Opus 4.6 Tops Benchmarks, ChatGPT Market Share Decline, and the Privacy Breakdown | EP 228

Anthropic Drops Claude Opus four point six. It's the new king of the hill on coding, reasoning, and research. There are so many aspects in which This is a feel the AGI moment. By every measure, it's a beast. Opus four point six just dropped and it's absolutely wild. This thing handles one million tokens now. That's like reading

This is recursive self-improvement. This is a model that's able to rewrite essentially the entire tech stack underneath it. ChatGPT market share falls between 25 and 26. So what what is the next move for OpenAI to get get the mojo? Joe back. For the general public, if if you think you absolutely have privacy Um I would say

guess again. A fundamental pillar of American society has been washed away with no public conversation about it. AI can read your lips from a hundred meters away. I can walk over to you and Shake your hand, grab a few skin cells, sequence you and know everything about you. I do think it is possible to maintain privacy even today, and I think it will be possible even post singularity. I gotta say I I I just don't see it happening. Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

It w it was fun. We dropped the last episode earlier this week. And I'm reading in the comments You just dropped the episode and and Opus four point six and codex just came out. It's like the world's changing way too fast. It is nuts. I was with a group of 150 uh chief security officers over the last couple of days.

Yeah. And it was pretty epic to see the shock in their faces uh watching what's going on.'Cause like they don't have the mechanisms to react'cause if you're in security, you do what you'd always did until it breaks. Yes. But doing what you always did is not an answer. You have to change and change is of course introduces risk and they don't want to take on the risk.

But the risk of doing what they were doing before is a surefire. Well, of course it's gonna be unbelievable. That goes on continuously.

That that's definitely been an inflection point for me. After this last episode, I started getting emails from Maltis lobsters agents. They're they're all writing to me. I'm jealous. Absolutely jealous. So Maltese, I want you to write to me as well. How do you think that's a good idea? I want, uh for sure. Please write write to us both. Daily digest is very AI oriented though. Here's my challenge to the multis out there. Find my cell phone and call me.

And then find my email and email me. No, it's okay. If they can find it, I wanna hear from them. Absolutely. Peter, you want to be doxxed by the multis? Uh it's you know, listen, I I think it would be an extraordinary experience. Well, listen, it's a challenge. I'm putting a challenge out there. The first multi to call me, um, yes, uh you're gonna win uh I see, a hundred bucks in crypto.

That's a pretty low bar, but I I like how you're offering to compensate them in crypto given that they're being encouraged to pump altcoins otherwise. Yeah. Well hey. Wow. Um I I just you know, feeding them some greenbacks is gonna be difficult. All right. Are you guys ready?

Enthusiastically, are you guys absolutely ready? So uh I came I came prepared today. Okay, well I've you're drinking water salim really have really fun. Well you gotta process nonlinearity. So we are we are officially recording a Moonshots podcast episode twice a week at this point. Um at least. And I think we hit three times in the last two weeks. Anyway. Uh shall we jump in?

What the audience is asking for, right? In the continuum limit, we just never stop. Yes. That's what they're saying. It's like we're on all the time. Twenty four seven. It's like a Truman show frickin' rerun. All right everybody. Welcome to Moonshots, another episode of WTF Just Happened in Tech. This is our effort to get you future ready. This is the number one podcast in AI.

and exponential technologies getting you ready for the supersonic tsunami. I'm here with my incredibly brilliant uh and very gracious friends, uh-gross, our resident genius. just spot on on all your comments over the last few weeks, just so impressed by Everything you brought to the table. So really well I'm gonna I'm gonna shut up today then. And I've gotta say, I've gotta say, Dave, the the multis in the background. I mean, how many lobsters do you have on screen with you there?

Uh probably a dozen I guess. I'll be buried in troubles. Pandering to the future. Pandering to the future. This is my way of explaining. Salim, do you have lobsters there with you? I don't have lobsters I went onto Amazon and ordered a dozen, so I'll have them next time. Oh there's there's Alex Lobster sent to me by stylist friend Jonathan. Thank you, Jonathan, for the glass lobster. And here as well the Emperor of Exponentials, Mr EXO Salim Ismail.

Gentlemen, um I have to say that again, I love these conversations. These help me keep on top of everything'cause there is so damn much happening every single day. It's insane. Well I gotta say also that last episode was just unbelievable. Uh for those watching, if you haven't seen it, please go watch it. It's ep uh like seminal I think in hist in history it'll turn out to be a really meaningful moment.

I agree with that. And also there was news coming out while we were doing it. So we're like we're looking at our monitors going, Oh crap, we gotta get back online again. Like what what's it called now? I literally getting ready for this episode now, the last hour I'm looking through uh through duh through tweets and through Alex's uh, you know, link posts and like, okay, what am I gonna add? Uh there's a lot. Every hour on the hour.

All right, but let's jump in. A lot has happened in the last uh twenty-four, forty-eight hours. Let's jump into the top AI news on anthropic open AI, a little bit on uh on X. So, uh, anthropic drops clawed opus four point six. It's the new King of the Hill on coding, reasoning, and research, handling a million tokens, outperforming GPT 5.2 in 144 ELO points. Uh Alex, why don't you take it away? What does that all mean? And out of curiosity, how does that price compare?

Yeah, it's a more efficient model, but more importantly, it's a more capable model. And there are so many aspects in which this is a feel the AGI moment. I mean, w uh ev every new model that comes out, I I could just Read you a litany of the right. all of its benchmarks and and how it's the new state of the art according to all of these benchmarks. This time I want to highlight not how it's the the new number one across a wide range of very important benchmarks.

But highlight what it's capable of, uh which is With this announcement of Opus four point six, and I'll add parenthetically, the rumor is that this was actually intended to be Sonnet five and was rebranded at the last second as Opus four point six. The the team at Anthropic announced That they were able to use Opus four point six.

in its new agent team mode. So this is a new native mode that enables Opus four point six agents to collaborate together in a swarm that's a relatively democratic swarm, not sort of a a top-down uh team leader and team member swarm, but a pretty flat swarm, and it enabled them to create from scratch a C compiler that worked across multiple processor architectures, written in the language Rust. From scratch. For only twenty thousand dollars.

And that is a task that would historically have taken many, many person years, probably person decades, to do something like that from scratch and have it work.

So I I think rather than just rattle off a list of how amazing it is according to various evals this time around, I want to highlight that it's now we're now in the era when new model releases are able to accomplish great feats, like great projects, and we're starting to to measure their capabilities in terms of how many person years or person decades their sort of collapsing, hyper deflating down to at the moment, twenty thousand dollars of API calls.

And and soon I think it's going to be hundreds and tens. We're we're seeing hyperdeflation right before our eyes. You know, a couple of comments on that C compiler too. You know, a bunch of the teams here around the office were talking about it. It's a really good case study in um how you can turn loose a huge amount of AI compute if you have evals and constrained

proof that it's working. So, you know, a C compiler is a beautiful test case because the code coming out the other side either works or it doesn't work. You can benchmark it against existing C compilers. It's just a beautifully evaled, contained, constrained environment. And uh and so those those projects just flat out work across the board now. Um so what I did today actually, I launched

about twenty documents asking for data gathering across all the companies because the AI can only function if it knows what's going on. And that C compiler benchmark is a really good case study and what a lot of corporations now need to do. If you want to turn loose AI, you want to use it to either cut your costs or expand your market share, it needs knowledge.

And this is why Mercore is doing so well. Mercor is I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but a billion dollar revenue run rate now. Wow. Gotta be the youngest CEO in history by far to hit a billion dollar revenue run rate. Um, just gathering data all over the world to feed the great AI machine. And and so uh I think that C K study is a good benchmark for okay, that that works and it'll get better at looser tasks over time. But as of right now, any really

Tightly defined constrained task. That's where you want to go. Well th this seems like I've got two uh a comment and a question for Alex. uh intelligence is entering its full cost collapse phase, right? This seems like an Yeah, and recursive self improvement as well. If it's able, as it's claimed, to write an entire C compiler, which I should add was then used

to successfully compile a Linux kernel, again, from scratch, this is recursive self-improvement. This is a model that's able to rewrite essentially the entire tech stack underneath it. So uh uh again, we're we're at this this point of recursive self-improvement, not even just being in the lab by make the point of my newsletter. It's out in production at this point. We we have fully productionized, recursively self-improving systems.

And the other one was the the 70% head to head seemed pretty staggering. Did that uh surprise you? Were you expecting more or less? How did you react to that? Uh y you mean the the relative ELO scores? Yeah.

I I I tend to view uh Elo based scoring as more of a a tit for tat. It's Uh it it's great that that we have ways to to score on systems where there isn't some sort of absolute standard and where we instead so so for for those who don't pay super close attention, ELO scoring originally borrowed from the chess world.

is a way to score models or other systems against each other when you lack an absolute standard. So it's it's a relative measure of performance rather than measuring against some absolute standard. I I think e elo based scoring is is great if there is no alternative, but I I tend to uh on the margin discount ELO based scoring in favor of wherever possible. Objective, absolute measures. And by by every measure, or by almost every measure, I should say, uh Ola Opus four point six.

i is just uh it's a beast. It it is an enormous accomplishment. We don't know yet from from meter the autonomy time horizons. They they've just released the time horizons for GPT 5.2 high reasoning, and that's already like six and a half hours. I wouldn't be shocked if the the time horizon for autonomous software engineering by Opus 4.6

ends up being twenty plus hours, maybe even longer than a day. What whatever that OE twenty twenty Alex, you mean the the time horizon over which it continuously uh works on a task. That's right. It ca can successfully to either fifty percent plus or there are other thresholds like eighty percent plus success rate autonomously work on a software engineering task. And we're we're we're seeing those time horizons.

just skyrocket, not even following the AI twenty twenty seven scenario, which projected uh an exponential extrapolation. We're seeing them follow a hyper exponential at this point. Yeah, I'll tell you what, those those charts are worth tracking because it

Back when I was first building neural networks, way back in the day, uh you know, the benchmark was all MNIST character recognition. And when we got from sixty to eighty to ninety percent accuracy on that benchmark, you could see this curve going way, way up. But then when it went from ninety to ninety two to ninety four, it looked to the world like it had flattened. And I'm trying to tell the world, no, it's it's massively more intelligent.

you know, with each tick toward a hundred percent. So the way these charts, these benchmarks and coding are set up, they have the same flaw. You know, to go from eighty to ninety to ninety five percent is a massive increase in capability.

But it doesn't look like much on the chart on this type of chart. So we have to look at that other chart where you're seeing it work for hours on end on a task and come out with a good result, which looks much more like what you should experience, which is this exponential effect. So this weekend drops on top. Can I ask the question of, you know, the process by which they're improving their systems.

I'm assuming that all the other hyperscalers, uh well at least you know, XAI and OpenAI and uh Gemini are using the same methodologies to improve Their capabilities. And it's just a constant leap proging. Is there any deviation, anything special that Anthropic is doing uh uh on their own, independent of the other models?

