP and go build something with the mirrors doing what she's doing or any of the other rafter people.

39:58Some may be interested in healthcare and the specific application there. And they can now have the currency to go do that. I think a lot of it has to do with that. And a secondary layer of the speed and move fast and break things, a process Sam has for how to build stuff that is concerning a lot of people. Then you have the third class of people kind of really nervous that we're moving this quickly without adequate wisdom and thought as to what we're building here. And I'd be curious, which would just be where your action is towards the emphasis on those two or three different areas. I think at a very high level, zooming out a little bit, the fact that California has non -compeats and the rest of the US is actually moving towards that, or like doesn't have non -compeats.

40:41As in non -compeats are not enforceable in California, is tough for companies very often research cost a lot of money, but once you show the world that something is possible at all, it's much, much cheaper to copy it. And it's also much easier to knowing how you've done in one place, go and take that knowledge without taking any code, but it's stuff in your head, and then go do it cheaper somewhere else. And honestly, it's sort of overall for the ecosystem, it's a positive thing where we're just going to see cheaper, better, faster models. So let's talk about thinking machines. Any clue about what Mira is going to focus on?

41:17So I guess lots of smart people joined her, John Schruelman, who let the ChatcheeBT application of the LMS, you know, that had been available as APIs before. We had already incorporated them before ChatcheeV come out inside you .com in a search engine like Context. And so having some amazing folks that really understand the technology and also have ideas for building products is probably a very positive thing. and I mean, she describes and they describe a lot on their website. My hunches, they're going to try to explore. I hope they don't just build another LM. I think there's so much more stuff out there, but yeah, we'll see.

41:56When I find fascinating and I'm, Suleon, I'm curious about your point of view here is, I think her starting valuation is $30 billion. $10 million. I mean, everything's gone up. Everything's gone up. Yeah, it used to be millions of dollars and not billions of dollars. I don't know how quickly you can just for our amount has this stuff. I think we're headed for a pretty big bubble on as we get to the application side of this. Because when you get to the end user, it's demonetizing so quickly that where's the revenue will be the big question over time. I think putting my investor head at AIX Ventures on for a little bit.

42:38The way we think of this is that it's essentially seed stage risk combined with late stage returns. And so as an investor that affected value just doesn't quite work out, but it doesn't mean that no one will succeed. It's just seed stage risk. Once in a while, every no 5 % or 10 % of seed stage companies actually do something amazing. And like one or two of those in the power laws and investor really blow out and return the entire fun multiple times. And so there are a few such possibilities, but man, yeah, it's really tough and the bar is so high to be able to get enough revenue to eventually be able to justify these high valuations.

43:15So can I just riff off that for a second, Richard, when you're kind of trying to invest in AI startups, right, you've got to figure out, A, does the founder or the team have something really magical. And B, can they get to market and can they find product market fit? And that's a big, big challenge today. How do you guys assess that? Can they do their revenue? Can they get revenue? Yeah. And what do you invest in stuff that has massive breakthrough and has the potential and you'll hope that the potential yields? Where do you put your chips on that? Yeah, so we've been doing really well fund ones already like five X TVPI and it's only like four years old or so.

43:59And so we're looking at the sort of two ways to slice and dice it. One is there's a horizontal new infrastructure layer, right? And in that you have companies like Huggingface, I was very fortunate there are my students when I was a professor at Stanford, invested at a 5 million valuation round, they're going to have billion now. So there's there are a few of those that can break out and really become part of this new stack of building software that is fundamentally different with AI and cursor similar one or investor in combium to the cursor CEO is actually an internal mine and I'm really bummed I didn't get to invest in that one.

44:35And so then there are thousands of application companies vertically that sitting on top of that are sitting on top of this new stack. And so there we look for deep industry insights and DPI expertise, like teams that actually understand my buyer will want this feature and they don't just sort of go off and try a bunch of different things and spend a lot of money on it. Our proprietary data sets, something that you look for, find exciting and all of this. The best companies will have what I call virtues data cycles, at least, if they don't have a direct data access already, they're building a product that as you use the product, you collect more data.

