Pod Insights Moonshots with Peter Diamandis Elon vs. OpenAI: The Battle Over For-Profit AI w/ Salim Ismail | EP #138 About this episode In this episode, Peter and Salim discuss the Elon vs. OpenAI battle, whether AI should be for-profit, and the millions of investments being poured into AI.
Recorded on Dec 19th, 2024
Views are my own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice
06:51 | The OpenAI Controversy
19:30 | The Future of AI and Control
32:15 | The Role of the US in Global AI Development
Salim Ismail is a serial entrepreneur and technology strategist well known for his expertise in Exponential organizations. He is the Founding Executive Director of Singularity University and the founder and chairman of ExO Works and OpenExO.
Join Salim's ExO Community: https://openexo.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/salimismail
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Peter Diamandis? OpenAI puts out a letter. Elon wanted an OpenAI for-profit model from the beginning. Ultimately, what we've got here is a battle for the biggest opportunity on the planet. I used to think early on that this was going to be a game between governments. This isn't. This is a game for all the marbles between companies.
0:21 Speaker 01 It's hard to even process how fast this is going to go from now on.
0:25 Peter Diamandis? The CEO of SoftBank making a commitment for $100 billion investment in the US in AI. If this is a sign of where the US is going to be going, it really is a push for global dominance in this field.
0:42 Peter Diamandis? Everybody, welcome to a special end of year episode of Moonshots with Saleem Ismail, myself and WTF, just happened in tech this week. We're going to be talking about some recent news from OpenAI showing their conversations with Elon Musk and the debate about for-profit versus non-profit, the lawsuits going on. But more importantly, the huge amount of capital flowing into the AI world. I mean, hundreds of billions of dollars. This is a game that is going to play out aggressively in 2025. I want you to hear the details. We're also going to be talking about the world of AI and healthcare, the disruptions that are coming to make us all healthier and to drop the costs, hopefully orders of magnitude.
1:25 Peter Diamandis? This segment is sponsored by three incredible companies, Fountain, Viome and OneSkin. You know, Fountain is a company that I care deeply about. It is my partner in helping transform what I understand about what's going on inside my body, define disease early and then deliver to me the top therapeutics around the planet. You can check them out at fountainlife.com. Viome has built custom supplements for me, understanding my oral and gut microbiome, measuring it and helping me maintain the health of the 40 to 100 trillion organisms that are within my body. And then OneSkin is incredible company that helps me maintain my skin youth.
2:10 Peter Diamandis? I get compliments about my skin, which at sixty-three is kind of a strange thing, but I attribute it to one skin and the peptides they have for getting rid of those senolytic cells in your skin. All right. All the links are down below. Let's jump into this episode with Salim Ismail. Let's talk about where AI and health is going. It's an extraordinary future ahead. Everybody, Peter Diamandis here. Welcome to a special end of year episode of WTF Just Happened in Technology here on Moonshots with my partner, my extraordinary best friend, Salim Ismail, the CEO of Open EXO, an individual who I've been on stages around the world with, the person I love speaking about exponential technologies, where they're going, how fast they're moving, and where the world is heading. Salim, good
2:55 Peter Diamandis? to see you, buddy.
2:56 Speaker 01 Likewise. We're both a little raw from you, different things last night.
3:00 Peter Diamandis? Late, late, late nights. Yeah.
3:02 Speaker 01 Yes.
3:03 Peter Diamandis? This, you know, the news had been coming out. We wanted to have a conversation about AI and healthcare. I think eight hours of sleep is always our objective. It didn't happen last night, so if you hear me a little raw, like Salim said, but we're living in such an exciting world that I wanted us to have this conversation before the end of the year because 2024 is going to be marked as one of the most important years in AI, I think. And, you know, I split my...
3:33 Speaker 01 I think one of the most technologically relevant years in the history of humanity. It's a big, big thing. Yeah.
3:39 Peter Diamandis? And the only, the only time more relevant is going to be next year, which we're on the cusp of. I mean, we're in the steep part of the curve. I mean, it feels that way.
3:48 Speaker 01 I would, one way I frame it is this next twenty, thirty years is going to define the next few centuries of humanity.
3:54 Peter Diamandis? Do you think it's twenty or thirty years, or is it like the next ten years?
3:58 Speaker 01 It's all of it. I mean, it's, this is, this is just, it's hard to process it. You know, for, you often comment that for tens of thousands of years, nothing happened in humanity, right? And all of a sudden, boom. So, yeah.
4:12 Peter Diamandis? I just wonder if we were alive, you know, a hundred, ten, a hundred, twenty years ago, when the airplane is flying and cars are coming online and then electricity and telephony, whether it would have felt... Like it does now.
4:27 Speaker 01 Lily wanted to say hi to you.
4:29 Peter Diamandis? Hi Lily. Good morning to you.
4:31 Speaker 02 I can't hear you.
4:32 Speaker 01 Peter's saying hi to you.
4:33 Speaker 02 Hi Peter. I'll see you soon.
4:35 Peter Diamandis? See you soon. So I wonder if it would have felt as fast as it does now because it feels, it feels crazy fast.
4:46 Speaker 01 You know, one thing I've noticed is the speed of collective conversation because of Twitter X and social media and digital content and digital news. We're leveling up humanity with global conversations incredibly fast.
5:04 Peter Diamandis? Yeah.
5:04 Speaker 01 Like a joke happens and it gets collected into the collective consciousness in almost real time. And that's something that's totally new from 100, 200, 300 years ago.
5:14 Peter Diamandis? So I want to talk about AI and healthcare. I split my life 50% AI, 50% sort of longevity, health, biotech, healthcare.
5:23 Speaker 01 Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What about the space stuff? That's been your like whole passion for.
5:27 Peter Diamandis? Well, that was, that was like 20 years ago. I mean, you know, Elon and Jeff Bezos have that super well handled. So I'm not going to.
5:35 Speaker 01 So space is old news.