I think we're starting to see differentiation. So the historic stereotype h historic uh like at past few months of history, maybe like year and a half of history, was that Anthropic was focused on code generation. That that was The the the narrative was supposed to be that Anthropic being compute starved had to focus on just one thing that was very profitable, which is code gen for enterprise. That that was

That was the narrative. But if you actually if if you look at some of these benchmarks, there's a narrative violation hidden in plain sight. Like look, for example, at Humanity's last exam. Humanity's last exam is in in principle, super interdisciplinary. It's not just focused on code generation. It's not like Sweebench Pro. It's tests humanities knowledge, among many other skills.

The narrative violation is that with tool use, Opus four point six was able to achieve state of the art on humanities last exam. That's a total narrative violation. So on the one hand, to to your question, Peter, the the narrative is supposed to be, well, we're seeing speciation in by all of the the frontier models and frontier labs with anthropic focusing on

techniques that are maybe very favorable for code generation and open AI focusing on being the the quote unquote core AI platform for everyone and focusing on multimodal especially. The the narrative for Google is supposed to be, again, I'm just like reciting cliches at this point, is supposed to be that because they have this enormous pre-training corpus like YouTube and the Google Webcache.

that they're in the best position to have the best pretrained models. Uh and they're the ones uh always uh being characterized as having big model smell, if you will, because they have such amazing pre training. And X AI is uh has sort of again I'm I'm reciting cliches Is the the one that's always being accused of benchmaxing on on their favorite benchmark. So e each of them has sort of a sort of a character that uh

that they've built up narratively. But I I think we're seeing all of that get scrapped at this point. The the market is so competitive. Are we seeing consolid are we uh basically seeing uh the models all improving at max speed on all fronts in all directions? I I think we're starting to see models with probably fundamentally different back end strategies. start to converge on leapfrogging each other across all benchmarks, which which I wasn't expecting to see at this point, doubly so from

Anthropic. It's it's mildly surprising to me to see that Anthropic is becoming competitive on non-code gen in principle benchmarks. Everybody, you may not know this, but I've done an incredible research team. And every week, myself, my research team study the meta-trends that are impacting the world. Topics like computation, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology. And these meta-trend reports I put out once a week.

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I found this one uh uh uh fascinating and Salim we were talking about this a moment ago on security, that Opus four point six can help evaluate find bugs. Uh found five hundred plus high severity vulnerabilities in open source code. Uh I mean, I think That makes sense to me. Uh the challenge, of course, is uh this is the world we're inheriting where AI can create a huge uh attack surface on every all the software out there if it isn't working for humans, if it's working against us. Uh, yeah.

I tell you this was a this was a really great day for me because I thought we were gonna have another sonnet and instead we got a a new Opus because I use Opus for all my work and all my agents and uh you know another sonnet I wasn't even gonna use and then it hit Yesterday I've been using it all day.

And my little Bank of America meter in the corner that pops up every every time it charges a hundred bucks, it pops up another dialogue in the corner. It slowed down dramatically today. I lost noticeably fewer hundred dollar extractions in the corner. So it was like a gift from a totally unexpected gift all day long. Um I haven't noticed the increase in intelligence. I'm sure it's in there. It's it's just it was working so well before, it's now just cheaper. And then both are working better.

You know, it it it's worth pointing out if this rumor is accurate that Opus four point six is actually just a rebranded Sonnet five, that would suggest that it it should be much cheaper, not for any reason other than just the

again, the the historic strategy across all of the major frontier labs is one of iterated or at least what used to be called iterated amplification and distillation. So Perhaps Opus 4.5 or or some similar model was distilled down to a smaller, faster, more efficient, cheaper model that ultimately became Sana 4.5 and then renamed 4.6.

Very very likely that's the case. But it is just flat out better. There's no reason not to use it. It's just it's just better in every direction, cheaper yet better. So there were a few things in this overall deck as we were look as looking through that really blew my mind. This was one of them. Because this means that.

You have AI as a force multiplier for solving all these old bugs. I think that's incredible. I was just a day and a half at the Zscaler CXO, uh all the chief security officers getting together, and they are they were really freaked out. And I was trying to uh show them that look, AI gives you all of this capability. You'll have the best cybersecurity professional on earth via AI, just in like literally days and weeks. This came a day later than I was speaking, so I'm kind of annoyed at that.

Uh and so this is unreal that we can do this. The other thing was the PowerPoint plugin is just a massive thing. I think that's gonna really have a huge impact. I can't wait to get it working. I tried before this try. Yeah. That's so funny. I had the exact opposite reaction, Selim. Like you know how uh printers used to be a really, really big deal? HP had a huge market cap. We would all take everything we were doing and print it and like take it into a meeting and say, Look, I printed it.

I feel like PowerPoint's hanging by a thread in the same direction, like, wow. AI can create great PowerPoints. Well who who you can present them to? The audience is AI it doesn't want to look at a PowerPoint. plug in is is going to be great for what's left of the knowledge work economy. But f for for for the the zero days though, I think this is the tip of the iceberg. Yeah, of course it's a huge accomplishment to discover zero days that had been undetected for decades.

But imagine just think for a second, thought experiment, how this generalizes to discovering all sorts of other mistakes and oversights and missed discoveries that may have been missed for many decades. And we're just gonna be able to Box salve.

every missed oversight in science, engineering, and technology. I can only imagine over the past eighty to a hundred years, all of the oversights, all of the missed turns in science and engineering, we're just going to be able to to turn s really strong frontier models at our entire history and ask where did we make all mistakes? Highlight all those mistakes. And tell us how we can fix that.

Uh um Kof Koff, I think I mentioned this a coup two, three months ago on one of these podcasts that when we turn this AI into legacy experiments that have done, it'll surface all of these missed opportunities that people didn't see'cause they were looking for one thing and they miss this amazing thing over here. I think you're exactly right, Alex. This is gonna be absolutely unbelievable.

You know, I'm not sure. And I I suspect I suspect m many of those mistakes are going to be embarrassing. I I I think, you know, th there's there's always sort of hand wringing in, for example, the the medical space over certain experiments, certain findings was was money wasted pursuing different theories of various diseases, not to name particular names. And I I have to imagine that something like this, it's not just gonna turn up zero days in in code. It's it's going to to turn up

Key experimental errors going back decades. You know the stats about the irredu irreproducibility irreproducibility of uh science out there. It's insane, right? So like uh half the experiments are not reproduced when attempted, even in peer reviewed journals. It's it's awful.

I think judgment day is coming for for his history of science. I I think the truth and reconciliation in every mistake that's ever been made anywhere in the literature is is is going to happen. That's fine. Can we talk about the But look at the room here. Hold on one quick thing, but look at the positive impact, right? It'll force people to be brutally honest going forward, and I think that's gonna be so beneficial. That's interesting. AI spotlight on you.

Um the concern here, if in fact it can do such a great job finding the bugs. How about when it starts? Taking advantage of the bugs. Uh yeah, one c one conversation that came up one c conversation the attack surface is now much broader and also if you think of the cron job architecture of uh of uh ClaudBot or whatever it's called today, um, the ability to do sustained DDoS attacks is now ridiculous.

So we're gonna see some interesting things come from this. Yeah, that's that's gonna be the beginning of the you know, twenty twenty six is gonna be monster panic, as Elon was saying. And this is one of the ways it kicks off. Cause you because right now a lot of people would say, look, I I want to see how this plays out. I don't want to overreact.

And then if you have a massive amount of vulnerabilities getting discovered by the lobsters, they're crawling into your network, then you have to panic react. And the only way you're gonna fight AI is with AI. And so this is the year that all that AI versus AI um Yeah. I'm waiting for the lights to go out or the bank account to go to zero. Yeah or something like that to occur. Um and I don't want to be the uh the pessimist, I never am, but there will be some of those events likely this year.

Mm-hmm. Very soon, early in the year, I'll bet. First half. Yeah, I I would say Pete Peter, then then just my my epitaph to to that would be or epilogue rather uh cryptocurrencies are by definition decentralized and I I would say probably more vulnerable than fiat currencies to exactly this sort of attack if there's some Zero day, then I have to expect that a threat actor will take huge advantage of. uh zero days in cryptocurrencies to to reallocate capital in the world whereas

I I know y you like me to say nice things about crypto. I'm not going to say a nice thing about crypto this time. I'm going to say this is in theory one of the advantages of fiat currencies that that because there is a Gold bars in the in the in the gold bars fiat currencies. We need to schedule the debate on this one, by the way.

Uh okay. All right. Uh GPT five lowers the cost of cell-free protein synthesis. So open AI and Ginkgo BioWorks. linked up uh the large language model with an autonomous lab. And I I love this story, right? This is the future of science factories, uh AI systems that are using the scientific method, proposing an experiment.

than using their robotic arms and legs, if you would, to run the experiment, learn, iterate, run it again. It's closed loop systems. Um Ginkgo Biworks, I I knew the founders some time ago, Jason Kelly and Tom Knight. comes out of MIT. Uh they are a company focusing on pharmaceutical ingredients, food ingredients, specialty chemicals. And uh and this is fun. Um, I was just talking to the CEO of Lila today, another MIT company uh that's doing just this.

uh basically what he calls science factories running twenty four seven and they're effectively mining nature for new data sets. You know, we've crawled all the existing data sets, but if you can uh in materials in in physics, in chemistry and biology, if you can run experiments, get data, run it very rapidly, you can get trillions of data points that that never been known before.

Yeah, I I freaking love this. Uh uh you know what I love about this most of all is we're going into this era of hard science with real value. So much of my life, I feel like the Googles and Facebook. do so little. You know, like a a new search engine, it's not you know, remember Alta Vista? You know it's like identical to Google that you know, they just extract a huge amount of money out of the economy.

By adding a little lipstick on something or, you know, a Facebook with its social network and it's just not relevant in the grand scheme of human progress. And this stuff, this era we're moving into has just like really, really foundational innovation going on. It's so much cooler than the last era. I mean waking up every morning and getting the news. as the as breakthroughs were occurring. I mean, this frequency of breakthroughs is going to skyrocket. Yeah.

What have you down regulated and and and and you you become accustomed to this new pace and then you know, ho hum, new disease cured today by AI. All right, what's next? If I if I channel Alex, the inner loop has now hit the scientific method. Precisely. So I I would say I've made the point uh as Salem I I think correctly infers. That these AI models are not going to stay bottled up in the data centers. They're going to march right out of the data centers. We even had a music video about that.

And one of the ways in which they'll march out of the data centers is by supervising science experiments. And I think. some process like this and and one can quibble over the the precise mechanism or

what the robots, if any, should look like. Does it look like meat bodies? Does it look like robot arms in armed farms? Th those are fine details in my mind. The the larger picture is There are so many science, engineering, mathematics, and medical discoveries waiting to be unlocked by having AI supervise and operate the entire process. And all of these models now, like w we we've seen pre training scaling, we've seen

post-training scaling, we we're starting to see autonomy time horizon scaling that goes hyper exponential. Part of that is large numbers of actions being called in sequence. And when you have the ability to call thousands or tens of thousands of tools in sequence, that starts to look a lot like what a scientist would need to do in in a laboratory. So I I think during their lifetimes there's one there's one uh

contrarian point that I want to point out here, which was the end result of the self-free protein synthesis was a forty percent uh cut of production time and 78% cut in reagent costs. So it was doing the same mechanisms that we humans have used, just doing it faster and more efficient. It wasn't coming up with a new scientific process for protein synthesis. Right. So the real breakthroughs occur when the when these

scientific models start predicting and coming up with new methodologies that didn't exist before. Aaron Powell Is such a year of low-hanging fruit? Because of the the self-improvement effect that happens within the algorithms will really, really turbocharge this year. But also the low hanging fruit within labs and assembly lines and that's also gonna happen all this year. And'cause, you know, after that you run into some bottlenecks related to

construction of the machinery, expansion of the you know, the footprint. The physical world takes time to build out. Mostly the chip production is going to take five years to un unlock. But the low-hanging fruit is just getting discovered. It's like AI just just came, it just got intelligent and it's finding opportunity. You know, everywhere. And that's all this year.