45:11One of the reasons why Tesla is much better suited and why we've seen a lot of self -driving car startups die is that they have to pay for every mile driven by a human to collect data versus if Tesla, we all drive the car and we give the data for free and we actually pay it to drive the car to collect that data. That is a perfect example of a virtuous data cycle. When you see that in very SaaS software, at g .com, people give us feedback of like this was a good answer. This wasn't a good answer. I didn't like this part and so on. And so those are sort of ways where you can Build some kind of advantage over time So I get two out of the two things out of this one Elon owes us money and number two To be really successful in AI be Richards intern at software I love that's right there All right guys that was fun And I think the other side of AI is one of my favorite topics.

46:05It's humanoid robots I was building robots when I was in junior high school But they didn't do what the robots today do. So I'm gonna share a short video here. This is a robot called clone I contacted the CEO and he's gonna be bringing his robots to the abundant summit next year, but let's check out a little bit of a video here

46:34So what clone is doing is basically creating which that westworld. So these are muscles, they're hydraulic systems, and that video is under representing what it can do in terms of moving the hands. They hope to have it walking in the next few months. They're based in Eastern Europe where they're doing a lot of the work. But talk about an interesting future of robots where, I mean, a lot of the robots today out of the US and China are clunky work walkers, they do walk, but they don't have that human emotional, fluidic movement, but these might. It's interesting that they chose to work in that way.

47:21In a sense, brushless motors have kind of helped us do an amazing amount of cheaper prices and incredible capabilities in robotics. That's my first stop. The second one is, I think the black horse here is similar to Beechseek, is UniTree. UniTree has some insane videos. They look like CGI where you have four -legged robots that also have wheels, which I think is a clever idea. And so super fast, but also jump and climb up stuff and spin the wheels at the same time. That's the second, the third one is, yeah, I'm excited. And now the question is always like, what's the really most amazing use case for humanoid robots like a tractor factory where you just have a bunch of little lasers and thousands of arms and things like that.

48:06You wouldn't want a bunch of humanoid robots walk over a field similar to the dishwasher stuff we talked about earlier. At the same time, it's not a zero -sum game. There's a ton of cool stuff. I would totally buy a humanoid robot to have stuff be done in my house and just kind of clean and they can do it at night. So they don't have to be super fast. And now the fourth comment is I feel like everyone works on the AI version of our body. It's like the original Terminator. No one works on the T1000 and one of my many ideas is actually to build a T1000 like robot and I have a bunch of ideas I recently like gemped on with a really brilliant hardware hacker and he's like you know this could actually work and make sense.

48:44So project number five. Uh oh you heard it here folks. Jim Cameron was right and it's all going to be due to Richard Tarsher. I got to say something here. If you want a musculoskeletan, humanoid robot, you get a man and a woman and you have a baby and you grow the baby. I really struggle with this. We talked earlier, right? If you want a dishwasher, you have a machine that sprays water in particular way and it looks like a box and you have trays to put dishes in whatever. I was saying with a vacuum cleaner. why and to the point that Richard just made, it's so much more powerful to have wheels on the legs, et cetera, et cetera.

49:26Why are we constantly going back to the human form? We've had this hard drive. We've had this hard drive. We have, we've gone about this. You're just wrong. I think driving nuts, you're just wrong. It's wrong. Richard, the argument we've had is I kind of say, if you're going to build a robot, have one with seven arms that can do many more things. Why make it look like a human? Well, and because it's cool. Oh, yeah. So I am an investor in McKinnell apps, too. They built these massive arms, and they can form sheet metal, and they work with SpaceX, and bunch of folks. Whenever you don't want to build an entire factory to make that same large piece of metal millions at times, but you need it 200 times.

50:05They're perfect for. They can literally ship a factory that creates any spare part into the field somewhere, and then just have almost like a blacksmith, but massive and AI. And they're also like, oh, anti -humanoid. Now, again, it's not a zero sum game, right? I think some people want like a beautiful humanoid -like robot in their house, but we can still have dishwashers and factory robots and so on that are very custom purpose and look crazy funky with 20 arms. And you know, that's the excitement for robotics. Doesn't have to be zero sum. All right, we have a lot of robot announcements this week.

