Solving the AI energy crisis (Interview)

31:23It's just, my God, okay. What are some examples? Like what? What do you mean? What decisions have they made? Water. Water. Yeah. The water, I mean. They've diverted water, right? Didn't they have like a lot of water diversion that like totally changed ecosystems? They mess with things to a degree where it was like playing God with, you know, landscape and geography to the point of this. It's done major, major change. That's one thing I'm aware of at least. Yeah. It was a human catastrophe. What happened with the LA fires recently? That should have not happened at all. if they didn't divert water the way they diverted for reasons that are just dumb, you know.

32:05And also, like California, I mean, Earth is 70 % water. But think about it. Why are we not using the water? Well, it's salt water. Well, how do you use salt water? You can desalinate. Well, what does it take to desalinate? More energy. About 8 to 12 watts of energy per gallon to desalinate, on average, to reverse our sources. Well, don't we have excess energy? We do have excess energy that produces during the day. Why are we not building desalination plants? Question mark. Oh, there was a proposal, but environmental concerns that desalination will produce too much salt. We don't know where to store the salt.

32:41How about digging a hole or throwing in and putting the salt there? Or how about export the salt out to throw it back in the sea? That will destroy the reef. Okay, sorry. Bad idea. But there's so much, if you go down like four levels deep and you ask questions, it's just almost embroiled in someone doesn't like because they think it's going to be bad for environment. So, you know, well, is dying and fires okay for the environment? I mean, even the water there, you got the challenges in California with that. And I don't know, I know you're in Austin like I am. And then if you're here in Texas or at least close to Austin, you know what happened in Hill Country with this major flood that just happened.

33:28Like the whole world's aware of it now. I mean, in moments like overnight, we have like I'll come close to crying. Like we have friends who died in this flood, really close friends whose kids are not coming back. And it's a shame because you got I don't know how much of this is about water diversion or being stupid or making poor political decisions with different choices you have to make. But these are things that don't have to happen. Like that water of mine was just insane. It was a major flash flood. Was it because of water diversion or things over time? I don't know. But what I can tell you, and you know this, is that we are constantly, I don't know how much in Austin you are, but over here in Dripping Springs, like west of Austin, we're constantly in a state of drought up until this flood, basically.

34:11It reinvigorated the aquifers. Like it's not back to normal, but Lake Travis is actually a lake again. it's not very little water and a few islands and boats in the land out there like it was laughably not a lake you know yeah and now it's a lake again so i don't know how this plays into it but that's a pretty big deal to yeah the power i haven't looked into the actual like flash floods and the reason there's a few speculations out there but it's it's very sad what happened i mean we lost someone from our neighborhood as well. A little girl, eight years old at a, at a camp. It was so sad because they were little girls camp and I have a little daughter.

34:52And it's just like, it hit me. I live in West Lake right now. So it's, it's, we don't have. Then you know, then in West Lake, you know how close we are to, to the, the water challenges here. I mean, so you mentioned water challenges in California, but they're also happening here. I mean, even our own expansion is. We can, we can claim that Texas doesn't have too much ocean in XF Houston. I mean, so you can make a claim that, well, we don't, I mean, our sources of water is just rainwater capture. That's what I'm doing in my home, right? It's true, yeah. But California has an entire coast, so it's like the dumbest problem.

35:24Yeah, I do know that. And most of the population lives in the coast, you know, in California. So you have most of the energy production, you know, happening at the coast. And we just, instead of burning energy, why don't we just desalinate water? That's what Israel does. I mean, that's what Middle East, the whole, I mean, they've been building oasis in the in Saudi Arabia, sorry, excuse my French, but it just makes me so mad looking at the things people could do with energy, like in the desert versus California is one of the most fertile places on planet Earth and most beautiful places, right?

35:58So either way, there are a lot of problems, I think, with enough motivation can be solved. I hope California state will take energy more seriously. And one of the worst things they did was to ban all fossil vehicles from 2030 without thinking about how they're going to upgrade the grid, along with the AI challenge now, with the EV challenges is catching up. So states that have EV mandates in terms of production mandates are going to suffer the most with AI. And I think it's just going to get worse and worse, the energy problem. So I read a couple of weeks ago about micro-reactors. is this something on your radar micro reactors oh yeah i'm interested in a bunch so this seems like you know okay it doesn't seem like there's one big solution to all this problems it seems like perhaps there's this litany of smaller solutions that all work together even your description of the companies trying to do swarming trying to do this other stuff what if we could decentralize and incentivize your average joe or your small business that has some gpus to make them available to the network so that you can use them and draw energy when it's not a peak time, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

37:12Like all these things together might like approximate a solution. And I'm curious if micro reactors or there's also small nuclear reactors, which I think are bigger than micro reactors. I'm not an expert here, Greg. These things might be additionally like onsite. Like we got a new plant, we got a new reactor for that plant and maybe they're small enough. These are like semi truck size, I believe. to actually solve a little slice of the problem. Yeah, I mean, I'm very pro next generation energy generators, right? So I've looked into quite a few, I've invested in quite a few. I wouldn't consider myself an expert.

37:47I mean, I don't know how nuclear physics is my subject expertise, but I've looked at it from a progress standpoint. Progress has been extremely slow on these things. There are very few companies, there's new scale, there's GE, there's Westington, I believe. There are a bunch of them. The progress has been extremely slow. There's enormous regulation for nuclear. I mean, right now, so there's something called interconnect network in America, right? So interconnect network is the network maintained by Department of Energy. Whenever there's a new energy source, you have to register that with the interconnect and get an interconnect approval.

38:29It doesn't matter if you're using that energy locally or whatnot. So the interconnect queues for nuclear is about 10 years. Now you can deregulate, but nobody wants to deregulate nuclear. You know, so even though the first nuclear reactor built in America took about 14 days, the last one took about 14 years. Most of them is just being regulated because it's very dangerous, very challenging. It seems like the sentiment around nuclear, now I'm in the Midwest, so maybe I have that color of sentiment versus elsewhere in the country. It seems like the sentiment towards nuclear is changing because I definitely grew up in the 90s and early aughts where it was like nuclear, bad, scary, big mushroom cloud in the sky.

39:20And that's definitely not what your average Joe and Jane think today about nuclear. So you think maybe the, what do they say? Politics is a downstream of culture. You think that some of that stuff would start to move the needle. Absolutely. I mean, nuclear is a lot safer now. I mean, nuclear is my favorite source of energy. It's very clean. It's very safe. We figured out a lot of uses, even with the nuclear waste disposal. I invested in another company that does isotope fuels. But the challenge of nuclear is it's great in every way. I mean, if we can solve the regulation problem and if we can solve the public perception problem, I think we have a winner there.

39:57But the fuel enrichment is very, very hard. It's very hard to get fuel. Africa has parts of the world that has fuel, but all that fuel is controlled by China. So China has done a phenomenal job over the last 20 years in controlling rare earth minerals, including nuclear fuel. They control the entire supply chain. They bought companies that do this. They bought the mines. They bought the ports in Africa. They bought the whole nine yards for nuclear because U.S. and the West fumbled on nuclear. The nuclear producers, the supply chain, went towards the buyer, which is China. So there's a geopolitical, I mean, look at Trump talking about rare earth minerals, talking about making deals with or liberating Greenland or deals with Ukraine.

40:44All that mostly is for rare earth minerals, right? So including nuclear. Even if you have a nuclear reactor, getting fuel is next to impossible in America. We don't have enrichment facilities in America no more. We used to. So we had to rebuild the nuclear capabilities, like energy capabilities. So I don't know how long that's going to take. But with the latest advancements, we have isotope reactors, which one reactor is based on uranium-233, not U-235. So it's basically thorium. So thorium is a side product of waste, a nuclear waste, that has a half-life of 400 years. It's still a very, very good source of energy.

41:31So if you can put them in a battery, a company I know is doing that, you can effectively create nuclear batteries that will last 400 years that can be placed anywhere in the world without worrying about waste. So there's all kinds of new things that are coming up in the nuclear space. Fortunately, there's more investment from DOE that's going into nuclear space now, with this current administration has been very pro-nuclear as well. So there could be good news in the next four years, depending on how the market goes. I've seen an increased amount of investment. And I know my friends are investing quite a bit in energy, SoftBank alone.

