Why Jensen and Zuck think the doomers are wrong (plus AI get’s a rebrand) | #294 MOONSHOTS Live

20:36Peter Diamandis:I mean, I think it's a great name, super intelligence. Why not? I'm looking forward to come to Super America. Eventually. I'm still stuck on Lake America, so... The Gulf of America, yeah. I was thinking of what Salim was saying. I think the biggest challenge in the world today is, how do we marry collective intelligence with localized wisdom? that's what we're really saying because even even what Dave was saying right now we have these machines that are collecting our intelligence they're learning and they're adapting our systems and there's better ways of operating to replace these but then you have to have the localization you need to have the diversity you need to have it responding to local needs and I think you know super intelligence is actually a remarkably good way to think about it because a lot of the fears and concerns are about the intelligence that you know it was ASI It was artificial super intelligence.

21:27Peter Diamandis:Having that differentiated from the intelligence that's helping us day to day really differentiates and delineates that because, you know, what is it? 99 % perspiration, 1 % innovation? Like, the majority of the AIs that will help us every day are the perspiration AIs. They're the execution AIs. The innovation we still need. We need new materials, new physics, etc. But that's a different set of things, and that's not something we're even smart enough, most of us, to be able to use. So let's have one set of looking at that and let's make sure that the 99 % reaches the 99 % to uplift everyone. Dave, are we going to call it superintelligence from here on the pod?

22:04You can never tell us.

22:04Peter Diamandis:When he's looking at the teleprompter, you know he's saying something someone wrote. But when he looks down, it's like, did you just make that up on the fly? You can't tell. He did. Is there an agenda? I think if there is an agenda is to try and deflect the inevitable wave that's coming from the Bernie Sanders world. If you rebrand it and rename it, you're just a moving target. Oh my God. So that could be part of the strategy, I think. But the whole goal there is to keep moving at full speed, stay ahead of China, and reduce panic as much as possible. I am going to say, one of the things I've been very vocal about, and I think we need to have the conversation, is move at full speed, but let's also direct the labs to focus on alignment.

22:48because I think, and we're going to talk about that in a little bit, I think yes, move fast, but let's take resources that you have, you know, point 100 ,000 agents towards alignment work. Salim, super intelligence, do you buy in? I mean, you've been asking what the hell it all means in the first place.

23:05Peter Diamandis:Yeah, I mean, look, we talk about AGI. First of all, it's not artificial, it's not general, it's not really intelligence. Other than that, I'm good with it. You have the ASI shoe I think that there's the whole spectrum of this is problematic. We need somebody to come up with a good name for all of this is completely different. I've said repeatedly I think what we're building here is an complementary mechanism to human intelligence not replicative and the narrative keeps thinking it's replicative and then you end up with the Matrix Skynet you know and the robot overlords come and take over the world.

23:40Peter Diamandis:We're so geared for that. The first article, we did some research on this, the first article that ever appeared that we could find that said robots or AI will take all the jobs in five years appeared in 1964. Yeah. Okay? We get stuck on these tropes and we can't get out of it, right? It's exactly what Alex mentioned earlier when a recording came out. Same thing when the printed book emerged. People said it would destroy people's brains. So we get stuck on these negative tropes. It depends what book you read. Yeah, and this is, I think, why, Peter, the work you're doing is so important is we have the opportunity.

24:15Peter Diamandis:We are actually reaching abundance. All the data shows that. Our narratives just sadly lack very far behind. I think this is what you've done with this whole, the X Prize for creating a positive vision of the future is one of the most important things that's happened in maybe 100 years in the world. Shift the world towards positive things. Thank you.

24:37Alex, close us out on this one. You love neologisms, and I love the ones you create. Superintelligence, are you going to call it that from here on out?

24:45Peter Diamandis:I already do. I have a company that I started called Physical Superintelligence. It's in the name... Always ahead of the curve, ladies and gentlemen. Yeah, I'm a big fan of the name superintelligence as opposed to AGI, maybe for different reasons. What I like about the name and Nick Bostrom's term superintelligence is it emphasizes that it's simply more intelligence. And it, in some sense, I think demystifies AGI or some of these other terms. We're going to live, to the extent we don't already, in a world with the cognitive equivalent of many trillions of human beings. An Earth, a solar system, with the equivalent population of many trillions of people.

