Open AI's Head of Product on the AI Race, Google & the Reality of AGI w/ Kevin Weil & David Blundin | EP #189

Get access to metatrends 10+ years before anyone else - https://qr.diamandis.com/metatrends Kevin Weil is CPO at OpenAI David Blundin is the founder & GP of Link Ventures – My companies: Reverse the age of your skin using the same cream I use at https://www.oneskin.co/ #oneskinpod Apply to Dave's and my new fund: https://qr.diamandis.com/linkventureslanding –- Connect with Kevin: Linkedin X Connect with Peter: X Instagram Connect with David X LinkedIn Listen to MOONSHOTS: Apple YouTube – *Recorded on Aug 19th, 2025 *Views are my own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You're like in the middle of the fastest growing, most rapid changing thing in human history. We don't always even know what the next model is going to be great at.

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Kevin Weil, the Chief Product Officer.

• 0:10Speaker 02

  Leads all of the product functions at OpenAI.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  Coming off the back of a storied career in companies like Twitter and Facebook. All right, I think everybody knows you. For those who don't know me, I'm Kevin Weil.

• 0:20Speaker 03

  Do you ever look at what the other products are doing and sort of say, that's a great idea, or let's not go there?

• 0:28Speaker 00

  Google is competition for us. They're moving very quickly and building good models. So is Anthropic. So are a bunch of other players. It's motivation for us to also go faster.

• 0:37Speaker 03

  I do have an important last question. Has OpenAI fully reached AGI? And what is Johnny I delivering for you?

• 0:45Speaker 00

  Oh, man, I've been waiting to talk about this since we started. All right, so.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

• 0:56Speaker 03

  Everybody, welcome to Moonshots. I'm here with my moonshot mate, Dave Blundin. And we're here at OpenAI headquarters in San Francisco. We're about to have a deep session with Kevin Weil, the Chief Product Officer of OpenAI. So let's dive in. Welcome to Moonshots. Kevin, congrats for GPT-5.

• 1:13Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:13Speaker 03

  That is a huge milestone. You know, as Chief Product Officer, I can't think of a bigger product to be announcing to the world.

• 1:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was, I mean, probably the most anticipated AI launch of all time.

• 1:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:25Speaker 00

  It would be the most anticipated product launch. We've been talking about it for a while. But we're super excited. I mean, we put a lot into it. A lot of the things that actually people might not even think about. Like, we did a lot of work on the health side.

• 1:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  So I had a lot of health data, because one of the things we see is that people are using ChatGPT all the time to ask about health data, whether it's, you know, just this thing happened to my kid, what should I do? Or all the way to, you know, I just got a cancer diagnosis. Here's a bunch of data. How should I think about this? And it doesn't replace a doctor, but it sure is helpful to be, to have this super smart thing that you can talk to 24/7.

• 2:00Speaker 03

  I gotta say, I loved that part of the launch, by the way.

• 2:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:03Speaker 03

  And everyone on Twitter has got different opinions of that part. I loved that part of the launch.

• 2:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:07Speaker 03

  Were you a big part of scripting that whole day? Or how did that work?

• 2:10Speaker 00

  Oh, no, we have a, we have an incredible team that puts that together. The G P T five one was fun because we had so much to talk about because it wasn't just health. It's also it's the smartest model we've ever launched. It is an incredible coding model. Um, it can do a lot of highly agentic things that you may not see as much in chat G P T. But are super valuable for developers building on it. You can follow very complex instructions, make lots of different tool calls to different services, integrate things without losing the plot, which has been, you know, a real area that the whole industry is like making models better. So G P T five is the best across the board in a whole bunch of areas. And we wanted to try and figure out how to show all of these things.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  Um, but we needed a lot longer than our normal, you know, twenty minute live streams.

• 2:59Speaker 03

  And the simplicity of one product serves all was brilliant.

• 3:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's something cool about models that way, right?

• 3:06Speaker 03

  It's like the Google homepage, right? When it was simple search bar.

• 3:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  That's what allowed it to dominate over Yahoo and everybody else. So that simplicity is amazing.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  Well, it's also complicated because it's so anticipated. Like you said, probably the most anticipated product launch of all of all time. But if you think about an iPhone launch, you know, the features are obvious. A I is so open ended, you know? You could do anything on that stage. And so trying to script that and make it relevant for this, you know, really wide audience. It's got to be extra challenging for the team here to to figure out how to do that.

