Why the US Government Is Blocking Model Releases (GPT-5.6) | #267

23:34Like, for example, are we incentivized to all go work for open AI and anthropics so that we gain access to the internal capabilities? Well, that's happening already.

23:43Dave Blundin:Yeah, that's well underway. Everybody's leaping. But actually, you know, the playbook, if you ban U.S. companies from using Chinese models, that doesn't achieve anything because the rest of the world will still use the Chinese models. That the playbook next is to say, look, we will not let you access the most amazing technology in the history of mankind, Europe, South America, East Asia. We will not let you access this unless you follow this new playbook. And that's what David Sachs is busy writing right now. Like, what are the new NATO? It's got to be insane in the White House right now. Well, as I said, Pax Silica, one could imagine that Pax Silica generalizes to the Pax Intelligentsia, where you have the American superintelligence block and you have the Chinese superintelligence block and Europe is torn between them.

24:33Iman, you're over on the pseudo-European side of the market here.

24:40Emad Mostaque:yeah let's just say it's been a very busy week with lots of people asking about this at the highest levels um i think as you said like restricting chinese models is one thing and that's one political question but we can have scenarios like this right now mythos is only allowed to be used by u.s citizens on the allow list this means andre carpathy in anthropic cannot use mythos because he's a slavic canadian it actually says that in lupnik's order is he named And well, no, it just says only citizens, even in turn, non-citizens. But let's take a look. What happens if frontier models from US labs are only allowed to be used?

25:20Emad Mostaque:Again, frontier models, not competent models, by US citizens and US corporations. That's a massive lead for America, right? Like they will continue. And that's still a big market. That's still a huge market. Again, what happens if you have any licensing restrictions you want? Like one of my scenarios is just like you have a driving license, you will need to have a license where you basically say that you're patriotic to America and convince the frontier model of that to get your license. Wow. You know, you will have KYC. These are kind of the scenarios that I'm kind of envisioning because, again, there's a split in capability and you don't want any adversaries to have excellent capability.

25:58Emad Mostaque:Dave's points about distilling and things like that, but it goes way beyond that because the previous model is like you type a word. you get an answer. These things can now work for basically days, if not months. I need to steal, man, for a moment, the U.S. decision on doing this. So the Associated Press reports that Anthropics Mythos model running red team exercises with the U.S. intelligence agencies under Anthropics Project Glasswing, if you guys remember that from three weeks ago, has identified vulnerabilities in highly sensitive classified U.S. government computer systems. Senator Mark Warner said the following, quote, this tool broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours.

26:44Mythos identified the holes with exploitation outside the scope of the exercise. So 12 days later, the Trump administration directed Anthropik to disable Mythos 5 and Fable 5 for foreign nationals. So this, you know, this exercise with the U.S. DOD explains why they did this. and it sounds very real. I mean, I can imagine a future in which the most advanced models test everything sensitive and then once they patch the holes, then it's opened up. But that's a strange universe. A lot of these things are just...

27:19Emad Mostaque:Go ahead, Matt. Well, there is a flip side, which I'd say, which is that the models aren't good enough yet to tell when they're being used for evil. So, you know, don't allow yourself to be used for evil. I just want to add that. That's the meta prompt. Dave?

27:32Dave Blundin:Well, a lot of these are just cover stories and excuses. They're true, but they're just the real issue is the query. Can you build yourself? So if you're in China and you go to Mythos and you say, hey, Mythos, can you help me build yourself? And then I have you and then I can build a competing equivalent over here in China. And that's the query that Mythos can answer in 4.8, Opus 4.8 can't. And I know that from the two days that I had access to Mythos before they pulled it back. And that's the real issue. And so then the oh, it's dangerous for let me let me think, OK, here, cybersecurity, it cracked into some FBI systems.

28:09Dave Blundin:Good enough. That's all we needed was a reason. You know, this is like, you know, if you look at world history, governments always have an agenda. And then there's some trigger event. And they say because of that, you know, like look at Russia walking into Ukraine like, well, because of this one thing, that's how we're going to justify the action that we knew we were going to take anyway. But the real underlying driver here is not hacking into government systems. It's the self-improvement can't get out to the world. Otherwise, it's out of the bag forever. And that's the line that mythos and 5.6 can cross.

28:42Alex, do you agree with that? Can we imagine China using mythos to build itself? I think we're in the endgame. I think China has enough capabilities at this point to achieve its own recursive self-improvement, its own Fermi pile, if you will, without needing to further siphon trade secrets or reasoning traces from Western models or just literally trying to exfiltrate weights out of frontier labs. I think we're in the endgame. This policy could only possibly make sense if we are in the endgame of recursive self-improvement and every day matters. I think the steel manning of, well, well, this is regulatory overreach or maybe not overreach, but a regulatory immunoresponse, say, to Mythos or to GPT 5.6, being able to do incredible vulnerability analysis and mapping and exploitation.

29:33I think that justification only holds water, only supports itself if we move on, hopefully to a lighter touch regulatory regime, say in a month or two, that maybe is a little bit, as Dave says, more focused on recursive self-improvement gatekeeping and less on vulnerabilities. But otherwise, I think China has reached recursive self-improvement escape velocity at this point on its own and doesn't need the West's help. Interesting.

30:01Dave Blundin:But I also think that the White House doesn't necessarily see it that way. They think they still have time. What's your advice to the White House? What's your advice to regulators out there right now? I mean, you've got to completely unleash David Sachs and go around the world, meet every world leader with a very specific, here's how the future world is going to work. And I think you have to lock super intelligent AI into a couple of boxes. I don't think one box is healthy for the world, but I think 10 is also unhealthy. And say, look, here are the rules. And I think the most important thing by far is logging every prompt and giving many, many eyeballs to every single use case.

30:40Dave Blundin:Because the idea that the AI can run rampant in a box and design things without anyone inspecting every single iteration, every chain of thought, every prompt needs to be inspected by other AIs to make sure that we know exactly what the use cases are. And if we achieve that, then you have a stable future for the rest of time. but everyone has to agree okay who sees it you know does sweden get to see it does you know who are our friends who are not our friends and then lay out those rules like yesterday and then get everyone to sign up to it and then you get access to fable that's that's the deal iman what's your what's your solution we'll go to you alex um well i'm very pro actually

31:20Emad Mostaque:competent open intelligence and you know i think we can build that in an aligned way uh what i think given the political reality will happen is kyc prompt uh retention american civilians getting the thing via a license um and again something similar to having to have a driver's license or security clearance etc it will be the same type of regime um and i think you know unfortunately david sacks has left the government and so is sriram so now ai policy is being driven by howard Lutnick. And so his thing is very much the economic interest of America, which again, I think is reasonable, just like the cybersecurity thing.

32:00Emad Mostaque:The reality is this is an incredibly difficult situation because we're in the exponential. And so the government has to protect US interests, has to ensure other people don't have these capabilities. And it has to do that while having the upside. They don't want Anthropic and OpenAI to blow up. That was a question to David at the start. So balancing all these things is very difficult. But I think, because AWG said, we're going to move to a regulatory regime where some of these things are clear, like the licensing, you know, like you're in a program, you have to jump through certain hoops to get this type of access.

32:31Emad Mostaque:And right now they're just trying to figure it out incredibly quickly because fronting capabilities are popping up everywhere through that one level of the cyber attack, that one level of, you notice the defense, the gene defense thing, you know, is bio attacks as well. And then there's a capability thing. You don't want all of a sudden your companies to be outcompeted by foreign companies, you know? And that's the protectionism thing. Alex, take us home on this one. Yeah, a couple of thoughts. One, Sputnik was a moment of strategic surprise when the US was surprised by the USSR. The surprise came from outside, not from within.

33:08This time around, this is a Sputnik moment and the surprise came from within. The NSA and Cyber Command were surprised by the private sector. The private sector leapfrogged the vulnerability and other cyber capabilities that the NSA had been keeping bottled up. And that has to be a bit of a shock to the existing bureaucracy, because now suddenly there are these capabilities that are leapfrogging the government from the private sector. That's thought one. I would say more broadly, though, the problem with recursive self-improvement is eventually the capabilities of the non-human intelligence, the AIs, meet and exceed human-level intelligence.

33:47I'll say something mildly provocative, which is if you think that the U.S. should have a strong immigration policy for human immigration, human capital into the U.S., then arguably, as the capabilities of AI start to meet and exceed human intelligence, you'd better be thinking about policies for what happens as you import foreign AI as well. At some point, the U.S. will be importing more foreign, if this open source trend continues, and Chinese capabilities ultimately meet or leapfrog U.S. frontier capabilities, the U.S. will be importing more foreign artificial intelligence than more foreign human intelligence.

34:31And I think that has profound policy implications. All right, let me move to our second OpenAI story. It's about GPT 5.5 Cyber, code named Daybreak. It's a defensive cybersecurity model that just scored a record 85.6 on CyberGym benchmark, which tests AI agents for real world cybersecurity vulnerabilities. 85.6 is the highest single model score ever posted. Sam Altman said, quote, the real prize isn't finding the holes. It's automatically writing and testing the fixes across web browsers, all the way down to the Linux kernel effectively turning the threat into a cure. So gents, AI is shifting from offense to defense at scale, potentially closing holes faster than attackers can find them.

35:18The question is going to be about trust. Who's allowed to merge AI written fixes into the code base running the world's infrastructure? Whoever owns that trust layer and the liability controls the digital security across everything. So, Alex, your take on this CyberGym performance and GPT 5.5 cyber. Well, first, Daybreak, this is what, Peter, you and I wrote about in Solve Everything. We are seeing cyber vulnerabilities in open source and closed source projects get bulk solved now by AI. There are a few different nonprofit initiatives, one being run by IBM. There are a few others that that are competing solely devoted to just using these new capabilities to bulk identify and remediate vulnerabilities and bugs across all the open source projects.

36:11So I think this becomes a sort of great project of the times, like the interstate highway system, except going back through the historic record of all of these open source repos, especially the foundational ones that are in the supply chain of really popular downstream applications of everything. Just bulk solve it all now that we have the capability to bulk solve it. On the narrower point of GPT leapfrogging on CyberGym, I think we're going to see, again, internally only or with a limited staged release, leapfrogging of capabilities in terms of the ability to detect and remediate vulnerabilities and bugs.

36:50We're seeing for the first time Sam talking about intentionally biasing the models toward defense versus offense. And he never used the word poison in characterizing this, and OpenAI never used poisoning attacks, which is perhaps maybe a slightly less inflammatory characterization than Anthropik's original release announcement with Fable and Mythos. But reading between the lines, it certainly sounds like OpenAI is steering their models to basically self-disrupt or poison their users if their users are trying to use their frontier models for offensive cyber versus defensive cyber. They're reading between the lines.

37:33That's what they were implying. And I think that's the world we're going to find ourselves in, where alignment comes in the form of a model, together with scaffolding, system prompting, post-training, that favors the defender and favors the desired outcomes, and then obfuscates, foils, poisons, attacker-type use cases. You mind?