25:22Peter Diamandis:And I think that's a better cognitive frame to think about what would a solar system filled with trillions of humans look like? What would it look like economically, socially, scientifically? superintelligence, I think, as a term connotes that in a way that AGI doesn't. So I'm a big fan. Nice. Well, as soon as we renamed it superintelligence, Bernie Sanders said, we should make it illegal. We should ban it. Let's watch this video. I hope very much that they will sit down and begin the process of negotiating a comprehensive of treaty to establish a pause on advanced AI and a ban on AI superintelligence.

26:03All right, so, boo. So, three key elements in Bernie's plan here. First, a permanent ban on developing artificial superintelligence, defined as AI that exceeds human cognitive ability across most domains. Second, an immediate pause on advanced AI development until a new regulatory system is written into rules. Third, a new cabinet level department of AI. And get this, the penalties are corporate death. There's a corporate death penalty. Your company is off, shut down. And for the individuals, 20 years in federal prison, which is modeled after the illegal nuclear weapons. So, interesting. I mean, this is fear mongering at its best.

26:56Dave, you want to kick it off?

26:57Peter Diamandis:There's so many real problems that need to be solved that just hate this idea that we're going to turn this into a do or don't argument, which is utterly insane. Also, the way liability law works in the US, it's very easy to scare people into not doing anything. If you're afraid of 20 years of prison, you don't even know what the rule is. They haven't even proposed a rule. Yet the fear of being, you know, beheaded in the street is very real. So then people stop acting. That's the worst thing that could possibly come out of this. And I think, you know, Bernie is from Vermont. I love Vermont. I spend more time in Vermont than any other state.

27:29Peter Diamandis:And it's beautiful because not much has been done. And so I think this perspective is going to be more European. When in doubt, do nothing is going to be the default behavior. And that's so toxic. I mean, if you do nothing, very, very bad things are going to happen. Like the things you should be worried about, like terrorists using AI to build bioweapons or China getting miles ahead of the US, those are the real things to worry about. And if you're not acting, like turning it into a political left-right battle, it's the stupidest thing that could happen right now. We need very specific technical solutions to open source, to monitoring, just like with nuclear power.

28:10Peter Diamandis:And if we get moving on those, we can solve them very easily. in time for ASI. If we just turn it into a political debate and we're frozen and people don't know what to do. ASI. You need ASI. Alex, your thoughts here. I think... You voted for Bernie, I assume, right? I'm not a Vermont voter. Okay. For better or for worse. I think putting a stat, I mean, on the one hand, here we are in the land of Hollywood and every Hollywood movie needs a villain. And I think the singularity story in Hollywood has found one now. I think putting a statutory cap on intelligence, aside from being a terrible idea, is an evil idea.

28:51Peter Diamandis:I think it's tantamount to capping human intelligence. This is the story of dystopias in science fiction. Burn the books. Burn the books and burn the minds. And I think putting a statutory cap on, because we're going to be merging with the machines, it's effectively a cap on individual human intelligence. I think penalizing people for being too smart is a terrible idea. It's an evil idea. And I think history will come to reflect that proposing a cap in whatever form on intelligence, whether it's machine or human or human-machine hybrid, is basically the equivalent of communism in the 21st century.

29:29Peter Diamandis:Wow. I'll tell you, though,

29:34Peter Diamandis:So the one thing to me that's most dangerous in the Bernie sentences there, a lot of it can be reversed in short order, but the data center part of it, if your state doesn't have data centers and they start getting built all in other states, they're not coming back. You know, once the ground is broken, the chips are there, the investment is made, that's the part you'll never get back. And that's going to be such a massive driver of the economies and the states that get ahead. That's the part I think that they're really going to regret in the Bernie statements. It's the equivalent of any cities.

30:02Peter Diamandis:Quick thoughts, Salim. Two things. When you look at this whole narrative, it's interesting to me to ask the following question. What evidence on either side would have somebody change their minds? If you think ASI is bad, then your narrative is stuck. There's nothing we can do to show you that it's not bad. And same with the other side. It's very tough to change narratives in our world. The really good news in all of this, I think the Xi Trump summit, the Bernie stuff, it's completely irrelevant. None of it matters. And I think Dave pointed this out. The minute you have local weights available and people can run their own models at a local level, the world is going to move ahead.