• 3:35Speaker 00

  Well, it's the fun thing about working at OpenAI too, because we don't always even know what the next model is going to be great at. You know, you have some sense, you can kind of see it coming through the mist at you a little bit. But other times there's something emergent and we're surprised.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  That's the most interesting thing, the fact that A I's properties and capabilities are emergent. And I mean, no one predicted any of this two years ago, little than a year ago.

• 3:56Speaker 00

  Right.

• 3:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you had you had to have had you in particular have got all these comments from the world.

• 4:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:05Speaker 03

  I mean, like.

• 4:05Speaker 00

  I was headed product to Twitter. I'm used to lots of online.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  I mean, people are like, like, super excited and people are critical. And so how do you? How do you deal with all the feedback? And does that feedback actually tie back into how you iterate?

• 4:18Speaker 00

  Oh, it totally does.

• 4:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  Because like I said, these these models are so powerful, so generic. Uh, there's lots of things that, you know, we obviously test internally all over the place. And we're testing externally in various ways before we launch. Uh, but. Then you you give it to seven hundred million people and all of a sudden, you know, they're they're testing all kinds of new ways. So we listen a lot. People have feedback on Reddit, on Twitter, on LinkedIn, all the ways that you'd expect. We have people coming into our customer support. We have friends who are giving us their feedback. And then you you're also just looking at the data, right? And the data tells a really good story. We had one of our biggest plus upgrades.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh, I saw those. I saw those numbers. Stellar.

• 5:01Speaker 00

  But, you know, they're also, we we heard the feedback. We, I think there are a couple of things that we didn't quite get right. One is the model's personality was a little bit wooden. And so we iterated and shipped and shipped a fix very quickly for that, just like a little bit more of a more warm personality.

• 5:19Speaker 00

  That is an interesting subject in itself, because there's probably not one personality that will meet everyone's needs.

• 5:24Speaker 03

  By the way.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  To be fairly sort of dynamic to the individual.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  I've got to say, the voice models and the interactivity as a voice on OpenAI. For me is my favorite of all of the large language models. I mean, really, it feels natural.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  A really cross the tipping point, too, where if you're on a long drive, you can talk to it for hours now. You used to talk to it for maybe a minute or two, and then you kind of flip out and move to something else. Now you just go for, you know, infinite time.

• 5:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  It's just engaging and interesting and.

• 5:55Speaker 00

  You know, to my kids, it's completely natural, by the way, that they would take my phone and just talk to ChatGPT for twenty minutes.

• 5:59Speaker 03

  So you're you're a new dad as well. How how old is your newborn?

• 6:02Speaker 00

  Uh, no, no, we have a, our oldest is eleven, and then we have eight-year-old twins.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 6:07Speaker 00

  So we're we're a little bit into it. We're kind of middle stage.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  I was looking at the photo on your on your.

• 6:12Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  It's a baby on.

• 6:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, that's ten years old. My WhatsApp photo, yeah.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. So, I mean, you got to admit, people were expecting AGI. People were expecting GPT five to be, yeah. I know I know you will.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  I'm very confident, yeah.

• 6:28Speaker 03

  I'm sure you will. So they had people that were expecting that, and then they got actually a very usable product at like half the price point.

• 6:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  Which is extraordinary in its own.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, less than half the price point. And also, what you said a second ago, I really want everybody to understand. Nobody knows what next year's capabilities, or even three months from now's capabilities will be. A lot of people think like, hey, Noam Brown knows exactly what's going to happen next.

• 6:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  But it's not true. Like, we, humanity doesn't know what capabilities will and won't exist. Because as you scale, it's not obvious. Are you thinking consciousness, or what? Well, no, I wasn't thinking that.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, Noam has a bunch of incredible research ideas, and we have some sense, and like, things are starting to work.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:10Speaker 00

  And you have a rough sense of the capabilities, but what will that enable?

• 7:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:15Speaker 00

  You know, that's the, that's the kind of thing that only kind of becomes clear as the, as the model comes together. And sometimes, not even then, to our earlier discussion, sometimes you launch, and then you realize the model has these emergent capabilities that you, you know.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  When we were here before, I was asking Noam, because I teach a class at MIT on foundations of AI ventures, how to build an AI.

