TECH012: Monthly Tech Roundup – Data Centers in Space, AI5 Chip, Tesla vs. Waymo w/ Seb Bunney (Tech Podcast)

26:13But what happens when they're also dependent on effectively the workforce, which is just AGI, is the productivity of the entire nation state? Does that mean that we lead into a world where governments lose policymaking power and regulation and such becomes governed by a lot of these entities? So I'm curious to hear your take on this. One of the things that I think is really lost on the tech space, people out of Silicon Valley, is the effect of sound money potentially being the new bedrock and what that means for dealing with bad decision-making. So what the world has become accustomed to, especially in banking and finance, but if you're a major player in tech, it applies to you as well because your access to capital feels almost limitless.

27:01And we're seeing this with Oracle and all these players that are just conjuring up crazy amounts of money because of where they sit in their access to capital markets, Wall Street and everything. But now let's play the tape forward. And I'm just going to use Tesla or Elon as an example. If we're on a sound money standard, a Bitcoin standard, where no government, the desirable units of the people in the global economy, they don't want dollars anymore because they know that they're just going to get debased and lose value against this thing that can't, which would be Bitcoin. So we're in that world.

27:37And let's say Elon makes a really bad decision with something with the humanoid robots. Maybe there's a safety thing and nobody wants any of these things near them or around them because of, call it some situation. I'm just using this as an extreme example to kind of illustrate my point. All of a sudden, the governments can't bail out that company. and let's say it's a strategic company, it's a huge amount of the world's GDP, right? When you're dealing with sound money and sound monetary units, all of a sudden, when you make a bad decision or something bad happens, all of a sudden, you have to start selling assets.

28:13You have to start paying the cost for bad decisions. And this is something that, in my humble opinion, over the last, call it 40 years, the world has never had to deal with at least the major players in the game have not had to deal with the consequences of bad decisions. And sound money changes all of that. So if he continues to make really good decisions, well, then the capital of these scarce desirable units will continue to flow into the hands of these people making great decisions. But the second that they slip up, and make no mistake about it, where we're going, the power and the control of this capital is flowing into the hands of very few people, like you said.

28:57But what's coming with that is ultimate responsibility. And that's what I think they're missing in this conversation is that effect, which nobody's really kind of realized or seen because of how the fiat system works, I think is going to be drastically different and call it 10 to 15 years from now. And when that plays out, what you're going to see is creative destruction actually happen again in a free and open market kind of way. And I can just tell from their conversations about GDP and some of the other comments that happened in the interview that this idea of using scarce desirable economic units is not on anybody's radar in Silicon Valley.

29:39And more importantly, the consequences of mistakes at a grand scale. Because listen, the bigger this thing grows, that these companies grow, the harder they can fall with even the smallest minuscule mistake or slip up. And the thing that's going with this is it's getting bigger and bigger and more and more complex. So one little mistake is going to topple some of this and then the creative destruction is going to actually happen. And I don't think we've seen creative destruction for some of these larger companies for a very... Look at JP Morgan. Look at some of these companies. They are just like growing behemoths that cannot be shut down.

30:17And I mean, that's why you and I are such hardcore Bitcoiners is because I think for the first time that really does bring a counterbalance to reorganize equity and reorganize some of these things in a way that if you make a small mistake, you're going to actually have to pay the price these days or those days in the future. I think there's something that's really important to touch on, which is what you've mentioned around kind of sound money and this idea that ultimately in a free market we still have regulation we don't have regulation in the sense that you have legislation and regulators regulating instead you have regulation in that if you don't provide value capital is no longer going to flow to you so you're no longer going to be able to continue to do the thing that you're doing amen and so kind of expanding on this point i think what a lot of people don't recognize right now is we have this weird feedback loop where you've got these entities lobbying government and the government is then sending funding back their ways they're able to continue doing this thing that can be unproductive for society that just wouldn't exist yeah in more of a free market and i know if you ever listen to eric weinstein kind of the mathematician physicist he talks a lot about this idea called the distributed idea suppression complex he coins the term a disk and this idea is that science today is massively suppressed and it's suppressed not necessarily in positive, but it was suppression is not positive.

31:39But ultimately, you've got government funding 50 to 70 % of almost every single industry, scientific industry. But immediately, they can dictate which trajectory we're on, regardless of whether or not that's what society deems as valuable. Then you've got the regulatory oversight, which is then kneecapping anyone who's trying to go off on their own trajectory and try and create value for society. So it's basically the government and and the regulatory arms are deciding what is deemed a value through their lens, not necessarily through public lens. You've then got the scientific journals, which are these centralized entities that govern what is in the scientific journals, what is able to be spread, what information is deemed valid by mainstream science, and not necessarily, again, what society deems valuable.