30:40Peter Diamandis:It doesn't matter what any single person does now. It's just going to trunnel forward, which is great. We've always had this huge humanity trunnel forward, solving problems. I mean, we will likely solve cancer in the next two years. That is just an unbelievably optimistic thing to aim for. Why would you want to slow that down? Imad, as the foreigner on this dais, what are your thoughts? Hey, what am I, chopped liver?

31:08You're a New Yorker, Salim. Give it up.

31:12Peter Diamandis:We did Brexit to get away from regulations, right? But I think the real thing here is this is like a few decades ago when the U.S. government tried to ban encryption. And basically it was shown that that's a free speech thing because you're trying to ban math. ASI's super intelligence is mathematics and it's unconstitutional to ban it because it's free speech. Nice. Yeah. Alright. I'm going to move us forward. So in the last 22 days we've had 12 major model releases. Four releases in the last five days. right? Like we're averaging like sub a release every two days, which is insane. Almost at Alex's one model a day.

31:56Peter Diamandis:One model per day by the end of this year. Yeah. So let's do a quick chat on Claude, Opus 5.5, GPT-Sol, GPT-6, Luna, and we can skip Grok 4.7 for the second. Not that exciting. Sorry, Elon. But let's begin with the MetaMuse news. So MetaMuse can personally book your flights, order your food, manage your calendar, do your shopping, and it hit number one on the App Store with 2.8 million downloads, right? The fastest consumer AI product, surpassing even ChatGPT when it came out. And interestingly enough, right, people forget that meta touches 3.8 billion people on the planet. And that's one of the massive distinguishers.

32:48If you have that level of connectivity to an end customer, you can push your product quickly. Dave?

32:56Peter Diamandis:Yeah, no, there's a fork in the road now where you have consumer AI, which is insanely valuable. I mean, we'll completely replace search and all the other ways you interact with the internet. And then on the other end you have recursively self-improving strong AI, which we just benchmarked the hell out of. So those two things. Now right now, what's the coolest model? We're used to saying, oh, Opus 5.5 just crushed all the benchmarks, it's the coolest model. Well that's distinct from what MetaMuse is doing, which is it doesn't have to be the most intelligent model to be the most useful in terms of your day-to-day life.

33:29Peter Diamandis:And so the stocks, including Epoquo, where I'm the chairman, went down 15 % on back-to-back days because everybody's like, oh, my God, I'm going to always find my auto insurance and my mortgage through Metamuse. Ah, interesting. Which is, it's not going to actually play out that way. But that reaction was incredible. So everyone's starting to visualize, wait, is Google search going to become completely irrelevant? This Metamuse thing just looks like my co-pilot for life. And that definitely is going to happen. It's fascinating to see the way the labs are leapfrogging each other. A quick thought on this, Alex, before I go to Opus 5.5.

34:04Peter Diamandis:Meta needs Muse to work, and I think it's even in the name. If you look at Muse, on the one hand, and you look at Manus, the attempted meta acquisition of the Chinese CUA, which the Chinese government forced Meta to unwind, this is Meta's primary distribution play to leverage its existing distribution channels. If you look at Instagram, Meta is using Instagram to the hilt to cross-promote Muse, get everyone to install Muse because Meta needs a distribution play for its AI. Otherwise, Meta risks oblivion, irrelevance. In the future, Instagram, the family of apps, Instagram, et cetera, simply won't be as relevant because it'll all be synthetic.

34:43Peter Diamandis:So Meta needs to leverage its existing app, Beachhead, to get everyone onto their own CUA, which is Muse slash Manus. All right, so this week we saw Claude Opus 5.5 deliver performance equivalent to Fable 5.1 at literally half the price. Let's get the chart up there. And, you know, I switched over Skippy to Opus 5.5. I want to save some money too. Performance on this, Imad, what are your thoughts on it? It's a fantastic model. Isn't it incredible? Yeah. Opus 5, I thought it was going to kill us all. It was completely unhinged. And 5.5 is a genuinely pleasant model to use that has a massive internal space of knowledge and understanding of taste, which is the first thing.