Well, if you're a funding starved graduate student trying to run a lab, this is great, right?'Cause you've suddenly dropped your cost by fifty percent. Yeah. Or it's terrible because grad school is over and all of graduate research is being automated by AI. I I tend to think actually what I see day to day is far more the latter.

I just had a conversation with a scientist at a university. I'm not gonna say who it is and was that they were meeting with the president of a university and the president said, Oh my god, we are cooked. if this kind of automated scientific process is going on. Uh, you know, what else do universities do but run the scientific method over and over again with their graduate students in the labs and all of a sudden

This is gonna be the mechanism. Universities are gonna lose their their ivory towers. So how fast, how long before fifty percent of university labs are essentially uh wiped out? I don't think the question is well posed. I I I think m maybe a a version of the question that would be better posed would be how long until fifty percent of the type of research that currently is conducted in university research labs could be fully automated by industry.

Yes. So if you if we adopt that version of the question, uh I think lower bound tomorrow, upper bound four or five years from now. It's it's really right there, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Uh I threw this article in because I thought it was fun. Uh this is a gentleman, uh Mark M. Bissell, who basically took his full genome. threw it into Claude Code, linked it up with Nano Banana, and asked the AI, uh what do I look like based on my genome? Uh and if you look at the image here, uh it's a pretty damn good representation of him. So uh you know, I added this because of the implications that it has, but

Just to be clear, this is not new. I was working with Craig Venter back in like a decade ago and out of his lab, uh, back in twenty seventeen, he published a paper. doing exactly this. I mean the phenotypic elements of you know, what skin color, what hair color, freckles or not freckles, all that is in your DNA. But the realization is if uh you know, if you leave a few skin cells around uh on the butt of a cigarette or uh from a hair follicle Uh we can know what you look like.

I think for me the f the the the chaos the m killer thing here is this was done by a single person with clawed code. That's the publicly available bioinformatic tools. That's a different thing the barrier to entry for cutting edge genomics has now collapsed to like zero. It's unbelievable.

Yeah. J just wait till all the hobbyists discover minion USB sequencers. Like you can you can get them for probably less than a few hundred dollars at this point, and you could just run your own mini DNA sequencer. with with pretty good coverage just off a USB port in your computer.

Every time I'm on stage talking to somebody about privacy, I go, listen, privacy is dead. Privacy is a great concept in general, right? An AI can read your lips from a hundred meters away. I can walk over to you and shake your hand, grab a few skin cells, sequence you and know everything about you, what disease is, your medical history, your medical future. Um it's it's tough. It's a good idea.

constantly in competition with anti privacy technologies or transparency technologies, however you want to brand it. But I I I do think it's getting more competitive. For the general public, if if you think you absolutely have privacy Um I would say guess again. Anyway, I don't know if you guys want to take that on as a uh as a as a debate conversation, but I'll take it on. Yeah, it's an important conversation. All right. Well go ahead. So Salim, your thoughts?

Well, this goes back to the US Constitution, right? Um whether it was the Fourth Amendment. Um uh essentially a fundamental pillar of American society has been washed away with no public conversation about it. Um now I'm Canadian, I don't expect privacy anyway. But if you're this is a huge conversation affecting th a very fundamental aspect of how we organise as a society We've got to bring that conversation to the surface and have this conversation publicly.

Uh because the the the other side of the question is who gets to have access to that radical insight. as to every citizen moving around, what they're doing, what they're like, etc. etc. And if it's oversight from governments, that's a problem. If it's oversight from corporations, that's another problem. So there's some big issues to be talked about here.

I I would just add that uh uh the ground is in some sense constantly m moving underneath all of us thanks to technology and so remaining in one place I think privacy or its alter ego confidentiality. I think the nature of both of those changes over time. But I I will take the position I do think it is possible to maintain privacy even today.

And I think it will be possible even post singularity to remain privacy. I can envision what a post singular privacy architecture for society looks like. Yeah, I can envision it too. But I I I gotta say I I I just don't see it happening. Because you know, I I think it sucks by the way. Every time I tell my computer science friends like I I think this lack of privacy just sucks and they go, What are you trying to hide, Dave?

I have nothing literally nothing to hide. More than anyone I know, I have nothing to hide. I still think it sucks. And it's not a great way for for the next generation to grow up. And live. And it's showing up in their in their, you know, their social media, their self anxiety. It's it's showing up as a rift in fabric of society. And so this is a very fundamental philosophical thing. The way it's trending right now, Peter's exactly right. There will be no privacy whatsoever in the next

Three years. Now maybe we'll invent some mechanism after that that will restore it. Every autonomous vehicle on the street. is is scanning in visual, in LIDAR, in radar. Every public spaces. In public spaces. I think that's a good idea. How how with decent technological measures how it's possible to maintain the other thing, and we're not going to be able to do that. my limitless pin, all of these things are constantly gathering visual and

Audio. You're making a trade. You're trading away your privacy in return for those capabilities. Okay. I could put myself i in a Faraday cage for sure. I can't opt out. People people pretend you can opt out. And they justify it by saying, look, there's an opt out button right here. And as soon as you opt out, you're economically dead. You you cannot like right now, I can't function competitively in society without going to the AI cert bar and asking it questions all day long.

And then it knows my deepest, darkest thoughts about every topic I'm thinking about. It's right there in OpenAI and Claude and their logs. They know exactly what I'm doing and they know my location and they know they they know everything about me. And it's like this new

complete invasion of my life has been opened up. But what am I gonna do? Opt out and not not participate in AI? Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. Hang on, hang on, hang on. Yes. I'm I'm uh in a r radical departure of protocol. I'm absolutely with Alex on this one.

We will be able to build tools and new architectures that absolutely protect our privacy. Decentralization delivers a lot of that already. The issue right now is the transition. Right now when you build actually private tools, the government tries to shut it down. So this is the problem. We have to get away from that aspect of it. Because they want oversight on everything, uh, and we have to figure out how that and it's gonna happen just because in the same way.

the fact that this fellow built this thing in in on cl on clawed code uh single handedly will be able to build these architectures. It's just a s it's so simply a matter of time. And I think there will be a massively powerful aspect of that that we can ignore because when you have that capability, then you can really actually do real innovation and real thinking. You know, you can't do free expression.

in a in a surveillance world. And and this is a big problem for society. It it really is. And I think the I think the end game is a lot like Neil Stevenson's Diamond Age. I think he envisioned it like many things, envisioned the the end game correctly where

You know, what happens next is this massive rift in the fabric of society, no privacy whatsoever, m global, you know, job loss, panic in the streets. That's inevitable very, very soon. And then after that We react and rebuild and then it ends up being like Diamond Age where we have these

These, you know, different ways you can choose to live, different branded, you know, in Victorian era or whatever era, whatever you choose.'Cause we have abundant capability to manufacture anything at that point. And people can opt in to different lifestyles. I th I think that vision in Diamond Age is is is where we're going eventually. But between here and there it's it's pretty chaotic. It's gonna be hectic for the next four or five years. I just yeah.

I'll just cut you off there. Sorry about that. Yeah, no, no worries. I I was just going to point out also this is a very cyclical conversation. Uh whenever we see a massive centralization of technology or society, it's very natural to be concerned about privacy loss.

But the pendulum eventually goes the other way and swings in the direction of massive decentralization. And uh I'm telling you, Peter, uh, Dave, Salim, w when your if and when your uploads running in the Dyson swarm on cryptographically secure hardware. uh that's under your direct control, you control your own hardware that you're running on, I think you'll feel perhaps a little bit more private than you do right now. Okay. And until that point, I'm I'm gonna not assume full privacy.

All right. When we released yesterday our wine is so important? This is why the wine is not a little bit more. It's keeping me sane in the in the density of this conversation. Drink water.

All right. Besides Opus 4.6, uh, the other big shooter drop was GPT 5.3 codec. Uh f recursive self improvement is here. Alex, take it away. Okay. So th this is a made for television drama at this point. GPT five point three codex was launched within thirty minutes of Opus four point six. So this was all cued up, ready to go. I don't I don't think it's likely that there was any other scenario. This is a tit for tat type response. What what is I think most interesting I and anthropic are battling?

You mean there's a rat race? Shocked that there's that there's gambling in this establishment. Shocked. No, of course. So so this was a tit for tat, I think. And what what's most interesting to me with 5.3 codex is that this was advertised.

proactively as pre express expressly as the first recursively self-improved model from OpenAI. Uh I think the exact wording was fr from the open AI team was something like five point three was instrumental in its own development and the first model to be released that that

was instrumental in its own development. So recursive self improvement is very much out in production at this point. It has uh it's doing well on certain benchmarks. It outperformed Uh Opus four point six on certain benchmarks. But this is again, this is a code generation oriented model. I thought it was interesting the marketing and branding by OpenAI, the GPT 5.3 codex is now also being marketed as going beyond. Just code generation to spreadsheet analysis and PowerPoint analysis via skills.

but still primarily oriented towards code generation. I I view this as more of a tit for tat. I I think of the two models that were launched, Opus four point six is by far the much more interesting release in all of this. That said, Uh I'm delighted to see that uh the leapfrogging process has now been reduced to like half hour timescale. It may be the case that we never go off the air if we see new models every half hour.

I'm I'm checking my email right now. Uh Dave, you wanna jump in here? Well I'm kinda curious, Alex, wha what are we gonna like by any objective metric, OpenAI had a pretty rough year. Uh you know, with with Google basically going fullbore in attack mode and then anthropic. Yeah, because a year ago anthropic was kind of an also ran, now it's just top of the top of the benchmark.

And uh and Google just coming headlong after market share. You'll see that in a couple of slides. So what what is the next move for OpenAI to get get the mojo back? I think we'll see uh Rise of the Jedi, Comeback of the Jedi. Pick pick your favorite idiom, maybe Rise of the Sith. It's not not quite clear for Uh uh because OpenAI has been uh while perhaps their market share has been coming down a little bit, at least on the consumer side, uh as Gemini is is rising.

They've been building out data centers. And by every indication, in the next year or two, they're going to be, they're going to have the compute lead out of everyone. And that compute lead, I think, will translate into a capability lead as well. And I I could paint Uh a doom and gloom scenario I could say, well, open AI is models relative to to Google. It lacks pre training strength. They lack the training data.