• 7:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  Company. And all these people want to be at OpenAI because they want to be in the middle of seeing it happen day to day.

• 7:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  I said, why don't you open an office in Boston where all these, you know, this talent is? You know, like, at the rate that AGI will arrive, it won't matter. We're not, we're not doing that because it won't matter. The timeline doesn't, doesn't line up. We're going to keep the headcount small. The AI is going to be the workforce. And by the time we got a building built and got it all populated, it wouldn't matter anyway, because AGI will be here. So I don't know if that timeline lines up with what you're saying, because you're on the inside, you're like in the middle of the fastest growing, most rapid changing thing in human history.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. It, I mean, we're very, we're very optimistic. There's also something magical to being in person, to the point about, you know, a Boston office.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  There is.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  You know, you're in person, you're like drawing on whiteboards together. It's, it's a very researchy culture.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  I keep on telling my team that. It's like, you know.

• 8:28Speaker 03

  I want the team to come back together again physically. I want, you know, co-locate as much as possible. Zoom is fantastic, but there's the human nature. One of the questions I'm going to ask you later is what's not going to change in the next five to 10 years?

• 8:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  And I think that human nature is part of it. Every week, my team and I study the top 10 technology meta trends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from humanoid robotics, AGI, and quantum computing to transport, energy, longevity, and more. There's no fluff, only the most important stuff that matters, that impacts our lives, our companies, and our careers. If you want me to share these meta trends with you, I write a newsletter twice a week, sending it out as a short two-minute read via email. And if you want to discover the most important meta trends 10 years before anyone else, this report's for you. Readers include founders and CEOs from the world's most disruptive companies, and entrepreneurs building the world's most disruptive tech.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  It's not for you if you don't want to be informed about what's coming, why it matters, and how you can benefit from it. To subscribe for free, go to diamandis.com/metatrends to gain access to the trends 10 years before anyone else. All right, now back to this episode. Here's a question. So you're constantly creating increasing capabilities within the OpenAI ecosystem, and you've got to decide how much of that capability to launch to the public and how much to hold back. How do you think about that? Because I'm sure you have much more capable models and capabilities than are accessible right now. Is that something that's internally sort of constantly you're metering it out at a specific rate? How do you think about that?

• 10:06Speaker 00

  Not really. I mean, our mission is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity. And the way that we do that is to put AGI in people's hands as much as possible. And we believe in this this process of iterative development, iterative deployment. So rather than kind of holding it back and then bestowing it, you know, fully formed upon the world, we want to get AI out to people as soon as we feel like it's ready.

• 10:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:28Speaker 00

  And we'll do that early and we'll do it often. We want to do it safely, obviously. So that's that's its own sort of guard. But other than that, like, we'd rather put something that You know, we'd rather put something out to people earlier and let them play with it and build awesome stuff with it.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  And learn and learn from it.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  And learn from it. And then we get their feedback and that helps us build better models.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  It's not the kind of thing where we're like, there's obviously a bunch of stuff we have internally that's ahead of what we have launched, but that's also stuff that is very much in research mode and development.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 11:00Speaker 00

  And will make its way into models over time. It's sort of the ability to learn to harness it. Um, but but we try and put stuff in people's hands because like the fun thing about this world right now, I think every service, product, device we use is going to be reinvented and.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  So that answers the question in terms of, you know, like core model capabilities.

• 11:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  But what about just raw speed? Because, you know, I write code with G P T five every single day.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  And, you know, you watch the lines of code come out and it's it's incredible. I mean, as a force multiplier, like thousand X.

• 11:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  More product productive than I would be without it.

• 11:33Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  But I'm watching the lines of code come out and I'm picturing like when you guys are using it internally, it must be many more G P U's blazing past, you know, lines of code just pouring out of it. Am I?

• 11:45Speaker 00

  Well, we use, we use pretty much the same settings everybody else does.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  You're kidding.

• 11:49Speaker 00

  But um, that's really just a function of the number of G P U's we have. So, uh, I mean, right now we are.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Heard you have a few.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  We do have a few. We have, we have a little bit more than a few, but we're also completely maxed out at all times.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:02Speaker 00

  This is one of the reasons that uh, we talked about Project Stargate where we're going in with a bunch of other groups and building out more than five hundred billion dollars of infrastructure.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  Extraordinary. It's like a computronium covering the planet.