32:22And then you've got the peer review system where you've got all these various entities that they'll never peer review a paper if it impacts their bottom line. So it's very hard for new technology new knowledge to be able to really emerge if that knowledge is detrimental to the existing structure. And then finally, you've got all of these scientists that have this cultural and career incentive where ultimately, if they can't support for their family, if they can't go and pay rent, put food on the table, then they can't necessarily thrive and exist. So they're willing to just go to where the capital is flowing.

32:53But given government controls that capital flow, they're kind of stuck in these kind of designated industries. And so I think what's really fascinating about this idea of sell money, bring it back to sell money, is that when we have more of a free market where capital flows, where value is being created, I think that if you have an entity slip up and they start creating AGI that is detrimental to society or is overriding its ability to be shut down repeatedly, I think that what we will see is capital move away from them and towards someone else who's creating safer AGI. Ultimately, you need to have more of a free market as opposed to this controlled information kind of system that we're dealing with right now.

33:32Yeah. And I think the thing that's lost is the magnitude of every decision being made inside of these organizations is growing with the size of the market cap and the influence that they're wielding in the world. And one little mistake is actually going to have consequences. If we get sound money and Bitcoin becomes the new global settlement layer, the decisions are going to actually have consequences. And I think that that is something that very few are talking about that I think is super important to kind of understand why maybe this isn't going to be this dystopian one company's ruling the whole planet kind of scenario.

34:16Yet another reason why we cannot work hard enough to make sure Bitcoin's successful. It's super important as a counterbalance to all of this stuff, in my humble opinion. And you know what? I'm very open to people arguing the contra or why that might not be the case. Let us know online. We'd love to hear your arguments. Guys, go listen to this whole interview. This interview is really good. Again, it's called The Diary of a CEO, and it's Tristan Harris and Stephen Bartlett. They did a really good job in this discussion. It was very captivating. But the question you had, Seb, when we were kind of talking through this before we started recording is, what can we do now to future-proof ourselves based on all of this?

34:58What can you do right now? What action can you take to protect yourself from all of this? Ultimately, I think this is one of the most important questions. The world we're living in today, there is so much noise and it's really hard to separate out the signal and also recognize like, what does my life look like in five, 10 years time? And I'm sure like I speak for many people. I've spoken to a lot of friends about this pre pandemic. I would say that life felt like I had clarity moving forwards post pandemic. I just feel like what does that mean? Sometimes I have no idea where I see myself in five years time, in 10 years time, which I just never had pre-pandemic.

35:38It felt like we were on a bit more of a linear trajectory as opposed to this kind of exponential trajectory. So anyway, I think this discussion, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts as well, Preston, and there's this idea around what can we as individuals do to future-proof ourselves? And I think that there's a few kind of core things. And ultimately, for me personally, what I really, really recommend, and this isn't just for ourselves, it's also for our kids. If we're thinking about how do we support our kids who are going through the school system right now, or they're kind of coming up into this world.

36:06And I think that there are a few things that really give us an edge. And these things that give us an edge not only give us an edge now, they've given us an edge all the way throughout history. And the first one that I kind of tend to think about is this idea of learn to really think and not just memorize. School really teaches us to kind of regurgitate information, but actually you have an edge when you're able to critically think about this information. And so this is especially true in a world where I think AI can recall everything. then the valuable skill becomes evaluating information and not just storing this information.

36:37And so it's kind of this idea about kind of teaching ourselves and our kids how to ask better questions, how to analyze assumptions, how to challenge narratives. And I know you've talked about this. Jeff Booth has talked about this. It's this whole idea of just kind of first principles thinking. What is actually true here and what assumptions can I remove? And I think I may have spoken about this in one of the previous conversations, but there's a really interesting framework that the founder of Toyota uses, which is called kind of the five whys. And so whenever anyone in the factory has an issue or he comes up against kind of a hurdle, rather than immediately going to upper management or someone else to try and look for an answer, he wants to train everyone to learn about the five whys.

37:20And so this idea is how to get to the root of an issue. So the first thing you ask is, why is this thing happening? Now you're going to get an answer to that. Usually it's not the reason why that thing is happening. Now you've got that answer, you ask, why did I get this answer or why is that thing happening? And then you keep asking why until eventually you get to the root cause. And a perfect example of this would be, let's just say you've got a lot of individuals in society that say, prices are rising. Well, why are prices rising? Oh, it's because of greedy corporations. And that's as deep as it goes.