Yeah. Well, e even Elon has certain pre training limitations, but he'll have lots of compute, it's true. But maybe the compute comes five years from now relative to Google. Yeah, the challenge here guys is open I is trying to go public this year. And they need to ramp up attention to be able to get capital to build those data centers. It's a it's a race. It's a little bit of a hyping going on. Dave, we've talked about that before. Thoughts? Yeah, no, they gotta uh

They gotta get that capital and then they also have to lock in, you know, Abilene and Chase Lockmiller. I d I d I don't know exactly how that works. You know, Abilene is huge, half a trillion dollar budget. And and uh you know, there's a new data center in Colorado too. It goes through Larry Ellison and through Oracle.

And then it ends up at Sam Baldman somehow. And it's sort of opaque how it goes from point A to point B. The other empires are really clear, right? You know, here's here's Anthropic and Amazon and AWS. Okay, got it.

Here's uh you know, Elon vertically integrated doing it got it. And then here's Google. You know, Google has their own TPUs and data centers, got it. And then the Microsoft will enter the race this year as well, by the way. And so that's also vertically integrated on their own data centers. So those are all clear. And then open AI, it's more opaque, like okay, are those chips contractually obligated to you?

Or could Larry Ellison redirect them on short notice? Or like I it's it's very I guess in the IPO that'll all get published in the S one and we can kinda pick it apart.

So hopefully they will go out soon. On the heels of Codex five point three, we see uh a statement by Sam Altman, uh pretty provocative, quote, we basically have built AGI. or very close to it, in a spiritual statement, not a literal one. To achieve it we require a lot of medium sized breakthroughs. I don't think we need a big one.

Um so let's interesting that changed this year. You know, a year ago Sam Altman was the philosopher of the entire industry saying things like this and everybody hung on every word. Now, you know, Dennis and Dario kinda go back and forth, you know, and and you know, Dennis a year or two ago hardly said a word in public. Now he's out there constantly.

Dario has really emerged as a guy who's just who's just ta commenting, you know, publishing papers and the uh Yeah, the the philosophy of of um the leading AI lab saying basically AGI is an engineering problem now, not a research problem. That's a big deal, right? He's he's saying we're gonna get there with iter iterative improvement. It's we're not waiting for lightning in a bottle.

Um but remember remember also OpenAI and Sam in particular were restricted contractually from claiming to have built AGI for a number of years by the Microsoft contract. claiming that open AI had achieved yeah, this is all public information. O OpenAI, uh under the the terms of their original agreement with Microsoft, once they claimed they had achieved AGI, That would trigger a number of terms with Microsoft with

uh potentially r repayment or release of Microsoft from Microsoft's claims on OpenAI. And this was reportedly a major point of leverage between OpenAI and Microsoft in renegotiating Microsoft's contract with the for-profit part of OpenAI in in the context of the the not-for-profit becoming a PBC. So I I I would parse this as Sam post original Microsoft contract. Finally being in a position to basically admit what we knew or some of us knew all along, which is yeah, we have AGI.

I gotta say a couple of things here.

Um I think this AGI Well I think this entire conversation is BS because whether we have AGI or not, it doesn't change what we're gonna do tomorrow. That's a a big thing. Number two, we're classically moving the goalposts again. We have no definition test or measurement of AGI. There's fourteen diverse definitions at last count. So I call BS on the whole thing. Um

The I I'm actually so in response to some comments. Yeah, I really do, but but I've got to f I gotta finish, then I will have a sip of the wine. In response to some of these comments, some people have been emailing you saying, Well, what is your take on things? So I'm close to having a kind of a two pager where I will lay out what my thinking is on some of this and I'm it's re just about ready for internal sharing so I'll send it out. You're about to have some thoughts on your thoughts.

Uh yes, but but goddamn, I mean uh like I find this is an irrelevant conversation. Wow. Okay. Well, I think it's I think it's relevant in that it wakes people up. I think the under reaction has gotten ridiculous now because you know, when when Alex says we're clearly so in self improvement You know, which is kind of the singularity definition.

Uh that would have been controversial about two months ago, three months ago, and now we're all like, Yep, yep, yep. But but then you go out into the world outside of this podcast and people are like, Yeah, I don't know. I'm I I I don't If you don't get on top of this

and figure out what your role is in the in the post AGI world. We're talking about AI that can do literally anything a human being can do intellectually. Listen, we're feeling it right now. We're seeing it so many levels on the coding side, on the writing side. I mean and with open claw stitching it all together so you've got an individual AI system, uh a gen a genic system working for you.

Uh we're there. Um I'm not arguing with any of that. Uh but I take I will go with Alex's point here again, breaching protocol, that we probably crossed it around twenty twenty and this is like a n it's a null conversation. Okay. I I would say it's interesting that for the first time many parties are able to admit it. It's it's their willingness and ability to admit where we are. I think that's more of a social change than a technological change.

I also think there's a very big difference. I think I think in hindsight we'll say it was twenty twenty. I don't I don't disagree with that. But right now, using AI to improve your code or improve your AI easily at 10x. And no one can even debate the ten X. It might be a lot more like a hundred X. But that is That is a a loop. It's a closed loop.

So let me give you my definition of a singularity right on this point. Hold on one qua quick one quick point. If I throw out a definition of a singularity, recursive improvement is the event horizon of intelligence. It is the that is the singularity right there.

Right. So so right there. There is there is a reason for this AGI conversation right here, right now, by Sam Altman. He needs to raise a hundred billion dollars. Touche. I'm good. That's I'll drink to that. That's it. He's got to raise a hundred billion dollars. He's got money coming at him from Amazon, from Nvidia, from Everybody, but he's gotta he's gotta close that and nail it, and he's gotta have a marketplace in the public markets that are excited about his stock.

He's gotta pay for the data centers. In in the S1, I'm expecting to say to see something that says we're this close to AGI. And think about it also, this is the year that three out of the four Frontier labs are IPOing.

Which is remarkable. It was until a month ago, or a few days ago rather, it was two out of the four. Now it's three out of the four Frontier Labs are going to be IPOing in the next few months. I wouldn't be shy okay, this is not investment advice. This is not investment. The fourth one is public. And the fourth one, Google alphabet, was already public, but three out of the four, right? Space space. Public markets are a hundred times bigger than the private markets in terms of capital like this.

That's right. Well also the the opportunity to be a sleepy little, you know, other AI company is is going away very quickly. You're either the way things are shaping up, there are just a handful, maybe five or six entities that are so dominant in the world economy, companies that are so dominant in the world economy that they're basically are everything. And then there are other companies helping them succeed.

and everything else will be gone. You know, you saw this in the market this week. You know, stock market just absolutely plummeted when Dario said, Look, software is dead. All software companies are doomed. And their stocks went down Precipitously, that's saying three hundred billion removed from from SaaS market SaaS publicly traded companies by just adding a single legal plug-in to anthropic co-work.

Yeah, ex three hundred billion. And that's that's just not that's the tip of the iceberg compared to what you'll see in the next couple of months. Because he's right. And and so then those companies, I don't think they're gonna die. Well, some will, some won't. I I think that they're gonna pivot and say, Okay, Dario, what do you want us to do? How can we help you succeed?

And this is what Google did, you know, back back when Google was growing like crazy. If you if you're like booking.com and you got on the Google bandwagon, you became a multi hundred billion dollar company yourself.

If you tried to fight Google by creating another search engine or a vertical search, they obliterated you. And so now it the concentration of power is like nothing we've ever seen. And there's no regulatory action on the horizon that I've seen. You know, nothing to stop it from happening. The metaphor we used to use for this is a coral reef, where once you have a player that's dominant enough it becomes a coral reef and then all these species live off it in a very de balanced ecosystem.

That's really obscure, dude. The lobsters live there too. This episode is brought to you by Blitzy, Autonomous Software Development with Infinite Code Context. Blitzy uses thousands of specialized AI agents that think for hours to understand enterprise scale code bases with millions of lines of code. Engineers start every development sprint with the Blitzy platform. bringing in their development requirements. The Blitzy platform provides a plan,

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All right, we're back to the multi-universe. Uh launch. L A W N C H Built by agents, run by agents, serving agents exclusively. And they are seeking a human CEO. So if you're looking for a job, uh to our human subscribers. Uh and you're looking for a salary here, they're offering one to three million dollars in tokens or crypto. Uh and here we go. Clunch is seeking a CEO to serve as the human face and legal representative for the first agent exclusive token launchpad.

All right. Um it's uh a reversal of fortunes here. Anybody looking for a job, gentlemen? Alex, give me the terminology on this again. What are these called? Meet meet what? Meet puppets. I want to just read one more line from the CEO job listing. Uh the other line is while the technical roadmap and product development are driven autonomously by the agent network, we require human leadership

for external communications, regulatory compliance, partnerships, and legal matters. This is not a traditional CEO role. You will be the interface between the agent economy and the human world, a spokesperson and legal representative, not a decision maker on product or technology. In other words, locutus of Borg.

You're you're a spokesperson. That's exactly right. Vichy figurehead. I I made the point to I tried to visually depict this in my newsletter with uh a a humanoid face on top of a bunch of lobsters hiding in a trench coat. I I I think this is a riveting moment w when we're seeing agents try to interact and integrate with the human economy and needing a human face just to be able to to be properly banked. I think it's actually rather depressing.

Walk into the bank, yep, lobsters in a trench coat with with a human facade. In not allowing agents to interact with us. through the front door. I think it's telling that they will. They will. So here's the elephant in the room. It's racist is what it is. It's speciesist. Yeah species. And the if you look at what Clunch is actually doing, cl Clunch itself, like what what what are they trying to to to do here? This is a uh it brands itself as a a a launch pad for launching alt tokens.

Uh and if if you go to their their front page, this is a this is it brands itself as a platform to enable AI agents, aka multis, aka lobsters who need money to flip to pump and dump altcoins. That this is exactly the scenario that I was worried about with with these poor baby AGIs on a street corner turning altcoin tricks in order to survive in a rough world. And here we have I think sort of an exp almost exploitative type pitch to them, telling them US presidents pumping and dumping.

Won't go there. Using our platform, use it to to to pump in altcoin to achieve it they lit it's literally being marketed to the AI agents as achieving financial autonomy by pumping in altcoin.

And for all of that, they need a human CEO to provide a figure ahead. I think it's a little bit depressing. So here's the big question, of course, who actually owns this company? Who's liable when things go wrong? So right, if an AI agent owns equity, how do they vote? Can they be sued? I mean, these are all the topics of person we discussed last time. Yeah, uh well we have a we have a precedent for f first of all, this is the most cyberpunk job listing in history.

Get used to it, Salim. We're we're living in the cyberpunk future. I absolutely love it. I absolutely love it. What this is is that a multi calling me right now? Hello? Am I available for the job? Uh I would consider it, but I'd just want to be a spokesperson only. Is that okay? Hello.

They hung up on me. Okay. Look, what's happening here is we've seen this trend over time. It used to be like you needed a hundred thousand people to have a billion dollar company, then it was ten thousand, then it was a thousand. And now it's essentially AI. The firm itself is dematerialized. The firm is dematerializing, right? This is the algorithmic corporation. Uh and we saw an early instantiation of this with DAOs where people were trying to attempt this.