50:39So let me continue on here. Next up is Neo's gamma. So, you know, listen, I think this looks pretty damn cool. I mean, this is, you know, in terms of its motions. Now, how stage this is and how practiced. You know, we don't see the 37 ,000 shots that went wrong. But that looks like a pretty friendly home robot. You know, one of the questions I ask everybody is, How many will you own? You know, I when I interviewed Elon and Brett adcock breads the CEO will see him in a minute CEO of a figure and of course Elon overseas Tesla and Tesla bought now called Optimus the projection is as many as 10 billion robots by 2040 and I can imagine that I have no problems imagining I would own You know two or three maybe ten So, Celine, no, not you.

51:39You know my struggle with this. I mean, one robot moving very quickly is the same as seven of them. And again, why does it have to look like a human being? It would be much better with wheels and seven arms. You could have the same thing. You could have the same thing. You could have the same thing. You could have the same thing. So, I struggle with that. I think I feel more comfortable having, you know, a humanoid robot walking around the house than some strange looking contraption. I think we're going to end up with the problem in the same way with virtual reality with the uncanny valley, where it's very disconcerting.

52:10I think we're going to have the same thing with humanoid robots. For sure. And like the sci -fi is underrated and showing us sometimes also the positive ways. People will fall in love with their robots and they'll have these androids. Now, I think with short -term, we're going to see a lot of folks just remote controlling a robot, collecting training data that way. And so there's going to be an unpart of the uncanny valley is you may have someone in India or somewhere sitting looking into your entire home being able to navigate everything seeing your kids opening your doors and everything and you kind of have to be okay with that invasion of privacy potentially, right?

52:48And then once you once they got good enough then you're right like they could be faster. I mean they could put on like wheels and like you know shoes with wheels on and you know and attach another arm if we really want them to, they can be more modular that way. So I'm excited for it. All right, so that was NeoGamma from OneX Tech. Let's go to the next robot here. And this is Figure AI. So just for disclosure, I'm an investor in Figure. I don't know if you are Richard. This is Brett Adcox Company, and they just announced their software. Interestingly enough, the figure used to have a software relationship or a Gen -AI relationship with OpenAI, and they shut that down, and they decided to build their own AI team internally and to build Helix.

53:44I think the logic there is, in the same way that Tesla got so much data from autopilot as we're driving it around that allowed them to create these incredible models, that figures AI, I really hope they come up with a separate name for it because calling the company figure and the robot figure gets a little bit confusing. But they're going to get a lot of data and that's going to train the AI in the physical universe. Let's take a look at at their video.

54:33So, Celine, instead of having four arms, you have two robots instead, and they collaborate. It's called collaboration. I think this is going to take a much longer time for people to work out than people realize. But it's fantastic to see the speed at which it's moving forward. Because if 10 years ago when we were first looking at robots, it was really hard to imagine they would get the stock of grandchildren. Yeah. Remember the government? It was so clunky and so I think so. So it's fantastic to see that. But the use cases and the application areas is where I think it'll be. You know, my roomba still cannot clean a room without me moving all the furniture around for it.

55:15So it's working for us hard. Yeah. And like Robotic says, done a phenomenal job if we can constrain the environment a little bit more. And that's why self -driving is also a fairly constrained environment where it's standardized in a lot of places. The highways all look the same. Things like that, road signs are standardizations. houses have very little standardization and you're right, it will be very very hard and the companies that are actually able to get through and get like one use case so nailed that is big enough and important enough for folks will be in a huge advantage but it is harder than most people think it'll be very capital intensive and then the question is can you be a fast follower out of China and just say oh this is how they do it now we reverse engineer it and then you can leap frog skip all the expensive research stage and that's right.