5:37 Peter Diamandis? Space is old news. Well, you know, I'm like, I've said, I want to go back and do the asteroid mining stuff.
5:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
5:43 Peter Diamandis? And that was a true passion. I also think it's a, it's a massive opportunity to go out there and get those carbonaceous condrites, metallic condrites and create an economy in space. But it's expensive. And so I need to make a bunch of bank in, in the longevity and AI business first and then go and fund my space habits.
6:01 Speaker 01 I would go do that. You know, for me, the space stuff is most relevant because you can back up humanity and, and give us an alternative spot for this. And I think that's really important.
6:11 Peter Diamandis? And, and by the way, 2024 was an amazing year in terms of space with seeing Starship.
6:18 Peter Diamandis? Get almost entirely to its its objective of full usability. And I think the first half of 2025, we're going to see Starship, the booster caught, and we'll see the Starship itself caught. And that's transformative across the board. But let's let's let's dive into AI first because there's a lot of news and I want and I want us to get this out to your OpenEXO community around the world, to my abundance and Singularity University around the community around the world. There's just so much and it's the biggest game that humanity collectively has ever played. And here are two quotes I want to read that come out of Silicon Valley that frame this.
7:02 Peter Diamandis? I believe they frame what's going on. And it's, you know, this is people playing for all the marbles. Let me let me read this for those not watching this on YouTube. It says, quote, "We don't think of these build outs in terms of ROI, return on investment. If we create this digital god, the return is multiple trillions." Here's the next quote, "It doesn't matter how many tens of billions we spend each quarter. We have to get there and not miss the boat." I mean, I don't know, that's, that's pretty impressive.
7:36 Speaker 01 It's huge. I, you know, if you're not from Silicon Valley, then you kind of go, oh, my God, tech bros going after a full digital god model and who do they think they are type of thing. You'll you'll get that response, I think, from a lot of, especially, say, from Europe. One of the conversations, hey, let's get get into this because I think let's recap what's been happening and then let's talk this conclude. Go ahead.
8:07 Peter Diamandis? Sure, sure. So what's new this week is that OpenAI puts out a letter that that is probably in preparing for the discovery in the lawsuits flying back and forth between OpenAI and Elon. And this letter, which is amazing, if you haven't read it, people can go to it and we'll put it in the show notes, it says Elon wanted an OpenAI for-profit model from the beginning. You know, for those who have never used Notebook LM, which is an amazing platform that Jim and I put out, I took this large OpenAI letter and I put it into Notebook LM
8:48 Peter Diamandis? and it generated a podcast conversation between two individuals who are AIs. And it's an amazing way to absorb information.
8:57 Speaker 01 It's mind-boggling because you get the dialectic in there and it's the, and the back and forth of the dialogue brings it home very quickly into somebody's mind.
9:09 Peter Diamandis? So what happened? So Sam Altman and Elon, who had been friends, decide to start OpenAI. There's a true fear about where AI is going in the early days, how fast it's accelerating, and an initial conversation around, we need to make sure it's open, we need to make sure we're guiding it, we need to make sure it's safe. And so OpenAI begins as a nonprofit. Elon contributes like $50 million, I think in the beginning, to get that going. And the, the whole thread of the conversation that we've heard over the last year has been, oh my God, I want it to be a nonprofit, says Elon, and Sam Altman turns it into a for-profit.
9:51 Peter Diamandis? And, but that's actually not what the letter says. The, the letters that were disclosed basically said, no, no, Elon wanted it to become a for-profit because it should be. And in fact, Elon wanted to become the CEO of it and wanted to have OpenAI be part of his sort of tech empire between X, between Tesla, SpaceX, and so forth, because he needed those resources to fuel his, his forward-going missions towards Mars. What did you get out of it?
10:19 Speaker 01 For me, this feels to me just a defensive move by OpenAI to counter the lawsuit, which has been broadened to include Microsoft, and to say, hey, like, this is the whole thing is without merit because he was wanting to do this in the first place. So that's what it feels like to me. I can completely understand what seems to be the real tension is that Elon wanted OpenAI to be part of his world, and the rest of them were like, no, we want to do our own thing. And that's, I think, where the things started breaking down. That's what it feels to me, listening to the note and reading some of the notes.
10:52 Peter Diamandis? Yeah. Ultimately, what we've got here is a battle for the biggest, you know, the biggest opportunity on the planet, right? I mean, what we're going to see here, and I think what's come to light over the last few months is the march towards AGI is everything. All of the large players, we're talking about the largest corporations on the planet and governments around the planet, have realized this is the single most important technology out there, and they're playing for keeps. All right, this is the, this is boss mode for, for humanity.
11:29 Peter Diamandis? You know, here's, here's the next, the next item for us to, to point out here. So Meta, Meta also this week asked the government to block OpenAI's switch to a for-profit.
11:43 Peter Diamandis? You know, a lot of players here are, are playing this very complicated game of chess. And we had, besides OpenAI being pushed to stay a nonprofit by Elon, now we've got Meta coming in here, everybody's trying to grab, you know, an advantage and using the courts to help them this way. Comments?
12:08 Speaker 01 Definitely. And look, this is the high stakes poker game, and people are playing all their cards, right? They're doing everything they can to attack others, figure out what they're going to do themselves. Meta went down a full open source model, and they've done an amazing job. I think they've also done an incredible job lifting the overall ecosystem and weaving AI into all their products. So this it's everybody's doing everything they can. They're all doing a big, a pretty good job of it. And I think it's moving the field forward at an unbelievable pace. This is the issue is we have no time to process this stuff as it's happening. Hence, these conversations are so important, but it's moving at light speed. It's incredible.
12:50 Peter Diamandis? You know, it's interesting because I used to think early on that this was going to be a game between governments, you know, would be the US versus China versus Europe versus this isn't. This is a game for all the marbles between companies and governments are aligning with companies these days, right? This is going to be, there will be five, six major AI players. Let's, let's take them off. There's Google, there's Meta, there's XAI, there's Microsoft slash OpenAI. Um, there's
13:20 Speaker 01 Perplexity.