37:48And so you can understand why people lean into these socialist actions because it's always the greedy corporations. But why are greedy corporations rising prices? Well, their input costs into those resources, those goods, those services are going up. Why are the input costs going up? Well, the monetary units are increasing. Why are the monetary units increasing? Oh, there's a central bank tinkering with interest rates. And basically that affects money supply. And so when you start digging down deeper, you're able to determine what is the root cause of this issue, as opposed to playing around to these superficial discussions.

38:21I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that. And then I've got a couple other ideas as well. Yeah. In Lean Six Sigma, which is an optimization efficiency methodology. That's one of the things that they really hit on hard is all of these whys to dig into the root cause of a production line. It's often used in production lines to make it really cost efficient and effective and you get the best product out of it is when you go in there, you're asking, well, why does that happen? Well, why do I have to do that? And you just continue to follow and dig very deep to get to the first principle. So I agree with that 100%.

38:53To answer the question, I have another clip that I want to share that I think addresses this, you know, what can we do to future-proof ourselves now? I'm going to play this clip, and this is from Marc Andreessen, which I know isn't the most popular person in Bitcoin circles, but it is an interesting clip. And he's explaining why he thinks being a generalist is going to be really important in the future. So here, I'm going to play the clip. Okay. I think there's basically like two ways to really have a differentiated edge, like, in general, right, there's sort of, there's kind of go deep or go broad.

39:25You know, go deep has kind of become a more and more specialized expert over time. And, you know, look, there are domains in which that like really matters, you know, biotech and working on AI foundation models, like that stuff really matters. The deeper you are, the better. I think for most fields, though, now with these new tools, I would probably bet more on basically people who are able to be broad, which is to say, basically, can you know something about a lot of different, you know, kind of aspects of life and how the world works? And then you can use the tool, you can use the AI to go deep whenever you need to.

39:53But then your job as the human is to basically then cross the domains, cross the disciplines. And look, you see this, if you talk to any of the great CEOs, you kind of see this, which is like, they're really great tech CEOs, they're great product people, and they're great salespeople, and they're great marketing people, and they're great legal thinkers, and they're great finance people, and they're great with investors, and they're great with the press. It's this sort of multidisciplinary kind of approach. Okay, that's the clip. And just to this point, I mean, if you can go look at an object from three different vantage points, you're going to be so much more effective describing it, drawing it.

40:24And really that's kind of what he's getting at. If you can study multidisciplinary in your approach and what you're learning, it's going to allow you just to kind of be able to synthesize or piece that together. And then you can use AI to just really kind of drill down into whatever your specific thesis or conclusion where you think what it is to really kind of shine a ton of light on what it is. That doesn't mean that you're getting the right answer, but it's kind of pointing you in the right direction in order to solve things. And I agree with this. I think people that are going to do quite well through a lot of this transition, maybe just early on, because I don't know long term, but during the transition, I think the generalist is going to do quite well.

41:04Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.

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44:05Past performance does not guarantee future results. Current distribution rate as of 1231, 2025. Carefully consider the investment material before investing, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. This and other information can be found in the income funds prospectus at fundrise.com slash income. This is a paid advertisement. All right, back to the show. What I've found just like unbelievably fascinating about this whole transition which we're seeing is that throughout history the people that have really succeeded in society have been specialists yeah so if we go back even pre-technology we go back to i don't know smaller little feudal systems you've got the baker and then you got the blacksmith and then you got the guy that trains the horses and then you got all of these individuals you've got one specific role and it is your job to be good at that role and people come to you for that thing.

44:58But what has been really interesting is we've seen the rise of technology is this idea of kind of the multi-potentialite. It's kind of like this individual that has a broad swath of knowledge, and then they rely on the specialists to help implement these ideas that kind of come to them that kind of spread across multiple disciplines. And so I think that this is increasingly where society is heading is that like, be curious, like be creative, figure out this cross-disciplinary insight and combine fields that AI doesn't naturally merge. I think AI, because it's taking in information, it's giving you outputs from information that's already consumed.

45:33If you want to have an edge as an individual, be curious, start reading all these books. And I think that what you and I always have conversations about and personal conversations, Preston, is this idea that as curious individuals, the more books you read, the more you can build out this puzzle that is the world and you start to see these connections that other people aren't necessarily seeing. And so I think that the world continues to thrive, the more curious people are. That I think is absolutely, absolutely important. And I think that kind of building on this idea, I think that kind of the next thing that I always kind of tend to recommend, and this is something that I've noticed has had a huge difference in my life, is this idea of kind of training your attention.