42:09I mean, we had SoftBank, Javier, who's one of the key persons in the Stargate program at Akash Accelerator Conference. in new york and he had a lot to say about nuclear and nuclear related uh energy sources so all in all i'm very pro-nuclear but i'm not very bullish on the regulatory landscape being to move fast enough to address the need and right to avoid the impending doom right the the crisis which will hit here soon very quickly so two years you said a year two years 2028 that's what the do talks about 2028 is when 26 is when we'll start seeing we got to make choices but 28 you're going to see bigger crisis 2030 i think is going to be even hard i'm more hopeful on like the offshore wind wind is the cheapest form of energy hands down right uh if you can get your wind proper wind i mean depends on how windy an area right now we look at desmoines And Iowa, which hosts the largest wind-based data center, which is owned by Google, has about 500 megawatts.

43:18It's almost half a nuclear reactor, all from wind. And that's a marvel. And we don't know whether we can do that again. We have that location good enough to be able to replicate what Google did in Iowa. How many mills does that require? I haven't looked into it, but it's quite a lot. I mean, 500 megawatts is a lot, right? So offshore wind is very promising, actually. So there's a lot of wind on the ocean. If we can tap into it, it's very challenging. I don't think we're going to see an offshore windmill come alive at least by 2030. So there's a lot of promise, right? There's quite a lot of using waves as energy form as well because the ocean waves are very, very good in terms of capturing energy.

44:06all kinds of cool things people are working on right so i'm hopeful that we may be able to find a solution but i'm not hopeful that we'll do that fast enough in the meantime i think decentralized ai is the only way i mean i don't see i mean i've looked at every possibility right look at every possibility lay it out and and and there is no magic solution to get more energy in america in the next four years like well let's say that you decentralized i'm not saying you greg but you the royal you people working on decentralization get that working don't you think there's still going to be massive centralized players that just say nah we're just going to keep buying up as much energy as we can and rolling blackout you know citizens be damned i don't know yeah there will be i mean there will be there will be a lot of players i'll go after there There will be a lot of protests, energy protests that are going to be like after this.

45:03I think there's going to be a political when people start getting sick and dying, like in Alabama, Texas. I'm really concerned about the amount of we were talking about the 4.5 gigawatts. Facility will produce as much exhaust equivalent to exhaust coming from two million cars in one place, in one place. crazy idea okay okay this is stupid it won't work but stupid uh reptilian brain says this says can't we just build this massive flex pipe i don't know that goes up into space and exhausts it all into space because space is just forever i mean it's a dumb question but is Is there possibly like to exhaust out of the atmosphere?

45:53Well, you can.

45:57There's easier solutions you can do carbon scrubbing. Like you can recapture scrub. I mean, there are possible solutions, right? I don't know. That's a dumb idea for sure. Okay. Science fiction. I mean, it's possible and it's not. I mean, think the first principles, right? Like there's something Elon would think, right? Like I've removed all the, what do you call, limitations and like think as big as possible. Carbon recapture could be a solution. I don't know how effective and how it would work at 4.5 gigawatt scale, but there's a lot of carbon. I don't even know the carbon footprint of producing the carbon capture devices.

46:36But no one is talking about them. No one is even doing it because I would imagine the cost is so prohibitively expensive to do these things that is going to outweigh the$500 billion that you have for building your data centers. right well if you spent one billion on the pipe one billion is nothing i'm saying yeah like one billion used to be a lot of comparative i mean it used to be if you spent one billion on this pipe this tidally locked aircraft that orbits earth that keeps the thing connected i don't know somebody can do that exhaust it out there yeah but i think it's going to be a real problem i don't think it's going to be a solution by the time they're done finishing they're done building it and when people get two million especially they're building that thing in two weeks or three weeks you know, however long they take to build one of these things.

47:19Two million worth cars exhaust in Albany, Texas, is not going to make any friends in the area. It's already destroyed. And think about the water, water for cooling. That big of a facility needs a whole lot of water because you need to dump it somewhere. Where are they dumping their water? Exactly. We don't know. So I saw, I mean, I tweeted out recently talking about this, this one community in Texas, I think is in Albany. they're talking about how their water their drinking is so toxic now it's getting bad. It's getting really bad to a point where you'll start experiencing these things you know, every day, right?

47:53They should train these things in Antarctica, you know no one's living there and you don't have to cool because it's already cool. Well, you have a bandwidth problem in Antarctica, right? So you can't get latency. Solve the bandwidth problem it's just one pipe, you know at least it has to go out of the atmosphere I'm very, very bullish on the satellites I have a Starlink here home that i use as my backup internet it gives me about 500 megabytes which is not bad but put more satellites more more density of satellites that covers pretty much the entire earth then we have good enough energy a good enough uh what do you call uh bandwidth to source from antarctica that could be a problem could be a solution but i don't know it's looking bad the unintended consequences of having so many satellites in the sky that we have a there's another problem new ozone layer around us we saw wally right we saw when uh when the camera zoomed into the earth on the movie wally yeah yeah the sky was lit with satellites and you're spending space junk at that point right we're going there and these are low earth orbit leo leo satellites right they're not in the geostationary orbit so um so you need a lot of them very close because for the latency right if you have you do have geostationary internet super expensive i mean they're used for antarctica basically.

49:07Antarctica doesn't have LEO coverage. So you can't put a Starlink in Antarctica. It doesn't work. You have to put another company I forgot. They do geostation much, much higher. So you can get some internet, but you get some internet in Antarctica. So you know, possible, but it's just a lot of this stuff is just very, very complicated. Yeah. So if you add it up back to the decentralization concept, if you took all of the wasted energy, I'm thinking mostly of this these solar panels in california during the daytime situation and you just like extrapolate that around the world and say how much energy do we have capture that goes unused and you add all that up and you put gpus you plug gpus right into those suckers and you hook them up to the grid the electrical grid and the internet grid and allow people to lease them or rent them or whatever does that solve the problem i mean do we get there i mean we i know for sure we produce a lot more energy in the u.s than we consume uh during the day i know for sure in solar solar wind a whole lot of things we have a lot of sources in the u.s i mean there's been enormous investment that went into renewables over the last few years over the last 20 years um that is a phenomenal solution.

50:28That's what we're going towards, right? So why burn energy, but instead use that energy to train AI where it's windy in Kansas, move the AI workload there. When it's sunny in California, move the AI workload. The AI workload is to be elastic and has to be asynchronous. It has to be these things. So that's why I'm particularly excited about the progress with distributed training, because now we can have elastic workloads that can move where there's energy aware schedulers. So Akash, we're developing one of those. I'm sorry, I forgot to tell you what we're doing here at Akash. We are developing an energy aware schedulers that will pick the lowest energy.

51:09So we'll start advertising the cost per energy now. There are lots of data centers in US that can give you one cent. I mean, economics wise, right? Like if you're - Yeah, give me the cheapest thing I can get. Right, it's the cheapest thing. It's actually beneficial, not only for the environment, but for your pocket. So that's where capital is coming to play. Wind will give you one cent per kilowatt hour, which is the cheapest possible energy you can get. Solar, depending on the setup, right? Depending on the battery cost and a whole lot of things. Solar, you can get very, very cheap. And if you can arbitrage, you can get for like almost zero.

51:43LNG, the gas, natural gas will give you 10 cents a kilowatt hour, 10 times more than what you would pay for wind. Diesel will give you 32 cents a kilowatt hour. It's the most expensive option. And that's used diesel as a backup generator. The grid, depending on where you are in California, I believe is 20 cents a kilowatt hour. The grid, right? If you're just plugging from the grid, which is diverse sources. Texas is significantly cheaper. I think it's like 10 cents or below a kilowatt hour. So just from pure economic standpoint, I mean, it's the cheapest thing is to go where the energy is cheap.

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54:48I like the idea of the workload moving, where the energy is prominent at the time it's prominent, versus co-locating and destroying, because that seems just terribly bad. Using natural structures, and obviously these are, the sun, thankfully in our lifetime, is not going to go anywhere. unless there's astrophage, which is science fiction from the book Hail Mary that's coming out as a movie soon. It's going to be amazing. I love that book. Astrophage essentially ate the sun and we had to combat it when that happens. Yes. It's a terrible thing. But so in our lifetime and barring the science fiction from Andy Weir, we don't have to deal with astrophage.