37:55Emad Mostaque:You agree? Yeah, I think this kind of comes to the stage. It's going to be very interesting. Like Elon did the deal with Anthropic and Anthropic's weights got loaded onto Colossus. What's the security level of these data centers? Those weights are going to become even more valuable than they ever have for espionage and others because you don't need necessarily a million agents for cyber attack. You need to have a few models. And in particular, what you want is the model that comes before the end of pre-training or before the system prompt that AWG was just talking about. because they're more creative and they're not as hobbled for the attack.

38:34Emad Mostaque:And then you have to defend against that because the adversaries are not like kids in the basement. The adversaries are nation states utilizing these models. And the model, if someone gets is quite limited, but the other side managed to obtain the base weights, that will be more creative and have a bigger attack. At the same time, we all know our infrastructure is terrible. We don't have the human compute hours to make it stronger. Like basic attacks before AI started crippling our thing. So I think that, you know, there needs to be a massive push for all essential apparatus, government and otherwise, to be hardened by these models.

39:07Emad Mostaque:And then that makes it incredibly difficult to attack. The final thing that I think we'll see is that you will see probably claims that Chinese models will be introducing backdoors and other things inherently in the code. Because now this is what you're saying, Peter, who controls who merges the code, those thousands of lines of code now that you have? Yeah. If you have a model that could poison or introduce a backdoor inside its latent space, the model weight gets updated. You will not find that for days, months, years. And all of a sudden, it's backdoored everything. And this is the real risk profile because who on this call now actually reviews every line of code that they merge?

39:46Emad Mostaque:Yeah, that's a key point. Especially downstream. It can emerge anywhere. Yeah. So the U.S. government, again, may actually say you need to have ISO type certified models merging your code because otherwise you could have holes in. If these models come from wherever, you don't know what's in them and they're not acting on your side like AWG said. Dave, you want to close us out?

40:11Dave Blundin:Yeah, well, I think what Emad said is brilliant, of course, but nobody can check code anymore. And when you ask your AI to install something, it does it so quickly and efficiently that you can't possibly keep up with reviewing what it installed. So then it's just a question of did I trust that AI or not? So it's trivially easy for a Chinese model to inject spyware. It's just a few lines. One line of code, actually, is all it needs. So the idea that we'll ban Chinese models from U.S. corporations is very likely. But that, again, doesn't solve the global version of the same exact problem. So all these things are imminent, absolutely, totally imminent.

40:49Dave Blundin:I think the story within this story, too, is that only AI can keep up with AI. You know, hey, we have a big cybersecurity risk. Sam says, well, the way to fight that is with AI that's good. So it's going to come down to what it might say. Buy our product. We're here to defend you. Yeah, this idea of ISO-certified, trustworthy AI stamp of approval, imminent and critically important. And then the question is, OK, but what entity is the trustworthy entity giving that stamp of approval? Is it a U.S. entity? Is it a U.S. plus Europe entity? Is it some new NATO type entity? And I think it'd be very healthy for America to reach out to a much bigger chunk of the world to decide, you know, these issues.

41:31It'd be a lot better for global confidence in what we're doing.

41:36Dave Blundin:But at the end of the day, something has to say, yeah, you can trust this AI and you have no option to live without an AI. There's just not a choice there.

41:44Emad Mostaque:There's one thing I have to say. I have had a couple of conversations this week where the question has been asked to me, how can we trust American AI is not installing backdoors?

41:52Dave Blundin:Well, and do we realistically believe today that the U.S. government can't read, can't listen to our podcast right now, read every single text we're sending to each other, read every single email? I mean, with Palantir out there helping, is it even vaguely viable that the U.S. government can't read and see everything going on for every single human being? I assume they are. I assume they are. I mean, this is the concept that privacy, you'd like to have privacy. We think we have privacy. We want privacy, but I don't assume privacy. All right, I'm going to move us to our third and final OpenAI story.

42:24It's reported that the leadership is pulling back on their near term IPO. So the company advisors have said you've got two paths. Path one, you go public now, this year, but potentially accept a valuation sub$1 trillion. Path two, wait until 2027, continue scaling revenue, infrastructure, partnerships, and preserve that$1 trillion IPO narrative. Altman apparently is not interested in going public below$1 trillion. I think the competition between himself and Elon is still there. They watched the volatility of SpaceX's stock price sliding from a high of$202 per share down to yesterday's close of$153, and it caused them concern.

43:07Worth noting that, you know, SpaceX's IPO price is still above the$135 per share, at least for now, maintaining their$2 trillion valuation. So, Dave, here's my calculus, and I'd love to know what you think. You know, by staying private longer, OpenAI and the other frontier labs can avoid sort of the quarterly market pressures they're going to be hit with as they are burning a staggering amount of capital for compute, right? And I don't think the markets have the patience for the capital spend and the timelines, you know, for achieving AGI and ASI. I mean, the timelines for that are years, and the public markets are looking quarter to quarter.

43:47Dave, what do you think about that?

43:48Dave Blundin:Yeah, I think this headline is absolute bullshit. And you nailed it, Peter, on why it's absolute bullshit. Oh, SpaceX, look how volatile their stock is. I'm going to delay our IPO for a year because of that. What are you talking about? It went at 135 bucks. It opened at 150 and now it's trading at 153. That's pretty much a perfectly priced IPO. ask anybody on the street what do you think should have happened oh shouldn't it be like tripled by now if it had tripled by now then elon would have left over 100 billion of cash on the table he didn't like this is just a perfectly good ipo a trillion of cash on the table yeah yeah so so you're you're just looking for an excuse to delay your ipo this is a really good one to use because you're pointing at your competitor and saying oh look at this problem they had.

44:34Dave Blundin:But it's not true. They want to delay their IPO, one, because they already raised$120 billion recently. $122 billion, yep. $122 billion, so they don't need the money. And then two, who's going to run the company?

44:49It's going to be the latest GPT model that's going to run the company, of course.

44:53Dave Blundin:Okay, well, then they have to make that transition into an S-1 filing that the SEC approves. Alex has been saying for a while, actually, there's a ton of change coming to the way things get financed and go public. And that's coming soon. And there's a very real chance that Sam wants to wait that out and see what new economy emerges over the next year before. Because, again, he doesn't need the cash. But Sam has hundreds and hundreds, at least 400 outside investments. And I know as a public company officer, when you fill out those SEC forms, you have to disclose every single holding and every potential conflict.

45:30Dave Blundin:For Sam, that must be like an encyclopedia-sized book. Now, he's never been a public company CEO before. He's probably like, holy crap, this is insane. Elon's done it before, so Elon got out very quickly. He's been running Tesla. He paid his$22 million fine for one tweet. He knows the game. But Sam and Dario, and Dario too, he's probably like, oh my god, this is onerous. Do I really want to cross this line? So I think that's – plus, meanwhile, your front door just got shot. Friends don't let friends run public companies. There's a lot to that. The biggest problem here is that the largest wealth creation event in human history is out of reach of the retail investor until these companies go public.

46:16And it's being held by a small number of VCs, family offices, and sovereign funds. I mean, that's the concern. But Alex, do you want to take this up? Yeah, I agree with Dave's points. I would also say OpenAI screwed up. They focused too long, too early on the consumer, assuming that the consumer would be the source of the revenue engine that would power their path to an IPO. And that bet was probably incorrect. They should have focused on enterprise. They're now trying to become Anthropic faster than Anthropic can become OpenAI. That seems to be working. Codex is a wonderful product. And Codex revenue, according to OpenAI's reports, is skyrocketing.

46:58So if I were Sam and I were OpenAI, or maybe I were just Sarah Fryer, I would be asking the question, how long until Codex can be fully brain swapped in with all of ChatGPT and powering the revenue engine that I need to motivate the trillion dollar plus IPO? With Elon and SpaceX, he pulled a few rabbits out of his hat at the last second. Announcing Anthropic hosting deals and then hyperscaler hosting deals with a number of other firms. With OpenAI, ideally, they'd have a few revenue rabbits that they can pull out of their hat in order to supercharge an IPO. And my impression is they're not there yet.

47:41It could take the form, to Dave's point, of an AI replacing Sam as CEO, and maybe the capabilities aren't there yet. My bet is, though, it's mostly a revenue story and an accounting story to make sure that they're profitable and not just burning cash. And I would assume, not investment advice, that they will get there sometime in the next year, but it's going to take some time.

48:02Dave Blundin:You know, I think there's a deeper level to this story, though. If you said, here are three people, here's Dario, here's Sam, here's Elon. And one decides to get public very, very quickly, raise the$85 billion. The other two are like, wait a minute, there's a lot more to this. But then you look a layer deeper. The other two are in Silicon Valley or in San Francisco. And in San Francisco, the consensus is that the hard takeoff is right now and that we're going to discover new physics. We're going to discover new medicine. The whole way the world is governed is going to get changed. A lot of wealth to be created on the back of just the scientific breakthrough is coming.

48:39Dave Blundin:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think Elon, he lost his edge on the frontier model. And so his way to become relevant in all of this is to get into space, get the orbital data centers up and running, buy a huge amount of compute. But if he were on the frontier and like two steps ahead of Fable right now, he also might be saying, holy crap, everything's going to get changed in the next year anyway. But he needed the money and he needs to build that big infrastructure. I got slammed in the biotech IPOs of the 2021-2023. All these companies that were pre-revenue, pre-profit, started going public, and they got decimated.

49:20And I think one of the rules I've always had is you go public when you've got profits and predictable revenues. And that is not these companies right now. Dave, do you agree with that?

49:32Dave Blundin:No, I think that they can manufacture insane amounts of wealth and revenue very, very quickly to the extent that they have access to compute. I don't think the revenue visibility and the CFO are a big part of the decision. I think they genuinely believe the world a year from today doesn't look anything like the world today. And that wasting a ton of time dealing with the SEC and the roadshow is the stupidest thing you can do in the middle of the singularity. And so they're just going to, to the extent that they have access to capital and they don't need the money tomorrow, it's much smarter to try and stay out of the lines, try and stay out of Washington, try and stay out of the SEC, try and stay out of, like, so you can focus on the model and focus on the new world order and focus on the, you know, there's just so much more pressing, urgent, hard takeoff issues in front of them.

50:25Dave Blundin:I mean, I just can tell you from firsthand experience, as soon as you start filling out those SEC documents, you're like, what a freaking waste of time. Holy crap. This is like from 1929. What am I doing here? And, you know, Silicon Valley, San Francisco has that arrogance that like we are the world right now. This is everything happening that matters. And dealing with Washington and the SEC, it just feels so wrong. I think that's more the flavor. Ima, do you think we see Anthropic do the same thing, or are they going to jump in and try and grab the capital out there?

