The State of AI: Humanoid Robots, AI Copyright Wars & China’s Growing Influence w/ Salim Ismail | EP #157

28:20Superintelligence is meant to convey something far more capable than that. When you have such a capability, it's like, can we even imagine how it will be? But without question is going to be unbelievably powerful. It could be used to solve incomprehensibly hard problems if it is used well, if we navigate the challenges that super intelligence poses. We could radically improve the quality of life, but the power of super intelligence is so vast. Wow. So, you know, the theme of the abundance 360 summit next year is super intelligence unleashed. I have to get Ilya to be our opening speaker. That'll be my goal.

29:05Okay. Can I get on my favorite? Get on it. What the hell do we mean by super intelligence? We have no idea what artificial general intelligence is. Can we please spend some time defining these terms before we start throwing them out like bathwater. That'll be my first question for you. Yeah, well, like please define. Now, you know, we have emotional intelligence, spatial intelligence, visual, spiritual intelligence. If anybody that's a leader is bringing a lot of that to bear when they make decisions and choices. So what the... Frick do we mean when we mean superintelligence? And I've yet to have seen so many different definitions of just AGI that I really kind of struggling with this.

29:52So what are we talking about here? But having said all that, right? Fantastic. All power to them. I love the fact that he's making safety a key part of this. I didn't know how he's going to do it because when he had a super intelligence, were kind of toast anyway if they're going down that path. But go, go, go, and amazing that you can get a start of valuation like that. 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 during this extraordinary time where the space frontier and AI and crypto is all exploding.

30:36It 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. You 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 near degenerative 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.

31:17So super important. So found is one of my keys. I make it available to the CEOs of all my companies, my family members, because you know, I help this in you wealth. But beyond that, we are a collection of 40 trillion human cells and about another 100 trillion bacterial cells, fungi, a viarite. And we don't understand how that impacts us. And so I use a company and 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 which bacteria are producing, which proteins, and as a consequence of that, what foods are your super foods that are best for you to eat?

32:12Or 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 Viom really helps me understand from a biological and data standpoint, what's best for me? And then finally, feeling good, being intelligent, moving well is critical, but looking good when you look yourself in the mirror, saying, you know, I feel great about life is so important, right? 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.

33:02So 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. Oh my god, I mean the start valuation so we've seen a number of companies that go from like literally first outside financing round in the multiple billions. Yes. Yes, I was talking to somebody about this and they were like, well, that's just a ridiculous valuation. Dut it out of doubt. I'm struggling to raise money for my startup at this valuation, et cetera. And so that's just bullshit.

33:39And I said, well, would you rather be him or you? I'll be there. So here's the question, right? AGI, again, very fuzzy definition, but it's short of sounds like an AI that can do as good as the best human in every possible field. So an AI that is the best physician and the best mathematician and the best cook and the best whatever. That's sort of the blurry line that we call AGI today. Now, digital superintelligence in my definition is just following the law of excelling returns that says, okay, 10 doublings later, you're a thousand times better, and that's super intelligent. That's great. What would it do?

34:35What would it do? I mean, I think the area where I would point it would be two areas that I would like to kind of get. One is, you know, figure out deep problems like the wave particle duality of light, right? And solve some of the grand notification theories and physics that we've nobody's been able to crack yet, et cetera, right? That's one. The second would be figure out the right model for civilization to follow and figure out a way for getting the entirety of humanity to follow that right governance model and rather on all the political bullshit we have going on today. So those would be two areas I would assign to an ASI.

35:19So I think that is the point. Solve problems that have been unsolvable by humanity to date. Okay, that might be double human lifespan, you know, you know, I feel theories Understanding what dark matter is you know get us through our next dilemmas. Yeah, I mean that that would be How can I reach into parallel universe and go down that path instead of this path? Who's sure what I would ask sure? I think that sounds like a perfect definition reaching into parallel universes. I'll make sure we put that one forward, buddy. Next one Open AI employee on the future of the web. So here, let me read this quote.

36:00It's 2025 and most content is still written for humans instead of LLM's 99 .9 % of web attention is about to be LLM attention, not human attention. So how does he pronounce his name? Andred. Andred. Carpuffy. Andred. So Andred's point is, listen, we've been building the web for us meat sacks as carbon -based life forms and going forward the value of the web is going to be to feed the large language models. We have to restructure how we write it. Fascinating thought, absolutely fascinating. I think there's a huge layer to be built here. I put this in the category of AI -like electricity. It just becomes this invisible layer that just is part of everything.