56:00And I'll go to my favorite use case, which is going to be a while before you get one of these human argrobots and say go change the baby's diaper. There's just so many things that can go wrong with that. Yes, I still love the, the, the, walk into the room and the, the robot is holding the, the baby by one foot. The funniest comment I saw on this figure video was this reminds me of two of my buddies being really stone and trying to load the lot that the end. That's perfect. I'm sorry, but I was scared with episodes around this. The doorbell is about to ring. It's my figure robot coming over there.

56:36I don't give you a hug. So answer it and be nice. All right. I can't help doing episode without Bitcoin. Let me begin the question to you, Richard. Are you a believer in Bitcoin? There's a faith component here. I say a believer. Are you a holder in Bitcoin? I have just a tiny bit here and there. I invested in a fund that does a lot of crypto things just to have a little bit of exposure, but I mostly want to focus on AI and find it a bit of a distraction, so I'm not really deep in it. Well, when focusing on AI, I mean, listen, AI's are going to need to have, and agents are going to need to have mechanisms for transacting financial aid.

57:15So, let's take it slightly sideways to cryptocurrencies for AI agents to do business amongst each other. What do you think about that? I mean, it makes sense, but they can also do that with credit cards. We'll have AI kind of made credit card purchases fairly quickly. I was a little bit dismayed when I actually tried to play around with the technology, and then it's just like the gas fees and so on. We're also pretty high. I'm like, wait, this is like a credit card fee almost. It's like already cost a lot of money. I'm like, this doesn't seem right. So I don't know, I feel like they need to really lower the prices so that the transactions themselves are insanely cheap.

57:57Yeah, there's a whole stack of, you know, you've got Bitcoin with very expensive transaction fees and proof of work to proof of stake. And as you get closer to the end use, where you need less security. So if I'm moving, if I'm storing jewelry in a bank vault, then you have a lot of security in, But you don't do that many transactions when it comes to a debit card. You can have much less security. The transactions are limited to like $50 each. And then for you can lower the security in exchange for the volume. I think that's the kind of thing we're going to see in the crypto world as well. How nervous do you get, Celine, when you see the price now at this very moment?

58:33It's... I'm actually... Yeah, so I'm really encouraged by what's happened here. So two things happened over the last few days. One was the bite, the bit bite, whatever bite bit hack, which was the biggest hack ever. And in previous years, this would have caused massive collapse in the crypto world, and it barely even noticed. So I think that's one that variant. And the second was the response from the exchange with the CEO going, we're going to get everybody made whole again very quickly, et cetera. gives me encouragement that there's robustness being built into the ecosystem, which gives people a lot of confidence going forward.

59:12I'm pretty excited about where this will go. The Trump meme coin did not help the crypto world at all. That's really unfortunate, but that's life you get when you ask for. You didn't buy it, did you? No, no, no, no, because you can see it's only going in one direction. So if you don't mind, you mentioned the the the the the buy bit billion dollar hack. Can you unpack it? Yeah. So what's happened was one cold wallet which stored a lot of Ethereum got hacked and suffered a massive withdrawal. Now the challenge here is that you want to if you're if you're the hacker, you want to move this into anonymous places and kind of to wash the transactions because crypto is fairly traceable.

59:59There's appeals to Ethereum, right up to Vitalik to say, can we just roll back the thing before the hack? And it'll just undo the hack, basically. So there's a call for that. But trying to wash all the currency out is going to be very, very tricky to do. And everybody's watching all these wallets where they're going very, very carefully to find out who it is. I don't know how you sustain this. I'll just repeat, I'm really encouraged by the response from Ben Zhao and the Bibet folks saying we're going to just navigate all this. We're going to keep everybody hold on the fact that they had enough backup to do this.

1:00:39In general, what we found in the crypto world is you want to not keep major wealth on centralized exchange for this exact reason. in my box, a lot of people lost a lot of money on early on. So you keep it offline and you do trading on these exchanges, but not storage of value. Yeah, I know, but every time I, you know, I use a treasure or a, what's the allegor, you know, sort of thumb drive wallet, but I pucker up every time I go and plug it into my computer. It's non -trivial, it's very tricky. And you know, this goes to that whole usability idea, right? where we, we, when you remember, you were comment about when a technology goes from deceptive to disruptive, the usability becomes much 10x, 100x better.