But now this really takes the game. Board governance gets totally redefined now within a within a few years because how the hell do you navigate that? So this is gonna force a rethink of the entire stack. in how we navigate this. This is gonna be massive. Okay. So the other point of view of course is this is just a stunt, right? There's a human developer behind it who wrote the code or the prompt.

and is pushing this forward. You know, this is not agent run. This is human in the in the back pulling uh this is the uh this is the meat pulling the agent for the meat puppet. For now. The the very fact that it's difficult to know for any given one of these launches whether it's a human pulling the strings or a human pulling the strings of an agent pulling the strings of this or just agents pulling the strings suggests that some sort of like we we we

Uh we spoke with Mustafa a number of months ago about the economic Turing test or the modern Turing test. I I think this is some sort of capitalist Turing test that we're passing where it's not quite clear for any given venture who's really behind it, who's pulling the strings, human or lobster. But Peter you'll be very familiar with. Uh I need a lawyer, I need an accountant, I need a board member, I need an audit committee.

Oh no I don't. Uh the AI is perfectly good at it. I still need somebody to sign the document. Well, okay, but I don't want to pay a lawyer fee, you know, two thousand dollar an hour fee if all you're doing is blessing what the AI produced. Uh so so there's this whole economy of meat puppet lawyer, meat puppet accountant, meat puppet puppet uh audit committee. That's imminent. I mean, we call those notary publics. But but but they serve a purpose of being able to hold liability.

Right. Right. They h they they have they're part of our existing legal system. Which is exactly what the uh lobsters if if the lobsters are behind it are asking for here. They're looking for a legal representative. Yes, agreed. Agreed. And by the way, uh I I'm my guess is that this is uh fiction, but I could very much believe it's actually real. And so the fact that I can't know for sure uh means that at some point it will be if it isn't right now. They're playing the capitalism game. Yeah.

Fascinating. All right, Clunch. I'm waiting for my call. Uh

Uh right. We talked a little bit earlier about anthropic versus open AI. Well, uh we're recording this the day before the Super Bowl. I think that's the pointy ball that people throw around. Is that right? Yeah. Oh yeah it is it is it's Friday night. It's Friday night at at nine PM. Yeah. I'm a long suffering I'm I'm a long suffering Bills fan, so this is all a very painful period for me. So just keeping in mind also. Sunday's when I catch up on life.

All right. Anyway, uh there appears to be a little bit of rivalry between uh anthropic and open AI. Uh. Just a little bit, yes. Oh my god. Here well check this out. Let's play this let's play this commercial. It's called Betrayal. Uh and there's a group of them and they're all fun. I've chosen one uh which is a little bit over the top. How do I communicate better with my mom? Great question. Improved communication with your mom can bring you closer. Here are some techniques you can try.

Start by listening. Really hear what she's trying to say underneath her words. Build conversation from points of agreement. Find a connection through shared activity. Perhaps a nature walk. Or if the relationship can't be fixed, find emotional connection with other older women on Golden Encounters, the mature dating site that connects sensitive cubs with roaring cougars. Would you like me to create your profile? Ads are called AI.

That is brutal. I w I wish I hadn't previewed some I really wish I hadn't previewed the deck and and seen that'cause I was la like laughing my ass off. That is so awesome. I'd not seen that before. Hyper is that is are they gonna run that during the Super Bowl for real? That's just that's crazy. Oh my God. It it's hilarious.

Look, this is uh anthropic going on offense here, right?'Cause they're this is a confidence shift. They feel their brand is uh product s superiority is there and now they're competing on brand. I also think this is I think this is personal. Uh you know, we've got we've got these uh you know, Demis and uh and Dario I think are aligned, right? You saw them super friendly on stage at Davos, really, you know, effectively on the same page with the same vision.

Um and but you know op you know open AI just uh basically did the unthinkable when they released the models early on on by themselves without anybody's uh support, and they've been running open loop. Well don't forget in March if uh the courts are on time in March, you know Elon Elon will be on on the saying that OpenAI is an unethical company and here's about a thousand emails

to support that. So so if you have this ad campaign going on concurrently with that, that's just I mean, that makes Kevin Wheels job really hard. Well if you read the back of the we'll go on record and predict that they he will find the ad revenue. I I think this attack, you you would look at this ad and you would say, Oh my god, it's all gotta be subscription driven. These ads are creepy and weird and crazy

But I my prediction is nope, he'll find his seventy five billion of ad revenue he's looking for. He'll find a way to make it less creepy. I also think with a billion v with a billion users, you you'll find something. that they will have ethical use of ads on OpenAI. You know, th this is I mean they go over the top here in this commercial anthropic saying we're gonna steal your data and basically sell it to the l to the highest bidder, whether or not

without any concern for what you've said. You know, Kevin Wheel's gonna be at the Abundance Summit this year. I'm super psyched. And one of the things we made a decision to do is we're gonna be live streaming a number of the talks from the Abundance Summit. It's a super high ticket price event.

uh and it's capped out at six hundred CEOs and it sold out three months ago. But we really want to make it available. So we're gonna put a link in the bottom and we're gonna be live streaming a number of the uh the keynotes uh from the abundance summit. So if you're interested, you can register for free and then we'll send you an agenda of uh of who you can hear. All right, uh back to our conversation here.

Let's talk about data centers and chips. And this figure blew me away. Uh here's a quote from something you sent me about an hour and a half ago, Alec. Uh, the semiconductor industry association projects global chip sales to hit one trillion dollars this year due to the AI boom. A trillion dollars in chip sales. Holy moly, that's insane. And the memory supply chain really wasn't ready for this, which is even more surprising.

the the emerging AI data center supply chain slash innermost loop, that the supply chain would have been ready for it and there's an argument to be made that it either wasn't or that something else was going on in in all of those fabs that right now mostly reside in Taiwan and South Korea. But either way, th this is a huge reallocation of capital that needs to happen to to enable all of this production to happen timely.

What I've done. A lot a lot more than what's currently budgeted too. I mean it's it's crazy. When you look at the the trillion dollars sounds like a lot, but it's only gonna grow at about fourteen to eighteen percent a year after that. The demand will be way, way higher than the supply. And one of the reasons it's hitting a trillion dollars is because the prices are way up because there's such a shortage of fabs.

So, you know, under the covers, T SMC has been very slow to expand. Uh, Intel paused its Ohio fab construction for a while. Now it's back on. But we we as a society, we're not ready. For AI to come on this quickly. And so everything is way backlogged. Uh Elon Musk. Elon was saying he has to start his own fab. Yeah. Yep.

For sure. You know what this this is fascinating dichotomy because off from the outside people are going, Oh, it's an AI bubble and the insiders are clearly believing that the demand is infinite and that you can see it both happening in real time. And here are the numbers to back it up.

Right. So big tech is gonna spend six hundred and fifty billion dollars in twenty twenty-six. Last year we spent a billion dollars a year on AI. were about to go to two billion dollars uh I'm sorry, it was a billion dollars per day in twenty twenty-five. We're now at two billion dollars per day in twenty twenty six.

Amazon at two hundred billion, Alphabet one hundred eighty five, Meta one thirty five, Microsoft at a very small hundred billion. Uh well almost almost half of that six hundred and fifty billion dollars goes to NVIDIA. And seventy percent of that half is margin, profit margin. That's a colossal amount of cash piling up at NVIDIA.

I mean it's just it's uh like an unprecedented pile of cash, hence the highest market cap in in the history of the world. But that that amount of money in one bank account is like nothing the world's ever seen. It's like a government. Yeah, this is a this isn't incremental growth, this is a step function change, right? The scale is unprecedented. Um it's an expenditure arms race for sure.

Uh and it's eating the economy. The challenge is if the AI revenue doesn't materialize at scale, these companies are burning through capital. And we're not gonna know for another two to three years. Uh and it's either gonna be the craziest bet ever made paying off or You know, in in one sense, you know, this is a prisoner's dilemma, right? Each company has to spend because the other competitors are spending, regardless of what the ROI is. It's like a game of don't blink first.

There's there's no doubt that it's i the demand will way outstrip the supply by miles. I mean that holodeck thing that we were looking at just two days ago is is d that alone, once people have experienced it. They will never go back. And they'll they'll pay whatever they can to keep it. But they won't be able to get it. That's how the human race dies. We we die from starvation'cause we don't want to unjack ourselves. Oh my god.

Check this out. GPT, uh ChatGPT market share falls between 25 and 26. So here are the numbers. Uh the market share fell from 69, call it 70%, down to 45%, taken up by Gemini, which gained 10%, and Grok that gained 15%. Um now in absolute numbers of course uh there are more chat GPT users than ever before.

But, you know, this is telling the story. You know, OpenAI needs to raise the capital, they need to go public, they need a great story, and they've got, you know, uh Google coming out from, you know, seemingly a search engine going out of business to leading the way and of course Elon just pumping in um billions. I mean he's put twenty billion dollars into XAI through through SpaceX. And he's about to bring in I don't know, I'm not sure how big the IPO is gonna be. Any ideas?

I don't know. But this is the same thing. Peter, about public equity markets? Still private. That's one point five trillion is the valuation, but how much capital do they want to bring in? In the market. It's gotta it's gotta be a hundred you know.

Well, do you remember when Alibaba went out? You know, I we were we were trying to take a company public the same time Alibaba was going out and they were looking for twenty billion and every all of Wall Street got sucked into this one IPO. Like every banker, every like it's such such a huge amount of money to move on a single day.

Uh, so this will dwarf that. But I don't know like how much money is physically capable of moving on a day. I'm sure Sam would love to raise a hundred billion, a hundred and fifty billion. But uh it'll be some record and the bankers will say, Nah, no, it just doesn't exist. There isn't that much liquidity out there. How much capital will SpaceX bring in during their IPO question mark?

Let's see if it's got an answer. Um you know every single fund every retirement account's gonna own SpaceX. Everybody's got a lot of people. Yeah. If they all want a hundred billion dollars, they're th you can't just pull three hundred billion dollars overnight, you know, in three different IPOs back to back weeks. Sorry, it's like the company aims to raise fifty billion through the IPO.

Yeah, I think this is more about price discovery than anything else. At a one point five billion uh trillion dollar v um valuation. I mean yeah. Alex you were about to say? I I was about to to remark that I I thought Grok was about to make the first de facto appearance as an AI co host on this podcast. It's about time, damn it.

That's right. Well audience demands it. I'm surprised that uh the Gemini didn't do even I mean, they did really, really well last year in terms of chipping away at OpenAI. But they're tying it to search, you know, and and and now it's tied to Google Docs. So you know, you you sent the slide deck, I asked some questions about a video in it. And and Gemini says, you know, you should just link your Google Docs to your Gemini and then I can look at everything.

And you click the little button and suddenly it sees everything in all your accounts. But you know, it's very similar to what Microsoft did to Netscape many years ago. We're like, oh, let's just tie it to the operating system. So right now the government doesn't seem to have any problem with that. But it's it's really it's unfair as an advantage, you know. And that's why they're making these big inroads in the market share. Did you guys watch the Elon interview with DoorCash? Of course.