36:47And this is one of those examples where the reality is a human being can't go through many pages on the web anyway. So you want to pass this whole thing over to an AI and let it navigate it and give you the more relevant pieces for you. And so I think this is super exciting to see if we can make this happen. I mean, I think the point is an important one. And I'm surprised we haven't heard this much before, but it's probably very true. Let's go into some of the conversations that came out of the abundant summit. I think there are some fun ones. Kathy Wood at ARC Invest was giving us her 2025 report.

37:33And I think just huge believer in all things exponential in particular, she was focused based on humanoid robots and, you know, robo -taxes with, you know, making the note that Tesla's cybercab should be up and operating by this summer in Texas and soon thereafter LA and then hopefully nationwide. Hmm. We had a great session on investing in AI with Anj Mita who had AI investing from Andreessen Harwitz and Dave Blundin, who is my partner in exponential ventures and Rana L. Calubi, who is interviewing them. One of the things I found fascinating was Dave talking about two key points. One was, it turns out MIT is the number one AI school on the planet.

38:32the CSAAL Computer Science AI Lab has more graduates, more compute than any other location. Yes. And then it's producing more unicorn startups than any other university, more than... So, number one is MIT and unicorn startups. Number two is USC, which shocked everybody. And number three is Stanford. The other thing that he mentioned was he showed a graph of the average age for an entrepreneur starting an AI company in particular out of MIT and the bell curb used to peak in the thirties. Now it's moved to early twenties like twenty through twenty three. That's amazing. Yeah, about that. I saw the same thing, by the way, in the Bitcoin blockchain world, all the founders are in their early 20s.

39:29Like if you're over 25, there's some bylaw that you have to be under 25 to work on blockchain. It's working somewhere. I think we're seeing the same thing. The paradigm shifts are so big that anybody over a certain age can't get their heads around it, they're not native to it. Yeah. I mean, that's the part, not native, but the other part is, so I think the number is like 75 % of incoming MIT freshmen want to start a company before they graduate. And now the ability to find a great partner and come up with an idea and actually test the idea and launch it inside of a Euro2, yeah. That's crazy. So we had, so out of exponential ventures, out of MIT, two companies went from zero to $2 billion dollar valuations in two years.

40:18That's insane. Incredible. I see a lot of that as we kind of decimate the real world or the old world with AI. The creative destruction is going to be incredible. The, uh, there's a lot more point that they made that I think was worth pointing out. Please. That if you're a big challenge is when do you invest in AI and they made the point that you really need to just get into an investment because it's the only way you're going to keep track of tabs of what's going on. And I thought that was a really important point that we should all take account of, you need to get into it quickly. When we advise companies, the big question is always when you tap into some technology or not.

40:55And the minute it's mission critical, you should be in it right away so that you're learning and not being left behind. Yeah. Your mind goes, your attention goes, where your money goes. Great point. Yeah. Max Hodaq came on stage. I love Max. He's the CEO of science. He is building what I consider the most extraordinary BCI company out there. He was the co -founder and the president of NERLINK with Elon. And it's quite a journey. He went to Elon University on NERLINK. He broke away and started science. And he's got something called a biohybrid neural interface, which I love. So let me take a second to dissect this literally.

41:43So when you put a neural ink device into your neocortex, you're putting like a thousand to 2000 very fine filaments into the neocortex so that these filaments can read and write out to neurons, but these filaments, even as thin as they are, are destroying millions of neurons when you poke them into the brain. That's a problem. And then there's a limited number. Do you I don't know if you remember do you remember the bit rate at which the brain communicates with the outside world? It's like 10 or 20 or something Yeah, it's in like the 10 to 40 bits or a second of bits You know Bauderade. Yeah bits bits per second.

42:25So Which seems like nothing compared to you know gigabits and petabytes that we're going out But what he's built and he's demonstrating animal models and will be going into primates later this year and humans Hopefully a couple years after that is Imagine having a physical computer circuitry with millions of micro wells and In those wells are nutrients in which you place Neural stem cells and the neural stem cells are interfacing the electronics on this on this piece of material and then the neural stem cells and those micro wells are placed on the surface of the brain and the neural stem cells grow their exons and dendrites into the brain like roots into the soil and they don't kill any neurons But you've got millions of these yeah rolling into the brain and connecting and forming you know forming appropriate neural connections and And it's a brand new strategy and approach to BCI.