1:01:29So Steve Jobs made the smartphone usable and boom it took off. Coinbase made the purchasing of Bitcoin usable and very user friendly in that took off, but the rest equipped was still a hot mess. Anyway, the transg buy an NFT or trade in NFT knows how sticky it is or execute a smart contract. But you have to be like geek level 14 to be able to even touch that stuff. Yeah, I'm using Abra from my major holdings, but I still have again on Coinbase and a number of different places. But it turns out to be a significant amount of capital and you've got to be careful about it. That's right. I think the tricky bit is like, why credit cards work is that you're kind of insured.

1:02:07Like someone steals your credit card and you see a bunch of purchases. You can just tell them like, that was me. And then the bank will give you your money back. And part of the problem of the decentralization here is you decentralize also the risk, the security that you have to have and the liability that each user has for their own wallet. And then people are just not sophisticated enough to be able to deal with all the cyber security threats very often. You know, switching here to micro strategies now called strategy, Richard, Michael Seller was my roommate, Fraternity Brother at MIT, so we go way back.

1:02:45He is extraordinarily brilliant. And I was just with him in El Salvador. I was there speaking with Carlos Slim, Mike Seller, and Mark Andries and Ben Harwitz. And Mike gave a massively compelling 90 minute presentation to this room full of billionaire family offices. And every time I hear him, I'm like, OK, I mortgage my house, sell everything, buy Bitcoin. The guy is, you know, it's very dangerous to listen to Michael Frinnington. My friends like, yeah. It's compelling. You know, it's interesting though, that when I just point one thing out for those of you who are nervous about this fall, the equivalent is, you know, it's hoddle and buy on the dips, but I have to verify this, something I wonder if you know that if, if you try and buy into an out of, like sell out of and buy into Bitcoin, that's problematic that most of the gains, this is a memory, I wonder if it's true that most of the gains last year were made on like five trading days.

1:03:51Yeah, this is historically accurate. In any given year, Bitcoin accelerates at some point in the year and it's very, very few trading days that make up 80 % of the upside. the problem is you don't know which those five days are, right? And I've managed to spectacularly miss four out of the five of those. And so, and then you buy on the other side of it and it goes horribly wrong. So it's a very tricky thing that what I tell people is just buy as much of it as you can and close your eyes for 10 years. Yeah. If you can. Well, this is, you know, Michael made another move. He acquired another 20 ,000 Bitcoin for about two billion dollars.

1:04:33It's pretty extraordinary moves. I mean, I wish... In our opinion, it has a lot of incentives to give 90 -minute presentations to everyone. Yes. I'm on Bitcoin, yeah. He does, for sure. It's definitely... No, I think there's one other way to look at it. If you wanted to have somebody be the prime evangelist for technology, the articulation he brings that the table is hard to beat. And you could spend a lot of time trying to find a better one. It's incredible. He is amazing. Richard, open forum here. What's been the most amazing events, breakthroughs, technologies, companies that you've seen in the last few months?

1:05:17Oh, boy. We just covered quite a view. And I saw Agent Forrest. I did a podcast with your buddy and mine, Mark Benioff, Mark's amazing Agent Force 2 coming on strong. What do you think about the whole agentic world? I'm a huge fan. I think when you think about what kind, so essentially large language models can be thought of neural sequence models, right? They're very large neural networks. They can be trained on any kind of sequence of things and you can train in both with imitation and with exploration. And so when you think about what are other interesting sequences, you know, in 2019, we started 2018, we started on these large language models for protein sequences.

1:05:59So boom, you got biology. But then the very obvious sequences, the sequence of actions too. And so I'm very excited. We already have over 50 ,000 custom agents built on the U .Com platform by our users. You you can select which LMS you use. Give us examples of the agents that people would use. What are the top two? PTA. So for example, you're in marketing and you say, oh, every time, every two or three weeks, I get a huge PDF file with a bunch of new features and some website that describes a new feature that product engineering have been shipped. And then I'm tasked to write to email marketing campaigns for specific industries, tasked to write three LinkedIn messages.