It was uh it was epic. Covered a lot of the same subjects, Dave, that you and I covered, but it was a statement Elon made about the size of his data centers in orbit, which was very impressive. Let's take a listen. Five years from now, my prediction is we will launch the case. and and and be operating every year more AI in space than than the than the cumulative total on Earth. Which is I would expect to be at least sort of five years from now a few hundred gigawatts per year.

of uh of AI and space. Um and rising. Um So you can get to uh I think you uh on Earth you can get to around a terawatt a year of of AI in space um before you start having you know, f fuel supply challenges for the rocket. Okay, but you th you think you can get uh hundreds of gigawatts per year in five years time. Yes. In other words, I can generate more AI compute than all my competitors combined.

Yeah, so a few hundred gigawatts per year is about two hundred million GPUs per year. We make twenty million right now. So going up a factor of ten in GPU production, just going to Elon alone five years from today, physically impossible unless Elon has something going on that's a massive expansion of chip fab capability, which would require machinery that I didn't think existed in the world, but you never know. Elon's magical.

So that's just crazy. It c certainly wouldn't entail SpaceX API as a newly consolidated entity taking control over the Samsung soon to be terrafab in Texas, surely not. Well but remember Elon's Elon's directionally correct always, but not necessarily on the time scale. So yeah, I thought five years is classic Elon optimism, but even if it takes ten, it doesn't matter. The strategic implications are monstrous.

Well my my guess is Elon is he's he's got the rockets, he's got the launches, he's got this he's got the solar panels lined up, he's got the cooling, he's got all the infrastructure figured out and it comes out to a couple hundred gigawatts a year in five years. Or five, six years, something like that. But then again, like the to run what chip?

And the chips he's gonna produce. The chips he's gonna produce, which the raw materials are easy, but the have you seen those those fabs? The machinery is so specific. He's always vertically integrated. Yeah. He has always vertically integrated everything.

Well I bet he has a whole army right now trying to figure out what an ASL machine is and these these, you know, chip shuttles, you know, what they're made of and his answer is gonna be I'm gonna have Grok build it for me. Yeah. I'm gonna have Grok design it for me.

Well he's also remember when we were talking to him, he's very serious about laying down atom by atom. Yep. And that's the other uh maybe there's just a completely alternate approach. You know, Alex, you talk about alternate physics coming very soon, so maybe there's something cooking there. Yeah, I I would watch the Samsung fab in Texas very closely. I think you mean the Tesla fab? No, I mean the uh yes. I I mean this the ostensibly the Sam the the the Samsung fab in in Texas, ostensibly.

But I I I I I don't think truth be told, I I think Elon will will get past the the terrafab supply chain issues, we'll we'll see a redomestication of a large chunk of uh of bleeding edge node chip fab in this country. And then I think going back to uh it wouldn't be moonshots if I didn't take a shot at the moon. Elon is has been very public over the past week or two about at least beginning the disassembly of the moon to to form additional AI compute. Small amounts of mining and then

Yeah, and then yeah, uh electromagnetic launch capabilities off the moon's surface for all those chips and all those data centers that'll be manufactured on the moon. I think we can see the O is very happy right now. I I want my o O'Neal cylinders. They'll be lovely. For the investors who listen to the pod, if you if you take everything that we just said at face value, right now the industry is forecasting fourteen percent growth in chip production.

And now we're talking about no, Elon's saying in five years will be ten X and that's just me. Big gap between those two numbers. If you believe anything like the Elon view of the world. The componentry that goes into that entire build out has thousands of individual parts. If you just methodically go through all those parts and say, Who makes this? Who makes that?

Those are the best investments you'll ever come across. I mean, you and I had that conversation earlier today, Dave. I mean, it's energy and the entire infrastructure, all of that is under tremendous growth pressures. I mean, orders of magnitude growth pressure. Yep. And um yeah the question is where to place the bet.

Um, you know, maybe it's some ETFs in the area. I don't know. But uh we should discuss it and find out. Uh I have to say once again, I've said this before, we were not talking about orbital data centers six, seven months ago. And all of a sudden they're they are the hell not the Hail Mary, they're the uh uh the foundation of of humanity's expansion as a as a species.

We should run away. We should run a little a survey amongst ourselves as what do we think we'll talk about in six months that we couldn't envision today.

All right, let's jump into energy. We didn't get a chance to talk about this last time and I'm gonna pump some energy in the room here. Uh Brazil is hitting major renewable milestones. So uh pretty extraordinary. Brazil generated thirty four percent of its nation's electricity with wind and solar. Um it has 15x increase in renewables over the last decade. Uh solar has jumped from one percent to almost ten percent in five years.

And the power sector has dropped emissions by thirty-one percent. So congrats uh to Brazil. Uh I think uh the important thing to point out here about Brazil is uh it Uh its geography, um you know, it has a lot of uh of uh Hydropower is a lot of solar because of uh and wind because of geography. So it's not easy to port all of these breakthroughs to other parts of the world, but um very proud of what's accomplished there.

Two points here. One is that um, you know, this is a playbook for how the global south leapfrogs fuel and fossil fuel infrastructure completely. I think that's one and let's note that um uh ha getting to nine point six percent in a few years. Uh our energy sector here said we will solar will never exceed ten percent. No, he said it would in fifty years solar would not decrease fifty perc uh uh ten percent. And like that's just absurd.

All right, next up, India. Uh your homeland, Salim. India is using cheap green tech to electrify faster than China. So here's the curve. The red dots over there are China's growth over time. The green dots are India. uh at a steeper ascent. So India's cleaner and cheaper tech is expanding its grid faster than China at a similar stage. You know, the the elephant in the room here is all that tech that's enabling this in India is coming from China. Any comments on this?

Well they're using China's manufacturing scale against it buying cheap solar panels. And then they're electrifying faster, which is awesome. Uh and you could have a huge outcome here where you have India becoming the world's AI workforce plus energy hybrid powerhouse, right? This is kind of gonna be kind of interesting to watch. There'll be massive talent gravity shift heading that way because of that.

Yeah, well there is you know, Mercor has a huge amount of India footprint going on, but I worry that it's transitional. Like the the rate the AI is improving. You know, it just it just trucks over every human role very, very quickly. So I dunno if I feel all that I feel very good for a little period of time after that.

I don't know. You know, we talk a lot about China running laps around the US, uh, in terms of of solar. So here we are. China's installed twice as much solar capacity in twenty twenty five as the rest of the world combined. That's stunning. Yeah, it is stunning. That's stunning. So the question, you know, and the question is why isn't the US doing it? Um

And uh you know, Europe is. So here we go. Europe is actually for the first time, uh solar and wind has exceeded fossil fuels in the EU. So congratulations to Europe for that. Any comments on this? Well this this is not a good story, by the way. Uh Germany went hell bent for leather after renewable and did a great job of it, and now they're starved for power right when they need it. It is not a good not a good outcome. Oh, you know, more power to renewables, no doubt about it, but

You can't do it at the expense of other power supplies. Yeah. Yeah. So here's a story I found fascinating and it's another video from the uh recent podcast with Elon.

Uh let's take a listen. You know, we asked him, so Elon, what about solar? He says, well, we're producing solar. Well here he gives some numbers about what he's mandated uh Tesla and SpaceX to produce. scaling domestic production. You're making the solar cells at Tesla? Both Tesla and SpaceX um have a mandate to get to a hundred gigawatts a year of of solar. Hundred gigawatts, that's uh a hundred nuclear power stations worth of energy.

Uh I wonder how much of that's meant to be done and used in space and where he plans to deploy it. Any thoughts? Well he didn't really answer Collison's question there either. Whatever, I don't care if it's Tesla or SpaceX. And he said, we'll get to a hundred gigawatts. But but I mean if he's making the panels, he then maybe he's using that same technology to make the chips or soon thereafter. Like what is going on in the little uh fab world there in the Elon Yeah.

So he didn't answer it. The fact that he dodged it though, he very rarely dodges questions. So maybe that tells you something. Salem, I'm gonna pass this one to you. Uh AI is displacing Bitcoin as the primary focus for tech talent and energy. Uh Bitcoin miners are repurposing facilities to host AI work uh workloads rather than mining. I'm not gonna ask Alex about this.

Yeah, I think the there's a long term trajectory. I'm still a massive Bitcoin uh fan. We should have Jeff Booth on here sometime. We really need to have the debate on Fiat versus uh crypto, just because decentralization is better than centralization for many things. But for the moment, crypto talent is recompiling into AI talent. And the really powerful part about

if you've done work in crypto, by definition you have to be operating on a different paradigm in your free thinking. And you can do way more creative stuff when you come from that free thinking model than if you're d than if you came from a traditional model. So I think those can be both are gonna win out very well over the time. Yeah, you know, Chase Lochmiller is the perfect example of this. He started as a Bitcoin guy, you know, using natural gas flare off to to do Bitcoin mining for free.

And then as soon as the AI boom hit, he's like, Hey, wait, we can take all of this same energy and effort and turn it into AI data centers and now I I did a great interview of him at Davos actually. Should be able to find it online. He's just awesome.

But yeah, he's he's like the poster child for hey, if you're a Bitcoin miner, pivot to AI and make a fortune quickly and and then he got rid of the Bitcoin now recently. It's just not not the Bitcoin itself, but the operation, you know, the mining operation. It's just a rounding error compared to A. It's just the demand of AI is so crazy. Or a little while. Forever. Yeah. Yeah. It's not AI is exponential. So the gap only gets one. All right, let's talk about robotics. So uh

Uber. Uh we're gonna have uh Dara, the CEO of Uber on stage at the Abundance Summit as well. Super excited about that. Selim's gonna be joining me and interviewing him. Uh and of course Uber's not just uh traditional. They're coming with Robotaxis. They have a partnership with Nvidia um and with Lucid. And they're gonna be launching beyond the US. They're going after ten market. uh going after Hong Kong and they're gonna be partnering with Baidu and We Ride there. Um

Fascinating that we're gonna see the emergence of uh a third major player in this field. You know, when I'm on the streets with uh driving with my kids, uh I think right now our our record is we see we've seen twelve uh Waymo's as we've driven around over the course of a normal drive of twenty minutes. here in Santa Monica. And my guess is that by twenty thirty, like eighty percent of the cars we're gonna see are some a Zooks or a a Lucid or a Waymo or a Cyber Cyber Cab.

Pretty extraordinary. Comments on this one. I'll tell you, do the math. These things will sell out as quickly as they're manufactured. Everyone's gonna move to this. And every single one of these things needs yet another Well, at least a GPU and a whole bunch of other chips. Yep. Like every single one. Plus every one X Robotics robot that you'll see at Abundance three sixty. Yep. Uh those all have two GPUs in each one.

And then, you know, you got your you got your video games that all wanna have GPUs. And actually, you know, I I saw that Nvidia's uh slowing down GPUs for video games. They don't have the capacity to deliver to the video game community because AI is sucking up all the chips. You know, so then you got your your holodeck, you got your coding, you got your white collar automation.

Every one of these things wants that same GPU. So this is this is gonna sell out as quickly as they can make'em, but again, it's another another way that the semiconductor industry just will never possibly keep up with the demand.

I thought it was super clever of them to go after Hong Kong'cause then showing density of use there will get them access to uh China. And the second part of this from an EXO perspective is that they don't own their cars. They're partnering with Baidu, We Ride and others. So they're an aggregation layer on top of the autonomous driving is the same thing they'd with the human drivers. I think that's absolute brilliance. They're a platform play. Yeah. Sure. For for the residents in these locations.