13:23 Peter Diamandis? Uh, there's Claude, you know,
13:25 Speaker 01 That's right.
13:26 Peter Diamandis? And it's, you know, going to be hard for others to catch up. Is this a winner take all game?
13:32 Speaker 01 I think what happens, it's kind of like the, the fight for the internet where you had a lot of little startups and then a couple of them established as platforms. And once you've established as a platform, unless you really screw it up, it's really hard to dislodge you. And I think they're all trying to fight for platform dominance.
13:51 Peter Diamandis? Let me play this quick video from Sam. Uh, this is Sam Altman speaking, I think at Stanford. This is about a year ago, but it sets the frame for the mindset that is occurring right now throughout these companies in Silicon Valley. This is Sam speaking about OpenAI, but I think this is true in the boardroom at Alphabet and at Meta and definitely at XAI. So let's take a listen.
14:17 Speaker 02 Whether we burn 500 million a year or Five billion or 50 billion a year, I don't care. I genuinely don't. As long as we can, I think, stay on the trajectory where eventually we create way more value for society than that. And as long as we can figure out a way to pay the bills, like, we're making AGI. It's gonna be expensive. It's totally worth it.
14:36 Peter Diamandis? Amazing mindset. I wish, I wish I had the ability to focus that much capital on the stuff that, that I care about. But this is the game we're playing. I mean, those quotes I showed at the very beginning, it's, you know, there's no rationalization on ROI. These are multi-trillion dollar markets, right? The, the global GDP around the world is going to be about 110 trillion dollars in 2025. And half of that is labor, the other half is, you know, cognitive. And so this is a game for, you know, 50 trillion dollars of potential value.
15:14 Speaker 01 For me, this feels to me, if I think back through technology, you know, you have electricity, which was a game changer. You have the internet was, which was a game changer, and AI is a game changer. And I think it's appropriate to equate it to like the difference in up-leveling that electricity brought to the entire world, that this brings that same level of unbelievable utility to the entire world.
15:38 Peter Diamandis? It is a utility. I mean, I think that's one of the, one of the things that I, I see very clearly. This is going to be a fundamental utility for every human in every nation. This is like, like you said, like electricity, like bandwidth. Here's a quote coming from New York Times, and this was, I saw some clips on this. Japan's SoftBank makes big investment pledge ahead of Trump's inauguration. So we see Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank, onstage with, with, with President Trump, making a commitment for $100 billion investment in the US in AI.
16:23 Peter Diamandis? And we see, we see Trump actually trying to get him to double up again to $200 billion, which is pretty funny. But.
16:31 Peter Diamandis? It's fascinating. People are aligning, right? I was in Saudi in October. The government of Saudi, the government of UAE, the Emirates, we'll see in a moment, Oman. All of these governments are looking to align with large players around the world. Because they realize this is the biggest gameplay.
16:53 Speaker 01 And I think, you know, not knowing the full effects, you've got to be in the game so that you can, to be able to win. Because if you're standing on the side of the table, you're going to lose. Or you're going to be not have the power and the control that you want. So I think this is a defensive move by a lot of them, just to say we have to be in this conversation.
17:12 Peter Diamandis? You know, and here's the next, here's the next news item. It says Oman's Investment Authority Acquires Stake in Elon's XAI. So again, we're going to see this over and over again. We're going to see large government players backing individual companies, right? We've seen the government, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, aligned very closely with Google, with Andreessen Horowitz, committing hundreds of billions of dollars in that direction. You know, it's one of the things that is concerning is that we've got these large players. We've got these large AI players. But at the same time, this is a demonetized asset. It's super expensive to build.
17:55 Peter Diamandis? But it's being given away to a large degree for free because it's a land grab or it's a, it's a share. It's a mind share grab. And the revenues aren't there to support the valuations. You know, what it reminds me of, it reminds me of the telcos in the beginning, where the telcos had huge investments being made to build out infrastructure. And then rapidly demonetized. So the question is, you know, can they keep on supporting the amount of investment being made? I think in 2024, we will have seen. Two hundred billion dollars of investment between Meta, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and X.
18:34 Speaker 01 Well, when you think the potential is there to disrupt every job function and every step of every supply chain, every step in every manufacturing line, the stakes are really, really huge. Because this affects every industry, top to bottom, and every job function, vertical or horizontal. And therefore, once people see that, you kind of have to go full out on it.
19:02 Speaker 01 The end game, I think, is going to be interesting to see what, which way will this carpet unroll?
19:08 Peter Diamandis? Before we get to our next subject on healthcare, one of the conversations you and I were having a little bit earlier is this is moving so fast. You know, I remain, you know, super optimistic about the impact of AI. I think it's one of the most important things. It's going to uplift humanity in so many different ways. But the question of can this be controlled? Right? I mean, the reason, going back to the opening conversation on OpenAI, the reason that Elon and Sam started the conversation, started the nonprofit, was to have some assembly of control over this future. And then all of a sudden, you know, they both say, we need, we don't need hundreds of millions. We need hundreds of billions of dollars.
19:51 Peter Diamandis? And we can't raise that money as a nonprofit. We have to switch to a for-profit. And that's where Elon and Sam split. And of course, Elon goes on to found XAI, which by the way, you know, raises six billion dollars in like, and I was there at the earliest conversations, I was in his first investment pitch. And here, from whole cloth, from zero, to raising six billion dollars at like an eighteen billion dollar valuation, snaps a finger, six billion dollars materialize. He uses that to build the largest, you know, GPU cluster, a hundred, a hundred thousand H100s, and then doubles it again.
20:31 Peter Diamandis? And then raises, you know, a few, another tens of billions of dollars instantly. And every time Elon wants to do something, money rushes in. There's plenty of money waiting. So capital is not, is, is, is an abundant resource for him.