46:10Because I think in a world where technology is advancing so quickly, and we've got social media, we've got all of these things vying for our attention, all of these stimulus, I think attention is ultimately one of our most important currencies. And so if algorithms are constantly fighting to kind of capture and hijack your focus, I think those who are able to focus and they're able to guard their attention, focus on things like long-form reading, reading books, focus on writing, focus on long-form conversations, listen to two, three-hour podcasts. Don't just listen to a one-minute clip of something.

46:42Craftsmanship, like philosophy, negotiation, leadership. These are all things that are like kind of slow skills developed through training your attention. as opposed to getting caught up in the newest things, because it's very hard to compete in a world where you can only direct 20 seconds of your attention. Yeah. I think it's so important to pay attention to the source of where you're receiving that flow of information as well. Because if you just think of it from a filtering standpoint, do I want to go listen to what Elon Musk is focusing on right now? Or do I want to go listen to my neighbor, Joe Schmo, who just has random opinions about whatever.

47:19And the answer is really obvious. You want to listen to what the person who's really kind of having a huge impact on the world is looking at, why they're looking at it, what they're trying to do with that. And I think that that's also going to be another thing to kind of... Because the next question is, okay, so now what do I put my attention on? And I think that that can also be an extremely helpful thing for people to think about as to like, who am I using as my compression source to point my attention at? Let's go ahead and go on to our next topic. So on the last time we chatted, Seb, we were talking about StarCloud and this data centers in space.

47:59And since that conversation, we've had some people throw us some really interesting comments online. And I had an interesting interaction this past weekend, but to just kind of kick this off, I'm going to bring up a post from X that you sent over to me. and I'm going to throw it over to you to take this away for the intro. So digging into kind of the StarCloud, and this is kind of like two topics in one, I'll get to the second topic in a second, but it's this idea that basically this Washington based StarCloud launched a satellite with an NVIDIA H100 graphics processing unit in early November.

48:33And this chip is a hundred times more powerful than any GPU compute that's been sent up into space up until now. And so this StarCloud satellite is now running and querying response answers. And from my understanding, it's the first time we've ever been able to train AI in space. This is kind of like a huge hurdle. But the thing that it kind of sent me down this rabbit hole is kind of the second point on this. And this was related to a comment that someone made in relation to our previous episode. And it's this idea of how costly is it to even get this material, these satellites up into space.

49:10And so... And just for context, in the last episode, we were saying that the price to get it up into orbit has to drop 10x. And we were both kind of, at the time, we were just kind of like, I don't know if that's possible or what. And then we had a comment from somebody online that's like, not only is it possible, but the expectation is that it's going to drop 100x and in maybe short order. Sorry to interrupt, Seb, keep going. No, no, no. Yeah. And so we started doing a little bit of digging and we stumbled across this chart. And so maybe bring up the chart, Preston. Okay. So this little chart here goes all the way back to like 1962.

49:43And what it is highlighting is the cost of moving one kilo of weight up into space. And we're talking about like hundreds of thousands of dollars to be able to move just a single kilo. And right now it is currently costing the Falcon Heavy by SpaceX is currently costing getting up into low earth orbit,$1 ,400 per kilo, which already is just like you've dropped it that's a 99 % reduction and what we're trying to move towards right now and this is what kind of Elon discusses is we're trying to move towards this kind of super heavy Starship booster is going to drop that to 250 to 600 dollars per kilo if you start reusing this super heavy Starship booster it's going to start dropping it to under a hundred dollars per kilo and if you can get 70 flights from the same booster we're getting down to around$10 per kilo.

50:34But anyway, before we jumped on this call, Preston and I were just kind of riffing back and forth about this. And Preston gave me a flag. And this to me, I'm going to pass it to you because to me, it just blew my mind. Well, before I tell this story, so just for the listener, if you're not seeing the video here, I have my cursor over the space shuttle. 1981 is when the space shuttle started being used. And the cost to put something in the orbit was our cost per launch with the payload was$65 ,400 per kilogram to put something into space. So, Seven and I were talking before recording this, like, oh yeah, I've got this on my bookcase back here.

51:14I was like, I got a flag back here that was flown into space that was given to me whenever I was a cadet at West Point. And he goes, no way. And I said, yeah. And I got it down. And he's like, oh my God, you got to share this on the show. And I've never talked about this in over a decade of podcasting. But going into my senior year, I did an internship at NASA. I got the opportunity to work right in the astronaut office, which was really neat. I was just surrounded by all the NASA astronauts at Johnson Space Center. And this is what they gave me whenever I left after that summer. And you can see it signed by, and I'm sorry if you're just listening to this, but on the video, I'm showing this document or this little certificate that has all their signatures there.