• 12:15Speaker 00

  Totally. I mean, just the, the more, every time we get more G P U's, they immediately get used, whether it's, you know, we can take them on the product side and use it to, you know, lower latency or speed up token generation uh, or launch new products, you know, take a product that's only available to pro users and bring it to plus users or free users. Or it just means that we can run more experiments on the research side. There's basically infinite demand for G P U's within these walls. And that's why we're doing so much to build capacity.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  I'm really glad you said that because uh, there, there is a school of thought out there that G P U's will commoditize and it's just so wrong. It's so incredibly wrong.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  We're far from that moment at the very least. Yeah.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  I, I think we'll never, that will never exist in the world.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  I, I, it's, it's one of those things. It's like the internet, you know, like. You every bit, every bit that we like lower latency, increase bandwidth on the internet. People do more things. Video used to be impossible.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:09Speaker 00

  Now, video is every day because the capabilities are there. The network can handle it. The more GPUs we get, the more AI we'll all use.

• 13:16Speaker 03

  So last year I made, I made four trips to India.

• 13:19Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  And, you know, population of one point four one billion, huge amount of builders there, right?

• 13:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  Massive latent talent for building. And I heard, I saw Sam's tweet about building for India. And I'm curious, how do you think about that? Cause I mean, India needs that for education, needs it for healthcare, needs it for governance, needs it for to help uplift one point four billion people. It's the only thing that's gonna do that. Is, how does it enter your mission as a chief product officer? Do you think about that differently from just in general?

• 13:54Speaker 00

  It's a huge priority. Uh, I was out there with Sam and a bunch of people from OpenAI, I don't remember, four or five months ago. Um, and the, the reception was just incredible. Everywhere we went, you know, talking to developers, people are using chat GPT, building on top of our APIs.

• 14:11Speaker 00

  It's, you know, the biggest country in the world.

• 14:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:13Speaker 00

  There's so much good we can do. The most youthful, also, you know, one of the things I'm really excited about, talk about coding. Today, there are something like thirty million developers in the world, thirty million people that know how to code. With a, an AI coding model, we can give a couple more orders of magnitude of people. We can take it from thirty million to three hundred million to three billion people.

• 14:34Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 14:35Speaker 00

  That effectively know how to code, that can create software. And when you can create software, it's such a general purpose skill, you can do anything. You can build personalized tools, you can build all kinds of stuff. And every time you increase something like that, access to a general purpose tool by an order of magnitude, the world changes. So I, whether you're talking health or education, or just frankly, the ability to build software. I think. You know, this is it's why AI is going to be the biggest transformational force in our lives. And I think in places like India, it's like gonna be that much more powerful.

• 15:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I mean, there are nations that need it more than others, and India is most definitely gonna be one of the biggest beneficiaries.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, we actually just launched uh this morning a uh a paid plan in India, just for India. Um, so it's a it's a much cheaper plan, but it gives uh Indian users a lot of access to to chat G P T. Like ten X more access than you get as a free user.

• 15:35Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 15:36Speaker 00

  Uh, but a heavily discounted plan because we're trying to bring as much of the benefit as AI to people in India as we can.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  So how much do you think that's gonna unlock a latent talent base? Because you start in India, you think globally, there's there's talent everywhere.

• 15:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  And a lot of it is is latent, they can't get into a great school, they can't get into a great ecosystem, AI AI is gonna be an incredible leveler of that, starting with coding.

• 15:57Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  So is that is that part of the motivation of going in with a lower price point in India?