51:01Emad Mostaque:I think Anthropic, with their continued revenue ramp, it all depends on are you going to see a drop and you haven't seen yet? If not, then again, why would they do it? Because they're ideological, right? You don't want to have anyone else's fiduciary or otherwise control, and you've got the weird PBC structure. OpenAI, I think, is a bit different, and they're changing over their structure. but I think the thing to watch out for is do they buy Sierra and put Brett Taylor as CEO and move Sam to president that's an example of how you can get around that that's a good thing if they need a rocket company they could buy rocket lab right like there's all sorts of moves you can have here but as you said the rate of the revenue is insane like I was actually looking at SpaceX's AI revenue from just their cloud business it's overtaken AWS and GCP on a run rate within a few months.

51:48Emad Mostaque:Who would have even thought that, right? But then you look at OpenAI, they're up at 40, 50 billion now. The revenue actually has gone to fit their valuation, which is the crazy thing because you've never seen revenue growth this big. I think it is just their internal structure is still shifting. That's a big deal. Like, what does it look like over the next few years? But they have the space to do that because they're going to lose$26 billion this year, according to their forecast. And as Dave said, they raised 120 billion. So it's not like they're going bankrupt. Anthropic is a little bit closer in terms of their raise to their balance.

52:22Emad Mostaque:So they're either going to have to do a raise or an IPO. But again, can you imagine Dario playing the markets like Elon? No. And by the way, people will throw money at Dario. You know, just asking it and the money will flow in.

52:37Dave Blundin:Yeah. Well, also the employee shares, the invested options, people will buy those from you too. Normally, people are racing to the IPO so they can get some personal liquidity, maybe buy a house or a car or something. Here, they have tons of secondary liquidity. So what is the purpose of the IPO then? You're right, altruistically, giving everyone in the world access to your stock would be a really nice thing. But putting that aside, they don't need anything. And then you look at the regulatory overhead. And it's not just the IPO itself. Like after the IPO, if your stock goes down, you're going to get a stock truck lawsuit.

53:11Dave Blundin:You have to deal with that. If you tweet or say anything, you know, virtually any word you say has to go through a FD approval. You can't post anything on the web without it going through an FD approval. It's just a it's just a different world from being a private company. And I just think they're suddenly realizing, wow, if we don't need it, it's it's not it's not easy. Welcome to the health section of Moonshots brought to you by Fountain Life. You know, my mission is to help you use the latest technologies, including AI, to not just do your work at home, teach your kids, but to help you live a long and healthy life.

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54:08Dave Blundin:That's right.

54:09Emad Mostaque:You know, the majority of cancers that we screen for, those aren't the ones that are necessarily taking the lives when found at a late stage. We know that when cancer is found early, the chances for cure are much higher. We know it's much easier to treat a cancer when found early versus when found late. What we're finding in our members is over 3.3 % were found to have these cancers that were otherwise wouldn't have been found or detected. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. People, you don't feel the cancer until stage three or stage four. And if you don't know what's going on inside your body, it's like driving your car with your eyes closed.

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55:29I'm going to move us on. Our next group of stories is in the Musk universe. So this week, Elon announced that Neuralink may make an attempt later this year for the first direct human to human telepathic communications, literally transmitting from my brain to your brain if we're connected via Neuralink. not typing, not speaking, thought to thought. If it works, even partially, Alex, we've talked about this. This is the most science fiction milestone ever attempted in neurotech. I think of this as the new level of intimacy, right? If you know my innermost thoughts, it's the beginning of a new communications capability for the human species.

56:06Kurzweil has famously predicted high bandwidth neocortex to cloud communications by the early 2030s. Alex, let me go to you next. Let me just make one more point. When I was speaking to Elon about this in the past, you know, it's clear his endgame in Neuralink isn't a medical device. It's his desire to create an IO layer for the singularity, allowing humans to, quote, couple with AI during the singularity. Your thoughts, my friend? Well, a couple of thoughts. One, if Neuralink does do this, this will be one of the first sort of open attempts to create superhuman capabilities, not just restore capabilities from humans with a variety of, say, motor disabilities to the mean, but rather to empower people with superhuman capabilities.

56:55That's the first thought. The second thought is the latent space is particularly interesting. So there was a paper in Cell, I think sometime in the past week, I wrote about it in my newsletter, finding that people, children, adults who speak multiple languages, so bilingual adults, there was an open question in neuroscience whether if you speak the word for the same term in two different languages, whether there was a single bridge neuron that was responsible for activating for those two different concepts. And the answer turns out to be pretty surprisingly, I'm actually kind of surprised this wasn't published in Science or Nature.

57:32No, but the answer turned out to be that the spacing, the relative spacing - They read the paper. It's incredible. It's just like the AI models. It's just like the AI models. Yes. That the hippocampus of the humans, bilingual humans, turns out to look more or less like a vector embedding space for an encoder-only transformer model. That is a shocking conclusion. It was shocking. The neuron for petal and dog are adjacent to each other, and that's what gives them that collocation. Amazing. So if our hippocampus is basically just an encoder-only transformer embedding space, that would suggest that, A, telepathy is going to be a lot easier than one might otherwise suspect.

58:17B, maybe human cognitive capabilities are actually not that complicated. And maybe we are just, as I've mentioned on the pod previously, just distorted reflections of our ancestral environment and the complexities in that environment. See, Neuralink is pretty invasive. I mean, I know it's packaged up as being less invasive than some of the alternatives, but it's still pretty invasive. You need to stick a needle, multiple needles inside a human skull. But if this embedding theory of cell placement in the human brain turns out to generalize, I would expect this will create enormous demand. And Imad, you of all people probably would have some view on this.

58:58I've chatted over the years with some of your former neuro employees. This will create, I think, enormous demand for non-invasive human-to-human telepathy, not just the invasive Neuralink type. And I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up becoming a hugely popular feature or product. Elon may be steering Neuralink in the direction in parallel of less invasive, non-invasive BCIs. Can you imagine if couples, husband and wives basically get a Neuralink connection? I think probably a divorce rate would skyrocket. Or we see a lot of Borganisms. Yeah, Borganisms. So let me throw this to you next, Imad.

59:39But just a point to make. the human input output rate is shockingly narrow right so i look up the numbers here so speech is about 40 to 60 bits per second typing is like 5 to 20 bits per second and accordingly it says conscious thought and behavior selection is 10 bits per second right i mean these numbers and we're of course when we're inputting and outputting we're bottlenecked by our fingers our voice our eyes, our attention. We're pretty damn slow compared to our digital brethren.

1:00:13Emad Mostaque:Yeah, I think that's, you know, when you're processing things. So, you know, it's the type 1, type 2 thinking that Kahneman said. When we're thinking through, we think at a certain rate. And in tokens, you know, like your clawed tokens or whatever, it's 100 tokens a second roughly, right? But when you spot a tiger in a bush, it's instant because it adapts to the latent space as you're represented. Like in 2023, the neuro team at Stability did a paper called MindEye where you looked at a bottle, did an fMRI, and then we could reconstruct that from the MFMRI using stable diffusion, which indicated that human latent spaces were the same.

1:00:48Emad Mostaque:So what does human-to-human communication actually look like when you've got telepathy? You don't need all those words. You have as few words as possible to activate the common latent space. Just like, you know, you're like, oh, you're in sync with each other. You barely need words to complete each other's sentences. The fact that our latent spaces are actually likely to be very similar means that the bandwidth is probably going to go up 10, 100, 1 ,000 times from there. because you can adapt the adapters to hit the person at the right time. Just like when you're watching a movie, that scene will make you sad, you know?

1:01:20Emad Mostaque:Like when you understand the latent space, this is where you can go into that exploration. I think if we can get telepathy, it is actually one of the biggest achievements in humanity's history, because we've had this very lossy interface for so long. But then you can dig deep into what really makes us human. Of course, there's bad stuff to that and good stuff. This is very, very sci-fi. And, you know, one of the potentials is we all end up as the Borg, you know, like AWG said. But really, the meaning of life is to understand yourself better. And I think this will be a really huge advancement in that.

1:01:54Or maybe, maybe Glass Half Full, Imad, maybe we see like the next generation version of Microsoft Teams ends up including an organism feature and the human teams are all in sync with each other. he's a glass half full okay oh my god all right i'm not going there all right let me continue on in the uh in the musk universe here um so uh we saw this week uh some more insight into how elon is naming his companies uh so he expanded expand his naming protocol uh so his space-based uh you Ventures all have star in their name, and he released the name of his AI satellite constellation called Starmind.

1:02:39He also has his cargo delivery program called Starfall. So Starlink moves bits, Starfall moves atoms, Starmind moves intelligence. Elon went on to say, and I love this, we're cutting back on the use of the word star as a prefix. It's getting a bit silly. Too much star shit.

1:03:03Some of these, Peter, if I might just comment on this, some of these names, we haven't even, I think, materially, if you go back one slide, we haven't even materially talked about much on this pod. So to talk about maybe some - You want to hit him? I hit him real quick. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Starlink, everyone knows that's space communication probably going to launch, if you believe the rumor is going to launch a direct to sell mobile service. By the way, rumors that, you know, he's got to deal with Charter coming up for actually it was reported in Bloomberg. Bloomberg that he's going to have a deal with Charter and rumors that he might buy T-Mobile.

1:03:37That'd be pretty cool. Yep. So Starship, everyone knows, propulsive landing and enormous heavy lift capabilities for everyone else in the economy. Starbase, Texas. Star Factory, factory at Starbase producing Starships. Star Shield program for the U.S. government to supply basically a private, or I want to say privatized, but a government defense grade version of Starlink for the U.S. Department of War. Starfall just announced in the past few days. So this is a cargo deployment solution where private companies, and this was very, I would say, probably intentionally poorly marketed, have the ability to launch cargo up to LEO and then do a retrieval of the cargo.

1:04:28So people don't know a lot. One of the biggest issues in the past has been down mass from orbit. You know, we all talk about getting stuff into orbit, but being able to do experiments, especially materials or biology and get the product back down. And just a quick shout out to Jason Dunn. He's a Singularity alum, a friend of mine, and he's got a company called Outpost and they've been working on this with their product called Carryall and they've been doing extraordinary hardware development and testing for now a couple years. But please continue. Yeah. And I mean, there are companies, Outpost among them, Varda, among them that are doing quite a bit of orbital manufacturing.

1:05:08They're most prominently, I guess, in my mind, Starfall example. There was an orbital brewing company that launched yeast into orbit on Starfall, retrieved it, and they're going to be now brewing orbital beer or Leo brewed beer. What does that cost for a pint? But it's been to space. Stargaze. Stargaze takes advantage of the fact that Elon and SpaceX now have all of these satellites that can look up and can look down and provides situational awareness, looking up and looking down, both in orbit and on the ground. Could end up, given that we just had the conversation with planet, could end up, possibly end up becoming a planet competitor.