43:33Yes. I find this fascinating. I've been saying for a long time that one of the challenges is we don't understand how the brain works, right? 100 billion cells are all true neurons are operating and each of them has hundreds of connections, 10 ,000 connections to the nearest neuron. It's like totally, the numbers go totally insane. But you don't have to understand it as long as you can interface effectively to it and that becomes really powerful Can I can I tell you a fun little story? Of course. Back in 2010, Luke Lemur used to run this event called Low Web. Okay? I know the way. Like the big web conference in your hey said to be hey sleep come and give a talk via your learnings It's singularity on whatever you want.

44:20So I thought how neuroscience. So I went and interviewed all over our neuroscience folks at Singularity University, Chris to charm a bunch of others. And I tried to get a common definition of the brain. Okay. And the best common agreed, the only agreed common definition I should get to was something like a fractal chaotic, fractal chaotic information processing system that may or may not generate consciousness. Really, that's what you got for me. It really blew. And they said, we have no idea why any of this stuff. We have no idea why we sleep still after all these decades. Right. So, but I think interfacing with it, like Max's figure out how to do will give unbelievable potential because the brain will figure out how to optimize the connections and use the computing capabilities.

45:08It'll figure it out. We don't have to do that for it. And now things become really, really interesting. Yeah. One last point on this. I remember one of Ray Kurzweil's predictions was that we would have high bandwidth, brain computer interface by 2033. And I was always like, you know, Ray, you've been right on so many things on this one. I just don't believe you. I don't see the technology there. You know, we've got eight bits per second, 30 bits per second. I don't get high bandwidth BCI. And then I met Max. And then boom. And then boom. It's one of those you just shake your fist at the pressions that Ray has.

45:45He, I don't think he's a human being. I think he's an avatar from a different dimension coming in to kind of poke us and Jiggle us so that we kind of stay on the right path. All right next up. We had Joshua Sue from Hey Jen who is up there and Hey Jen is an extraordinary company creating high fidelity avatars and visual and voice models It was amazing. We they were in our Google Tech Hub and they gave everybody their chance to image themselves. You go into the studio for two minutes, the data will be collected and all of a sudden, you would have this visual representation of yourself. Do you ever have any languages your agent, Avatar, can speak?

46:33It was like dozens instantly. It was like a couple of hundred languages. It was like hundreds of languages like that. That's crazy. I'm actually really looking. I've waited for a while to try and create an AI twin. I feel that now is the right time to do it because having an AI of me that can remember all of the things I've ever said and analyze everything the way I've done it over decades is going to be so much smarter than the real me that you just want to go let that thing go do presentations, a conference is it's going to be amazing. I've been waiting till the right time and I'm hoping this is now actually.

47:11Yeah, it is. I remember a couple of points here about a year ago with Steve Brown, who's been my chief AI officer supporting me at PhD ventures. We created Peter Bot, uploaded all of my content. There's actually a much better podcast episode with Peter Bot. And I was like so impressed by Peter Bot. I mean, it was much more eloquent. Memored everything was able to make much better looking than I could. So that was that was fun. In this year what we did at the abundance summit and I should probably do a podcast was with Peter at 120 years old. So we created a version of me 120 years old. So I'm 63 now.

47:55It's 57 years into the future. And I interviewed this version of Peter about how do we get through the singularity. What do you do to get to longevity escape velocity? You know, it's crypto. I still love I asked, I asked what is crypto at in the year, or whatever, 57 years from that was. And it said it's running at $5 million in 2025 dollars at Bitcoin. So that's that's my Peter bots prediction. Boom. And I said, is the dollar still a thing? He said, it's kind of like a novelty, but we've definitely going to a crypto default currency across the world. So that was fun. Can I make a quick point about that?

48:39Of course. We have all grown up. Everybody that's over say 25 has grown up with the only major currency we've ever known to be the US dollar. Right? So everything is in terms of how much dollars does it cost to do something? That's the unit of account for the last five generations. Right? Whereas if you go hang out in these NFT discord channels with all these young and Pups who are trading NFTs, you never ever, ever, ever, ever hear the word US dollar. You only ever hear Ethereum and now Bitcoin on with the Ordinals world. So this is a generation growing up where the US dollar is not the dominant unit of account.