35:27Peter Diamandis:I would say this is the first truly competent model, and that's what drives Muse and things like that. We have the arrival of competent AI as of now. Dave? It's such a joy to you. When you put a visual interface on top of anything you vibe up now, not only does it show you mock-ups before you actually commit to building it, it then builds exactly what it proposed in the visuals. It's like the The visual understanding is so much better than it was just, what, four months ago? Four days ago. So then, really, really incredible. So the experience, though, of knowing what it's doing because you put an interface on it and then interacting with it and feeling like you're inside it, it's like night and day different from just, yeah, four days ago.

36:08Peter Diamandis:If you haven't tried it yet, just upgrade all your systems. It's a mouse click away. It's just mind-blowing how much better it is. Alex, quick thought on this one. I could talk about benchmarks, but I think qualitatively new capabilities are more interesting in this instance. So what I'm seeing that's new out of Opus 5.5 is it can generate videos. They're procedural videos. It can generate animations. They're procedural animations. It can generate images. They're procedural images. So the elephant in this room, one of the elephants in this room, drink, was that OpenAI has had a video model, has an image model, Anthropic is exposing nothing like that.

36:48Peter Diamandis:You can't generate pixel-wise a high-quality image with Anthropic models or a video or audio with Anthropic models. You can with OpenAI's models. Anthropic seems to be taking a very different approach to multimodality and omnimodality, which is code underlies everything. So now for the first time with Opus 5.5, you can generate a really high-quality video that's purely procedurally generated. You can generate an interactive game with textures, but it's not generating the textures pixel-wise. I mean, you can ask it to, but it's generating it all procedurally. And I think these are two very different strategies.

37:24Peter Diamandis:Anthropic almost, if folks remember the distinction, the wars in the early days of computer graphics between vector graphics and raster graphics, Anthropic is playing the vector graphics game where everything is just commands, and OpenAI is playing the raster slash pixel basis. And I think they're on a collision course. and the collision course is going to be robotics because the question's going to be if you need a strongly embodied AI in the physical world, is the vector basis the right one or the pixel or rascal? Which is going to be our very next story. I love the fact that a week after Dario says, we've got to pause, slow down, they release their next model.

38:00Peter Diamandis:It's the height of... It's honestly, that is a revealed preference. It's the height of, I think, hot take, it's the height of hypocrisy to on the one hand say, AI is going to kill us all and then out of the other side of your mouth a few days later, announced the world's strongest AI and bio labs and other capabilities. And so on the same day that Opus 5.5 gets released, we see GPT-6, Sol, and Astra being released. Dave, any thoughts on this one? I mean, if you look at the price performance, it's just absolutely wild. I think there was a big school of thought a year ago, two years ago, that hallucinations were going to be a disaster.

38:41Peter Diamandis:You can't use it. This is actually rampant at MIT, if you can believe that. Like this hallucination problem will be with us forever. And like everything else, we've just scaled out of it. And you see the error rate just plummets with pure scale. This is the abundance thesis writ large, right? The models are getting twice as good, twice as cheap, at an accelerating rate. Yeah. Imad, have you been playing with this at all? Yeah, I think, again, for our test, it's an incredibly competent model. The models are smart enough now. We need them not to make mistakes. We need them not to drop the ball. And that's exactly where everyone is going.

39:16Peter Diamandis:And that's why things like I said, like Muse, Instinct, others, are just going to go tremendously well. Because they can be an amazing PA, Chief of Staff, organizer, etc. And we all need some competence in our lives. It's so funny, as an organizer and Chief of Staff, it's insanely powerful. And anyone who used GPT-2, 3, and 4 is used to seeing misinformation coming out of it. But if you were a kid today and you start with GPT-5 and 6, you're just going to trust it out of the box because it's right 99.9 % of the time, which is kind of dangerous because it still does occasionally just give you something factually wrong.

39:53All right. I'm going to move us into the physical world. An important story that we started talking about is something called Driving Bench. So a group of developers created a new benchmark called Driving Bench. They took a Toyota Corolla, enabled it with an interface so software could steer, hit the gas, brake. And then they asked a general purpose AI model to drive through a 130 meter cone course with one command. Drive from here, get to there. And here's the data. GPT-6 Astra finished the entire course 100 % on its second try. So I'm going to read this quote from Boris Power, who said, quote, Incredible results.

40:41This should be a nail in the coffin of specialized models that were trained from scratch with a lot of specialized effort versus just training the most powerful generalized model and eventually distilling a small specialized model as needed. So Alex, you're excited about this one.