55:25So the sun is going to be there, meaning that it's producing energy constantly and it's the biggest source of energy. So leverage that thing. It's not going to go anywhere. And it's natural. If I remember correctly, I think every, I mean, the sun produces the energy that hits earth is about 177 terawatts of capacity just from sun. Every, I mean, that's a current like capacity. US entire grid is about 1.9 terawatts. So we are like literally over hundreds of times more energy that we produce from sun. I think it could be more, I could be wrong. The point is, there is this civilization scale, so type 1, type 2, type 3, by Kardashev levels, we call them.

56:07I don't know if you're aware of this, but there's a Soviet astrophysicist from the 60s who defined what civilizations in terms of advancements they are compared to extraterrestrials and whatnot. So Kardashev level 1 civilization, or type 1 civilization, is a civilization that figured out how to capture all sources of energy on the home planet. like from planets. So anything that hits the earth, we should be able to capture. We're currently at 0.7 level. So we're not one yet. So to reach one, that means we are an advanced species. We need to capture all the energy that we got and figure out how to use it.

56:47Because even though we capture now, we don't know how to use it. But with AI, we can know how to use energy. Level two, Kardashav level two, is when we get Dyson spheres, right? Dyson sphere is like when the civilization expands from its home planet and captures all the energy from its home solar system. There's always a sun. So the best way to do that is to build a sphere around the sun and capture the energy. So that's why I don't know how much deep into extraterrestrial life. Only through science fiction, really. Dyson Sphere. Dennis C. Taylor, he's been on this podcast. He talked about Dyson Sphere in his We Are Legion, We Are Bob.

57:24The Bobaverse series covers the whole entire there's a book four I believe I don't know anyways they talk about it there pretty plausibly when it comes to the science like he's a software developer he's grounded in science I think while it's science fiction it may give you some you know insight to a Dyson sphere yeah so there was some some study I mean astronomers they found a star nearing the light years away from Earth that looked like it was there was strobes around the star so there was some indication this could be a type 2 civilization no way so the star was pulsating it was not a dying star so only time a star pulsates is when you have light being distracted so they say it's a dyson sphere anyway so type 2 is the entire solar system type 3 is a civilization that can leverage or harness all the energy for its home galaxy so we are like type 0.7 so i mean in my lifetime i like to see us to go towards a type one type one at least uh that that would be my dream and that's something i want to work towards i i dig that well i mean the dyson sphere things would be gosh i could i cannot imagine that in my lifetime like my kids kids kids will probably do that for now we're trying to harness the existing energy we can capture through solar do you feel like i know you just said that's the most cheapest way is there's a lot of pushback to nuclear is there any positive ground being made towards like adopting nuclear here in the u.s is it oh yeah so if you look at if you look at the pushback to nuclear it's on safety and if you look at all the safety all the incidents that happened over the last since the beginning of nuclear almost not a hundred percent of those issues were due to negligence by the staff staff forgot to check something or put something because they, you know, whatever, right?

59:23It was all negligence. And there are very few incidents that were caused due to natural disasters. And Fukushima was the only one that we can point to that was, you know, that melted because of a tsunami, right? Historically, there hasn't been any natural disasters leading to nuclear meltdowns. In Fukushima, nobody died. Zero deaths, zero fatalities. And you can actually drink water now from Fukushima. It's pretty safe, right? So from a safety standpoint with AI now, and we have a lot of other automated systems that are phenomenally good, you can make a case saying that if you remove the human out of the equation to maintain a nuclear facility, safety levels are significantly higher.

1:00:06Right now, nuclear, for example, nuclear like Gen 3, we currently have Gen 2, right? So Gen 3s are the new ones that are coming out. Their cost per kilowatt is significantly higher than Gen 2 because there's so much of investment or so much of capital that needs to go towards safety protocols. The recovery of capital is significantly longer for Gen 3. So if you put Gen 3 reactors, you're not going to see cheaper energy for a while on these reactors, right? I mean, I remember doing the math, I think it was at least 50 % higher than Gen 2s, because most of the Gen 2s are actually now paid off. So, you know, nuclear is very, very good, but you had to make a case on safety is one case and economics is the second case.

1:00:57Like, why would someone choose nuclear over, let's say, wind, unless there's no option? Or nuclear is more expensive than LNG right now, right? Like from the Gen 3 at least. So you had to make a case. Like why would someone choose nuclear over drill baby drill, right? Like it's kind of sad. Yeah. So essentially it sounds like the most plausible best solution long term for all angles we've thought through really is solar or capturing natural energy sources, water, wind, primarily solar. and then finding a way to decentralize and allow the workload to move elastically throughout the world to train to inference to whatever to handle this this push that's the best where you're at at least is that what your argument is this is the best that is that is my argument that is my argument and we're not waiting for people we are executing on the strategy I've testified before Congress about a potential solution, and also we announced this program called Star Cluster Program at Akash Accelerate.

1:02:13The Star Cluster Program is an effort by Overclock Labs, a company behind Akash Network, to prove out a distributed infrastructure can train AI with the least amount of loss, right? And we're executing on it. We're going to be deploying, we're partnering with a few telecoms. I don't want to name anyone out, but we have access to energy across America. We have access to about 2 million homes through our partners that we can go into potentially. I mean, we are currently selecting ideal houses with cheap solar, with solar and bandwidth are two big variables. And also, when you go into a home, you quite don't have the same level of energy.

1:02:59And there's another policy side of things. It's very, very, very frustrating. Like U.S. homes on average have 15 amps at 120 volts, right? That's your U.S. standard. That's a scam. Like I don't understand why we have such low energy. It was, you know, I looked into it. I think it was Edison, GE. They had a lot of things to do with the standard. Like why? Because think about, right? Like 120 volts or 15 amps gives you 1 ,800 watts. 1800 watts is you can't even power i mean if you power a heater a home heater it's done that's 1800 watts right there right you can put two 5090s, which is the most powerful GPU from NVIDIA, or maybe you can put three 4090s max in a home because of the limitation.

1:03:52If you were to go higher, it'll break all the residential limits per se about how much energy. So you don't get, you'd upgrade to a commercial facility if you put over uh 1200 watts i mean 800 watts and you lose all kinds of discounts and kinds of regulatory you know benefits that you have as a home so you know the average is really there though right like it's you're talking about the grid on the inside of the home if i understand correctly so you can have up to 100 to 200 amps of service coming to the residence but we're talking about i think is the the grid within right like we're operating on 15 amp circuit breakers and maybe even 20 amp if you paid for the upgrade is that what you mean by that yeah so what i meant is the interconnect speed or interconnect like uh limits when you have even if you're making solar producing solar locally you still have to settle back to the grid by law right so you still have to connect to the grid so when you connect to the grid you got to say how much energy you're using and that will break or make your your your discounts it's complicated when you have to deal with energy companies and there's a lot of like legal implications uh you know safety implications and all kinds of things when you have a home it's different when you have a commercial facility it's possible to go higher you just need don't you don't get the same benefits it's not common yeah like one in ten homes will do that now but it may become a state-of-the-art future with homes being part of the grid?

1:05:24My home, a new home in Texas, is 100 kilowatts, right? No doubt. Like, I'm going. I'm not going after residential discounts, right? I don't care because I'm going to produce so much energy and I'm going to have a much bigger cluster. But an average home in the U.S., if I were to come to your house and be like, hey, I want to put, like, a GPU, it cannot exceed over 1 ,800 watts. You know, if I do, you're going to make some investments. So much investments in your home, the economics won't even work out for you. like you it doesn't make sense yeah my home can handle it we we made those investments we kind of planned ahead a little bit but uh maybe not as aggressively probably should have we did plan ahead but not that much so you're trying to go into homes i mean that's what you're saying right like your goal is to put gpus in people's homes through their telecom relationship or like that's how you're going to actually reach that's one way to do that yeah we have several ways but telecoms are the best way because sure sure that's just one way you're going about it and you're going to connect those up to your network yeah right a cache network and they're going to become resources available so now consider me as your potential homeowner and you're pitching me on the idea of putting a gpu in my house well why you get the package that we're going after is you get free bandwidth you get free energy i get free bandwidth so you're providing my internet connection.