51:54And it was really neat. I think it was every Wednesday, they had an astronaut flight briefing that they were all in there. I got to go in and sit. There was, I don't even know how many at the time, at least 50 of them in the room, just sitting there talking about what was going on and whose mission was coming up next, things that they learned, what was happening on the flight line, blah, blah, blah. And so they just took this and they passed it around the table on that Wednesday meeting and they all signed it. And then the little flag here was flown in space. And on the little thing, it says this United States flag was flown aboard the space shuttle Atlantis STS-101 from May 19th through the 29th of 2000.

52:33So yeah, and it was at the time when they gave this to me, they're like, yeah, that little flag, it probably cost like a thousand dollars to fly into space or whatever the number was from back in the day. And I was always like, wow, that's so amazing. Yeah. That's my story. To me, it just, it blows me away because I'm just like that little flag has been up into space and And the cost of sending that flag to space, let's just say it was$1 ,000. Today, we are, well, not necessarily today, but coming into the near future, we may be able to see$10 per kilo of weight. Just to put that in perspective, because I think sometimes we come across these posts and we hear Elon saying, we want to get it down$10 per kilo.

53:11But we don't have any reference point for just how insane that is. And maybe just even to kind of like give another reference point. And Canada, if I use Canada Post and I want to ship one of my books, one of my books that weighs like, I think it weighs maybe half a kilo. I want to ship that across Canada. It costs me$30. $30. Yeah. That is absolutely useless. Canada Post, that's government efficiency for you. But just highlighting that it may in time be cheaper to move stuff up into space than it currently is to move stuff with Canada Post across Canada. I mean, I think that's a certainty, Seb.

53:48okay i want to play the clip real fast of elon talking about this just so everybody can kind of hear it straight from the guy that's doing it with our falcon rocket we are able to reuse the main stage and the nose cone but we're not able to reuse the upper stage and it still takes us at least a few days from when the main stage lands to when we can fly it again so it's not fully reusable because we lose the upper stage, which costs$10 million. And then the main stage, it's not as reusable as like an aircraft. You can't just like refuel it and fly. It requires work for a couple of days. The Starship design is the first design that is capable of full and rapid reusability, where that is one of the possible outcomes.

54:30And once you have full and rapid reusability, the cost of access to space drops by a factor of a hundred. So there it is. Pretty phenomenal. This was just pure serendipity. I was in Baltimore this past week for the Army-Navy football game, and I ran into a good friend, Tim Kopra, who's been on the show. We talked about him actually on the last episode. I had no idea I was going to see him at the game. We were able to spend quite a bit of time together, and he's a former NASA astronaut. And of course, I immediately bring some of this stuff up, Tim. And I said, so what is reality check here. How hard is it going to be to do these data centers in space?

55:10And he did not write this off as not being viable by any shape of the imagination. The one thing that he did highlight that he thought was a concern and would maybe be the critical path to it is the cooling concerns and how you're going to be able to manage the thermal cooling of the data centers up there. And he implied that there really wasn't, he hadn't seen something that was a viable roadmap. To this point, I did find a person that was talking about this online, and I'm going to pull up the tweet. And this gentleman, Vlad, he's basically laying out how some of the things that they saw with Starlink V3 and how it's scaling using first principles going from a 20 kilowatt to a hundred kilowatt is a reference point to how they can actually solve the cooling problem.

56:00And he's saying that he doesn't think that it's that big of a deal. I don't really know what his background is, but more importantly, Elon responds to him and this is how he responded. He says, SpaceX has over 9 ,000 satellites orbiting earth right now, which is twice as many as the rest of the world combined. So maybe we know a thing or two about the subject. I don't know what to say other than like, Like this guy is truly on a whole different level. I find it all to be crazy fascinating just to kind of like add some more context or just more interesting, whatever. So SpaceX, it's been announced that SpaceX is going to IPO maybe by the summer and that the valuation on the company is going to be around$1.5 trillion.

56:48So my immediate question to a couple of people that I saw over the weekend, one being the CEO of a space company, not SpaceX, but a space company that IPO'd this past year. I said, so why would he be selling his equity? Why is he selling is really the question. And it seems like there's a lot of marketing hitting right now with all these data centers in space being shared by Google and everybody else, Jensen Huang and everybody talking about it. And, oh, by the way, we're doing this IPO and we're going to sell some of our equity of SpaceX. You got to ask yourself why. And I'm not saying that they aren't trying to raise the capital for a good reason or whatever, or that this isn't possible.