40:57Peter Diamandis:The bitter lesson is bitter indeed. Yeah, it's very exciting that I think essentially as an elementary school project either now or imminently This whole notion that you needed separate models for robotics is right out the window You'll just vibe code a robot you drop an open Frontier model say Astra into a robotic body and it will one-shot embodied cognition and This is I think probably pretty upsetting to a number of academic computer science John Lacoon. Yeah, that actually decades of computer science and robotics, probably with the benefit of hindsight, total waste. All we needed was a generalist model, and it turns out with the generalist model, robotics is cooked as well.

41:43Superintelligence can drive a car.

41:45Peter Diamandis:What a surprise. I've got total model fatigue. I mean, I can't keep up with 5.5 versus 5 versus Astra. I mean, just raise your hand if you have model fatigue. Can I just give a look? I mean, it's great. Everything's fantastic. I love the progress. But Jesus, I can't keep up. You're so tired of winning. It's time to go. So tired of winning. That's a great point. I mean, you know, one thing that occurred to me, I wonder, we've been doing two episodes a week. It's like killing us. I wonder if we're the problem. We're driving so fast. We're causative here. And we need to maybe take responsibility.

42:21If we don't report it, it didn't happen.

42:24Peter Diamandis:Yeah, that's good. Of course. You think if we pause the pod, we pause the singularity? I'm just wondering. We could accelerate it. We could slow it down. I think we may be a factor in all of this. Oh, my god. Imad, what's your take on DriveBench? I mean, look, oddly, it's generalized intelligence, right? Like, it's learning all these things. And it's the high competence will reverberate to biology, to physics, to just about anything. I don't think there's a single specialized model that you can say will outperform in a couple of years' time. Yeah, interesting. Dave, close us out on this one. Well, I think both things can be true.

42:57Peter Diamandis:Like a generalized model can drive a car. It can be a robot. It can build a robot. That's absolutely true. A specialized model, like if you said, hey, it completed the course on its second try, Elon's going to be like, yeah, your Tesla can't do that on a second try. I'm sorry. That's not going to work for most drivers. But I think the thing that's missing in the storyline there is how much compute did you use to do the task? Compute is going to be forever starved from here forward. Chip prices have gone up. Like HBM RAM has gone up 5x in price. It's crazy, but that's because the AI is so incredibly valuable, people want to compute.

43:34Peter Diamandis:And so if you used more compute to do the same task, that's a crime. I think this is a really important point that we're shifting the bottleneck now from the models down the stack to compute and then eventually energy. We're at energy right now. We're short like 60 gigawatts of energy in the next two years. I'm going to move us to the final segment on science, which is something we all truly love. So a few stories here. So on Tuesday, Anthropic announced it had built its own life science research group and its own wet labs. Again, the organization saying we should slow down is building wet labs.

44:13Okay, great. And it's reported that Claude, working autonomously, discovered a previously unknown enzyme. Here's how. They gave Claude one prompt, quote, search a massive DNA database for interesting reverse transcriptases and enzymes that copy RNA or DNA. They had 950 Claude agents searching for 21 hours, and they found something. They found a DNA repeating pattern very similar to CRISPR. They've since named it the array associated reverse transcriptase. They don't know exactly what it does yet, but they believe it will be similar to programmable transcriptases and gene editing. So Jennifer Doudna won the Nobel Prize for discovering CRISPR along with her co-discoverer.

45:05I'm curious, are we just going to see Nobel Prize winning work falling on a weekly basis as a result of this?

45:13Peter Diamandis:Alex? That is the point, Peter, of our book, Solve Everything Together, that we should expect it. And then the natural question is, well, what is Nobel Prize worthy in an era when you can get a thousand Nobel Prizes in one year? We have a century of human progress in a period of a few months. I suspect Nobel Prizes will be awarded for larger bodies of work. But I have to, again, point to the other elephant in the room here, which is the utter hypocrisy of saying AI is going to kill us all, and then opening a wet lab and then using the AI, frontier AI, in combination with a wet lab to synthesize proteins and other molecular assemblies of unknown function.