1:06:46Yeah. And my bandwidth is now free and I get free energy. Yeah. We'll put solar in your home. We'll put a battery in your home. You don't have to pay a thing. We will charge a battery during the day. We'll sell it back to the grid. When we make the most money, we'll use excess energy to produce or we'll produce enough energy to power the GPU. So you get free energy, you get free bandwidth, maybe some money on top of it. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And how many GPUs can you put in my house? You said one or two? Depending on the GPU. So if you were to go with a 5090, which most likely will, which is the latest consumer GPU from NVIDIA, we can put two GPUs in a home.

1:07:27Okay. So to fulfill XAI's desires, you only need 25 million homes to get that done, right? Two GPUs per house. They're going to do 50 million GPUs. We have access to 22 million homes right now through our partners. In the U.S. So that's it. You hit the number. You got to sell all of them. And roll them out. Not just sell them, but actually deploy. That's a big job. I think the way we live may change. Don't you think? I'm just thinking of like as an N of one, like as a person who owns a house, like do I want that? Of course I want free internet and free energy. So yes. Do I want a GPU running in my house?

1:08:07They're pretty loud. Is that a concern? Yeah. So we have all that worked out. So the 40, 50, 90s liquor cold will give you about 30 decibels. It's not that crazy loud, you know. Put it in the attic or something. You can put it in your office, 30 or less. I mean, you're trying to get it to 15 decibels, right? Like my child, when she cries, is about 90 decibels. Like a vacuum cleaner at max produces 60 decibels, right, of sound. So 30 is, I don't know. i think it's not quiet but it's it's it's definitely uh not not too loud right we're trying to get it to concern i mean if you don't consider that and you say sure come on in and do it and then they do it and you're like i didn't think about how loud this was going to be yeah you're going to be calling them back say yeah pull this thing out of my house yeah yeah so we get all those consideration as well so we're trying to get it to as quiet as possible yeah getting it quiet is very challenging yeah totally because the fans are you know like cooling is a big challenge right like so you need fans going off right only way to avoid fans is through liquid cooling and liquid means you need the coolant also not cheap so now you experimented with uh the like i've explored this because we do audio and i've explored really crazy ways to make my room more better like my previous house had a really issue my ac unit was like right outside my office and every time it turned on i would just hear the hum of it you know i just hear it it was terrible so i was thinking about ways to isolate the sound from out to in and there's a lot of sound isolate like if you can put it in a sound isolation chamber essentially designed to minimize out sound but still have exhaust could that solve it did you explore that you can solve a lot of things but the typical home will not have a sound optimized setup you are an audiophile no but if you deliver a solution that's already in that sort of it's it's engineered in the package like a half like a mini rack that's engineered to be yeah it has to be self-contained unit right that's beautiful for a home you can it has to look pretty right it has to it's a consumer device and has to incorporate everything you know single single board so it's not the easiest thing to design but we're on it so we have a home uh you know aspiration uh i would call it aspiration because we haven't announced a home product yet We're still in design.

1:10:27But we are going more aggressively with the data center products first. One of the cool things we discovered was we have access to telco edges, edge networks, because telcos have data centers pretty much in every urban area. Even in small towns, you have data centers for telcos. That's how Comcast and all these guys deliver the internet, right? So there's quite a lot of connected energy. A lot of them are coming from renewables. So these guys have done quite a bit, which is very fascinating. they have large networks built out all over the west so we'll probably tap into that in the early days in the first phase in the next couple months actually to prove out that we can do distributed and then optimize and optimize come to the consumer model a consumer is going to take at least a year for us to put I'm going to have a box right here I can't quite move the camera but a box right here is like you can't hear nothing right it's pretty good it's running right now it's running not at max but at max you probably will yeah it does it's not running anything heavy but when those gpus go and the fans start kicking in when the heat goes up that's uh that'd be a problem well for all this to be feasible those two things have to come together first right the ability to train distributed in a way that's competitive right now it's not quite competitive yet it's getting there we don't have so in order for that for the home solution to work you need distributed training which I think is solved for the most part at least nobody has put a token on it yet to get in there why I say a token is because the business model for distributed training almost of all the models I've looked at the common thing they have is you contribute compute you get some representation of that contribution in form of a token and that token will guarantee you future revenues from the model from inference like for example you say say you train chat gpt right you're you're part of chat gpt training your machine is and if i as a user of chat gpt pay 200 a month you get a cut in that in that revenue i see so it's not you're not getting cash back out you're not getting oh it's cash no it's future cash right right yeah if I were to sell you my internet or my energy you'd give me ten dollars and I would give you some energy I mean there are ways to give you instant liquidity and all that good stuff but but just to give you an idea it's done that though we're getting there we're getting there so Akash is another way to look at right so forget for example a 50 90 on Akash will get you 92 cents an hour like right now right provided if it works for me home and there's still tech, we got to, there's work that needs to happen.

1:13:16Right. And like, and Akash or some company on top of Akash will do the training and say I am betting on, say, Les Jensen, for example. I think Jensen is, or Pluralis, Pluralis is a company that I have visibility into and I'm like, I know for sure that this token is going to be worth some money because, you know, they're trading this amazing model and there's demand for the model. Again, you get into that nuances. I will take the risk and I'll be like, hey, you home computer, give me your energy for cheap or computer for cheap. I will, you know, do a pass-through training to you. I'll keep the token from Provalis.

1:13:54I'll take the risk and, you know, and I win. I benefit. When that becomes more mature, maybe consumers can take all the risks themselves. But there's always going to be opportunity players like me that's going to take advantage. I mean, I think there's enormous money to be made in the next one year to two years in the decentralized space. If you look into these protocols deep enough, you'll understand. And the best part is there's zero hype on these protocols. And, you know, and I think it's an amazing time to, and they're getting so much like traction too. Like Jensen alone is right now training about 10 ,000 models concurrently.

1:14:3310 ,000 models. Name a single AI lab that can do that. so like so people are like have no idea how these things work which is great no idea what the progress is maybe made right now uh you know because again to use jensen is not the easiest thing you need to understand yeah so jensen is a company is a network is a both jensen is a decentralized uh machine learning training network uh it's uh it's founded by a bunch of researchers out of Oxford funded by Anderson Horowitz. What's the URL for that by any chance? You know that? G-E-N-S-Y-N, Jensen. So it's a handful of these decentralized compute networks that are currently being adopted by model training organizations.

1:15:22And basically they're all flying under the radar because all of the focus is on SAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, demined. Yeah. And Meta and a whole lot of other players now. Every company, Oracle, and every company. Yeah. What was that contract that OpenAI just signed with Oracle for like$30 billion or something like that? Do you see that? That's nothing. I mean, they're working with the data center in Texas. That's the same thing, right? That's the same$500 million they promised, right? So they promised $500 billion. Sorry,$500 billion? My gosh. Oops. Not millions. Softback money. That's a big discount.

1:16:03$500 billion was promised. They're$100 billion in, I believe, and with plans to do more once this facility is there, right? Funded by SoftBank. SoftBank is being very aggressive in the data center space. They're like... Well,$30 billion a year. That's the one I just read yesterday. A year, maybe. OpenAI to Oracle,$30 billion a year. This is in addition to or next to the Stargate project. It's like a different thing that they just announced. Anyways, just it's hard to pay attention to anything when that kind of stuff's flying at your face every day. And that's where we are. We are like under the radar, which I really like.

1:16:34I love this time because I think we're like about to blow up very soon in this decentralized AI space. People that know, know kind of thing. And I'm getting as much exposure as possible personally as well as corporate wise to this feature, right? So I want to do small experiments in the home very soon. My home will be the first home. But I think we're going to have a few homes by the next six months. using the Star Cluster program. Star Cluster, is that how you call it? Mm-hmm. Fascinating stuff. Fascinating stuff. Seems like the Bitcoin miners have been onto this stuff for a while, haven't they?

1:17:13I mean... They're all jumping ship now. Are they switching over? A lot of them. I mean, like these guys, I mean, Corby was, right? Corby was a Bitcoin miner. Yeah. Corby, yeah. We met Corby, Adam. We sure did, yeah. We didn't know who they were. This was last year at KubeCon. And we just walked up to them and we're at their booth. They were kind of off to the side by the food, So we were over there talking to them and we're trying to tell them they should advertise on our podcast. He's like, we don't need advertising. I was like, what are you talking about? He's like, we have so much business.