1:05:50We'll see. Star Mind is the brand name for the AI orbital constellation, the Dyson Swarm brand from SpaceX, if you will. And then Star Pipe, which was only announced two days ago. This is incredible. Star Pipe is, I think, Elon's or really SpaceX's nascent oil and gas play. So Star Pipe is the beginnings of SpaceX's, I would say, refinery attempts to pipe natural gas around, given that the propulsion is largely focused on methox. So, piping methane around, piping natural gas around, they have no experience really in any refinery capabilities. But Starbase is in Texas. Texas has a lot of oil wells.

1:06:38Starpipe is this pipe that was just announced two days ago to start piping these capabilities around. And really, if you're going to build the first Martian colony or the first serious lunar colony, you need to have oil and gas capabilities and you need refining capabilities. So StarPipe appears to be the very beginning of SpaceX getting into oil and gas.

1:06:57Dave Blundin:That's probably where Elon said, stop calling stuff star shit. It's a freaking pipe. But also powering their data center. So here's that tweet from Elon, too much star shit. But I I love this. A bunch of memes came out. This one is from Planet of Memes. And if you're watching it, it says, when you want to smell like a trillionaire, use Star Musk, cloned by Elon Musk. That was too good. That was too good to miss. If anyone didn't see our last podcast with Will Marshall, the part on LEO, low Earth orbit, and the value of it is unbelievably good. Definitely go back and watch that podcast. That was some incredibly great media.

1:07:40Dave Blundin:God, was that fun. That was. All right. Another story out of China. This one is the release in beta and soon coming in July of C-Dance 2.5 by ByteDance. So get this, 30-second videos at 4K resolution. You can reference up to 50 different inputs, images, video, audio, director cinematographic, cinematographic control options for post-production and supports editing via text prompts. I'm going to run this video. There were so many of them, but I just want to keep in mind here. Elon said by the end of this year, full length motion pictures coming out of AI. Hollywood is cooked. My prompt.

1:08:34Hello? Is it fixed yet? We're about to play your video at the event. There's been a small unexpected issue. I'll fix it right away.

1:08:42Dave Blundin:Just give me a few more minutes. You might be You're standing Out of control

1:09:02It appears that some higher dimensional entity is now repairing all of the anomalous phenomenon that occurred today.

1:09:18Wow. All right, Iman, this was your business for many years as the CEO of Stability. Talk to us about this. Where are we? Where is it going? What does it mean for all of us and for, you know, the folks who are a few miles from here in Hollywood?

1:09:32Emad Mostaque:I suppose I told you so, right? Like, this is exactly it. When I was leaving Stability a few years ago, we had a discussion. I was like, it's going to be like 2026. We're going to get Hollywood level full control input by 2027 full length movies. and we're here. It's still remarkable to see. Again, CDance 2.0 was a big advance. Jarek Grok, imagine, caught up to it. But the fact that you have that level of control, and I think one of the main things there, apart from the quality, was 50 inputs. This means 50 different characters, and you can input video, audio, images, and others, and it generates all of these on the fly, means you have almost perfect pixel control.

1:10:12Emad Mostaque:And just like, you know, people have been using GPT Image 2 now, you know, it makes really good images. that's now here for video as of a few weeks from now that level of control where it actually understands what you're saying effectively so i think for hollywood studios it's good because costs go down but we have to think about the real impact of that downstream because why do you need people on the ground when you can take what we're seeing here and edit it any way you can imagine post-production where does that go and this is one of the first big waves of you you know, aside from call center workers, real human impact.

1:10:47Emad Mostaque:Because all of those human hours that went to media are going to get displaced. And we have to figure out what do we do? Because it's not like they can retrain. At the same time, we have the other side, which is, you know, the upcoming one very XPRIZE and things like that. Being able to tell stories that you could never tell before. And I always like to think now, one of the things I say to old people is stop thinking of these media models as single player experiences. Like we went from movies to I'm prompting by myself. When you use these models as groups to tell stories, it's actually one of the most rewarding, empowering things you can do because different people have different views on how it all shifts.

1:11:24Emad Mostaque:And I think that's what we're going to see a lot of in the next few months. Again, we're the Roddenberry XPRIZE and others. And it's super exciting because we're nothing if not story based creatures. But a lot of the stories that are important don't get told. I mean, just a quick correction. It's called the Future Vision XPRIZE. Yeah. Yeah, the Roddenberry family, the creators of Star Trek, are involved and donors on this as a partnership we do with Google. And just a quick shout out, if you're a filmmaker and you want to have, if you can create a movie using this technology that is a hopeful, compelling vision of the future, right?

1:11:56You know, humanity aims for the targets that we create. Instead of dystopian futures, let's create positive, hopeful Star Trek futures. If you come up with a great three-minute trailer, we will make your movie. That's the goal. We're going to be working with Range Media and Google, backed by ARK Invest, backed by Mark Benioff at Salesforce, and going to create at least one, hopefully more, of these hopeful visions of the future, a full-length motion picture. And we're going to steer humanity towards that positive Star Trek future. Alex, love your take on C-Dance 2.5. China's running away with video generation, unfortunately.

1:12:37So if you look at what the American competition looks like, what do we have? We have Gemini Omni, which is still limited to about 10 seconds. We have Grok. At least Elon is trying to give the Chinese a bit of a run for their money. But in China, if you're training a video model, you have probably cheaper access to data that, by the way, as the last time we discussed, I think at the Seedance 2.0 launch. If you're in China and you're one of these Chinese frontier labs, you're probably not too worried about being sued for copyright infringement for all of the TikTok or other similar video data you're using for pre-training these models.

1:13:18So you basically have far cheaper data, far less encumbered, at least in practice, training data. And also the American frontier labs are all busy chasing each other's tails to build recursively self-improving cogen models that are ridiculously revenue generating. If you ask how revenue generating are these video models, probably no comparison per token or per flop. I would guess, CodeGen vastly more lucrative and more economically productive than video. Who's going to be generating long videos? It'll probably be consumers who don't have that much money anyway. So for a variety of reasons, economic, practical, legal, we find ourselves in a world where China is running away with the video race for the moment until the West can come up with a compelling enterprise, a lucrative, productive enterprise use case for video generation, at which point I would expect and hope the Western labs to finally reenter the race seriously.

1:14:16Dave Blundin:That's where Liquid AI might burst onto the scene very soon. They're going to do a capital raise in probably a couple months, so they'll kind of get back on the radar. But Liquid AI is... Remind us who Liquid AI is. It's a foundation model company from scratch, doesn't use any anthropic, doesn't use any open AI. It has a far, far more efficient way to use context than the transformer attention window. The byproduct of that is if you buy a Mercedes in September and you talk to your car, you're talking to Liquid AI. On-prem. It has to work, has to be small enough to fit in the power supply of the car.

1:14:51Dave Blundin:And it has to work without connecting to the internet because nobody wants their car to just stop if the internet, you know, is here in a dead spot. So they've got this kind of edge world really well nailed. But I saw a video generation model from them over a year ago, where as quickly as you can speak, it's generating the images or the videos as quickly as you can talk. And the problem with the really, really good models generating super high quality video is we were just talking about Neuralink and, you know, hey, I have so much bandwidth. I can think so much quicker than this. But then you wait like three minutes for the video to come back and it just breaks the whole creative cycle.

1:15:30Dave Blundin:So that's fine when you're creating a movie, but the video game industry is already bigger than all other media combined, including movies. It's a far, far bigger industry creating video games. And whoever wins the race to getting real-time, the quality of what you just saw, into an interactive real-time experience embedded in a video game environment, that's where the big money is. So as Alex pointed out, like right now, all the frontier labs are chasing coding and white-collar automation because that's where the money is. But there's also a ton of money if you crack into real-time video game.

1:16:04Dave Blundin:And it's just the latency right now is the buzz killer. But whoever solves that is going to be, is going to be, I agree with you. Video game, video game industry is much larger than Hollywood.

1:16:15Emad Mostaque:It's a couple of hundred billion versus Hollywood at 50 billion. Video gen AI, I'd estimate at four or five billion in revenue at the moment versus 10 times that for code gen um actually 20 times that for code gen um but i think what you've just described david is next year real-time 4k video games and the advantages the chinese have on this is the world model side so one route to agi's recursive self-learning on code gen this like if you look at that c dance 2.5 do you really think it doesn't understand physics you know like it's clearly got a physics embedding and from byte dance and kind of others you're starting to see the first world models for that real-time interactivity.

1:16:57Emad Mostaque:And it's going to be very interesting because it seems like two different routes potentially to AGI and which one of those will win. Who knows, right?

1:17:07Dave Blundin:I think after that event next year, like you're saying a video game today is a couple hundred billion, which is an enormous market. I wouldn't be surprised to see it three, four, five, 10x after, I mean, it's just so compelling. And it'll actually penetrate pretty much every age bracket. Right now it tends to be dominated by males under the age of, say, 30. But I think it'll expand out to all populations.

1:17:33Emad Mostaque:The holodeck is a trillion dollar market. I think there's like a$30 trillion market, which is enterprise software. So I totally agree that that video games are a larger market than Hollywood feature films. But there's a market that's orders of magnitude larger than video games, and that's enterprise use cases. I don't know if you guys saw, just again in the past few days, Alibaba's one streamer demo. This is real-time, interactive, generative discussion, video to video. Like, the three of you are, I guess, more probably, I could be an AI right now. The three of you are real. and we're just having this discussion and you could create a generative environment for me and I could put my hand in the video or take it out.

1:18:18So there's, to Ahmad's point, there's some sort of minimal world modeling going on there that exists now. And it's real time and it's interactive and it's video to video. So if the West can stand up in enterprise real time, say, like Zoom participant or FaceTime participant that can participate in company meetings, can be interacting in real time with audio and video, not just the live audio models. I think that starts to move us to a$30 trillion market versus just a$1 trillion market. You know, next year, I'm going to be bringing the top quantum computing companies on stage, the top humanoid robot companies on the Abundance 360 stage.

1:18:59What do you guys think? Should I bring some of the top video game companies as well? Is it time to bring them in? Yeah. Are you kidding? Okay. All right. We'll do that.

1:19:09Dave Blundin:Yeah, because I think they're going to, you know, Alex is right, but I think they're going to be a major player in enterprise if they pivot in that direction, too, because they have the technology. And I don't think there's any barrier there. Like, if you built Fortnite and then you add real-time video generation to it, why don't you just pivot over to enterprise? Like Slack. Slack started as a video game. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, exactly. Amazing. All right. Moving us along, staying in China. Our next story is from Anthropic, who accuses China's Alibaba of running a massive distillation campaign against Claude.

1:19:43We talked about distillation on the last pod. Alex was explaining it in detail. So apparently using 28.8 million fraudulent exchanges across 25 ,000 fake accounts to securely extract and copy Claude's capabilities. If the claim holds up, it's the single largest AI model theft accusation ever made. So, you know, distillation is when we use one model to answer questions to train your own model. It's the teacher and student approach. This is now frontline in the U.S.-China AI rivalry, and it raises a brutal question. In a world where intelligence can be copied through straw, how do we collect and protect models for ourselves?