• 16:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's talent everywhere and there's there's also like hustle and urgency. So, yeah, we wanna we wanna bring as much AI as we can. And we've we've got a we've got limits on GPUs and and all of this, we have to have to pay for it one way or another, but we wanna put this in the hands of as many people as we can. And so one of the interesting things about OpenAI, one of the things that's different about this company relative to anywhere I've ever worked. Normally, when you build products, you move things behind the paywall. So there's a product that starts out free, and then at some point you make it a paid feature to try and get people to pay, you know, more money for whatever you're building. We go the opposite way at OpenAI. Stuff starts in our pro or in plus, and so you're paying, you know, twenty dollars a month for it.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  Our entire goal is to make that a free product, because we wanna give a more powerful product to more people. Because we think that makes the world a better place. So if you look at the progression of a lot of our things, deep research started out as a pro feature. And then we brought it to plus, and now as a free user, you can do a bunch of deep research every month. So we our goal is actually to just give the most powerful, make make the most powerful product we can and give it to as many people as we can.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  So you're probably in charge of balancing the the need to create as many GPUs as possible, Stargate, and just you you need a massive amount of infrastructure and that takes money. And then you wanna balance that against, yeah, but we also wanna put this in the hands of as many people as possible, as cheaply as possible, that's gotta be. Incredible tension inside the building, trying to figure out how do you balance those two objectives?

• 17:32Speaker 00

  Not so much tension, actually, you might be surprised because we have just a long term belief. I I have a long term belief that this is going to be, we're not gonna. The idea that we used to live our lives without AI, helping us every day is going to feel crazy in a few years. And so if we're building a product that adds a ton of value to people's lives, we're gonna put as much as we possibly can available for free. But there are always going to be things that are super heavily, you know, computational and expensive for us. It will be in a plus plan or in a pro plan. And if we do our job, if I do my job and the team continues to do their job, then the those features are gonna be super valuable. They're gonna be ever more valuable, right? AI is only gonna be able to do more for you.

• 18:16Speaker 00

  Um, and you know, while you're sleeping, rather than waiting, like, chat GPT today is a pretty reactive product. You go there, you ask a question, it can do things for you that would have been crazy two years ago, but you're still asking it first.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  You're still, you're still under prompt.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  But you can, you can definitely imagine a world where chat GPT is much more proactive.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  Right now.

• 18:38Speaker 00

  Because of what it knows about you.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  Prompt it to be proactive, it's actually proactive.

• 18:41Speaker 00

  Totally, but why isn't it, why not think 24 hours a day? You're asleep and it's thinking about what it can do for you, you know? So there's just always more that we can do.

• 18:49Speaker 03

  My favorite model is still Jarvis. I want, I want Jarvis in my life.

• 18:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:53Speaker 03

  Doing things for me all the time. I still want my AI to do surprise and delight. The doorbell rings and something shows up that I'm not expecting and says, I bought this for you because I think you'd like it. I heard the conversation you had. Yeah, and that for me, that's when age.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  I'll do that for you. I'm gonna ask, I'll ask chat GPT.

• 19:07Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 19:08Speaker 00

  What random thing I should buy you and it will show up at your doorstep. We'll see what it does.

• 19:13Speaker 03

  Fantastic. I love that.

• 19:15Speaker 00

  By the way, what, what happened to your hand?

• 19:17Speaker 03

  So, um. I just had an RFID chip implanted. Today.

• 19:24Speaker 00

  As one does.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  As one does. I was over at, I was over at Frontier Towers.

• 19:27Speaker 00

  That's amazing.

• 19:28Speaker 03

  Over at Frontier Towers, a guy named Cass that runs their sort of longevity and biohacking. And I had done this, I, if you can feel right here, this, there's a little chip in there, but.

• 19:38Speaker 00

  Cool.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  Um, it's made by a company called Dangerous Things, which is a great, great marketing, right?

• 19:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:43Speaker 03

  But this is the more advanced one. So I put it in, so I can open my Tesla with it. And like, you know, wave in front of the elevator.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 19:49Speaker 03

  And yeah.

• 19:49Speaker 00

  Check out with Apple Pay?

• 19:50Speaker 03

  Exactly. I want my, you know, actually I will not put my, uh, my crypto keys on this because then my hand is at risk. Yes.

• 19:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, the, the hammer attack, five dollar wrench attack.

• 20:02Speaker 03

  Exactly. Um.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  I'm curious.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  Wait, how big is the chip?

• 20:08Speaker 03

  Oh, it's, uh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You want to see the photos here?

• 20:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I do.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  It's bigger than you would have thought.

• 20:13Speaker 03

  So this is the, what it looks like, right?

• 20:15Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 20:16Speaker 03

  Uh, uh, this is, this is, they actually put this giant needle in your head, about like a straw, size of a straw. Make some space and then they slip it in.