1:17:40We can't even keep up with it. I'm like, who are you guys? What are you doing? Yes. A bunch of GPUs. We're just leasing them out. We can't keep up. I'm like, interesting. And then the next thing I knew, they're IPOing. So that was crazy. Chlor Weave used to be a provider in Akash. They were, the CEO was in a Slack DMing, you know, selling his business. this was in 2018, 2019, 2020 until, and just 21, 22, I mean, not 22, 23 is when they started. My God, taking off like crazy. I almost thought it was a scam because I mean, all the people really well, but then like, I mean, the scam was, they were, or at least like, what seemed to be a scam was they were buying GPUs.

1:18:22They got a sweet deal from Nvidia. They They were buying GPUs left and right. These are called the Neo Clouds, right? So they're hyperscalers, which are Amazon, Google, Microsofts, the world. And the Neo Clouds are these new companies that maybe around for a little bit or just popped out in the last few years are much smaller facilities with maybe like 10 megawatts to maybe, you know, under 50 megawatt access to energy. They can build data centers and understand finance. So a lot of them, like Corby, what they did was they bought compute from NVIDIA, used that compute as a collateral to get more debt, used that debt to buy more compute, and so on and so on.

1:19:05So they over-leveraged or leveraged very well, betting on the fact there's going to be demand for compute. If that didn't happen, they would have an incredible downfall. So they did take risk quite a bit in terms of leverage, and they levered up all the way to billions of dollars. They were right about the demand. They were right about the demand in one year. So it seemed like these guys were unstoppable and they were selling like, I think I remember they were selling secondaries for like$12 billion valuations for like all the employees. So employees were getting out to the IPO. So all these things look like a scam, but ultimately I don't think it was a scam.

1:19:46It was actually kind of crazy. And it's very similar to what MicroStrategy does, similar to what New York real estate developers do, leverage, leverage, leverage, you know. So it's not a bad thing if the demand goes up. Right. If the prediction goes the right way. The bottom falls out, you crash pretty hard. Especially if you're, in the case of MicroStrategy with Bitcoin, it's like they themselves are also driving the demand. Whereas with CoreWeave, I guess they, were they kind of also driving demand? it seems like they weren't yeah there's a difference there the demand is external microstrategy is the only one driving demand but they certainly are driving some of it and so the big player i mean yeah yeah so i i can oh bitcoin has real demand but ai definitely ai chips and energy have real demand is very very clear now i mean i would even like i'm i spend a lot more time now on air and energy and below that sort of like area and it's a very small area and there's a lot of stuff happening in texas because texas is the energy capital of the world especially houston um so i'm spending time in like uh and a lot of vcs uh that used to be crypto are also spending time on this basement melton demorse is a good friend of mine she does uh quite a lot of energy now she's doing exclusive energy now what's her name melton demorse uh she was a co-founder of with grayscale with uh with barry with dcg she was either the founding member or co-founder.

1:21:15I don't remember, but the early person there, Meltem Demors now does CoinShares thing, and she started a new company called Crucible, ABC. So they are very, very good in terms of, I mean, she's very active in the space, looking at energy, looking at below data center sort of like stuff. I was also pretty fascinated with the amount of disruption that's happening in the space and not too many people are looking at. The new companies that are focusing on data center management software, which nobody touched for the last 40 years. The data centers were not the thing. It was a write-off. Right, they were boring.

1:21:49Boring, it was real estate businesses. They're write-offs. They're depreciation write-offs for the most part because that's what real estate is. And now, oh my God, if you have a data center, you're the hottest kid on the block. Everybody wants to talk to you. We work with... So we obviously do site hunting for data centers. We look at everything possible. We had to put our workloads. And the demand is so high. There's all these middlemen that let you get to data centers. There's a whole ecosystem around data center world. And they're just talking to these folks. The business is so crazy for these guys.

1:22:29And even people that build out the power infrastructure, we know a few companies, because once you put anything above a megawatt, you need a transformer, you need a whole lot of energy infrastructure, right? The companies are specialized in building energy infrastructure for AI, for data centers, and you cannot even get on a call with them these days. They're so hard to get by other companies. So it's a very, very profitable space. And I think, I mean, people need to look at it a little bit more if you really want exposure to the real AI, which is the energy underneath, and the infrastructure and the picks and shovels, you know, like the energy designers, the consultants, the, the, and there, there are very few electricians in America.

1:23:15There's a crisis for electricians. We don't know that. Like there's a lot of sociology majors, uh, not too many electricians. So sure. So being electrician now is, is very, very profitable. Yeah. It's hard to get one to even to call you back. I know personally. So if we go back to foundational things and first principles thinking, like what could change foundationally that would somehow invert this demand curve? Like what black swan events? Are there changes to technology where all of a sudden it's like, well, data centers are not the hot kid on the block anymore. Like, are there, have you looked at all that?

1:23:51Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think fundamentally it has to be technology. It has to be a breakthrough of distributed trading. It's a major area of research. People thought distributed training was impossible a few years ago. Now you look at ICML, the conference, we had six papers that got approved in ICML. And getting a paper approved in ICML is a big feat. It is something people work towards their entire postdoc. They work on these papers for like 10 years to get published. So it's a big deal to get a paper published and presented at ICML. Pluralis, Jensen, Bagel, all these companies presented. And that is an indication for me that this, and peer review, right?

1:24:38It's a very, very amazing milestone, I would call, for distributed training. And that's going to be a fundamentally different driver. But data centers are not going to go away. I mean, I don't think, you can't distribute everything. Well, what if, for instance, what if a plateau in advancement? Like, what if Grok5 isn't any better than Grok4, despite them putting out 500 million or just astronomical compute? Like, what if we just stop getting better? Would that then come to the man bubble? There's no limit to how better we can get. I mean, ASI, AGI, there are a lot of breakthroughs we still need to achieve.

1:25:18We're like very, very early with the AI, right? There's interesting stuff. Okay, there's another sort of like architectural pattern that is emerging in AI called mixture of experts. A mixture of experts is instead of having one gigantic large model, how about having a lot of small models that can work together? Like how humans work. We don't have an expert in everything. We have experts in areas and we all work together as a team to achieve a task, right? So there is that improvement that's happening or rather it's taking more center stage. if you look at the new chat GPT agent mode in your chat GPT, it's not using the biggest model.

1:25:56It's actually using smaller models to do agent work. CROC4 agent mode is also, the CROC4 heavy, is also using agents, right? So the agent stuff, I think, is very, very interesting when it comes to inferencing or getting results or getting tasks done. So there's quite a lot of, I don't know, I think there's still economies of scale that could work for hyperscalers, and they did work for hyperscalers over the last 20 years. It's just this new energy shock is not working out so well for now. But if you solve the energy shock, I see no reason why the economy of scale won't return for hyperscalers.

1:26:34So there's always going to be a balance, I believe. So, you know, like if a hyperscaler, let's say, goes to El Salvador and say, well, there's volcanoes that are giving basically free energy. and I can tap into that to build a 500 megawatt capacity. Beat that, right? So there are always going to be economies of scale that are going to work out better if there's not too much rush in getting to those facilities. Right. Just the gold rush right now is causing the demand bubble. It's a crisis. I would call it a midterm, short-term to midterm crisis. It will be long-term if you don't do anything about it.

1:27:15Sure. But I don't think people are sitting around not doing anything about it. So that's why I'm very, very like, I have high conviction over the next three to five years, decentralized AI has a best shot to make a mark on the world. Like we got the best shot right now. If we don't make progress in the next two years, I don't think decentralized AI will take off. People are not going to use decentralized AI because it's the right thing to do. people are going to use a solution because there's no other option that's really the best way to to sell a product you know people don't care about privacy as much as you think people care about privacy people are willing to give up comfort and people are willing to get comfort for give privacy for comfort right or cost um so humans are irrational beings right so you just see what's easy to use and cheap to use and you you tend to use that so decentralization i feel like like If you look at the decentralized finance and all kinds of things, DeFi would only took off because it's easy to use than your centralized stuff, right?

1:28:24Uniswap is significantly easier to use. Once you have a setup, then Binance. And it's private. So are we going to be easier to use than ChatGPT? I don't know. I mean, ChatGPT has done a phenomenal job with their product, right? They may not have the best models, but they still have a great product and it's getting better. So I don't know. So you got to really think through, like, why would DEI take a center stage? If you look at all the benefits DEI provides, those will not be the ones that people will care about. It has to be a product, has to be a good product, it's easy to use, has to compete with the opening asset role.