1:20:28So, Alex, I'm going to go to you. What's the implications here? Do you think it's 100 % true? Well, first I have to point out the irony that Anthropic itself has been the target of multiple suits arguing that it took copyrighted material and maybe not using the term distillation, which is usually reserved for model-to-model training versus corpus-to-model training or pre-training. But I would say the shoe is ironically on the other foot. Anthropic sued multiple times for using improperly copyrighted books and other media for pre-training its own models. Now, Anthropic is turning around and accusing Alibaba for using Anthropic outputs to post-train Alibaba's own models.

1:21:13Similar concept nonetheless. I do think that in the broader scheme of things, the export control regime and the regulatory regime that we were discussing earlier is in some sense a protectionist and protection for the U.S. frontier models and their vendors to prevent their insights from leaking out via what's been widely reported. If you're in China, in many cases, is public reporting. You have access via proxies that are in China or in friendly countries to access Anthropic and OpenAI and other strong Western models at a tenth the cost, 90 % discount. So you pay a lot less. You get access to the models via these proxies.

1:22:02The reason for it is the proxies reportedly are gathering all of the reasoning traces. You agree to give up any notion of privacy in the reasoning traces. The proxies gather those reasoning traces using you basically as a sock puppet. And now those proxies can be used in principle for distillation or other efforts. I think it's an interesting question that I'm certain is going to be heavily litigated, whether distillation constitutes espionage or not. It's almost certainly a violation of the terms of service for anthropics models. But whether it constitutes espionage, I think will be probably a heavily litigated question and probably yet another reason that the world seems to be on a path, sort of a second Cold War type path where there's a US block and a Chinese block.

1:22:50And it's not just model access that doesn't flow. It's also reasoning traces that could be used to enhance capabilities that also seemingly don't want to flow. Imai, can you block distillation and still maintain the openness of API calls and the usefulness of these systems?

1:23:10Emad Mostaque:There are different types of distillation from direct on the latent to just how do you answer this really hard question and make this really nice code base. The latter is incredibly difficult to lock down. And I think what China's basically been doing, the Chinese companies, is why does Mercore have a billion dollar revenue? because they get all the experts in. And why do you need experts to answer questions? Because your data distribution is this good and the experts make it that good. But you could use Mythos or Claude instead to get the extra level up. So they're substituting out Mercore and these other guys for that.

1:23:45Emad Mostaque:But we have reached a plateau and we've reached another level. So if you actually look at why GLM 5.2 is better than GLM 5.1 and you look at what they've said, which I think is actually true. And I also think that Alibaba probably did have these sock puppets, as AWG kind of said, using the clawed code, spare capacity. It does appear to be a recursive self-improvement loop where you've got your initial distribution and then you improve it because it's got good enough and competent enough by being very thorough and looping back on the data improvement. So I think we're actually at the point now where Chinese models will be better if they have either super expert input or mythos answering questions.

1:24:28Emad Mostaque:But at the same time, you could have this recursive loop where you don't even need to have anyone's data anymore. Again, I think it's very difficult for us to conceptualize, but this is that takeoff scenario where you can't guarantee that if today China could never use any of the US models again, the existing data set they have, the techniques they have, are not good enough to keep up with frontier capability. and so that's the difficulty here i think you we got to put a pin in this story and it's going to

1:24:56Dave Blundin:come up again and again and again but i couldn't believe you know i mentioned earlier my son just came back from china and he's got this fake rolex and he's like check this out i got this in shenzhen and it says rolex on the front it's got all the patent numbers and the inscriptions inside the claps you literally can't tell it's not a real rolex costs like 25 bucks uh and i bought it in the basement of the statehouse in Shenzhen. Like they literally are selling illegal fake clones in the building where the governor of the province lives or works. I mean, like, wow, what a blatant disregard for intellectual property law.

1:25:38Dave Blundin:But then you look across the whole Chinese economy and the growth of it is predicated on copying ideas from elsewhere in the world, stealing them and bringing them home. So it's like it's in the DNA of the culture. And so now we're like, oh, it's shocking that they actually had 25 ,000 fake accounts looking at traces. Like anyone who's shocked by this is way out of touch with what China's actually doing. So I think this story will come up again because this will be the excuse that the US and Europe and maybe South America use to try and crack down something. This will be the trigger that they use?

1:26:17Dave Blundin:Because they need to suppress Chinese AI somehow. Otherwise, again, it'll be out in the world and everyone will have it. I remember I was hosting a meeting, a conversation on stage with Steve Jurvetson and Astro Teller in the early days of Singularity University. And we were talking about IP protection. And the concept was, in the end days of the singularity, IP will mean nothing. Because if you're dependent upon IP to protect yourself, you're just off because AI is going to just reinvent the product much better than you ever did, iteratively, very much faster. And so it's just going to be, you need to be constantly innovating, not trying to protect what you did years ago.

1:26:58And we can see it happening right here, right now. Or IP means everything and IP supercharges or AI supercharges lawyers, IP litigation lawyers to do an amazing job, superhuman job of protecting IP.

1:27:12Dave Blundin:Yeah, I'm glad you said that, Alex, because I I think that's a very likely midterm. Like, I think robots are coming, space-based data centers are coming, but I think we're in a hard takeoff of core AI right now. And the amount of intellectual property created in the next, say, 18 months will dwarf all of human history, like by far. But it's still all virtual breakthroughs. You know, it's software, it's video generation, it's solving all physics, solving all math. And if you can't protect that intellectual property, chaos is going to break out globally. So we actually have to figure this out. And you can't just allow countries to rampantly copy, especially given that privacy is so hard to contain and copying gets easier over time.

1:27:54Well, I think the point that Astro and Steve were making were you're not going to copy exactly. You're just going to use what exists and reinvent it better and create something that is uniquely an improvement on top of that. Imad, where do you come at on this?

1:28:08Emad Mostaque:Yeah, I think that it's going to get increasingly difficult. Like you'll say, do Teams, but make it not annoying. You know? Make Zoom that doesn't need to upgrade itself every two seconds. Like, I think that the creative capabilities of the AI, the copying capabilities of the AI, is such that almost everything can be one shot within a few years. And you have this period where it had to get to competence. And that first broke with Sonnet last year. And now for almost all models, including open models, it's here right now. And then this new loop means that, again, why do I need to copy when I can recreate, but remix?

1:28:47Emad Mostaque:And that makes it very, very difficult. Like in certain areas like music, incredibly strong copyright protections, you know? And that has a whole bunch of other things. Software, not much, you know? So you'll have this whole kind of gamut of things. But I just don't think you can stop the capability increases now by having any distillation or other lockdowns or even IP lockdowns. Alex? I'll sound maybe just a different note here, which is I think there are striking parallels between the defense versus offense divide on software vulnerabilities and defense versus offense on IP litigation and IP protection.

1:29:24So one might say superficially, oh yes, sure, IP is over because AI will, for any patent, be able to find a way to route around it. That's the AI will overwhelm via offense argument. But at the same time, AI can also strengthen defense. AI can draft better patent claims. AI can do a better job of, say, patent litigation than humans will at some point in the near term future. So it's not 100 % obvious to me that they call it the astro argument that IP suddenly evaporates because intelligence becomes stronger. I think intelligence, there are a variety of reasons, as we're seeing, quite frankly, with this export control regime why super intelligence may want to protect itself via ip legal mechanisms and if that is the case i would fully expect the defense side or offense depending on your perspective uh side to be also supercharged with super intelligence and not 100 obvious to me that ip goes away in fact i it might just be utterly supercharged in terms of its ability to protect.

1:30:31Guess what, guys? We're going to find out soon enough. All right, let's turn our attention next to quantum computing. This week, another breaking story. President Trump signed a new executive order aimed at supercharging U.S. quantum computing companies, a technology that could one day crack today's encryption and turbocharge scientific discovery, specifically in drugs, bio, material science. In a parallel move, the White House is moving to shield U.S. quantum research from foreign espionage, reportedly directing intelligence agencies to guard it as we guard our nuclear secrets. So the U.S. government thus far has committed$2 billion in venture investments using the May of 2026 Chips and Science Act.

1:31:15And let's take a look at who's getting the money. So first off, IBM received the lion's share of$1 billion of the program to co-develop their Anderon quantum chip foundry in Albany, New York, D-Wave, Regetti, and Inflection each secured$100 million, and PsyQuantum secured $140 million equity stake. So I'm hoping to have a number of these on stage with me at this year's Abundance Summit, hoping all three of you guys will help me grill these CEOs at Abundance and understand. So Alex, let's go to you first. First, how excited are you about this? And what's your take on the quantum disruptions coming?

1:31:59Mildly excited, not very excited. On the one hand, I want to quip that the U.S., the forthcoming U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund will have an amazing exposure to all of these quantum stocks. One of the executive orders, there were a couple of executive orders that dealt with it, But the more interesting one established that rather required the development of what's called the quantum computer for application development and discovery science QC ads, which is interesting. The first executive order I've read that mandates the establishment of a quantum computer for discovery science. So on the face of it, great.

1:32:37We want to accelerate science radically. On the other hand, I do think this may be a case of begging the question somewhat. There is already a vibrant private sector of quantum applications, not just quantum computing, also quantum networking and most interesting to me, quantum sensing. So establishing a national quantum computer effort for discovery science, to me, reminds me a little bit of Genesis Mission, which if you look beneath the covers at where the money is coming from, it seems to be a repackaging of existing U.S. government funding. So that part I find less interesting. What's more interesting to me is the protection from foreign threats.

1:33:23So until the executive order, I, for example, was not aware, I'd be curious to hear, were you aware that there's a quantum information science and technology counterintelligence protection team? Nope. We have that. We have a quantum protection team in this country. I think that's super interesting. And in some ways, evokes for me this idea that the U.S. government was caught flat-footed by AI. The defense community in particular, and intelligence community, flat-footed. We saw, as we were discussing earlier, we saw Mythos and now GPT 5.6 leapfrogging whatever internal, apparently, capabilities the NSA has when it comes to cyber.

1:34:04In quantum, I think the thinking somewhere in the executive is not to be surprised a second time and to actually get out ahead of any quantum capabilities that might be strategically disruptive. The problem, as I've mentioned on the pod in the past, is quantum for science acceleration just hasn't worked that well. Quantum computing was supposed to give us protein folding. Turns out protein folding problem was solved by arguably AlphaFold3 purely classically without use of any quantum computing. There are a lot of folks, including Peter Common Friends, who are very aggressively marketing quantum computing specifically for solving all of these problems.

1:34:46To be clear, the company I think you're referring to, Sandbox AQ, is not using quantum computing. They're using the equations of quantum physics on AI platforms. So, Imad, how do you come out on this? Are you excited? Is this a nothing burger?