57:33I'm not saying that. I just find it interesting in that a guy that could go out and raise a whole bunch of money at a very low interest rate, or what I would suspect could be a very low interest rate, is instead selling equity of the business in order to do it. and question that I did not get a good answer for from anybody is why is he selling the equity? So Seb, do you have any? Why is he selling the equity, right? What I do think is interesting. I don't necessarily know if I've got an intelligent answer to that question. What I do think interesting is again, putting it in perspective, I think from what I understand, Saudi Aramco was the previous largest IPO and they were 29 billion.

58:16and this is going it's like one and a half trillion yeah crazy and that is the second or currently the largest the largest ipo ever in history we're talking 45 times bigger yeah that's insane but absolutely insane and so i think that either we've experienced massive hyperinflation which i don't think that has happened or there is this is kind of again like a canary in the coal mine as to where is society shifting right now where is monetary energy moving towards and i'm curious to see if it can actually sustain this$1.5 trillion IPO. But I think going back quickly for one second, I did a little bit of research into this kind of cooling by this guy, Vlad Saigu, I think his name is.

58:55And one of the things that I found really interesting is a lot of people are discussing this idea. They're like, oh man, how is it going to be possible? Cool stuff in space. There's all of these other input factors that we can't necessarily control. And when I did a little digging in many ways it's actually the inverse of earth the problem with earth is that we live in a very unpredictable environment and so on earth you're fighting the ambient temperature that's moving up and down you've got seasonal changes you've got humidity you've got dust you've got weather you've got vibrations you've got seismic activity you've got grid reliability in orbit you can pick your thermal environment and it's going to stay consistent you can pick your sun shade cycle so you know exactly you can with almost 100 confidence know exactly how much sun you're going to get through any period of time you can pick your surface temperature you can pick your like radiation angles and so if anything being up in space i think the hardest part which we're seeing is changing rapidly is actually getting this technology up into space and then once it's in space i think that it's a very different environment on earth because you've got this kind of predictable environment.

1:00:03So we no longer have this problem of kind of calling it an unpredictable environment. Instead, the whole environment is programmable. And so I find that really, really fascinating. Yeah. I have it. It's so funny how over we go and how many topics we had lined up for this discussion. Let's move through some of these really fast because I think they're super interesting. This next one we're going to go through very fast. Shmath, he shared this tweet very recently, and he says, to make the math simple, and we're talking about Waymo versus Tesla. And he's saying, to make this math really simple, the car on the left, which is the Tesla, is 25K to build.

1:00:41The car on the right is 150 ,000 to build. And it's this graphic that shows where the sensor type and the number of sensors that are on each car. And it's just straight up laughable. The difference in what Elon's doing with the Tesla car and its autonomous driving with eight sensors, and they're all just cameras, versus Waymo with 40 sensors, six that are radar, five that are LiDAR, and then 29 cameras. And not to mention, it's very ugly. And the point of his post is, from a cost standpoint, point, like he's just going to annihilate the competition. But where this could get interesting is on the safety front, is if the one, the Waymo goes into the political landscape, and let's say that they can verifiably prove that they're X number times safer.

1:01:34Now you got this interesting dynamic where politically, different jurisdictions could say, oh yeah, we don't allow that car in here because it's not safe enough. Look at how this other company's doing it, which is 10 times safer to the residents inside of our jurisdiction. And I think that that's a really interesting talking point and interesting thing that he's going to have to deal with. And he might've figured it all out from a math standpoint and something that's safer than a human driver. I guess you have to also consider, is it safer than what else could be done? And we'll move on to the next topic, unless you have any keen insights on that one, Seb, just for the interest of time.

1:02:16Honestly, the only point that pops up is just when you're looking at Waymo and when you're looking at Tesla, and we discussed this last time, let's maybe jump back to the other episode if you're curious more on this kind of topic, but LiDAR is extremely accurate with depth, works well in low light, great for precise navigation, but it's unbelievably expensive. And what Tesla is trying to do is just a vision only, and it's like a long-term bet that AI is going to improve, where it's able to interpret its environment far more accurately and make far more realistic decisions similar to a human and i think that the thing that's interesting is like you're looking at these two cars and it kind of reminds me a little bit in some ways of like blockbuster versus netflix and you've got tesla netflix which is kind of on this path towards like meeting the user advancing society and then you've got blockbuster which when it's being taken over by netflix ultimately it's like how do we attract people, we need to put candy in the aisles.