1:29:00Historically, we haven't been great. Like, that's the reality. But if it helps you solve the energy crisis, there's your linchpin. And that's why I said, next two years are going to be, next two to five years are going to be very very crucial for this because they had to take off plug us into the scene like where do you follow the progress how do you know the movers and shakers in the decentralized AI scene how do you participate is there a discord is there a well you can follow me Greg also I'm very loud on the center as a I might put a handle is Greg also reach your ego as URI. Is there a single place you go?

1:29:40Unfortunately, the information is so dispersed right now. The best place to learn about AI is to actually hang out at AI conferences, not crypto conferences. Because crypto is so terrible at claiming everything as decentralized AI because 99 % of the decentralized AI is junk. Like 99%. It's not the agents, it's not XPTs, it's not all these people that got millions of dollars of funding. I mean, people raised$70 million,$80 million,$100 million even. They don't do jack. They don't matter. Like, seriously. Only ones that matter are the ones that got their papers accepted and presented ICML. That's the first bar that I consider to be high quality.

1:30:26Because there's so much noise and you've got to find the signal. Well, one way to find signals through peer reviews, is what do the actual AI people that are doing mainstream AI, they're working at OpenAI's of the world and Anthropocic of the world, what do they think of decentralized? So see their take, right? And the way to get their take is by looking at actual peer-reviewed papers that are deeply technical. And by the way, if you try to read one of these papers, you need to be expert level in derivatives, calculus, you need, is extremely, you know, arithmetic. A lot of these papers, right?

1:31:04Extremely arithmetic, way above anything crypto has to offer in terms of like, you know, technicality on the papers. Fortunately, you have an AI to help you read those papers. I mean, I take, I mean, me, I mean, I don't consider, I mean, I've done differentials quite a bit. It takes, it's very challenging to read these papers. But if you can use AI to read them, I highly recommend you do so. Some of the investors that are making good investments in AI, and usually Anderson Horowitz has done a phenomenal job, I think, with investing in AI, decentralized AI, because they understand the space better.

1:31:44They have other things. CoinFund, I think, is remarkably good with decentralized AI. Their portfolio, I would say like in their portfolio, in their AI portfolio, I would say 80 % is good. legit 70 to 80 percent is legit uh and a lot of the companies that that i talk about are almost all of them are coin fund funded it's funny or at least they have their hand in right i don't want to name other vc names because you know that are not good uh name the bad ones we can avoid them no i don't want to do that but but i think coin fund is good and this is a good signal uh let's see what are the companies that are doing phenomenal with AI.

1:32:28And a lot of the traditional funds, like VC funds, that are heavy in AI are not writing any small checks, too. They're not writing anything less than$50 million these days. The AI checks are so large, it's nuts, right? So yeah, I don't know. The space is so early right now. Getting the signal is very challenging. The way to do that is just follow the smart people, I suppose. Yeah. I think the question Jared's asked is the kind of question I'm trying to ask too, which is like you said there's a ton of money to be made in the next two years. We dramatically, is that the right word to use? We talked to a lot of software developers, or I guess the ones that used to be software developers in the traditional sense.

1:33:11Now we become something different. Architects, thinkers, babysitters, pick your adjective to describe what you are. where and we're talking about d ai which i believe is d e ai right that'd be it's not d5 it's d ai decentrals yeah yeah where are the this is one of the areas where specifically if we had to give marching orders to a hungry changing audience that knows there's something changing knows they have to change their position in the value chain knows they have to either become more resilient become more dependent or change just fundamentally how they thought they would ever navigate their software developer career?

1:33:57What can they do to capitalize on this change, this massive money making possibility, and also just, you know, changing humanity in the positive way, fundamentally in the next couple of years, where can they apply their talents to capture some of these dollars and also innovate. If you are an engineer that has experience in distributed systems, go into AI. Have you seen how much meta is paying to poach AI researchers? I've seen offers for up to a billion dollars for an engineer, one engineer for four years. And they're still rejected. But I've seen offers all the way from, I know, the space is so, I'm like, what am I doing?

1:34:41Not enough. That's not enough. So they're offering engineers 300 million, 500 million offers for four years. If you're an engineer that is good with AI, that's the ceiling, right? Now, you can make a million if you're good enough. I think a decent researcher now in the space is about a million dollar cost on average per year. So as an engineer, you have a lot more to offer. So I would just drop everything. you need to do really deep into differential equations and you need to brush up on your math skills. But if you break it down, I mean, it's just multiplication. I bet if you spend enough time, you won't be that hard to regain confidence.

1:35:26There are lots of opportunities in AI, like lots of opportunities if you're an engineer, right? You can solve a distributed training, for example, right? If you can, I bet, if you can figure out how to distribute GPUs, even centralized, you know, across two data centers, really well, right? You have a winner. I mean, centralized companies, there's a good chance they may go distributed because Anthropic CEO, our co-founder, talked about distributed trading in their newsletter. I wrote an op-ed recently. By the way, I wrote an op-ed in CoinDesk last week. I mentioned about all these stuff that you can actually go.

1:36:02It's a good starting point if you're looking into getting understanding. So there are frontier labs that are actually looking at distributed training as a solution, right? Not decentralized yet. I will get there because decentralization is about adding incentives on top of distributed training. That's what decentralization is. But distributed training, I think, is a great area. We need a lot of people to focus on the stuff, right, as an engineer. Now, if you're an investor, savvy investor, if you're looking for that edge, the niche energy, like look at the space. like now i mean there's so many people you can talk to those that's better than me with the energy investing i'm not i'm not i'm you know i come from a usage standpoint i obviously don't understand the intricacies of the ecosystem but all the way from nuclear like there are public companies that are uh that do nuclear enrichment i think nuclear stocks are kind of kind of went like off the hook like last few few months right because of this energy demand i don't know that's just it's not financial advice.

1:37:04I'm just like looking at areas. I'm looking at personally nuclear. I'm looking at rare earth minerals. I'm looking at a data center companies, cruise energy of the world. I'm looking at chip companies rather. I invested in, I mean, I have exposure to NVIDIA and AMDs in the world, but also new chip companies that are innovating. There's a 99 % chance this will fail, but that 1 % is what I'm looking for. This is a new company that's doing quantum chips for AI. The guy, the founder used to work, was higher up at the Quantum Lab in Google. And they're literally coming out with a chip. And I know, and they send the cast to TSMC, which is the producer of all the chips, by the way, the fab.

1:37:49So they'll have a chip out in 18 months. I look at deals like that, right? Like, you know, make or break, high risk, high return investment. Look at data center management companies. There's a whole lot of them, not a whole, but there are a few companies that are doing really well, innovating because that space hasn't been touched in a long time. So there are disruptors that are popping up. If you want a more niche-like area to focus on, there is energy arbitrage companies, Enron's of the world that could imagine Enron existing in 2025 without crooks leading it. Phenomenal business model if they actually executed on them.

1:38:25They messed up on the other things, but there are new emergence of Enron's of the world that are coming up, look into those areas, right? There's lots of opportunities, I think. If you spend enough time, you'll get excited. And ChatGPT, deep research is very, very good at some of the stuff. Give it what you're looking for. Ask it to give you an overview. Grok4 is pretty good at getting you the information as well. The deep research stuff they have. I would start looking at them. I bet if you put the Department of Energy report, is publicly available into like chat GPT and put like deep research and be like, what companies are involved in all different layers of this energy?

1:39:08And it'll give you tons to just start your journey and start looking at them. But I highly, highly recommend. Yeah, I mean, highly recommend you looking at the space deeply. There's a, I'm going back a little bit to one thing that you told Jared, I guess me too by proxy, but you guys were really, I was listening in on that part where it was about the free internet, free energy stuff. And I'm thinking about like this idea of UBI becoming resurfaced as a true plausible need or some sort of like baseline because of the mass unemployment. I mean, you're talking about we've got lots of developers out there that are fearful of losing their jobs or, you know, they're building the thing that takes their job kind of thing.