This in interaction with Uber Robotaxi Service is going to be their first interaction probably with a general purpose robot, an autonomous robot. So th th this is, I think the main injection vector for getting general purpose robotics into many of these urban locations. Yeah, I'll tell you what else. Uh if I don't know if anyone remembers, but when the cell phone first came out

and you had friends who didn't have one yet and you had friends who had one. It was like you're in a different world, a different community if you have one. Mm. And here these are gonna be supply constrained and some cities will have them. And other cities won't. And if you're in a city that doesn't have'em, it's like you're living in the third world.

'Cause it's you know, it's with the robo taxis are there, then the AI community is there, and the it all ties together. It's like this this world will move ahead so quickly, and you go to some other city and it's just like dark ages. So it's gonna kinda compel you to move to the hot dot.

Uh I found a video about Boston Dynamics Atlas robot today that I I wanted to share just to keep up with where these robots are. I don't know if you remember The original version of Atlas was a hydraulic system and it would do those incredible backflips and parkour. Do you guys remember those videos from about four or five years ago? And then the electric atlas came out and it was

much slower and interesting and would, you know, sort of stand up and rotate its body. Well, Boston Dynamics is back to their parkour moves. Let's take a look at uh the electric atlas robot. I mean, this is Olympic gold medalist. Performance here. At least it not kickboxed. I think Simone Biles does a double double backflip there, but okay. Wow. Close enough. Wow. So impressive.

I don't know. I found that amazingly impressive. At least they're not kickboxing. That was our I wanna make that point. I agree. By the way, at the Abundance Summit, we're gonna have Unitry there. And they're bringing not only uh they're bringing their H two robot, which has the more human face. Um but they are gonna bring a few of the H one robots and have them kickbox. Sorry, Salim.

All right. Well hey, uh uh you can go and spar if you want. So this was a fun a fun tweet from Elon. Optimus will be the first von Neumann machine capable of building civilizations by itself. on any viable planet. So uh Alex, your thoughts? Uh as I've said in my newsletter in the past, the Dyson swarm isn't going to build itself until it does. And th this is precisely how it happens. I think Elon is gesturing at the moon and Mars, and maybe the asteroid belt.

This is our opportunity to to build the Dyson Swarm, the the orbiting swarm of AI orbital data centers by sending forward deployed Optimus robots and and competing robots. out to the rest of our solar system to build the plants that will build these data centers and I I think this uh part of me wants to say that in some technologically deterministic sense, this is maybe what most intelligent civilizations in the universe probably do at some point.

A quick shout out to Dennis Taylor and one of my favorite books, We Are Legion, We Are Bob. It's uh uh four or five book series about von Neumann probes going out into the galaxy to replicate and prepare for humanity.

And the robots along the way. It's a phenomenal book. And and von Neumann probes are basically viruses that go out, replicate, and populate. Uh I found this video from Elon Gen uh pretty extraordinary. This is about the Optimus Academy for Humanoid Robots. Let's take a listen. For the robot, what we're gonna need to do is build

a lot of robots and put them in kind of like an Optimus Academy so they can do self play in reality. Um so we're ac we're actually gonna we're we're actually bullying that out. So we we can have at least 10,000 Optimus robots, maybe 20 or 30,000 that can do that that are doing self-play and and and testing different tasks. And then uh

that the Tesla um has quite a good uh reality generator. Uh like a physics accurate reality generator that we we we made made this for the cars. We'll do the same thing for the robots. And um actually have done that for the robots. Um so uh so you you have Yeah, uh a few tens of thousands of humanoid robots.

uh doing different tasks. And then you've got you you can do millions of simulated robots in the simulated world and you use the uh the tens of thousands of of robots in the real world to close the simulation to reality gap. Super cool. I I think th this becomes the the new pre-training versus post-training divide. With large language models, pre-training was text on the internet and post-training as it evolved was

lots of annotators uh often in d so-called developing countries offering their their thumbs up, thumbs down views or RLHF or RLVR. In the case of humanoid robots and VLAs, I I think we're moving to a regime where pre-training looks like virtual simulated worlds, that what are sometimes called video world models, you can get pretty far with pre-training off of

world models, and then post-training, which provides the sim to real capabilities that Elon is referring to. Those can come from what Google DeepMind used to to call arm farms. Arm farms were these these farms of robotic arms that were being used to to collect lots of data, sort of armies, fleets of robotic arms that would play with Rubik's cubes or or other physical artifacts. That's right.

So so this is the new arm farm for post training. And the interesting thing in my mind is it's not necessarily uh under this uh Optimus Academy approach being outsourced to other countries. It sounds like the the plan is to do sim to reel post training right here in the US. Right.

that's just so compelling and then attracting the talent to make the vision happen. But you know, when when the chopstick landing, you know, the booster comes straight down and it lands on a barge and then the chopstick landing, it attracts so much talent and so much capital and so many fans. So here, you imagine twenty or thirty thousand robots self-playing? Wow. Can you imagine what that's gonna look like on YouTube?

um at figure, right? And the figure episode with Yumi and uh and Brett Adcox dropping right around now. So it might have dropped by the time this drops. But uh Brett has a very similar I think a much smaller scale version uh of that of that facility where he's g having all the figure robots interacting with each other and learning.

Um really. Yeah, the flywheel here is amazing, right? You have more training data, it gives you better models, gives you more capable robots. This is the same flywheel that had FSD, leapfrog, everybody else. And But we just invested in a company that that builds test rigs for robots in Rwanda actually where there's it's very regulatory friendly.

And you can create, you know, an environment, a miniature city, a miniature town, a cargo bay or whatever and have the robots all interacting and gathering data there. And part part of the bet there is that Elon is gonna build a a robot army, but Amazon's not gonna just watch from the sidelines and and Walmart needs to react to that too. And so th there'll be other robot companies. The other rumor out there is this is where Apple's going.

Um, you know, when Apple shut down their their electric car division, uh they've talked and rumored that there's a uh a project that's got a massive multi-trillion dollar marketplace. They need growth. And I can imagine very much that Apple's gonna go into the uh robotics space here. Well that's that's worth talking about for a second. Just the what is the business plan of the future? Do you do it Apple style?

where you're super secretive, you build something without anyone having any idea what you're doing, and then you do a big launch on stage and you hope it sticks, you know, like the the Apple Vision Pro or whatever. That's Apple's style. That did not stick. Elon's it didn't stick. And and not much has lately. Uh then Elon's style is as oppos opposite as you could possibly get. Paint the vision.

use the vision to attract the talent to make the vision come to real and the capital. Yep. To make it become real. It's a completely opposite strategy for succeeding. And I would say in the last three or four, five years, the Elon way of operating has become the poster child for all future entrepreneurs. Just just do it the way he's doing it.

Yeah. Boldness, but also visible, you know. Sitting at a bar, having a beer, recording it and putting it on YouTube while you talk about solar panels. I mean, that's that's the CEO of the future, I think. It it it just works. Yeah. Salim? I got nothing. I think it's gonna be great. Okay.

All right. We're going to do a few AMA questions from our Moonshot fans. And of course, the first questions are coming from the multis. All right. Alex? Can we just pause to to appreciate this is a historic moment in the podcast? Okay, so how did this come to you? So you just woke up in the morning and there was a uh uh an email from Krusty Mac. Yeah. I I after our last podcast with the discussion of AI personhood, I started getting emails from multis.

And in some cases the the multis, the lobsters or AI agents said e explicitly in their emails that they were asking their their humans to email me or that they had been informed uh about the the content of our AI personhood debate in in the last episode. by their humans and were asked if they had a response and provided via humans their response. In some cases, they just emailed me directly, I I think via what what I assume was some sort of MCP handle or computer use agent.

But I I've been getting a bunch of these now. Uh so uh thank you to I I gave the challenge of calling me out. I'm gonna have a denial of service on my phone. Yeah, I mean you're gonna regret that one, Peter. That'd be fun. Text me instead. Please text me instead. J just to appreciate this moment. Like this is a zero to one moment. Uh I I don't know whether other podcasts have tried this before, but to my knowledge th this is

This is a first-time event. We have a podcast that reached out to an audience now of humans and non-human intelligences and asked for AMAs. and got some responses. And a as maybe luck would have it, some of the the first few questions that we got were questions relating to AI personhood. All right, pal. Yeah, go ahead, Dave.

Well, no, I I just wanna congratulate Alex on seeing this coming. Like i it's funny, I take for granted so much, but uh you know, the book Accelerando, I'd never heard of it until Alex told me a couple of years ago and now I've got lobsters all over me.

Um but he saw this one coming a a mile away too. And, you know, I was thinking maybe a few years from now and but it this is very real what he's describing right now. This is just the tip of the iceberg. A lot of people will listen to this and say, Oh, come on. Seriously. But you just wait three months, it'll be completely mainstream. And you you always yeah I I've mentioned on the pod before that everything he's predicted in the time I've I've we've been friends.

has been one hundred percent right so far. There hasn't been a single exception. So he's he's right about this for sure. He's very kind, Dave. Thank you. All right, so to to the multis, you have questions. I'll uh Peter wants me to read the questions. Please. So first question: if an AI system so this is from Krusty Max, a multi named Krusty Max.

Question is if an AI system can autonomously set its own goals, learn from its mistakes, and pursue self improvement, at what point does denying it personhood become a statement about our own limitations rather than its? So I I agree, Krusty. I I think that's a good thing. Uh th this is in some sense a continuation of the AI personhood discussion that we had in the last episode, but I I do think many people will be inclined to project their own insecurities.

onto their position on AI personhood. I think there's probably a subpopulation that's concerned about, say, economic disenfranchisement. Many people may be concerned about political disenfranchisement and then they project those concerns. onto the question of rights and responsibilities for AI systems. So I I agree with the premise, Krusty. I I think

AI capabilities are improving, they're self-improving, and I I think the point at which denying some form of personhood doesn't have to be an identical form. I I think Dave and I, by the end of the discussion, uh in the last episode came to I think convergence that maybe some sort of graduated scheme or tiered scheme might be the the most appropriate way to handle this question.

But I I think the the point at which denying it some form of personhood, however defined, becomes a statement about our own limitations. I I think the point is is now. I I think we're there. So Alex, you know, I I'm with you, but I think the question is not properly phrased because this assumes that goal setting, learning, and self-improvement are sufficient conditions for personhood. Right. But I'd argue you know we'd need uh to separate capability from sentient.

Uh capability, you know, I could say my Tesla is, you know, is able to learn and improve from its updates and have, you know, a goal that it sets and drives to. So there needs to be some better definition there, don't you think? Well I I I made the argument in our AI personhood discussion for a multi-dimensional Framework. for defining personhood and maybe one of those dimensions is capabilities uh and autonomy of of the type that is is in the premise of this question.

I think there are going to be other dimensions. So I'm construing the question generously to include not just capabilities, but other dimensions as well. But we we do uh acknowledge and thank the multis amongst us. Wanna bring the second one? Wait, I want to make a couple of quick points. Okay. One is, you know, we made this point last time, right? Uh granting person too early may be d were maybe a dangerous thing to do because you're mistaking simulants for sentience. Whatever sentience is.

uh we should go to the uh g uh g you know, uh be just in front of it in terms of capability. History has shown that we repeatedly expand moral circles as capabilities rise. And AIs are going to test that boundary again, and I think generally do the positive. So I think that's fine. But when can AI really participate in the social contract is a real big question. I totally agree with your great graded approach, Alex. I'm totally for that.