1:06:41I have to go out in the web and compare these new features to the competition. So I don't say this is super novel. No one has it, even though other people have it. And so on. And what we've done is like we talked to these marketers and they say, oh, well, just describe that. Explain that very well to an agent on u .com. And the next week when a new thing comes in, like you just drag and drop that PDF and it just goes through all those steps. It writes the LinkedIn messages for you. It writes email campaigns for you. And you're just done. And then we have journalists who say, well, I need to like research a new thing.

1:07:15I want, I'm supposed to write an article about prostate cancer, like advances. Then I go to these 50 different sources. I read a bunch of research papers and then I put it together. Perfect use case, you know, this is like the kinds of sources you describe. Like use medical journals only. You can just say that in your prompt. You don't need like a special sort of feature of the switch in the UI UX. You just prompt it differently. You explain that and then it writes like more and more of that for you And then you just need to start comparing so we have journalists and chief editors and writers that Told us that tasks that used to take them multiple days and I'll take them like two three hours and they're done Maybe the last fun one that's relevant for you is we have venture capital firms that say well if I get a new data room I go through ten steps.

1:07:58I look at net dollar retention. I do cack LTV ratios blah blah blah And then you just describe that again and you drag and drop and hold data room into you .com and it just goes through those steps. So whenever it's like knowledge work, you can already automate a ton of it. You create an agent that says go out there and raise me a billion dollars of venture capital and go find the companies that are going to be unicorns and invest in those and then just send me the back account information. That's step two. from my description of a Gen TKI is white color job description. Yeah, they'll be epic.

1:08:36And then I think the next level will be they actually start taking actions for you. They start booking flights and things like that. Now the interesting bit is that just like if robotics like we're going to have an uncanny value or like just a trough of this disillusionment potentially because when I saw like this rabid R1 for instance and they in the demo they said, oh I want to book a flight with my four kids to London on these dates. And then boom, boom, boom, now it's done. And I'm like, no way that was real. Because you have so many details, right? Like this hotel, I wanted to be close to these kind of sites.

1:09:07I want to see. And then over time, you change, right? When I was a poor graduate student at Stanford, like on, like, less than minimum wage, I would have been willing to wait 10 hours for a layover in order to save $200. Now I spend thousands of dollars extra just to have a one, the stop like, or zero stop flight and they have a direct flight, right? And so you need to know all these subtleties of like, when are you willing to wait for how long, how much extra do you pay? And then you need to like have much more personalization still to make those agents work too. But for knowledge work, you can already automate a lot.

1:09:42Richard, why haven't we seen yet a kind of an agentic version of a Jarvis that just watches your tasks and says, Hey, last time you booked these, you always did this. So are you sure you don't want to do that again and tracks you and learns from your patterns and therefore that can then represent you more easily. I would have hoped to have seen that by now. Have you seen anything like that? Give it give it permission to listen to your phone calls read your emails, watch you all of that. Yeah, there are two two or three problems of why we haven't seen it yet and sort of lockers. Not nothing impossible to fix But so number one is you're not allowed to record other people without their consent So that puts a damper on a lot of things.

1:10:22A lot of countries will sue you and like California, like in Europe and so on. So that's why you can't have it. The second thing is Microsoft actually tried to like launch this where it just watches everything you do on Windows and people just went crazy. They're like, no way. You're gonna send a screenshot of every one of my things. People do private things sometimes in their browser. They don't wanna share all of that with the world. So that will be a privacy, like it's just a privacy thing. You need to build an insane amount of trust of those companies. Then you have a lot of AI companies that the AI forward, like AI first kind of novel startups, they don't have all the users trust yet and that ability to collect all of the data and so on.