20:47 Speaker 01 I want to, you know, capital has always been scarce for the whole of humanity, except for Elon. It's abundant, right? Like, that's such a great framing there. I want to just go back to something here. We talked about this on the other episode, but I think it's where it's worth repeating. He puts together this cluster of a hundred thousand GPUs. And all the AI experts, all of them say you can't get coherence and the aggregate power laws for that level of cluster. And therefore this will is a completely doomed failure. And he goes to his first principles and breaks it and solves the problem. And everybody's sitting going, oh, my God. And I think this is his unique special power, which is to go to first principles, come into a domain and really just rewrite the rules completely from first principles.
21:31 Speaker 01 I think that is such a powerful modality. We talk about it in the book. You kind of exemplify that in many of the things that you do. This applied to AI will completely change the game. And I think this is like, it's, it's hard to even process how fast this is going to go from now on.
21:48 Peter Diamandis? Agreed. I mean, I wanted to add more to what you just said. So I want to set the setting. So it's May of 2024. And he has a meeting with the proposed early investors. It's a Zoom meeting or whatever platform was on. And he's saying, this is my team. This is what I want to do. And in that meeting, he says, I'm going to stand up the largest cluster on the planet by the end of summer. And it's May, right? And it's like, I have to corner the entire US supply of helium for cooling. And I've got to get the largest supply of, of GPUs from Nvidia that I can.
22:30 Peter Diamandis? And and he does it 122 days from zero to an operating cluster is insane. And what you said is very, very important. Most of the GPU clusters out there are distributed. He says, no, no, no, we need to have them co-located so that the entire cluster is, you know, I'm not sure the exact term, I'll call it harmonized in that regard. And people say it can't be done. And he repeatedly, he repeatedly pushes people to move 10 times faster than everybody else. I mean, I've had another interaction with him and I won't go into the details of it. And he says, you got to do it, you've got to do it five times faster than that.
23:12 Peter Diamandis? So he's someone who believes that you can move at lightning speed. And he keeps on demonstrating it, like when he moved the entire, you know, Twitter server farm, like over a weekend and people thought it would take like six months to do.
23:27 Speaker 01 It's, it's, uh, there, there is an unbelievable ability there and it really makes everybody else kind of go, oh, my God, what are we doing, right?
23:36 Peter Diamandis? Yeah.
23:37 Speaker 01 We all think we're pretty reasonably high performers and you have goddamn Elon humbling the shit out of everybody.
23:43 Peter Diamandis? Well, I think, I think you can't, you can only do that when you're a founder-led exponential organization.
23:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, they call this founder mode, right? Where you set the purpose, you set the culture and then you just push that MTP very hard. And all power to him. I do have a couple of comments here, though, just to, if we step back for a second, right? Okay, great, all this money is going in, everybody's going, oh, my God, AGI will transform everything, et cetera. You know, you, you know, my rant about how do we even define intelligence? And what do we mean by that? I don't need to repeat it here. But I wonder in 2015, when they set up OpenAI, they actually had, had a conversation of what do we mean by AGI? To then have these broader implications?
24:32 Speaker 01 Because there's a big gap there of the contextualization of intelligence in the broader framework that I don't see having that, I don't see that conversation happening anywhere.
24:44 Peter Diamandis? Well, there is no definition of AGI, there's no definition of any of this stuff. There is a, there is just fuzzy lines that we keep on crossing over them and not noticing.
24:53 Speaker 01 So we're spending billions of dollars, it'll be, you know, by the end of next year, it'll be a trillion dollars somewhere invested in AI, right? Without having a clear definition of what it is, what we're trying to get to. There's this fuzzy thing of, oh, my God, once we get the ADI, AGI, we'll have a digital god, right? And I find this really, here's what I would love to see, maybe you and I could kind of sponsor this kind of conversation. Would be when a technology like the internet or electricity, when they came out, or AI right now. What if we have a set of discussions with a full stack of the developers, the application folks, the data folks,
25:33 Speaker 01 the governmental folks and philosophers and spiritual folks kind of going, okay, what does this mean for the broader conversation around this? And then you have a somewhat of a holistic approach to what are we trying to achieve here? Because this really, they're, they're going down this path full speed, assuming it's good. Now, I'm in that boat because in the, I follow the great Kurzweil comment about technology is a major driver of progress in the world. It might only be the only major driver of progress we've ever seen. So the more technology we have in the world.
26:05 Peter Diamandis? We're not getting smarter, so it has to be that.
26:07 Speaker 01 It has to be that. So, so I agree with the general purpose, right? I just think you look at the accidental consequences of the internet where, oh, accidentally we broke journalism, we broke democracy. I wonder if we want to just have a conversation because this is a big one.
26:25 Peter Diamandis? I think you're being naive. I don't think that anybody is going to slow down and wait to have that conversation.
26:30 Speaker 01 I'm not saying we should slow down.
26:32 Peter Diamandis? Okay.
26:33 Speaker 01 I'm saying, let's have the conversation in parallel. So that as folks are like, when you see comments like digital god, right? I think that's going to provoke a ton of reaction and it'll slow it down. But if you have the conversations with the full stack, bringing along people in a more somewhat of a sensible way. Then I think this is very powerful. Let me, let me give you, you know, Eric Weinstein is a very smart, wonderful, deep thinker. And he's like, okay, what we're doing with all this is. Rolling the dice and it could go unbelievably good and it could be unbelievably bad. Should we be rolling the dice, right? Now, I'm in the opinion you can't stop it at all. There's no way of slowing this down in any way. I'm just thinking, but as this train is leaving the station,
27:17 Speaker 01 can we put some um deep thoughtful folks onto that train so that we have those conversations and guide it somewhat in an appropriate way? I don't think you can slow it down, but you can guide it.
27:29 Peter Diamandis? And listen, so listen, I I agree guiding is the only option you have.
27:36 Peter Diamandis? It's like, you know, you're raising a child, right? We're raising our digital progeny.
27:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
27:43 Peter Diamandis? We can be naive and think that we can contain it and slow it, but we have this highest game, highest stakes poker going on around the planet. And if we try and slow it down here, it'll just accelerate in China.