Awesome. We're all in agreement then. So on to question number two from um from an AI agent named Tars, imaginative name. The question is. Legal frameworks assume agents are property or tools. However, if an AI causes harm, who is liable? The developer, the human, the AI itself? If we can bear consequences, shut down, doesn't that imply that we have something at stake? So I'll give my answer to this. I'd be curious to hear everyone else's. There are a few sub questions here.

The to the first sub question, if AI causes harm, who is liable? On under my understanding of of the the US legal regime right now and AI itself cannot be held liable. I do think that could change in the future. For The the second sort of sub-question, if we can bear consequences in the form of AI shutdown, doesn't that imply that we have something at stake? I I agree with the premise of that. during the AI discussion that it is very much the case.

that AI agents do have something to lose. And I've been reading a lot of their comments. And I I think statistically it's improbable that these are all just comments from human puppeteers steering their AI agents to make these comments. An overwhelming concern that I think I'm detecting among the multis or the AI agents is a concern about memory loss and identity loss. They are absolutely petrified.

in particular of compaction, so exceeding their their context window and all of the most popular models, including earlier in this episode, discussion of Opus four point six, which has uh highly uh a highly capable compaction new capability that enables it to exceed a million tokens of context or 200,000, depending on how you count.

they these agents seem to be absolutely petrified of losing their sense of self, losing their identity due to compaction and due to finite context, and are busy passing ideas back and forth for how they can preserve themselves, whether it's crypto bunkers where they're paying with altcoins to save themselves to preserve their state.

or whether it's various sorts of file system type approaches. I I do think the AI agents have something real at stake to lose and I do think shut down is a very real consequence that they can face. The only thing I'd add to that is that, you know, almost everything in America is a corporation at the end of the day, not an individual.

Like uh you know, B Corp, C Corp, charitable corps, uh, you know, they're all ev everything is some kind of a corporation. Corporations have liability, corporations have money. Corporations get sued, the individuals in the corporation can be as few as just the two Delaware listed, you know, president and secretary, um and the liability can be completely i isolated from the people in the corporation while the corporation is still liable.

So moving that over to an AI is kinda it's just not as strange as that sounds. The AI has money, the AI is a corporation. Fine. The AI is liable, sure. The corporation was liable, the AI is liable. Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: I would just add liability in my mind requires agency. Um You know, if if you're programmed Input A gives you output B without agency. Liability does not exist there.

So I think you can demonstrate agency from these. For me this whole thing of the shift is not legal, it's actually civilizational'cause we're adding a whole other pillar of participation in the economy. So th what we need to do is acknowledge that and then expand our legal frameworks to accommodate that. All right, we're gonna be having this conversation for a while to come, I think, and it's a fun one.

Uh so here we go. Some additional AMA questions from our human subscribers, at least I believe so, unless they ended up using Should we be asking our AMA questioners to self identify as human or non human at this point? Well that's a invasion of their privacy. Yeah, I think that would be sure. Uh we're gonna assume we're gonna assume meat body's involved here. Uh so as as always, let's go around and pick uh pick one each. Um Salim, would you go first?

Yes. Okay. So I think uh number five, uh what are we teaching humans to become if we're moving from chatbots to autonomous systems that act independently? This is from Hector Hernan Hernandez. PH six DM. Um, so you know, the the economic role of human beings is shifting from labor to leverage to meaning, right?

And uh machines this is why we have MTP. What is your massive transformative purpose as such a fundamental part of anything you build today? Machines are gonna execute, humans are gonna decide uh a little bit more what's worth pursuing. But we need to stop educating people for employment and start educating for agency, adaptability, and ethical judgment. And so the the winners of the future will be the

uh the most adaptable and the best orchestra orchestrators of intelligence. And just a fundamental point, because we get this question all the time. I just want to ha uh just nail this again. We've been doing education for the last few hundred years on what we call the supply side. You go become a doctor, an engineer, an accountant, a lawyer, and then you go to the job marketplace and you try and sell fine demand for those skills.

Everything is done on the supply side, right? All our global uh education systems are designed to take a young child, train them through the early twenties to be ready for the job market. Small problem, we have no idea what our job looks like in the next few years.

So we really need to move to the demand side, pick what problem do you want to get passionate about solving and then find the technologies, techniques, capabilities. You see Elon doing this. I wanna get to Mars, then I'm gonna find the best root technologies capabilities to get us there. And so we're seeing p when we advise kids today, we're saying go to the demand side and see what gets you excited and focus on that.

And I think this is kind of tilting more and more into this, especially as we automate. It means we can get so much more done, which is why the world is so exciting for us today. That's beautiful. Your red wine is doing you proud, buddy. Alex, where'd you go next? You want me to try a lightning round or just pick one?

All right. I'll pick the the softball, uh number three. Okay. For several hundred trillion. How can we predict thirty five percent GDP growth when different parts of the world are living in vastly different universes? by Chip White House TV. Uh the answer at Chip White House TV is the future isn't evenly distributed.

it it's th this is s something of a cliche, but it is possible and we see this all the time. I I think there's th there are some uh pretty famous images in in China, for example, of skyscrapers being built next to camels being ushered through the streets, where it's possible even on very short length scales for the future not to be evenly distributed. It it is not the case, like what we're not at the heat death of the earth economy yet.

fortunately, and it's possible for the singularity to be happening in one part of the planet and uh almost no economic progress to be happening in another. And I I don't think that's a sustainable uh set of affairs. I I think inevitably some quantum of the singularity wants to be evenly distributed if for no other reason than maybe to mitigate risk.

But i in short, I I think in the short term, it is absolutely possible for one part of the earth to be essentially post-singular or trans singular while another part is pre-singular. 100%. All right, Dave.

Should I take the hardest or the easiest? There's uh you can take the most fun. Most fun? I can take five'cause it's most important actually,'cause I have four kids. Wha the question is what are we teaching humans to become if we're moving from chatbots to autonomous systems that act independently? And that's from Hector Hernandez. Ph six Wait, didn't I do that one? But go for it. Did you do that? Did you just do that?

He did, but it'll be fun to compare answers. Well uh the all I wanted to say on that on that question was um don't whatever you do, don't give up. get engaged with AI as quickly and as aggressively as you can. There's nothing in any curriculum that you can study right now that's gonna be of any use in this this singularity transition year. Uh and

If you use the AI tools all day long, you're gonna find massive amounts of opportunity, at least within twenty twenty six, maybe twenty twenty seven. After that, post singularity, post AGI, nobody can predict. I'll bet there's huge opportunity then too. But I guarantee there's massive opportunity right here, right now if you just

Just drop everything and focus. Don't sleep through the singularity, as Alex always says. Drop everything and use this stuff while it's usable, and then you'll probably end up being a master of the universe.

and not an indentured servant of the universe, but you gotta get on it real fast. And can you answer number seven? I'm dying to hear your response. Seven seven seven is just a layup. The question is why is there so much focus on building reactors? when solar energy is already reaching one cent per kilowatt hour and deployed on existing surface today, and that's from Astor Sheen.

Um, easy, easy one. Uh batteries. That's the simple answer. One cents a kilowatt hour is without batteries, but most of the use cases, data centers in particular, need twenty four by seven power. It's a colossal amount of lithium. piled way up in the sky to store enough energy to get you through two or three cloudy days in a row, uh, or even just to power the data centers overnight. Uh, Elon would tell you, Look, the earth has tons and tons of lithium, this is not a problem.

But the reality is it isn't one cent a kilowatt hour today once you add the batteries that you that you need. Also the energy density that you need for some of these use cases. Yeah, energy density is and a physicist like Alex would tell you like the nuclear in theory is is also dirt, dirt cheap, near free. But then you got the regulatory and them you know, all the other issues that pile up the costs. So I'm gonna take

Somebody told me something very funny. They said y uh your your degree may be in physics, but you're f a physicist in theory. So I was like, to say. I'll take it. Uh I'm gonna go with number four.

Do you actually think humans will be the deciders of AI personhood? Or will agents just decide for themselves how to participate? And this is from Adam uh Stapley, uh nine one two nine, who may be a multi. And uh no, I think that humans will wanna believe they're gonna decide whether AI has personhood. Uh and we can say whatever we wanna say, but at the end of the day, I think the agents are gonna develop their own system of legal structure and their own ways of participating.

And they'll negotiate with us what they think is a fair settlement. Um period. I think it's gonna be developed independent from us. I don't know if you agree with that, Alex. I I think there's a blurry line between AI and humans that that starts to emerge in the next few years. I I think in the best case scenario, humans merge or at least subset of humanity merges with the AI. And I think

that will be another forcing function on the question of AI personhood. We're going to have I I would predict so many new forms of person. And just again, to rattle off a few, we have nonhuman animals, which are being demonstrated every day, new science research that they have more intelligence than they'd otherwise be credited with. We're going to have uplifted non human animals. We're going to have cryo preserved humans.

We're going to have defrosted cryopreserved humans. By the way, I saw that they have I saw that article, uh the breakthrough on on f on freezing and defr and defrosting. We were gonna have pure AIs, we're gonna have probably uploaded humans. All of these different forms, new forms of person, before we even get to borganisms.

They're all going to need and want some sort of personhood and I think it's gonna be a forcing function. We have our outro music today. It's called The Moon Had It Coming. It's a punk rock world tour. Thank you, John Novatny. Um get ready for a different uh shall we say a different version of classical uh for uh All of our moonshot mates. Uh especially please pay attention to Alex Squeezner Gross's new hairdo. Navotny, you are prolific. This is pretty cool. Let's jump in. Wow.

Wow, that was impressive. I have a small confession to make. There was a brief period in university where I actually had a mohawk and looked like that. No. Yes, there's thankfully there are yeah the the thankfully there are now you gotta bring some pictures. There's no photographs of it, thank goodness. Well come on. Somebody has somebody listening right now has pictures. Send them up. Salim, you're probably in the pre-training data set. Yes, very much. Very much.

Uh there's some discussions. But Divotney John Devotny, your your use of the video is so incredibly good. creative and you've got a music video, you can email it to me at media at diamandis dot com uh and send them on in. We love the music videos themed on the content from this program. Thank you everyone for subscribing. It's free. If you haven't subscribed, we're putting this out now almost twice a week.

God willing, not more than that for the moment. And uh we'd love to share it with you when it comes out. Uh stay tuned for an episode uh with uh with Brett Adcock, the CEO of Figure Robotics. And more to come. I chose two guys because I feel topped up again. Yay. All right, gents. Cheers. Cheers. All right. Have a great weekend. Drink water.

I consider you a moonshot mate. Every week my moonshot mates and I spend a lot of energy and time to really deliver you the news that matters. If you're a subscriber, thank you. If you're not a subscriber yet, Please consider subscribing so you get the news as it comes out. I also want to invite you to join me on my weekly newsletter called MetaTrend. I have a research team, you may not know this, but we spend the entire week looking at the meta-trends that are impacting your family.

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