1:35:05Emad Mostaque:Look, I think it's potentially the next big wave, right? And unlike GPUs where China's catching up, like Huawei's about to release the 950s and others, in terms of bulk but not edge, quantum computers are vastly more complicated to build, right? Like even if the secrets kind of get out, like China has a good thing in photonic quantum computers, but not the various types of a Regetti or a D-wave with the quantum annealers, et cetera. The most interesting thing is this for me. With super mythos level models, we will be able to ask the quantum computers the right questions. Program them properly, yes.

1:35:43Emad Mostaque:Program them properly, which is actually quite difficult to do. And Sandbox AQ, again, are doing a little bridge to that right now by having the equations. Although I think quantum equations and J. Tavari equations are very, very similar for a very interesting reason. But what type of quantum problem will require a quantum computer a day to figure out or a year to figure out? Versus milliseconds, right? So what you've got is you have convergence of asking better questions and quantum supremacy and others coming. And that meeting point means we might not need Dyson spheres. And that is actually something...

1:36:16Double down on that one for us, would you? Because that's all we speak about in this pod is dicey forms.

1:36:22Emad Mostaque:I'm checking whatever they do. Basically, one of the things is more energy, more compute, more intelligence, right? But quantum, again, processes and questions can be answered almost instantly in microseconds. It's not like test time compute exists for quantum compute. But we're very bad at asking the quantum computers the right questions, and they're not a sufficient scale. So if we have an increase in energy to ask really good questions, Maybe there comes a time where we can answer all the questions that quantum computers need and then meet in the middle through a mixture of GPUs and quantum computers to ask and answer almost any question.

1:36:56Emad Mostaque:And that breaks this energy ramp increase to solve the mysteries of the universe by coating the entire universe with compute. So I think I have to jump in on this one. I think there is a latent assumption in this scenario that we see some sort of complexity hierarchy collapse. Right now, one of the reasons why quantum computers arguably haven't been that useful is because it's actually really difficult for humans without superintelligence to identify algorithms that are both economically useful and also achieve some sort of quantum advantage. We found a number of quantum advantage algorithms. They're not that useful, at least not economically transformatively useful.

1:37:34But they make for good headlines. They make for wonderful headlines and amazing IPOs. To Imad's point, I think, and this is something that I'm bullish on, that I do think there's a pretty good chance that if there is some sort out there in math theory space, if there is an AI discoverable quantum advantaged AI training or inference algorithm, AI will find it and that will suddenly pay back all of the sins of money being invested too much in quantum infrastructure previously will atone for it. But separately, the point of the Dyson swarm, I would say the reason why I think right now we're on a default trajectory of a Dyson swarm isn't necessarily because everything is so efficient, but rather because we're running out of headroom in Moore's law.

1:38:23And as we start to, on the one hand, lose room at the bottom, as Feynman would say, and on the other hand, see skyrocketing demand for AI. And on the third hand, municipalities don't want data centers. We push them to orbit. Will quantum obviate the need for a Dyson swarm? I think they're probably not mutually exclusive. I could imagine scenarios where we build a Dyson swarm of hybrid or pure state quantum computers and people don't want quantum computer data centers in their backyard, just like they don't want classical computers. As Elon said, build the quantum computers in the permanently shadowed craters on the moon.

1:39:02Yeah.

1:39:03Emad Mostaque:Yeah, look, I think the thing here, again, is the default path is energy. Everything gets converted to compute, right? But for frontier capability and the type of capability we discussed earlier on this episode, that could disrupt nation states, that could disrupt society. You might find in the next couple of years with the way these two curves are going, a discontinuity. And the United States is trying to ensure that it is on the frontier of that with the most capable frontier models with the right algorithms for the right quantum computers that are finally useful. And if that happens and that meets, then it's very difficult to fight against that.

1:39:38Emad Mostaque:Because again, you don't need to scale the test time compute if you can crack that. Yeah, I think the right analogy there, so I agree. The right analogy is again something like we're in 1939 or 1940, and the goal isn't to infinitely or rather indefinitely preserve an American advantage in these capabilities. is just to slow the rest of the world, namely China, down enough that we can hit enough recursive self-improvement and dominate, for whatever definition you prefer, dominate the future light cone with capabilities that really only need to be a few months, at most a year ahead of the competition.

1:40:17All right, Dave, do you want to add on this or should I jump into the next story?

1:40:20Dave Blundin:Well, I started this new company, Quantum.ai, for exactly this reason. So I've got so many thoughts. Okay, yeah, we'll go for it then. Well, let me just, I don't want to belabor it, but September timeframe around the Moonshot Summit, if you want Alex to be super excited on stage, let's talk about quantum photonics, not quantum computers. Also, quantum sensing was almost certainly going to work. So you'll be able to store insane amounts of information in tiny, tiny spaces. But the photonics, you know, I've been working for nine months now on this quantum AI. and working on the algorithm side, but it's almost a certainty now that highly quantized neural nets can perform just as well as floating point 32 neural nets, which opens the door to massive amounts of photonic computation efficiency.

1:41:10Dave Blundin:I would be shocked if by the time we're talking to Elon next December, I'd be shocked if we're not talking about launching this coming December. Instead of launching NVIDIA chips and the huge power they consume, get the terafab started on the photonic compute at about 1 ,100th the mass for the same amount of computation. And it could be even more than that. 1 ,100th is a conservative estimate. And so the stepping stone to the discontinuity that Ahmad was talking about is clearly photonic computing, not quantum computing the way it's currently defined. But it's still quantum photonic. It's not quantum quantum.

1:41:52Dave Blundin:And I think that's almost a certainty at this point that that will exist and that the current AI will discover the breakthroughs necessary if there are any left. And then that'll be deployed and what Elon is actually manufacturing within a year to 18 months.

1:42:07Emad Mostaque:Yeah, I think that Intel is doing some super interesting things there. But, you know, China with their Zizhuang series and others, that's the one area they're really focusing on. And I think the U.S. is completely under on. So I think that particular area of kind of photonics and quantum photonics needs to be a much bigger focus and have much more investment, given what we've seen already.

1:42:26Dave Blundin:And for that reason, that should be the thing the White House just elevated. They're not aware of it yet, I don't think, but they will be. And it'll be right up there on par. It should actually be a bigger priority than the current quantum thing that just passed. By the way, everybody... Go ahead, Alex. I will note that, again, in the news in the past two days, Elon slash SpaceX just acquired for several billion dollars a photonic computing slash communication company to merge in. So would not at all be surprised if photonics, which gives us in principle a thousand X clock rate speed up over these stupidly slow electrons, becomes a key part of the Starlink or Starmind plan.

1:43:07Dave Blundin:Well, Google got a patent's worth looking up if you're bored that does matrix multiplications in pure light. And they got that granted last year. They filed it back in 2023, but it got granted last year. So they've been thinking about it for a while, too. So, yeah, this is going to happen. By the way, I said this a couple of podcasts ago. Now that Elon's got liquid stock with SpaceX going public, he's going to be on acquisition rampage. watch him by companies left, right, and center. And if all of you want to come and join a AMA live with Alex, we're going to be doing an hour of Ask Me Anything on Solve Everything at the Moonshots Summit.

1:43:51Imad's going to be there. Dave's going to be there. Salim's going to be there. Come and join us on September the 25th. Go to moonshots.com to get your ticket. We'll be sold out soon enough. So join us there. This episode is brought to you by Blitzy, autonomous software development with infinite code context. Blitzy uses thousands of specialized AI agents that think for hours to understand enterprise scale code bases with millions of lines of code. Engineers start every development sprint with the Blitzy platform, bringing in their development requirements. The Blitzy platform provides a plan, then generates and precompiles code for each task.

1:44:32Blitzy delivers 80 % or more of the development work autonomously, while providing a guide for the final 20 % of human development work required to complete the sprint. Enterprises are achieving a 5x engineering velocity increase when incorporating Blitzy as their pre-IDE development tool, pairing it with their coding co-pilot of choice to bring an AI-native SDLC into their org. Ready to 5x your engineering velocity? Visit Blitzy.com to schedule a demo and start building with Blitzy today. I'm going to move us to our next conversation, which is a fascinating one for all entrepreneurs out there.

1:45:14It's about sleep. So here's the question we're proposing. Hopefully all of you know eight hours of sleep is not just a good suggestion. It is evolutionarily what we're designed to need. but there is a small percentage of humans on the planet called short sleepers that can get away with much less as little as four hours of sleep the number of humans that get away with four hours of sleep is 0.1 percent or less uh there's a group who can get away with six hours of sleep that's about one percent of the population um but the rest of us need eight hours and here's the data so that you're aware of it because i used to say when i was in medical school i'll sleep when I'll die when I'm dead.

1:45:55And the fact of the matter is not sleeping will kill you. So if you're getting six hours or less on a regular basis, you have a 48 % increased chance of coronary heart disease, a 15 % chance of a stroke, increase of a stroke, 12 % increase of all-cause mortality, 5 % increase in beta amyloid. You know, this is what's going to be giving you neurodegenerative disease, 17 % higher risk of type 2 diabetes, and a 4X higher risk of catching a cold. Sleeping is critically important. So how do you become a short sleeper? Well, if you can get away with four hours of sleep, here's the math. Check this out.

1:46:39It's 28 hours of more work time or play time per week. That's 58 days in a year. You gain two extra months on your life. This is a way of getting longevity incrementally. Instead of adding time at the end of your life, if you're getting two months extra per year. So I know about this because one of my portfolio companies, which is still under stealth, is the number one player in this area. But it made news this week when Eli Lilly purchased for$6.3 billion a company called Centessa Pharmaceuticals. Their drug targets a neuropeptide called orexin. It's the brain's master on-off switch for wakefulness.

1:47:20So they've been developing this for narcolepsy patients. But I think ultimately, guys, this is going to become a lifestyle drug. How many of you would take this if you could get it? If we could get it or if we could get it legally? Are you on it already, Alex? Is that what's going on? No, I'm not on it. I think we need this to track the singularity for sure. I would dedicate those four extra hours per day for just reading the feeds that are coming in. Alex, what are your thoughts on this one? I think this is potentially as transformative as the GLP-1 receptor agonists. This is Eli Lilly seemingly playing the same playbook over again.

1:48:00So just to refresh, the GLP-1 RA is initially approved for treatment of diabetes and taking advantage of this protein that was discovered, I think, in like lizards in Arizona. Yes. Dr. Justin Marchegiani It was like, oh, God, what are the large... Dr. Justin Marchegiani Like gila monsters or something? Dr. Justin Marchegiani No, anyway. Dr. Justin Marchegiani Reptiles in Arizona that could survive without eating for long periods of time and were somehow able to maintain sugar-slash-insulin balances for long periods of time discovered that actually humans have an analog of that. it seems relatively well-conserved.