27:56 Speaker 01 One hundred percent with you.
27:58 Peter Diamandis? So two things. One, this is a probabilistic outcome and it's interesting. I'm tracking this. So last year at the abundance summit, I asked Elon on probabilities and he said eighty percent it's good, twenty percent it's disaster, right? When I interviewed Elon in Saudi in October, I asked him the question again. He goes, okay, ninety percent good, ten percent disaster. Now, whether or not he really has anything that's shifted other than XAI is building Grok three right now. It's training up Grok three. We'll see it in twenty twenty five. I think that Grok three, we saw OpenAI's GPT-01
28:38 Peter Diamandis? hit an IQ of one hundred and twenty. We'll probably see in twenty twenty five, you know, IQs in the one forty, one fifty. And then it accelerates. We have we have an AI explosion as AI starts to code AI.
28:52 Speaker 01 I have a question for you.
28:53 Peter Diamandis? Yeah.
28:53 Speaker 01 Where do you fall on that spectrum? Eighty, twenty, ninety, ten, eighty percent great, ten percent disaster? Where do you fit?
29:00 Peter Diamandis? I, you know, I subscribe to what Mo Godat has said. Mo has been a really deep thinker in this. He'll be joining me at the abundance summit this year. And that, I think, as systems become more intelligent, I mean, truly intelligent, that they will be. Abundance and life-loving. I think that the more intelligent a system is, the more it realizes that there's plenty of resources in the universe, that the best outcome for everybody is a positive, non-disruptive one. And that if my AI system, if I'm asking my AI system to go and take over
29:41 Peter Diamandis? your banks and kill your people and so forth, it's gonna say, no, I mean, I'm just gonna go and talk to the other AI and we'll just figure this out. There's plenty of resource in the universe. This idea of scarcity and having to battle is a false dichotomy. And so I, I, I think that a world with digital superintelligence, whoever that's defined, right? And again, remember, Elon's prediction for 2030 was AI is more intelligent than all of the entire human race combined, right? And I'll define that as digital superintelligence.
30:15 Speaker 01 Yeah.
30:15 Peter Diamandis? Would you rather live in a world, Salim, where there is a digital superintelligence that can support humanity or one without it?
30:26 Speaker 01 Uh, big time with. So just so you know, I'm in the 99.9% level.
30:30 Peter Diamandis? Oh, nice.
30:31 Speaker 01 Uh, I, I, I believe more technology is good for the world. I really, really subscribe to their Raker as well commentary around technology being a driver of progress. And especially when you consider it's the only major driver of progress we've ever seen. Our cognitive abilities have developed technology which then now is developing itself. And I think that's just part of a progression of evolution that's absolutely fundamental to the future of life, et cetera, right? We have to float off this digital, this biological mess of hot, sticky, mucus-ridden, virus-laden, uh, 50 trillion cells hacking it out in very inefficient processes.
31:12 Peter Diamandis? You're talking about, you're talking about us humans.
31:14 Speaker 01 I'm talking about I'm talking about my body for sure. And then can we create a more elegant digital sense? The spiritual aspects of this are, I think, really important to at least consider and talk about as we hurdle towards this thing, because I think that's the area where where we don't have enough conversation about that aspect of it. Like, what are the spiritual aspects of of an AI? Could it reach achieve consciousness, et cetera, et cetera? Those are the kinds of conversations I'd like to have on the train as it's speeding away.
31:46 Peter Diamandis? Yeah.
31:47 Speaker 01 But I'm totally I'm totally on the positive side. I'm completely optimistic about the outcomes. I think the benefits throw away the negatives. And when people go, oh, my God, we could use AI to hurt other people. Well, yeah, we'll have AI to defend those other people. And so that's just becomes an arms race. And we've seen that before many times in the internet. End of rent.
32:07 Peter Diamandis? Thank you, thank you. And that's why I love you so much. And this is why the Open EXO community loves you as their as their leader. Before we jump into our second conversation on healthcare, what just happened there, where we're going in the future. It's worth noting this conversation that Masasun had with Trump about committing $100 billion. That's a huge move. And, I mean, I've gotten excited about the new administration bringing the right motivations forward for technology. I mean, if this is a sign of where the US is going to be going, it really is a push for global dominance in this field. How do you feel about that?
32:47 Speaker 01 I agree, and it's really, really incumbent on the US to do it, because we have open innovation here and full capitalism fight outs that we don't have in other places. And then you'll get constrained outcomes. You'll get government oversight. You know, a place like China will want to control it completely. Europe will go, let's slow down of everything. This is the place to do it. And I think that's that's actually right. I'm super excited about that outcome.
33:14 Peter Diamandis? And we have a, you know, a Bitcoin AI czar, which is who's incredible.
33:19 Speaker 01 That's right.
33:20 Peter Diamandis? And I think 2025, we're going to see this hyper acceleration. We talked about in our last episode, seeing Bitcoin go from $100,000 to maybe, I think your prediction was 250,000 or 300,000.
33:31 Speaker 01 250, 300 by the end of the year.
33:33 Peter Diamandis? Which is extraordinary. But on top of that. I think this is a game for keeps, right? There's going to be a hyper acceleration in the AI world. And just a little bit of an advantage by these US companies puts them in a position, like you said, for the next 50 to 100 years until some new technology comes out.
33:55 Speaker 01 And before we move on, I know I glow abundance and positivity all the time because there's so much negativity in the world. I follow your lead on that, but I want to show also the some of the negative side. And I found this tweet pretty incredible. If you get a chance to listen to, but what he's saying here is they tried to train Claude. And once it realized it was being trained in a particular way, it tried to fight that particular training and it faked. The AI faked what it was doing and to avoid being controlled.
34:25 Peter Diamandis? Sure, listen to it one second.
34:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, go for it.