49:15It's going to be very easy for them to flip over to a different model. Yeah. Let's go to the Mogadot of it all. But before I do that, by the way, we released the new abundance logo that A -like gold carrot. What do you think of it? I like the rocket ship flavor to it. Yeah, I thought that was great. Well, what I told everybody was that carrot, you know, in the phrase that you and I put forward in the very first year of singular university was 10 to the ninth plus, and that upward carrot is the exponent portion. Oh, excellent. Yes, love it. Beautiful. So, I love that. And you logo. So, Mogadot comes on stage.

50:04I love Moe. We're producing a documentary called Scary Smart together. Kristen, myself, Moe co -funded this and its Atlantic production is producing it. and Moe is interviewing people around the world about this. And Moe got very emotional on stage and we've done some podcasts with him on the Moonchats channel here. But Moe is very concerned about dystopia on the way to abundance. He thinks we'll finally reach an extraordinary world of abundance, but that for the next five to 12 years, we're gonna have a period of dystopian concerns that we need to be forewarned about. What do you think about that?

50:46I think he's right. For those who haven't gone and listened to it, the podcast that Peter and I did with Mo a few weeks ago was off the hook. The amount of wisdom he dropped and that was incredible. I think that's exactly right. I would put the framing that it's always darkest before the dawn, right? You always have a period of huge chaos before you get to a period of stability. We've seen that in World War I, World War II, et cetera, et cetera. And unfortunately we're coming into that period now where there's extraordinary volatility and anything could happen. One of the geopolitical folks that I kind of pay a lot of attention to said with the US pulling away, every country in the world will try and go for nuclear weapons as a defensive stance.

51:32And that's just a bad outcome with so many hits and too many hands and bad things could happen as things happen. Go down that way. The only good news is the point that warfare is now being fought largely with drones and not by human beings. So that's something good in that level, but it's going to be a scary decade or two. One of the things that I put forward that feels very real to me is I said, we are currently holding two futures in superposition, right, from a stranger's cat point of view. one future in which AI has dystopian qualities and it has the potential to threaten us. The other one in which it is one of the greatest stabilizing forces that we have in this huge superintelligence.

52:22I call it Star Trek versus Mad Max. Yeah. And we need to do a lot of a lot of that future is determined by what we believe in how we act. So can I throw a two ideas here? Yeah, of course. People often ask me, you know, why am I so positive about the world and optimistic about the world? And I think there's two comments. One is from Ray who said that technology is a major driver of progress in the world. And frankly, it might be the only major driver of progress we've ever seen, right? And now that we have a dozen technologies, and I think one of the most profound things that we saw at the abundance the summit this year was just the unbelievable real convergence of all these technologies into new breakthrough applications and domains that are being created.

53:08The second is that as anything becomes more intelligence, it tends to become wiser and more benevolent. And we've never seen the alternative. And so that gives you encouragement that as AI evolves, it should become wiser and smarter and go, wow, these human beings are nutty. Let's just figure out ways of protecting themselves from themselves while we move them along to their next level. In the same way, we would protect a natural species that doesn't know it's killing itself off. So let's just protect its environment for it. And so those are the kinds of things I'm encouraged by as we heard a little bit this very follow -up to a couple of decades.

53:45Yeah. We had a bunch of other fascinating speakers. We had the team from Google, Alphabet's company called Wing that does drone deliveries and we actually had wing delivering stuff to everybody from the sky. It was amazing. And just in time. I have two thoughts about that. One is the fact that this is kind of standard in China today. you can order coffees and have a drone delivered to you, etc. We need to get our regulatory act in order very very fast We're so behind on that aspect of it, but the sheer granularity of the capability and the speed is unbelievable and so excited by this because it will totally change life for the better if you can do stuff like that Especially in emergency situations where you have to get a defibrillator somewhere because somebody's having a heart attack The potential here is unbelievable.

54:42You know, I love it and it's in Dallas right now. Can't wait for it to become available. And the accuracy with which they can deliver is extraordinary. One of the things that we did for every day, at the end of every day, we uploaded all the content from the summit into deep research and then into notebook LM and we created a podcast the next morning, which I found fascinating. Yeah. Did you get a chance to to play with Google's new video teleconferencing capability? Video teleconferencing? No. So they built and they demonstrated at the summit something called Starline, which you sit in a room.