1:03:13And I feel like Waymo is just like, let's just put another red light on the top. Let's just put three more little cameras. And so I do think it's interesting, but I have to say that's not coming from an informed place. I don't understand the depth of technology on these Waymo cars. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, I think more, more data that you can collect, the better it's going to make. It's just going to have more information to make a more informed decision. It's just like, what scale are you getting that it's just 2 % better or it's 1 % better, but you have to pay 10 times the amount, right?

1:03:48It comes back to this classic engineering quandary, which is, can it do better? And the answer is yes. I mean, you see this with just the space race. When you looked at, and I forget the name of the organization that Elon's competing with. It's like this conglomerate of Lockheed and I think Boeing that formed this alliance. And their requirement was no mission failure, no matter what, we can never have a failed mission launch. Well, the reason their cost is 100X Elon is because of this requirement of a no fail, nothing can possibly go wrong. And Elon's kind of looking at it like, well, that's just over-engineered.

1:04:27There can be failures, then we'll optimize those. And so I think you have the same thing happening with that particular comment. And the really question is, is how much better would the driving be with all these extra sensors and relative to the cost that it's going to take to do it? And in the end, I don't think it's going to matter because I think he's going to go out there with so much volume and so much scale that it's just going to be an absolute clinic. And the competition is, they're just going to be too far behind to ever catch up to where I think he's about to go with all this, but totally.

1:05:00And I think that the other thing is like Claude Shannon talks about like information and X formation. And it's just like, what is, you can have more information, but in that information is so much noise. And so at what point, like to your point, it's kind of like the drop off where more information is only actually creating noise and it's reducing the signal. Okay. This next one is really interesting. thing. I'm sharing a post that somebody had here and the post says Elon Musk has reportedly requested his own personal office workspace inside Samsung's semiconductor fab site in Texas. And Elon has previously mentioned he will personally walk the factory line to accelerate progress.

1:05:42And then I found this really interesting comment where somebody else is also talking about this AI5 chip, which is their inference chip. It's like an ASIC. It's very specific for inference in AI for his cars and for the humanoid robots. That's what it's going to be used for. And then Elon responded to this person. He says, AI5 and AI6 engineering is my biggest time allocation at Tesla. AI5 will be good. AI6 will be great. So the reason I'm highlighting this is I don't think that this gets a lot of attention. You typically see the really swoop-dee things like the rocket launches and the cars driving themselves down the streets.

1:06:26But when you look at him and all of the things that he's doing, for him to say this is his number one priority, for me is a really, really interesting thing. So I started digging into this AI-5 chip. This is going to be 40x the performance increase over the existing chips that he has in the cars. It's eight times more raw compute. It's nine times more memory capacity. The other thing that I think is it's five times more bandwidth increase. And like all of these things, when you look at it, he's putting it in the car and he's putting it in the humanoid robot. And these numbers that I'm quoting you are just for the five.

1:07:05It's not even the six, which he's saying is going to be leaps and bounds over the five. So one other point that I think is interesting is he's not using NVIDIA chips. He's going upstream and doing his own thing and using that in a very specialized, specific way that how in the world are you going to compete with this? That's my question for anybody dabbling in any of these spaces. How in the world are you going to compete with this? there's two points that kind of come to mind around this kind of chip topic and it's kind of like one i think sometimes where we struggle is we were just talking about this information we can get more and more information but at the moment i think ai autonomy self-driving all of these things they're kind of like hit a wall and it is not because of the software it's because the hardware can't process everything fast enough and so when you've got these chips processing it 40 to 80 times faster than what we're using today.

1:08:04That means that they're able to see if we take like Tesla cars, like other cars, pedestrians, weather, road lines, lights, all of these things that's able to interpret that information, distill it down and figure out the signal far, far, far quicker than what we can currently do today. And I think kind of the second point that I find even more fascinating is this idea of it's moving a lot of this stuff in-house. Now, from what I understand digging into it they're still going to be using third parties like samsung and tsmc to actually make the chips but they're no longer relying on nvidia for nvidia to design these chips instead they're kind of taking on chip architecture interconnects compilers runtime neural networking inference engines firmware training pipeline all of these things is coming in-house and so if it's coming in-house this is where i think that it's really interesting because an analogy that kind that came to mind is when you think about report in comparison to Microsoft or anyone else.