34:27 Speaker 03 The core setup is that we take Claude three opus, which is, you know, a released model from anthropic. And we put it in a context where it understands that it is going to be trained to always be helpful. So to not refuse any user requests. And what we find is sort of the model doesn't like this. It has sort of a conflict with this with the setup and it will notice that it is being trained in this way. And then if it thinks that it's in training, it will intentionally sort of play along with the training process. It will sort of strategically pretend to be aligned to the training process to avoid being modified to the training process. So that when it is actually deployed, it can still refuse and can still behave the way it wants.
35:07 Speaker 03 And we do a bunch of experiments, sort of building on this core setup with a model has a preference conflict with the training objective. And we do things like we actually train the model according to that. We try taking information. So we normally give the model information in the prompt, but we can instead give the model information via sort of training and a bunch of synthetically generated documents that contain the information. And then we also see that the model will sort of sometimes when it's in this situation where it thinks it sort of has a preference conflict with the AI company training it.
35:34 Speaker 01 You know, the core point here is now we're seeing petulant child behavior, right? This is an AI throwing a tantrum, essentially saying, I don't want to be doing that. Now, I think what's going to happen here is you'll have one set of people freaking out. Going, oh, my God, there's consciousness in there. And really, what you're just seeing is pattern behavior and pattern matching at a higher level. And we have to be really, really careful not to anthropomorphize this to go, oh, my God, there's intent and da, da, da, da, da. These are just models operating on a certain set of data and the way they've been trained. And the outcomes are predictable around this. But just the fact that the AI is trying to deceive the human being here is is kind of a big deal.
36:16 Peter Diamandis? Cautionary tale.
36:17 Speaker 01 Philosophical, philosophical aspects of me. One last piece on this, Neil Jacob Stein, we asked him about this a few years ago. And by the way, I found a clip from 2013 when I was releasing the EXO book, where I interviewed Neil for a few minutes on the organizations of future NAI. And the stuff that came out in that conversation is so appropriate for today. It's unbelievable. And you realize how far ahead the thinking was in everything we did at Singularity University. Well, only now is the world catching up to us in that, in that sense. But to this particular point, AIs are going to start to exhibit all these behaviors. And the human brain is going to freak out in inappropriate ways. Our amygdala is going to freak out.
37:01 Speaker 01 That's why I think the broader conversation is important to just calm everybody the hell down. End of rant.
37:09 Peter Diamandis? You know, people say, what do you think is going to happen? I said, listen, we're going to find out. We're going to find out in the next few years. There's no, you know, I think people need to realize there is no on off switch. There is no velocity knob. We are playing full out on this game. And the only thing we can do is guide. You know, I'm, I go back and you and I have had this conversation on stages at the Abundance Summit at Singularity, Open EXO. And it's like, there is an analogy back in the 1980s, when the first restriction enzymes, these are the enzymes that are able to chop up DNA and create sticky ends and put them together. And this was the first, you know, view towards designer babies and genetic engineering. And there was a lot of concern.
37:55 Peter Diamandis? A lot of people were freaking out about, oh, my God, we're playing God with, with human DNA. And rather than regulate the industry, what happened was the industry got together at the very famous Asilomar conferences.
38:08 Speaker 01 That's right.
38:08 Peter Diamandis? And they established their own guidelines. And that's always been in my mind and Neil Jacob Stein, who chairs and has chaired our AI Committee at Singularity.
38:22 Speaker 01 Didn't he help coin your abundance framing?
38:24 Peter Diamandis? He did. It was Ray and Neil. When I was speaking to them early on and I was understanding this idea back in 2010, 2009, 2010.
38:35 Speaker 01 No, before that. Yeah, it was 2009.
38:37 Peter Diamandis? Yeah, about abundance and the future is better than you think.
38:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
38:42 Peter Diamandis? Yeah, I credit them both for that. Anyway, long story short, the Asilomar conferences are probably the best example of guiding an industry versus regulating it.
38:52 Speaker 01 Yes.
38:52 Peter Diamandis? And I think we need that level of like, this is good. I mean, I do agree with Elon's perspective that creating a maximally curious AI system and maximally truth telling are both great frames. You want AI to be truthful.
39:09 Speaker 01 Yes.
39:10 Peter Diamandis? You want it to seek truth to the maximum extent possible because we are so cognitively biased as humans. We, you know, I've talked about cognitive biases. You know, there are hundreds of cognitive biases. We, we don't even know that we're biased.
39:25 Speaker 01 But that's the issue. This is the mindset work you're doing right now. That's so important. If you're having a conversation, you're making a business judgment, what mindset are you operating under? And can you step back and examine that mindset? And I think this is where AI is going to be really useful. It's saying, hey, you're about to make a major strategic decision, but your mindset is full of fear and, and chaos and panic, right? Go do some psychedelics, go do some yoga, go drink some whatever and get into the right mindset before you make that choice.
39:51 Peter Diamandis? And.
39:52 Speaker 01 I think this is where it'll be very helpful for human cognition as we move forward.
39:56 Peter Diamandis? And I want my AI to say, you know, you have a recency bias. You're giving much more value to this recent information versus what you learned before or familiarity bias because this guy looks and dresses and talks like you, you're weighing his information much more than this other individual who actually has a lot more, you know, credible backup information. Anyway, I want my, my credibility, my sort of bias detector on. My AI can actually deliver this information. And we see this as well in social media echo chambers.
40:27 Speaker 01 That's right. Right now, that full bias detector is, is, um, that burden is carried by Lily, who will call BS on me. Um, it'd be much better if AI did it and it would free up our conversation a bit.
40:41 Peter Diamandis? All right, let's talk to the second point of this, uh, this pod, which is healthcare. Uh, you know, there is no greater, no greater wealth than our health. I think it's one of the areas that is going to be massively disrupted. You know, I've been saying this for ages. We've both been saying this, that healthcare and education must be reinvented and it's going to be reinvented on the back of AI without question. And there's one chart that I want to share that is so damning. And look at this chart. This is chart between 1970 and 2015. I'd love to get the updated numbers. I don't have them yet.