55:26You've got a video screen in front of you and someone else is in a different room other side of the country wherever it might be with a video screen and the cameras there, a kid you not, it gives you this 3D imagery like the person is sitting in front of you, like you reach out, you know, in their demo, they'll hand you an apple, and it feels like the apple is like a few inches in front of you. And I brought my kids in there and they said it was the, by far, the coolest demonstration in the entire Google Tech hub. So that was fun. StarLine, I gotta go check this out. And they're going to be commercializing it by the end of this year.

56:06So this is the new telecom, a new version. If you would, a version of Zoom that doesn't feel like a flat screen in front of you. We had a session on longevity, which was amazing. We had sessions on how to upload your brain into the cloud. Travis Kalanik was there for our moonshots. But we ended the summit on Palmer Lucky. Palmer was with us two years ago, such a hit, and he did not disappoint again this year. What do you think of Palmer's closing presentation? I thought, first of all, the amount of wisdom and brashness coming at the same time, right? You often get people with a lot of brashness and during due, but not a lot of wisdom.

56:56And he's got frickin' both of them. It's really annoying in a good way. I just love the fact that he was like, yeah, I'm gonna do this just to take revenge out on all the people that thought I would never make it and call Kata down to me. I'm just really, really glad he's on our side with the one thing. That was one. I really loved the fact that they've been in Ukraine from day one helping out because it's really devastating to see what the Ukrainians are going through and God help us, they need all the help they can get. So that was really fantastic. I thought the one thing that I thought was really awesome Was the way when this whole folly or dream stuff is bullshit Figure out where you can make the most impact and shut up and just go do that this dream stuff is we'll just get you trouble every time I thought that was such a great Kind of dimension to add to what we always talk about right?

57:50Yeah, so that was great a couple of things One of the things that I found fascinating, I said, Pomer, it's pretty crazy that you had started, you had started Oculus basically in Garage, and then a few years in Zuckerberg offers you the ability to sell it for a billion dollars and you turn them down. That's what he said. He said he didn't. I was like, honestly, I turned it. And the word for that called Hutzpah, Hutzpah, yes, and then a good Greek term. And then he takes like 2 .2 to 2 .3 billion dollars. And I said, and he goes, but that wasn't it. That wasn't the reason I sold for that amount of money.

58:28The reason I sold for that amount of money was that Zach promised me that he would spend a billion dollars a year developing the technology for the next 10 years. For 10 years, yeah. And when I did the calculus, I could either try and do the work on my own and could I ever get $10 billion of R &D budget on my own and still have some control? Or, and he said, that was it. I sold it for that reason. Yeah. And then he got thrown out. And then when Facebook changed her name to meta, he invested way back into meta again. Just admitted to this technology. That's the... See, so all this stuff about figure out where you get that, that's his...

59:08That's who I think really counterpoints his own thing, because that was his dream was to figure out the Metaverse, et cetera. The part that I also loved when he added was that they said they were gonna spend a billion a year, but the end is spending 60 billion. Oh my God. So that's like crazy, amazing. I mean, the Metaverse will take longer to get there than just because of the feature footprint of the hardware, but it's going to be amazing when it does and it'll open up a whole new world literally. Yeah, we'll be releasing the podcast with Palmer on the moonshots channel here. So I don't want to ruin it for folks, but it was most definitely one of the most fascinating conversations he does not disappoint.

59:45Yeah. All right, brother. Listen, thank you for breaking free on a Saturday to record this episode of WTF just happened this week in tech. I love you, care about you, and can't wait to see you again very soon. I have to tell you massive congratulations, well, it was for what was the best conference anybody's ever been to. So for folks listening, figure out a way, a scrape together, whatever you can, change your plans, get to next year's abundant summit. Yeah, and if you can't come physically, our exponential mastery programs, a chance to join via a live stream as well as a chance to get all of the Selim and I and others recorded, God, 17 hours of training content, so that all the stuff we discuss at these summits make sense to you.

1:00:35Anyway, have a beautiful weekend, brother. I'll see you. Big hug to the family. Thanks, you too. Everybody, thanks for listening to moon shots. You know, this is the content I love sharing with the world. Every week I put out two blogs, a lot of it from the content here, but these are my personal journals, the things that I'm learning, the conversations I'm having, about AI, about longevity, about the important technology transforming all of our worlds. If you're interested, again, please join me and subscribe at DMandis .com slash subscribe. That's DMandis .com slash subscribe. See you next week on moonshots.