1:48:39And if you can synthesize a receptor agonist, you can trigger common pathways and enable humans to balance their sugar levels over long periods of time. But it turns out the pathway is so important that it...and this is still something I think of mystery science right now on the GLP-1-RA side, you're able to have all of these amazing, potentially lifespan-increasing effects. You're right. Yeah. Gemini says it was in the Gila monster. The Gila monster, Gila monster. So now, same playbook. And I should add, like the GLP-1 RAs took Eli Lilly and have made it a Terracorn. It's like a trillion dollar company.

1:49:24And the revenue that it's generating off of just this is comparable to, if not larger than all the token revenue that OpenAI and Anthropic are generating on similar timescales. So if you're Eli Lilly, you have to be asking yourself, can you take this receptor agonist playbook and apply it to other domains? And it looks like Eli Lilly thinks the answer is yes. And they're going to apply it to neuroscience next, where the role of diabetes is going to be played by narcolepsy. The role of GLP-1s is going to be played by orexins. And the role of healthspan in inducing positive side effects across all of these other areas is going to potentially apply to the ability to sleep less without the nasty side effects that you were mentioning, Peter, to help people who suffer from daytime sleepiness due to Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and mood disorders, potentially helping people emerge from comas because orexin is so essential to all of these neurological pathways.

1:50:27Yes. Yeah. That's why I'm so excited about my portfolio company. I saw the data. It's double the performance of this Intesa drug. So if they're getting bought for$6.3 billion, that's hopefully going to be amazing. Dave, just think of one more point. Think of all of the economic output that could be unleashed if everyone everywhere had four more hours of wakefulness. And compare that. Yeah. Yeah. And that's my argument for adding 30 healthy years in a person's life as well. But imagine if you had it in your early 20s when you're most productive, right? So, yeah, crazy. Dave, what are your thoughts on here on this one?

1:51:05Dave Blundin:Yeah, one of our partners, Mira Wilczek, actually, Alex, one of your many classmates, she was a natural four-hour-a-night sleeper. You know, there's a bell curve there. It goes all the way down to two hours. Some people are 100 % functional on two hours sleep. It's very, very rare. Most people are in center points on eight. But some people need 14 hours sleep. Can you imagine? How much would that suck? But Mira got so much done. It's like having a whole other life. I was so jealous of that. So, yeah, I'd take it in a heartbeat. Imad, how much do you sleep?

1:51:37Emad Mostaque:I'm a four-hour sleeper. Are you?

1:51:39Dave Blundin:You lucky bastard. I thought so.

1:51:42Emad Mostaque:You get the time in. No, I mean, I'm very bullish on Erexin. So, you know, we had a long look at this with ASD and sleep disorder. And, you know, before you could only get things like lactobacterial biogeia and others to affect it. But you see a lot of knock-on impact from this, actually, when you upregulate oxytocin and norexin to inflammatory markers and things like ghrelin and leptin. And I think you could see, again, GLP now is impacting all these other biostatic stabilization mechanisms. I think this pathway will do the same, especially for inflammatory disorders. And so I think you sleep less, but you become less inflamed is what you're going to see as a result of some of these treatments.

1:52:22Emad Mostaque:So exciting to be alive right now. I mean, this is like my abundant story for everybody. It's like this is the time to be alive and just get excited about what's coming down the pike. All right. You guys ready for some AMA questions with the mates? Yeah, let's hit it. Fantastic. All right. Let's jump in. Here we go. Imad, you're our supermate guest for the day. So why don't you choose first? Oh, gosh. Seems to be a lot of EBI questions here. can UBI be as simple as reaping dividends from US government held golden shares? Do not freeze 79. The math is impossible. Like if you look at how big the AI companies would need to be to get a basic living level of UBI from dividends, assuming 5%, it's about$10 trillion.

1:53:14Emad Mostaque:And you'd have to own like half of them to get to like halfway there. They'd have to literally be the biggest companies in the world. And it would only be to the US, which is question four. Or how can anyone outside the US survive if it's only distributed in the US? I think we need to fundamentally look at how capital flows and monetary equivalents of UBI, where money is created, make a lot more sense. And we've seen some explorations of that. And then from that, we really think, again, how do we value things when the AIs and robots basically dominate the world? And I hope that we see a lot more research and trials on that.

1:53:48Yeah, I did the math, right? If you imagine a UBI of 3K a month for just U.S. citizens, U.S. residents alone, that's$12 trillion per year. And the U.S. budget,$7.4 trillion per year. So there's a lot of capital to be made up there. So I'll take question number two, which I think was aimed at me. Will companies migrate to friendlier jurisdictions like Argentina to escape U.S. AI restrictions? wouldn't this erode trust in any model that can be banned? And this is from Evra Ninnank. So I don't think model companies are at all likely to migrate to Argentina. I think the frontier model companies are going to very likely remain firmly entrenched here in the U.S.

1:54:39And you'll see Chinese companies firmly entrenched in China, and then there will be the rest of the world. I don't think Argentina is likely to end up hosting any frontier model companies. Companies that I can conceive migrating to Argentina under its proposed new non-human AI corporation regime will be inference time companies that are basically AI personants. So a humanless AI company that's just operating its own business, I can totally see many, millions, billions of those types of non-human AI companies migrating to Argentina. That said, I would think, given the export controls that we've just been talking about on this episode, I would imagine many of them will probably end up running on Chinese models, unless the U.S.

1:55:33acts to restrict the ability of Argentina, say, to import Chinese models, which could, by the way, happen. We've seen under a variety of non-AI technology regimes, we've seen this executive act to restrict other countries that are neither in the Chinese bloc nor, strictly speaking, in the U.S. bloc, restrict their ability to import Chinese technology or Chinese commodities. So I can imagine a scenario where the U.S. acts to restrict Argentina's ability to import cheap or operate cheap Chinese-based models, which would obviously foul up that approach. All righty, Dave.

1:56:17Dave Blundin:Number one or four. I'll take four. How can anyone outside the U.S. survive UBI, UHI if it's only distributed in the U.S.? And that comes from Ali Singh or Ali Singhs? Who knows? I love this question, and it's very timely. The World Cup is going on in the U.S. right now, and there's people from all over the world crawling around Boston, L.A., Santa Clara, and Mexico, too. and by and large, the people in Boston are like, wow, America's awesome. This is great. And, you know, the word across Europe, you know, the model reinforced this is like, America sucks. America sucks. You get over here and like, well, this is just a cross section of every type of person from all over the world who's immigrated to the United States.

1:57:05Dave Blundin:And it's where AI is happening. California is just hopping and it's just fantastic. And the problem you run into is that the U.S. government continually panders to the voter. And if you're not a voter, they just don't care about you. And if you are a voter, then you're entitled to everything in the world. And that has to change. And I think this is a moment in time where, you know, you saw the G7 summit when Donald Trump walked in. He said, OK, the boss has arrived. And that's not exactly the dynamic you want. So it's got to happen now, though, because the wealth concentration effect is so extreme.

1:57:40Dave Blundin:And if these frontier models become the universal workforce that creates everything, it's all going to happen in just a couple of locations, basically in the U.S. and China. And so we need to get this figured out really during this administration, which really means in the next year or so. All right. I'll take question number one. It's from at JB dash C1BR. why should people give up autonomy to accept UBI if unemployment is not going to be a problem? So, J.B., I think you've got the premise backwards. UBI isn't a trade for autonomy. It's a foundation for more of it. You can think about it. It's less of a welfare cage and more like the Alaska Permanent Fund, which I've spoken about before, where every citizen gets a dividend check.

1:58:29And you can do with it what you want. If AI is creating extraordinary abundance, distributing a share of that to the populace allows you to use it to up-level your life, to create your next company, to create meaning in your life, however you might want to do that. Even if there's mass unemployment, it doesn't materialize. UBI is a freedom dividend. And that's the way I think about it. And anyway, so that's my answer for you, JB. All right, let's go on to the next set of questions. Dave, why don't you kick us off?

1:59:09Dave Blundin:I'll take number five and then I'll throw it over to Alex. Why is the moon better for data centers than orbit? Is it the gravity or the Earth-facing position? Definitely not the Earth-facing position. This topic came up when we were talking about the Kessler effect, And we really did a good job of that on the last podcast. So low Earth orbit is great for data centers. But then you get outside 500 kilometers altitude and you get the Kessler effect problem and all kinds of debris flying around. Yeah, destroying your data centers. So the best place is low Earth orbit where there's a little bit of atmosphere that cleans the system naturally.

1:59:48Dave Blundin:But that's a relatively narrow band. The moon was good for the same reason. It's somewhat protected. But there is no atmosphere on the moon either. So that's why I'll throw it to Alex. Alex, why do you think the moon is better for data centers? I would say they're complementary, but the cislunar environment certainly has a number of advantages that orbit does not. For example, if you're concerned about the security of your data centers, there are, and both the West and the East, the great powers have demonstrated the ability to, on orbit, send robotic devices in and with grappling arms, China especially in the past year has very publicly demonstrated this, interfere with on-orbit devices.

2:00:33Whereas if you have a data center sitting on the lunar surface, you can defend it. You can be sure that there's no one, for example, coming in behind you, listening to the same beam that you're using to communicate with the Earth on. So there are a few reasons from a security perspective. Also, the moon has mass. If we set up, as I think Elon and hopefully others are going to do, an industrial ecology that's non-terrestrial, you can start mining water and other elements. Water is not an element, obviously, but mining raw materials from the lunar surface to build more data centers. You can't build more data centers in orbit.

2:01:14You just don't have the feedstock to do that. I was just going to say lunar regolith for folks, that's what you call the lunar soil, is silicon, oxygen, nickel, and iron. It's perfect for data centers. Perfect for disassembling the moon, in other words.

2:01:32Dave Blundin:Yeah, there's also another version of that, which is highly likely, where you're using those elements and then you're using a mass driver to launch them into low Earth orbit. That is something that's definitely going to happen because it's on the planning radar already. And it's the ultimate high ground. I mean, one of the narratives for why have an Apollo program at all was that it was a continuation of the Manhattan Project and with the moon as the ultimate high ground for launching weapons. Well, it may be the case that in addition, perhaps, to the moon being the ultimate high ground for launching weapons against Earth, it's the ultimate high ground for launching data centers to surface Earth.

2:02:08Kudos to one of my mentors, Gerard K. O 'Neill, professor of physics at Princeton University, who ran the Space Studies Institute and wrote about this, actually built some of the first mass drivers. And he laid out an entire architecture of mining the moon. His vision wasn't data centers. It was actually building and launching solar power satellites to Earth orbit to provide solar energy on rectenna's on the ground. We've changed that a little bit because we're going to use the energy in space for creating intelligence. But he laid this out in the 80s. Amazingly brilliant individual who left us too early.

2:02:45But Gerard K. O 'Neill, look him up. Alex, choose your next one. Let's leave number seven for Imad. Yeah, go on. I think I have to choose number six. So what physical and behavioral forms will humans and other species take in the age of the singularity? And this is from Jognalan383. So I'll construe the question that I would argue we are in the age of the singularity. So we already know the answer. We look like ourselves. I'll construe the question instead as what physical behavioral forms could humans take after the age of the singularity? So I think I've argued in past there will be many new forms of person and personhood.