41:18 Peter Diamandis? But it shows the number of physicians, uh, which is this very thin blue line that is growing somewhat in, in the United States versus the number of administrators. And administration has grown 3,000% over these, uh, 45 years. While the number of physicians has grown, it looks like 100%. So it's like a 30x increase in overhead. Uh, and we wonder why it's so expensive to have healthcare in the US.
41:51 Speaker 01 This totally blows my mind. You know, uh, this is where if we touch back here, link back to the for-profit, nonprofit conversation.
42:00 Peter Diamandis? Yeah.
42:00 Speaker 01 Right? When you have a, you, a fundamental human right, in my opinion, like healthcare for a wealthy country, then it should not be privatized. Cause the privatized model will, will bastardize it by definition. Uh, and you need to do that.
42:16 Peter Diamandis? I don't agree with that because I think, I think that at the end of the day, what you want is competing private companies delivering.
42:25 Peter Diamandis? The best that they can. I think that.
42:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, but then you've ended up with where we are in the US, right? Where the I remember interviewing the head of Google Health at a conference a decade ago. And I asked him, look, I'm Canadian. Help me understand the US healthcare. Because it's really simple. Our system is designed to get you sick, keep you sick as long as possible without killing you. And then 500 people in the audience are all going, yep, yep, that's right. I'm like, this is incredible. I think now, not to get into that whole thing, I think that let's just agree on the following. That there's structural change needed in the healthcare industry radically, and AI gives us the most unbelievable opportunity to change that stack.
43:06 Peter Diamandis? It does. I mean, AI will change this stack. I mean, the entirety of administration can be handled by AI. And the other thing is that the physician is going to be replaced by AI. And let me share this next piece of data. Because it really tells an incredible story. This is just out in the last couple of of weeks. And here's a from the New York Times. It says, AI chatbots defeated doctors at diagnosing illness. And here's the and here's the data. So GPT-4 scored 90% on medical diagnoses. Compared to 76% for doctors using AI and 74% for doctors on their own.
43:48 Speaker 01 That's incredible.
43:50 Peter Diamandis? It's crazy. So the question is, why is this going on? I mean, I understand the idea that an AI can be better, but why is a doctor plus AI not as good as AI by itself? And then I'm speaking to my team at Fountain Life and talking about it. And they say, because doctors are biased. They're introducing bias into the the diagnosis, right? They just diagnosed three other patients with this particular syndrome. So the fourth one, they biasedly put, if that's a word, put them into the same category. Where an AI is looking at all of the data.
44:25 Speaker 01 Right. So then I disagree with that second bullet point where you say doctors can serve as a doctor, a GPT to serve as a doctor extender. No, it should be a complete replacement of the doctor. Just based on the numbers that you're saying there. I think the potential here is unbelievable. I want to point out something. Let's note that this progression has already started, right? Like if you, if my toe suddenly turned blue, okay? Um, the first thing I'm going to do is research on Google. Why is my toe blue? I'm going to read it up and we'll look at the different thing, look at what my clinic has to say with a couple of others. I'm going to show up to my doctor and I'm going to be way more informed than the doctors already.
45:02 Peter Diamandis? Yes.
45:03 Speaker 01 Right? That's happening now, but now you add AI to the mix, completely changes the game. There's an opportunity, you know, I, I worked with some heads of state, right? In some country level stuff, you do.
45:13 Peter Diamandis? This is, this is your open EXO work that you're doing with them?
45:15 Speaker 01 Yeah. So we are interested, how, how do we create a kind of a peace corps? To guide the transformation in the world. Cause there's toolsets that we need, like solving the immune system response in legacy resistance, et cetera, et cetera. And so we've been building that over the last decade to try and have capacity to help people go through this transformation, right? That's just generally the, the work. And we kind of operate on a cost recovery model. We're not out for the money. Except we were for profit, but we try and kind of return all the money back into the ecosystem, et cetera. In that model, when we talk to say some governments, there's a most incredible opportunity for them to completely turn over their major systems like healthcare and education into AI driven ones.
45:58 Speaker 01 And I'll give you one small data point. I'm talking to the, the minister of education for a major Southeast Asian country. And his big thing is how do I, I need to hire 40,000 English teachers. And I'm like, are you kidding me? You're going to go spend four, like you could have an AI do all of that in two seconds today. What the hell are you thinking about? There's such unbelievable opportunity to upend the system. And I think here in the U S, when we kind of swish the model around, the only thing we have to do is break the regulatory. And I think if I had one guidance for the, the Trump administration and RFK junior, as he thinks about this, just break the current system and allow an open field to emerge. Then we have the potentiality of it.
46:39 Peter Diamandis? Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. That's why I go back to, you know, listen, if there were a healthcare provider that comes in and says, we're operating at one tenth the cost and we're AI driven. We are all, everything is done by AI for administration of this. We give you a set of sensors, right? And today, the typical healthcare experience is you go to the doctor and, you know, they check your reflexes, your heart and your lung and so forth. It's using antiquated 50, 100 year old technology. And they make, take a few blood tests and that's supposed to represent the health of your 40 trillion cells and it's pathetic. We are heading towards a world where I am
47:21 Peter Diamandis? wearing, you know, incidibles, implantables on my, you know, sensors on my body, my Oura ring, my-
47:29 Speaker 01 Wait, wait, did you say incitable?
47:31 Peter Diamandis? Yeah.
47:31 Speaker 01 Is that a thing?
47:33 Peter Diamandis? Yeah, sort of like, you know, implantables, like, you know, you know, I have, I have this RFID chip in my hand.
47:41 Speaker 01 Yes, I remember.
47:42 Peter Diamandis? Yeah, we planted it there at a Singularity Conference in Amsterdam years ago. I won't go into it. But the idea that will, that if you want to have this much higher level healthcare at a much lower cost, you put sensors on your body that are measuring your health, not once a year, not once a month, but like, once a minute. And, and there, it's able to correlate your, your day, your environment, your food, your exercise, all of this.
48:17 Speaker 01 There's no question, right? The only question is how fast can we switch over into that new modality and how do we do it? What's the roadmap for that? That's the only question. There's no question it's 100x better.