• 20:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:25Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  It'll heal on there. I'll, I'll put this up. I'll put this up on the, on the, uh.

• 20:29Speaker 00

  And then how, how long will the batteries last?

• 20:32Speaker 03

  Oh, it's not, it's not battery. It's, uh, it's a near field. So basically an electric current comes in.

• 20:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, right, right, right. Yeah.

• 20:38Speaker 03

  So, uh, anyway, uh, that was, that was fun. It was an hour ago. So you guys had keep it compressed. Conversations internally, I, I have to believe that you, I mean, OpenAI is like the most progressive, but. You know, between Gemini, Anthropic and Grok and everybody's sort of, it used to, you still wonder would there be a hard takeoff? And it would be one company that just takes off across everybody else. And it looks like there's a really a leveling up continuously across, across the pack. Do you ever look at what the other products are doing? And and sort of say, that's a great idea, or let's not go there.

• 21:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's so much, there's so much. A, there's about a lot of innovation happening, right? And there are smart people within these walls and there's a lot more smart people outside of these walls. So we, you know, it's we, we watch what other folks are doing. We also look at how people are using our own models and get a lot of feedback about, you know, things they wish they could do, things they love about our models. So I kind of think of that all as part of the feedback that you take in.

• 21:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  But what matters at the end of the day is, are we executing? Because I think we have the best people in the world. We have a very clear mission. People are here because we want to build AGI. And we see a path to it. So like, at the end of the day, it's about our own execution. But I think we'd be crazy if we weren't like watching what's happening and trying to learn from it.

• 22:02Speaker 03

  So I met your EA outside and I asked him, has Mark Zuckerberg called in?

• 22:08Speaker 00

  Mark's after researchers.

• 22:11Speaker 03

  Oh, that's gotta be crazy.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  I would love to ask you some questions that will help. We have this huge ecosystem of startups that are building AI companies. You know, it's funny, you, you were there when the internet, you know, was everything. And if you're trying to build an internet company, it's pretty obvious that, you know, TCP IP stack isn't going to change, you're going to be right on top of it.

• 22:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  Compare that to AI today and you're like, wow, it's such a moving target that you're building on top of.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:34Speaker 02

  And so if you can help the teams in any way, understand, like, you know, are we going to build our own like windsurf cursor type capability? Or is that an available market?

• 22:45Speaker 03

  Meaning, meaning where's OpenAI not going to go that leaves? Space for the entrepreneurs to go.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. And I'll give you a case today. So where, you know, Mark Ormberg, the chairman of MIT, really wanted Sam to come to campus and meet with the president, Sally Kornbluth. And Sam said, yeah, I'll come and do that if you introduce me to 50 startups back to back. And so Mark set it all up and they did the 50 back to back meetings and then.

• 23:06Speaker 00

  That's awesome.

• 23:07Speaker 02

  Sam was on stage. But, you know, Sam, genuine like Y Combinator background. It absolutely cares about the startup economy thriving on top of OpenAI. So the mission is right on right in alignment. But then knowing what's going to happen next is harder than anything I've ever seen before.

• 23:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  So any, any insight you can give on like.

• 23:24Speaker 03

  What's your advice to entrepreneurs wanting to build on top of OpenAI? You know, we've seen a lot of OpenAI wrappers in the past. How, how, what's your advice?

• 23:33Speaker 00

  So here's the, here's the context that I think is most important. Every single product we use, every single service that we use today, every single device that we use. All of them, practically all of them were pre-AI. Any of the ones that are at scale were pre-AI. They're all going to be reinvented.

• 23:55Speaker 02

  It's like adding electricity to every mechanical thing.

• 23:57Speaker 00

  Exactly. It's a really good analogy. Everything is going to be reinvented. And you know, sometimes, sometimes the incumbents are gonna figure out how to do it themselves. If history is any guide, not many of them are gonna figure it out, right? And that's, that's a huge opportunity for startups, for entrepreneurs. Because we're in this complete transformation. So that's super exciting. I think it's an awesome time to be an entrepreneur. Um, certainly, we're gonna try and do some of that reinvention ourself. But no matter how big we get, how many things we do. And I'm talking, everything is different, right? And it's not just tech, it's also the way you interact with your doctor is different. You know, so material science is different. So we're only gonna be able to do this much.