1:39:45That's been the, you know, the concern, I suppose, to some degree. but then the way you described it was like okay well if you're in distributed engineering or you do it you're doing kubernetes you've got lots of change that you can move up the value chain around so it seems like there's the the job traditional software developer job of i write code is is a changing i wouldn't say dying but just changing you're still involved in the code writing you're not literally writing it yourself you're directing it through teamwork through yourself whatever And this idea of UBI is this, I don't want to get political with it necessarily, but the plausibility of the way people are making their money or being incentivized.

1:40:28It sounds like that's a version of UBI where you get your internet and you get your energy for free because you provide a value service back to the DEI infrastructure that will be future built. What are your thoughts on, I guess, UBI and concerns for folks like having to have some sort of base level income? That seems like a version of UBI where, hey, if I give you a little of my compute or I take on this device, maybe I spend a little bit of money, but long term, I never have to pay for internet again or energy. That's kind of a version of UBI because you probably cut off 500 bucks of my personal bill to my household.

1:41:04Yeah. So when I'm giving you something, there's always something in exchange, right? so you're not getting free it's a way to augment the need for for earning as an income yeah you take it's just i had to earn to maintain energy and internet and now i can you know repurpose that same earning if i have it or take it away if i don't in my model you're leasing you're giving your real estate and a room in your house and the position on planet earth to capture energy in exchange for free bandwidth. You're not literally getting free, but there's always an exchange of value. You know what I mean? That's fine.

1:41:43No one will put something in your home unless there's something to get out of it. About when it comes to UBI and like future of AI taking jobs, there are two things to look at. Number one is, so far, the society has rewarded intelligence. human time has value, right? So whatever value that may be, because you're providing some time and you're giving intelligence during the time, you have some value that's called value of labor, right? Now, value of labor, you get some price back. Question you should be asking is, will the value of labor be diminished to a point is no longer valuable? Number one.

1:42:26Number two, what happens when a world shifts to that mode where the only mode we knew so far in existence of all civilization is the value of time. So question number one, will AI replace human beings fully autonomously? Now, I am a practitioner of AI. I use AI much more than most people do. And I'm also an engineer and guarantee you the state at which AI right now is it cannot replace a human being. Not even close. Because of one main reason. That happens to be learning capability. AI, once trained, cannot learn continuously. Whereas a human, if you do something, if you work for me, if you're doing a bad job, if you do something that I don't want you to do, I'll tell you what to do.

1:43:22Next time you're going to not repeat that. Right? you can't tell that you're AI. AI is not self-learning. You can talk about reinforcement learning and all these techniques, but it's not self-learning yet. So you cannot replace a human being in any way. But a human being will be replaced by someone that knows how to use AI, for sure. Now, is it a replacement or is it an augmentation? Now, there are two ways to look at it. As a CEO of a company, I was not coding as much as I used to code. back in the day. But now with the AI, I'm coding a lot more than I used to code, even back then. Why? Because the speed at which I can deliver stuff has gotten significantly lower compared to pre-AI world.

1:44:11So I'm able to do a lot more than I couldn't do. Now, is there as a CEO, do I want to do more things? Absolutely. There's no limit as to what kinds of things I want to do. Like I told you, I wide-coded a Siri replacement because Siri sucks. Now, would I do that without AI? Probably not because I don't know how to do Swift. I don't know how to do Mac apps. I don't know any of this stuff. I mean, I could learn, but is it valuable for me to do that? Probably not. But I was able to replace this whole thing in, I don't know, afternoon because it was fun. I reconfigured my entire network on 4th of July because I wanted to protect against Chinese IP device.

1:44:51or IoT devices, right? Will I do that without AI? If I have the motivation, but probably not as quick as what I could do. So I could do a lot more as a human being that I would rather need a network engineer. Probably I need to hire to do this. Or I need a developer I need to hire to do this, right? Yeah. Am I hiring more developers? I am. And we're equipping them with AI to do a lot more like I do. So our production capability is just going to be higher. we're not going to use less developers we're just going to use more developers to do more things that's like human nature there's never a list of things that you're going to run out of doing i mean imagine if you have all the time in the world if i ask you what would you do always going to be things like you know always going to be thinking i want to build a spaceship i want to have the time and the energy and the resources right i want to build so many things right as a builder i was always want to build things only limitation right now is time that time imagine taking that away so it's the Javon's Paradox we call it I'm pretty sure you heard this term Javon's Paradox is yeah we have yeah it's pretty popular right like it's like oh gosh I forgot Aminota told us about it go ahead Greg Javon's Paradox is you know came from this this age when people thought coal coal would just basically replace all forms of energy and like you know we don't have humans won't have work to do because you don't you don't need human physical strength anymore, coal is going to replace the human thing, and we're just going to not have any value for human beings.

1:46:26But that turned out to be the opposite. With coal, we were able to industrialize, we were able to produce a lot more demand, and that in turn needed more supply of humans that can actually operate the machine. So something with tellers, right? People thought when tellers came, when ATMs came, it's going to destroy the banks, and all the tellers are going to go out of business. It's like, no, we had a lot more banks and a lot more ATMs. So same thing with iPhone, for example, like people think like, oh, iPhones are getting faster and faster. I mean, the chips are getting faster and faster. Like, are we going to have less iPhones?

1:46:58No, we're just going to have more iPhones because, you know, the faster chips get, the more demanding the applications get. That's just the nature. Right. So something gets more efficient. The usage is going to go up historically because of this paradox and not not the opposite. Right. So, yes. What you're saying is there's been a dramatic inefficiency in producing code at scale. And now we have a way to produce code at scale. And so the inefficiency has been unlocked and it doesn't change our need to create more and produce more. It only exacerbates it. It fuels it. It doesn't matter. I think we're going to accelerate beyond our wildest imagination.

1:47:39Or at least a great take on it because I think there's a lot of doom and gloom out there to some degree. And I think we need to look at, I almost thought like the traditional way to write software, like literally hand code something will become a hobby of a previously, you know, traditional software developer that now they'll do it because they really love to write software. Not because they have to write it. You know, it'll become a choice maybe, you know, not, and I'm thinking like really just maybe the, I don't even know how to describe it, but just the randos who really just want to keep writing.

1:48:14the actual software not for their jobs but just for the fun just for the i go ride a bike i swing golf clubs kind of thing you know yeah i mean so there's going to be hobbyists that are going to do it for hobbies and they're going to be people uh and that i write using a pen i mean i have a fountain pen literally a fountain pen which is the most content but i haven't written content right at that kind of scale i use a fountain pen to even today even though i have more advanced pens. But why? Because I like using a fountain pen. I use an analog camera. Why? Because analog camera produces pictures that a digital camera can't.

1:48:47I use a lot of old things because they're just better in so many ways. And people like me are going to exist, right? But that's going to be a small percentage of people like me. So, and I think most of the world is just going to use AI to accelerate, augment, right? I'm particularly excited about removing the next inefficiency in production of goods and services, which is the human computer interface. Like right now, we're so ancient. We use a mechanism to interact with a computer that was invented over 100 years ago. A typewriter basically became a keyboard, right? Like imagine being able to plug in using Neuralink or something where your thoughts control the computer accelerated by AI.

1:49:32Imagine the possibilities, right? so one thing that will be most disruptive right now is people that know how to use ai is going to disrupt people that don't use ai hands down like we're we have an active policy in the company we give amount of x amount of time to employees that are that haven't quite embraced ai that if you don't do it by x amount of time you're going to be replaced and we're very public about it we're very open about it because you know you're required and we give a lot of training to our to our staff people that are not going i mean fortunately we don't have anyone that hasn't adopted adopted yeah but but we have a standing policy another thing that's going to be standard across the across different companies right what's the time frame on that i'll give six months six months to your current employees yeah and what do they have to do exactly they have to learn how to leverage ai to do everything they do so first step is obviously like for engineer go to chat gpt and like, you know, that's a basic AI basic, but if you're like level, we have four levels, right?