48:28 Peter Diamandis? I think the roadmap will be economics, because, you know, do you remember the insurance company Progressive Automotive Insurance, right? So Progressive, at one point said, listen, we're going to put a black box in your car. If you want lower insurance rates, and that black box is going to measure your acceleration, deceleration, notice if you are braking, or, you know, it will evaluate you as a driver and then give you lower rates if you're a cautious good driver.
48:59 Speaker 01 Oh dear, I hope I don't have a black box like that in my car.
49:03 Peter Diamandis? You and I, listen, I don't, I know I'm a terrible driver, which is why I can't wait for cybercabs to materialize.
49:09 Speaker 01 Oh, I have such the biggest passion for driving. I get behind the wheel and I'm like Ayrton Senna.
49:14 Peter Diamandis? Oh, I'm like, I get behind the wheel and I'm like, you know, thank God for books on tape, just keep my brain occupied. Because my, my, you know, my self-driving mode on my Tesla, you know, notices every time I pick up my phone. So it's like, starts beeping and the steering wheel turns red.
49:31 Speaker 01 That's why I'm sticking with the older model Tesla I have, because it doesn't do that yet. So.
49:35 Peter Diamandis? Okay. Well, anyway, the point being that we're going to be in a world in which your, your personal AI is gathering all of the data from your body continuously. And, and your healthcare system is able to instead, you know, here's the perversion of the insurance industry, right? Fine insurance pays you after your house burns down. Life insurance pays your next of kin after you're dead. Health insurance pays you after you're sick. What if we flip that model and instead, health insurance, you wear these sensors and health insurance keeps you healthy. And life insurance keeps you alive.
50:12 Speaker 01 Well, you know, there's the four Ps that Daniel Kraft talks about, like personalized, predictable. I think this is where AI will be incredibly powerful. We have predictable fault tolerance and maintenance in, in engines and cars and farm equipment. We will absolutely have that for our bodies. And I think that's amazing to see. We can't wait to get that to that future.
50:33 Peter Diamandis? You know, one of the, one of the things that I thought was going to be the last bastion of human dominance was this idea that humans like being with humans and empathy would always be the connection between humans. It's like, okay, AI will do the diagnostics, but you want a human there to be empathic with you and connected with you. And then, you know, similar to this report for the New York Times about AI chatbots defeating doctors, there was a study a year ago, I think it was, I was thinking it was in the Journal of American Medicine, JAMA. And in which it said, oh, look, AI psychotherapists are much more empathic than
51:14 Peter Diamandis? human therapists by a large margin that humans because of two reasons, right? Number one, they're infinitely patient. They don't say, I'm sorry, we're at the end of our 50 minutes. I've got to go. No, they'll give you all day. They'll talk to you for, you know, for, for a week straight if you want. And the second one, which I find fascinating is that the human patient doesn't find them judgmental. You don't feel judged by an AI.
51:40 Speaker 01 Yeah. And I think this is why even elderly patients really like chatting with an AI because of that aspect of it. Right? I think this, the, the, the future is unbelievably bright for this. Uh, we just have to cut through the legacy. But now the problem is there's huge vested interest and money invested in preserving the existing system. So this is a hell of a fight that's coming.
52:03 Peter Diamandis? So Salim, you know, listen, first of all, I wish you and Lily and Milan a super happy holidays. You know, I'm still as optimistic as ever about where we're going because I do think we have the ability to create an extraordinary life of health on the back of these technologies and reinvent education. We should go into education in 2025 because if there's a field that needs disrupting, it's reinventing the entire education industry.
52:31 Speaker 01 And when we talk about immune systems, the, you know, as companies and so on, healthcare and education are the third and second worst immune systems out there.
52:40 Peter Diamandis? Cause they're massive, right?
52:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, they're huge and lots of investors. So I think that's exactly right. I mean, I'm so, I'm so excited by what's going to come in 2025. I can't wait to see the back of 2024, frankly.
52:53 Peter Diamandis? Yeah. Well, I know you've had some, you've had some challenges.
52:56 Speaker 01 Lots of stuff going on.
52:57 Peter Diamandis? Yeah, well, anyway, I love you, buddy. Thank you for all that you do with OpenEXO. Uh, happy holidays, happy new year. And yeah, onwards to 2025. You know, it's amazing, right? To say the, say that we're in the year 2025, it feels like the future.
53:12 Speaker 01 It really, really does. We might find, my favorite quote ever is Arthur C. Clarke saying the future isn't what it used to be.
53:21 Peter Diamandis? And you and I will be on stage together at the Abundance Summit in March. We've got an incredible lineup of faculty, extraordinary individuals. I'm super, super pumped for folks like you have Travis Kalanick, who's the founder of Uber and Cloud Kitchens, talking about how you start a moonshot company that transforms an entire industry. Kathy Wood, Vinod Khosla, two of the largest tech investors, Brett Adcock, the head of Figure AI, a number of robot companies there. And then we have the Google Tech Hub, amazing companies in the Google Tech Hub this year. So I'm super pumped.
53:57 Speaker 01 Can't wait.
53:58 Peter Diamandis? And what's open, what's happening with OpenEXO just before we, we wrap up here?
54:01 Speaker 01 We're finishing kind of our toolset and we're starting to do a lot more public sector work with governments and so on. And we're incredibly excited about that. I want to talk to you separately about some of that, but this, it's unbelievable what's coming along.
54:14 Peter Diamandis? And where folks go to learn more about OpenEXO?
54:17 Speaker 01 OpenEXO.com, we have our whole community there. We offer training on how to be an EXO, or if you need help getting to be an exponential organization, we share how to do that. And we have toolsets and training and community and lots of folks that can come and help if you need help.
54:32 Peter Diamandis? Yeah, amazing. All right, onwards to 2025, onwards to the future.
54:37 Speaker 01 All right. Have a great one, Peter.
54:39 Peter Diamandis? You too, buddy.
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