1:11:02But then, you know, I think we will eventually get to it. I think someone will be able to like Apple is very good. They care about privacy and probably more likely you're trusting Apple with, you know, everything you might do on your phone. And then the fourth thing is that eventually we're going to have more AI agents surf the web than people. And that is a massive change for how the internet monetizes because there are basically a few companies that make money actually selling physical goods like Amazon, but even those companies are getting more and more into the second or main bucket, which is advertisement.

1:11:36Turns out your AI assistant doesn't get distracted when it has to just book a quick flight for work to Utah with this Bahamas like ads to like go for your next location. And so Expedia, even Amazon makes a lot of money with ads. If you start gnawing all of those, it changes how the internet monetized. So those companies will try to block all these operators, all these AI agents from just being able to get the work done. And so, you know, these are just like, oh man, you can have the intelligence, but the infrastructure around it will slow things down for adoption. I'm amazing. Richard, who are your main customers at u .com?

1:12:11Who should check out your site and tell us how to check it out. Yeah, so you can just go to u .com, why u .cum. Our biggest customers are cyber security companies, like MIMECAST. We have publishers, a lot of publishers that basically improve internal efficiencies for our journalists, or allow you just ask questions on your website and then get citations only on articles from your own network. So you can keep users longer. I want every journalistic outlet eventually to have their own GPT version, where it just answers questions about an article, you can eventually even think of these articles having very personalized follow -up questions like let's say you never understood why the Hootdoos and Tootsies were fighting each other and you read a new article and the outlet knows is the first time you read about this particular human conflict.

1:12:57Maybe they show you like some more explanations and background stories and stuff. We can are building that for for media and publishing companies. We have universities with like 30 ,000 students going live on U .Com where all the students can use it and the professors. Jeff thing will push those universities and all their professors to realize wait my students can just drag and drop this assignment in here and just give them the perfect answer I need to think in my assignments like we think all of that so we're excited about those And then there's a whole host of like consumer companies that want both the search APIs that power sort of the plumbing of the LM's as well as the answers Be done for them and have some API customers that are ramping up massively and revenues increasing lots been really great It's been a pleasure to get to know you and build our friendship.

1:13:44Seleme, as always, thank you for making time. I think I used to feel like I had a grip on what just happened. Now it's at an insane rate. I can't imagine next year. But yeah, incredible week in technology this week. Richard, Seleme, thank you guys. Stop. Give me.

1:14:19This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it at Progressive .com. Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates, price and coverage match limited by state law, not available in all states.

From the publisher

In this episode of WTF is Happening in Tech, Richard, Salim, and Peter discuss the latest news in tech and AI, including the LLM war, Grok’s update, and more. 

Recorded on Feb 24th, 2025
Views are my own thoughts, not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice.

Richard Socher is the founder and CEO of you.com and co-founder and managing partner of AIX Ventures. Richard previously served as the Chief Scientist and EVP at Salesforce. Before that, Richard was the CEO/CTO of AI startup MetaMind, acquired by Salesforce in 2016. Richard received his Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford. He is widely recognized as having brought neural networks into the field of natural language processing, inventing the most widely used word vectors, contextual vectors, and prompt engineering. He has over 205,000 citations and served as an adjunct professor in the computer science department at Stanford. 

Salim Ismail is a serial entrepreneur and technology strategist well known for his expertise in Exponential organizations. He is the Founding Executive Director of Singularity University and the founder and chairman of ExO Works and OpenExO. 

Get one year free of you.com Pro: https://you.com/moonshots
Join Salim's ExO Community: https://openexo.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/salimismail 
____________

I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are,  please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: 
Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/

AI-powered precision diagnosis you NEED for a healthy gut: https://www.viome.com/peter 

Get 15% off OneSkin with the code PETER at  https://www.oneskin.co/ #oneskinpod
_____________
I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now:  Tech Blog
_____________
Connect With Peter:
Twitter
Instagram
Youtube
Moonshots
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

More from Moonshots with Peter Diamandis

All 268 episodes
The Man Who Invented Prompt Engineering on AI, AGI & The Future of Humanoids w/ Richard Socher & Salim IsmailMoonshots with Peter Diamandis · 1 h 15 min
Listen in VO