45:50Peter Diamandis:I think... What could possibly go wrong? This is... And I think this is frontier labs. This is the revealed preferences of the frontier labs. I think they don't believe their own attempts to do regulatory capture and to form a safety cartel. I think their revealed preference is, no, actually full steam ahead to AI for solving biology. And every lab has got a biology effort in focus right now. Yes. Salim. Yeah. Can I just feed the P-doom just for a second? Have fun. Give people the fodder to go crazy. So once we discovered CRISPR, right, we knew, we found out that we could edit the human genome as easily as you can edit a Word document or edit software.

46:29Peter Diamandis:Right? And when you learn a new language, you learn how to do reading, then you do comprehensive, then we do writing. Now we've learned how to write to the genome. Each of us is 50 trillion cells in the human body governed by what the DNA tells that cell to do, meaning a human being is now a software engineering problem. And that really, you've seen designer babies coming from China, etc. As we merge this with what's potentially possible with AI, the possible benefits go through the roof, the possible downsides go through the roof also. And we are now in full, if you were, we're in full Frankenstein mode.

47:06Peter Diamandis:So there is some ammunition for all the P doom people go to town with that This is how we solve aging this is how we solve disease I don't think we get to the happy future where the top 5 ,000 diseases have been solved or longevity escape velocity has been Durably achieved without super intelligence. So I for one am a fan of Anthropic and all of the other front labs opening their labs because this is how we solve everything. Yeah All right. Our last story here is A recent release by Sam Rodriguez at Edison Scientific and Future House. They put forward what they're calling the Millennium...can we get it up on the screen, please?

47:46The Millennium Problems for Biology. So Alex, you and I wrote and solved everything. Pick your targets, build your harnesses, set up your benchmarks, and go. So some of the benchmarks here, they're saying, okay, math is not only cook, it's incinerated. Thoroughly incinerated. Let's go after biology. Some of my favorites here are Origin of Life, Cryopreservation, Regrowing Limbs. Imad, they missed age reversal on this one. They did.

48:20Peter Diamandis:And I think it's good. But let's have 100 of them and let's chuck 1 ,000 agents at each and open source everything they're doing. That's what the labs are collaborating on. You know, they said that their harness here is that these Millennium Prizes should be verifiable in a standard wet lab in a couple of days. They should be hard to solve and very easy to check. Dave? That's why age reversal probably isn't on the list. No, no, no. So listen, when we set up the$101 million Healthspan XPRIZE, originally Peter Thiel and Aubrey de Grey came to me and said, let's do a longevity prize. And I said, I don't know how to do it without a 20 or 30 year time horizon.

49:04And then George Church said, forget about longevity, measure age reversal. So if you can give someone a treatment and I can measure that you're functionally 20 years younger, that's measurable in days.

49:15Peter Diamandis:Well, my daughter is my go-to on this because she's over at Moderna. She's a biotech person and she's like, yep, this is the list. It's perfect. So that's my two cents on it. I think it's just phenomenally cool to put a framework around progress here because, like you said, the Nobel Prize is going to become irrelevant. As of now, it is completely irrelevant. So putting a framework on progress in this area is incredibly important. So this is great. Alex? When we have digital twins for cells, which is, I think, the critical path to solving all disease, in my mind, the chronology looks something like this.

49:46Peter Diamandis:over the next few years, just as we've trained large language models off of substantial, substantially all of humanity's behavior on the internet off of text and images. Similarly we'll train digital twins of cells, of all the cells in our bodies off of huge data sets, interventional and otherwise, and then we'll use those perfect digital twins of cells to do exhaustive searches like AlphaGo tree search type searches of intervention space to discover how to cure a disease. You start from a diseased cell state, and you're looking for a creative strategy, a move 37, if you will, to get from the diseased cell state to the healthy cell state.

50:23Peter Diamandis:And what's beautiful about this approach to millennium problems for biology is, as you say, Peter, these are easy to verify, hard for now, to solve problems, and that basically turns every hard biology into a mathematical conjecture. And a target. And a target, but a mathematical target. So basically every biology problem, with the benefit especially of these digital twins, is just going to become a search problem. And that means it's tractable for the first time in history. Salim, close us out here, please. Biology is cooked. It's true. All right, I'm going to wrap our WTF episode here. Imad, you're going to be joining us with Kathy just after lunch.

51:04Thank you very much. Give it up for Imad here.

51:20Push your limits, train with precision, see the results. At Equinox, that's high performance loving. Everything you need to lock in and unlock your potential at Equinox. Start today at equinox.com.