1:50:38Basically. So first level is, you know, how do you start GPT? Second level is, you know, how the customer share GPT or fine tune. Third level is, you know, how to sort of like, uh, for engineering, I think we have pretty different persons, you know, how to use different tools, pipeline together. Fourth level is you have a pipeline that's so self-optimized, self-learning that you don't even teach action and just tell talk to it and do it for you and most people on level one how do you start gpd or anthropic or cloud go to the web interface but there's so many things i'm probably at somewhere between like two and three where if i use chat gpd you wouldn't even know i use chat gpd it'll sound like i i speak and i write right uh and i can easily detect ai slop you can you can tell someone you're changing but you're not right are you speaking right now or i'm speaking right now but sometimes sometimes i'll wear different glasses like glasses like this uh which has ai in them it has a a hud a sorry a uh heads up display you can't see this but you may be able to see yeah put them on let's see yeah watch uh put your new mask on become clark kent this is a it's called even realities um is it on right now these are very early We're just like a crazy person at first.

1:51:58He's like, he's staring off into the ceiling. This is the early version of AI glasses. I'm experimenting with a bunch of these glasses, right? And a lot of companies working on different variations and not everything is ready for prime time. But like, okay, that's me augmenting myself. Like it has a teleprompter when I'm on stage and I'm giving like phenomenal, like keynotes, teleprompting. the hell out of it. Oh, you actually wore that on stage? Did you wear that at your conference you went to? People couldn't tell. They wouldn't even notice. They have no idea. They thought I was just a good speaker.

1:52:29This guy has great recall. He's got it all together. Wow. Were you just reading your teleprompter on your glasses? Wow. Secret's out. Secret's out now. I mean, I got the idea from, what's his name? The guy who created Oculus. Palmer. Palmer Lucky. Right. Palmer Luckey uses these glasses when he gives keynotes. That's where I got the idea from. And it looks like you're just talking extemporaneously, but you're just reading. Yeah, I mean, yeah. I'm Ron Burgundy style. It also requires a certain level of Ron Burgundy. You got to make sure that script is right, you know? You don't want to just read literally anything that's on there.

1:53:10It takes a while for you to get good at it, too. I sometimes use it just for, like, I don't read, read, read, read. Like, I will use it to get some numbers. I don't want to look at the screen. There's some numbers that you don't really remember, right? And the order of things, the flow state. I still like use... You can use... There's so many amazing things that you can do. Incorporate that in your real life. I have my new home building in Texas. It's a large home and multiple stories, soundproofed. It has cameras where possible. around the campus, about two acres, and inside and outside the house, it has sensors, infrared as well as ultrasound sensors for places where you can't have cameras, like bathrooms and bedrooms and whatnot.

1:54:01The goal is to detect any living form in the facility, be it within the walls or outside the walls, and particularly to detect any mishaps, like my mother-in-law, she's moving in with us, she's got her own very private unit inside the house. If she falls down, for example, I want to know. Or the AI should know. So all the information, everything is recorded and analyzed and fine-tuned locally using a massive GPU cluster. Nothing leaves the boundary of my home, the network of my home. It's fully locked down, locked down network because a lot of this stuff is private. Every conversation. So this conversation would be recorded.

1:54:45It'll be transcribed. And so that I come back and talk to you next time, I'll remember what I talked about. Simple things of that nature, right? You read your name off your glasses. Hello. Security, right? Like for security purposes, if someone is there on the campus that's not supposed to be there, there's going to be three drones that get dispatched, you know, triangulate the subject or the target rather. And if they still don't comply, they'll be like the robot dogs that will go in. This is now? This is your house now in Westlake? I'm building that. I'm actually working on it. I'm building that system.

1:55:15house or this is a different place the drones are currently set up i i'm by i'm experimenting with a bunch of drones the problem is a lot of these drones are like chinese drones and it just don't. like the software coming from China. So I'm trying to keep it most most American. and because it's national locally all right dji is the only dji is the best drone right now unfortunately the drones are awesome what are you using llama or what are you using locally deep seek deep seek okay r1 or 5b i mean chinese have way better i mean nothing goes to china right obviously it's local yeah uh but deep seek is really good for agents uh uh llama is pretty good too llama 70b is pretty good for agents too um but i'm experimenting we don't know like i got to load test the stuff right really like put through like chaos testing whatnot you documenting this somehow somewhere you got a blog you got a a tick tock i'm debating because it's a security posture you can't expose the security aspects of the system you know because you're going to expose though probably uh probably i haven't thought about how all my friends that i talk to they all want the system at their home so i don't know is it product product opportunity there i don't know business this is definitely a new business right i mean imagine a house where you can talk to the house like you know that's local running locally um it's responding to things i mean particularly about health right like i want to see what i'm eating all the time like you know what kind of food i imagine you can see it going i mean analyze i meant i want i want to know like continuously what i'm putting my body and and what i could do better like things of that nature right i was thinking about that recently in particular like this whole idea of like what comes into my home from the grocery store there's a way to communicate that to intelligence to my to my home to my homework you know all that so all the attempts of like taking pictures of what i'm eating that's not gonna work because i'm never going to remember i'm gonna be like picking something i'm talking to somebody it has to be unobtrusive it has to be like that's out of your way that's the basic thing if it's in your way you're not going to do it doesn't matter how much effort i mean i don't know how much more can we are highly motivated so so simple you can use ai to automate your everyday life so much that with the current tech with the current tech you don't need much right uh it's not going to be that expensive too i mean maybe sorry i take it back like expensive drones are the cheaper aspects of it drones are causing you uh that'll be cheap the chips to run a real time AI that can respond with low latency to agents, that is expensive.

1:57:57The chips are expensive. Energy expensive. That's why I think I'm so pro local AI of the future and leasing the unused compute back to the grid, like an AI grid with the cache. I'm very excited about this new future of shared economy like, you know, because everybody wants GPUs, if you want AI locally, right, in your homes, you know, say we have like, pass through the whole like, you know, limits for whatever your grid imposes on you. I'm particularly excited about like, what you can do with AI. And also the new home is very sovereign, right, has rainwater collection, about 70 ,000 gallons, gallon rainwater capture and it has a greenhouse on site that produces food local energy production with uh you need water for for food 70 000 gallons you said yeah two major massive rain capture tanks underneath the pool that they're hidden and it has gray water filtering uh it has uh you know we filter two of the plants it produces food locally the more you learn about the this is your home in west like you're building i know the permitting is taking a little bit I want to visit the site with you.

1:59:10I want to come and visit the site with you. Yeah, happy to show you. I mean, the permitting has been, they're like, what do you want to build? I'm like, wow. They were like blown away with my plans and they were a little challenging with permitting, but we're getting through that stuff. Yeah, nice. I even proposed a bunker, but the bunker is going to be challenging.

1:59:30Oh, boy. We'll just make the house the bunker. Just make the house the bunker. Wow. Okay. It turns out you cannot put a real nuclear fallout bunker in Westlake. unfortunately it's kind of sad you need a ranch for that stuff it's yeah it's terrible well just buy yourself a ranch too and say there's lots of land in texas you know well it depends on where the land is like so westlake is livable right yeah you gotta get outside of town outside of the whole like travis county yeah nobody wants to live then you real cheap land then you can put whatever you want nobody cares you can put you can put a a range if you want the challenge is You have to get there from your house as things are exploding around you.

2:00:09So we looked in there, maybe helicopter, helipad, some options. First principles thinking, you know what? What do I got to do here? Oh, yeah, you're fast. Click on a modified, like, cyber truck that can bulldoze through pretty much everything. There you go. In case of zombies. Yeah. Zombies are next. My gosh. Listen, okay, we got AI. I never thought we would. I didn't think we'd ever have zombies. And I don't think we ever will But wow I have a thesis for zombies Oh my gosh I bet you do Let's save it for the next time We have you on Greg We have to leave something unplung Let's throw the plus plus Let's end this and throw a little zombies to the plus plus folks Alright thanks Greg That's good stuff man Thanks a lot appreciate it

2:00:59So we do have a bonus on today's episode I can't wait for you to hear it because it's kind of like unexpected. If you're a plus plus subscriber, well, stick around. And if you're not a plus plus subscriber, it's better. Check it out, changelog.com slash plus plus. 10 bucks a month, 100 bucks a year. Drop the ads and get that sweet bonus content. Again, learn more at changelog.com slash plus plus. Of course, a big thank you to our friends at Auth0. A massive thank you to our friends at Depot, Depot.dev. And of course to fly.io launch your app in five minutes at fly.io and to the beat freak in residence break master cylinder for those awesome beats.

2:01:42So cool. Well, that's it. The show's done. We'll see you soon.

2:02:09Thank you.

2:02:32Game on!