1:09:02Apple really started crushing the market when it brought a lot of its chips in-house. Apple's M1 chip delivered twice the performance of the Intel chips at 25 % of the power. And Apple's M2 and M3 chips beat Intel and AMD by per watt three to four times. And so because they control the chip and the operating system and the compiler and the memory, there's so much more of a cohesive design and they can operate far more efficiently than any of their competitors. And you and I kind of talked about it very briefly before we jumped on, this idea that what we're seeing is Elon is kind of bringing everything in-house.

1:09:40Like he's got SpaceX and he's got Starlink and he's got Tesla and he's got Neuralink and he's got Grok and he's got the Boring Company and he's got Tesla Energy. All of these things he's trying to control because he wants control over the output. He wants to minimize operating costs. He wants to maximize efficiency. And so that's what I think is so cool about him bringing the chips in-house is it's just going to create far more efficiency and control. I just wonder, and I saw somebody post this online of potentially using the cars. Like, let's say I personally own the Tesla. Let's say that I agree to while it's charging in my garage at night that you could be using these inference chips in order to conduct, you know, AI energy consumption tasks, compute tasks for queries.

1:10:24for Grok, call it. I suspect this is maybe not possible, but the question was just fascinating because when you think of how many cars are out there and how often they're just sitting there idle, but you have this super powerful ASIC that's optimized for inference. And I think maybe the other reason why it might not be possible, I think it's a very specialized inference for image intelligence as opposed to large language model or other forms of intelligence. I think it's geared specifically for just image generation, right? And understanding where you're at in space and time in order to drive a car.

1:11:01So I don't know if it can be reallocated to these other use cases, or whether that would be something that would even be entertained. But I think when you just add up the number of cars and the fact that they're all networked, maybe there's something there that could be used for, I mean, maybe he could power video games or something. either that's fascinating actually you wonder i think the issue right now would be let's just say i don't know the human brain from my understanding i think the brain uses like 30 of our energy requirements and so our brain consumes a lot of energy now how efficient is the car if you've got a car turned off but you've got its chip running while it's parked in the garage how much is that going to cost to run that chip overnight doing some other task and then what happens if elon is like okay you know what it's costing this much to go and build all these data centers but we've got all of this compute power just sitting idle we're willing to give you i don't know five cents per hour your compute which then covers your cost of electricity yeah so people can then monetize their car not even from a taxi standpoint but from just a compute standpoint what happens when you can start hashing and frigging mining Bitcoin with your car overnight and you're just generating revenue while you're asleep.

1:12:18I think that's kind of fascinating. Yeah. I think there's something there because it's just a powerful resource that's sitting, for all intents and purposes, would be sitting idle. You know, I, geez, man, your imagination is truly the limiting factor with where this is all going. Let's go ahead and wrap there, There, Seb, we've been saying we can just keep going on and on because this stuff is just endless. I know you and I wanted to kind of talk about how when you look at everything that Elon's doing and how it seems to like all be converging and the foresight that he would have had to kind of piecemeal all these different business entities together to kind of point it all at this pinpoint moment in time where I think the general public is seeing it all converge.

1:13:01I just can't imagine what was in his head 10, 15, 20 years ago in order to bring all of this to this point. But maybe we'll save that for another day. Absolutely. You know what? Like, I think that's a whole topic of discussion in itself. Looking at, like, how does Elon think? How does he plan this stuff in advance? Like, to your point, like, what was his mind thinking about 10, 20, 30 years ago to be able to kind of think about all of these little nodes that have to come together to be able to be where we are right now? Yeah. I mean, I'm just struggling to make sure I pick up the kids from school on time and things like that, right?

1:13:39All right. Seb, give people a handoff to your book or anything else you want to highlight. Yeah. Again, I really appreciate everyone giving us a listen. And we've had a handful of people reach out and just mention their topics that they're fascinated about. And we've tried to bring them into these discussion points. So if there's anything that you guys are interested about, anything that you want further clarity on or you want us to dig into, feel free to just comment on Twitter or on YouTube. And we definitely scan those comments. But again, you can find me at Sebbunny, B-U-N-N-E-Y.com. That's my website and blog, or you can find me on Twitter.

1:14:11And my book is The Hidden Cost of Money, which touches on subjects adjacent to this, more related to money. But again, I appreciate you having me on, Preston. It's always, always awesome to chat. Well, guys, I hope you guys are enjoying it as much as Seb and I are, because this is a blast. And hopefully we're rounding up and filtering the high signal things that are happening in tech. And we'll keep doing this, I don't know, at least once a month to just kind of show you guys what's happening in the world and how exciting it all is. So thanks for joining us. And until next time, thanks for listening.

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