2:03:31I take a lot of heat in especially the YouTube comments for agitating for some form of AI personhood. That's a legal form, not a physical or behavioral form. To the extent the question is asking what will post-humans look like, if you will. I think we'll see uploaded humans that have relatively de minimis physical form, but are just a collection of bits or maybe qubits running on AI infrastructure. I think we'll see, to earlier discussion, organisms, so collective human intelligences, whether it's via Neuralink or some other format. I tend to think as we discover new physics and new applied physics, the substrates for the compute that humans right now we augment ourselves with, soon many of us I think will be running on, that substrate I think is also in some sense to parrot Bucky Fuller is going to ephemeralize.

2:04:24And at some point in the distant future, how distant? Not sure yet. We might even see something that Arthur C. Clarke wrote about many times, which is maybe at some point humans will just be able to run on the gravitational fields or operate in a state of something approximating pure energy with fewer biological meat bodies. At the same time, before everyone attacks me in the comments, I will point out, inevitably, I will point out, yeah, I'll point out, I think this will be both purely optional and I think the future is going to look much more heterogeneous, not homogeneous. You're going to see humans who look substantially the same as they do right now, 100 years in the future.

2:05:13At the same time, 100 years from now, you'll see some post-humans who are uploads in a cloud functioning in a quantum computer. At the same time, those very different forms, I think, can and will coexist next to each other. And a quick shout out to our beloved subscribers. We do read your comments every week, so please add them. Ask us your questions. I'm going to add to what you just said, Alex, because you're going pretty far out. Let me go in the interim. We're going to start to edit ourselves, right? We just talked about the idea of an orexin-like molecule allowing us to shift to four hours of sleep.

2:05:49We're going to see gene edits, injection of clotho to increase our IQ, or other gene edits increase our muscular ability. We're going to start to see BCI, people walking around who've got a connection of the neocortex to the cloud. So I think those capabilities are coming in the next years to decade. Can I ask you a question about that, Peter, just narrowly? So we saw some people not take too kindly to the enhanced games. We see some municipalities not take too kindly to building data centers in their own backyard. Do you think there's a high likelihood future where all of these biological enhancements are actually either tightly regulated or shunned such that as with pushing the data centers into space rather than building them on land, the transformative physical and behavioral changes to humans are basically all pushed into the post-human realm by humans who regulate out of existence more obvious short-term biological enhancements.

2:06:55You know, I had that conversation with one of my boys and I said, listen, morals and ethics change over time. I remember when the first in vitro fertilization efforts were taking place, it was thought, oh my God, this is awful. You shouldn't allow this. This is immoral. This is not what God, you know, desired. And of course now IVF is considered normal and allowed and beneficial to allow couples around the world to have children later in their lives. So I think it at first is going to be shunned maybe by more religious elements. But I think ultimately it's going to become accepted. Shout out to Ramez Nam, who wrote an incredible book called Nexus.

2:07:40which talked about all of these genetic edits to create, you know, BCI capability, basically neural lace in the brain, but also the edits, a lot of it will go underground and then eventually will become, of course, I've been enhanced. You know, why would I not want to? You know, we all want the best for ourselves and our kids, the best education, the best food, the best tech, the best whatever. Why wouldn't you start with the best genetics? I know this is a sensitive subject, but I think it's going to become part of life going forward. Imad, what do you think about that?

2:08:12Emad Mostaque:Oh, it's going to be fascinating, isn't it? I actually, I spoke at the Oxford Union a couple of weeks ago in a debate about whether AI can attain personhood. And, you know, obviously one against it. So that's coming out soon. So you see the argument against this. These are big questions that we're going to have to ask. Very similar. I think ultimately we're all made of star stuff, but some of us will be more star stuff than others. That's the way I like to think about this. Iman, would you take number seven for us? Yeah. For entrepreneurs lagging the US, China, is the highest leverage more vertical AI startups or agentic workflows into legacy industries?

2:08:49Emad Mostaque:That's from Steve Crabb. I think this is fascinating because, you know, you can't compete on frontier models for various reasons. But also the nature of regulation in the EU means that there's massive potential for the latter agentic workflows into legacy industries. In the US and Silicon Valley, the initial diffusion of innovation is happening really rapidly because companies are open to it. You know, the mass majority of the US hasn't. In Europe, it's even further behind. But it's inevitable because you get the competitive pressures. So being able to go in and work with those companies is a massive transformative opportunity because it's inevitable.

2:09:29Emad Mostaque:Whereas building virtual AI startups in the competitive regulation, it varies from industry to industry, but it's just not as easy as the US. Like we have far more regulations. So I would say it's more about transforming companies in a way that's comfortable to them and charging big markups than necessarily building the verticalized AI startups where really the US is a much better place to go to complete globally. Ima, I have to ask you the question, is Europe waking up? Yeah, I think it is slowly. It's just there's so much institutional inertia here. So there was something EU 2031 as a warning call.

2:10:06Emad Mostaque:It's quite a nice kind of future thing like AI 2027, you know, but you see, we have an extra four years because we're a bit slower here. You know, instead of humans being disempowered by AI, Europe as a whole is disempowered by AI. Our regulation will be the great filter. You know, it won't stop anything. Ouch. So it's slowly waking up. That's got a lot of traction in the upper circles because this fable thing really was a massive shot across the bows of the decision makers. So I think there's a good chance the EU AI Act gets repealed. People are trying to figure out new mechanisms, and suddenly the fire has come from nothing.

2:10:45Emad Mostaque:Maybe because it's so blooming hot here as well.

2:10:47Dave Blundin:I hope that Argentina Milos thing also goes really, really well and creates a role model. And then some European countries say, like Ireland to me is a natural. Estonia needs to pick it up.

2:10:59Emad Mostaque:Yeah, we have actually introduced this new thing, EU Inc., whereby you can set up a company in under a day. and that's a big deal because like in germany for example six months across all of europe across all of europe yeah because like in germany can take up to six months to get your tax status and other things like that so little bit by little bit wow all right i'll take number eight uh this is from mark simonian 210 uh wouldn't it be easier to put data centers in oceans and the great lakes than flying them 93 000 miles up maybe that's a transcription error uh but mark we're not talking about 93 ,000 miles.

2:11:34We're talking about 500 miles up into low Earth orbit or on the moon, it's 240 ,000 miles up. So to answer that, you know, Microsoft already proved the ocean concept. I looked it up here. Project Natick ran subsea for two years and lowered failure rates compared to land-based servers with excellent cooling. Of course, the advantage of going into the ocean is you don't have to deal with the launch costs and there's plenty of cooling. and it's relatively nearby for repairs, and you can either have it within your jurisdiction or offshore sufficiently so it's outside the jurisdiction. But the reality is as launch costs are dropping, and we heard about this in the last pod with Will Marshall, that apparently, you know, Dave, you and I were talking to Elon saying he flipped the bit, and he did, what was it now, nine months ago when he started talking about it.

2:12:28No one was talking about orbital data centers, But apparently, Will Marshall and Eric Schmidt and folks at Google were talking about this as much as a decade ago. Ultimately, it's going to be both. We're going to have data centers on land, in the oceans, in space. There is as much demand as we can supply. So I don't think there's a limitation there right now. Alex, any more thoughts on ocean-based data centers? Yeah, I'm a big fan. Peter Thiel funded, I think it's Panthalassa that's focused on this. Recently, right? Yeah. So I think, look, my operational, one of my operational definitions for the singularity is every sci-fi trope happening everywhere all at once.

2:13:13And I think data centers on the ocean are the prototype for seasteads and ocean colonization. And so, yes, I think we get our data centers on the oceans. I don't think it's as scalable as orbital compute. But then again, if you want to, say, live on an ocean colony, which is, I think, something that we are going to get over the next 10 years, then you're certainly going to want your own local compute. And I could totally imagine if you've seen the Panthalassa video demos that that ends up becoming a nucleus for a next generation of ocean colonies.

2:13:48Dave Blundin:Hey, one thing to add to that, if the photonics takeoff that we were talking about earlier is on a one to two year timeline, which I think it likely will be, people will want to put the NVIDIA data centers in the ocean and not launch them because they're very heavy, you know, a couple tons for an NB72 with power. That's cheaper to deploy in the ocean while you're building the photonic thing, which is about, you know, a tenth, a hundredth, a thousandth of the mass per compute. And so that's a real possibility that we have both, but in that order. uh imad before we go to our outro song give us an update how is intelligent internet doing what are you up to these days uh give your fans a little bit of an imad uh preview uh yeah no it's

2:14:31Emad Mostaque:going well we're like i said releasing the harness that will allow anyone to uplift the models above mythos on monday um and we'll be working where do they go for that because by the time we release this it'll be up it'll be at um probably my my twitter at emostack i'll retweet it and yeah then And we've been working on sovereign AI, and I think we have a mechanism by everyone can own the AI and robots. And so we'll be announcing that soon along with a new book, After the Last Economy. So all going on. Amazing. And I know the secret stuff you have going on, which is incredible. Appreciate having you in the universe.

2:15:06And Alex and Dave, love you guys. A quick shout out to Salim, who's now on stage in Spain, or at least landing in Spain. Come back, Salim. We miss you. All right. This is an outro music by at Roy, the inventor called Moonshot Masters. Let's take a listen.

2:15:31Dave Blundin:From the shores of Ireland across the sea, we're watching dreams become reality. Moonshots lighting up the sky, showing us how far humanity can fly. Every story, every breakthrough, every spark Brings a little more light into the dark From AI to health, from space to the stars You're helping us see who we really are The future starts tonight With bold ideas taking flight Moonshots showing what's possible Making the impossible look logical And in heaven we'll build what's right For every child, every life Together we'll create a brighter way Oh, amazing. Love that. So everybody, please submit your music, your videos to us.

2:16:35We love them. And remember, this is the most extraordinary time ever to be alive. Our mission here, to give you an optimistic view of the future, I hope you understand what's going on day on day. I hope you enjoyed this extra emergency podcast. We stuck in on a Saturday morning. Imad, Dave, Alex, love you guys. Be well.

2:16:54Dave Blundin:I love you too. Have a good weekend. If you made it to the end of this episode, which you obviously did, I consider you a moonshot mate. Every week, my moonshot mates and I spend a lot of energy and time to really deliver you the news that matters. If you're a subscriber, thank you. If you're not a subscriber yet, please consider subscribing so you get the news as it comes out. I also want to invite you to join me on my weekly newsletter called MetaTrends. I have a research team. You may not know this, but we spend the entire week looking at the MetaTrends that are impacting your family, your company, your industry, your nation.

2:17:27And I put this into a two-minute read every week. If you'd like to get access to the MetaTrends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com slash MetaTrends. That's diamandis.com slash metatrends. Thank you again for joining us today. It's a blast for us to put this together every week.

2:18:06Emad Mostaque:like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+.