• 24:41Speaker 00

  And so our, what, what we say to developers is, if you're building like right at the, at the edge of what the models can do. You're, you're so far at the bleeding edge that like the models can't quite do the thing you want, but you can just see little glimmers of hope. That's a great place to be building.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:58Speaker 00

  Because two months from now, we're gonna launch a new model. And the thing that you've been just barely getting to work is gonna sing. And that's gonna be awesome. If instead what you're doing is like covering, you know, patching a problem with the current model. And you're afraid of the next model launch that we are gonna come out with because it's gonna, you know.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Disrupt.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  It's gonna, it's gonna like obviate the need for the thing you're building. Like, don't do that. Assume that the models are gonna keep getting better at a crazy pace. And build something that's just at the edge, so you're excited about the next model. Because it's gonna make your thing awesome.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, Arvind Shenivas over at Perplexity Talks, he calls that AI complete. When he was designing the perplexity business plan, it had to be AI complete. Which I think he just made up, nobody.

• 25:43Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  But it means that exactly what you just said, it, it rides the wave, it doesn't get swamped by the.

• 25:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a, that's a much more concise way of saying what I was saying.

• 25:52Speaker 03

  I, I have a question, I'm gonna ask you. As the chief product officer, what does AGI look like as a product?

• 26:00Speaker 00

  Hmm, that's a good question.

• 26:03Speaker 00

  Uh.

• 26:04Speaker 03

  Is it just look like the chat G P T, but it can do anything better faster?

• 26:10Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, chat is such an interesting um. Format, because it, I mean, it mimics like how to how do humans communicate?

• 26:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:19Speaker 00

  Uh, we, I can text you, we can write on the keyboard, but I can also talk and we can, you know, look at each other and. And tech like a chat interface kind of gets at that full generality. So it's really powerful as a backdrop. But it's not the only interface. I think when you have A G I, your your model is going to be in real time, creating U I on the fly. To uh, to build the most like. E- economical, you know, sensible solution for the thing that you're trying to accomplish. And you're gonna have all kinds of software being created. And like being thrown away because you can just produce it again in an instant.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the the the vision when it's when you're just talking to it, it's really obvious that it's gonna be super empathetic. It's gonna it's gonna be. But then, you know, you start to see the video generation, you're like, oh, wait.

• 27:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Now now I'm my mind is blown like because it because it can create scenes for me in real time, create images, it can create.

• 27:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  You know, like entertainment, but also if I'm designing something, it can like Jarvis, you know, create the design in thin air. And so now I'm thinking, okay, Johnny Ive is gonna be working on something like.

• 27:22Speaker 03

  Let's talk about it. Let's talk about that one second.

• 27:24Speaker 00

  I always come back, by the way, to the if you've read Ender's Game.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:27Speaker 00

  You know, like the jewel in your ear, it can see what you see, it can hear what you hear, but it also is super intelligent and connects back to, you know. The information across the galaxy.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  Like, that's kind of, I think, where we're going.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, they lost that in the movie, actually. You got to read the book.

• 27:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:42Speaker 03

  They so I think we're gonna, you know, this multimodal world where there's video capturing everything and you're always being seen in your environments and. Where A G I becomes anticipatory, it knows what you likely want, right? And it's making the world automagical is the term I I use for that. So. Uh, I'm just still trying to dig into what does AGI as a product from OpenAI look like? Is it fully anticipatory? Is it just like doing things you don't expect it to be doing? I guess you could turn that feature on.

• 28:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think it's also the, and I don't even know that we need to be fully at AGI for this, but I think you want, you want the product to be taking everything it knows about you.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  Whatever AGI is.

• 28:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, um, and, and just doing, I mean, you think about the number of things that you do every day. You wake up in the morning and you have a whole bunch of emails. A lot of those are mechanical. Probably some of them are like ones that you really want to type out every word of response. Most of them are mechanical. They're scheduling, they're responding. I want my AI to have already done all of those for me before I wake up.

• 28:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:48Speaker 00

  Maybe every once in a while I need to say, yeah, that's right, or I want to edit that sentence, but mostly it's just like, be done.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:54Speaker 00

  Um, and you're going to have that across, how much of your browsing is semi mechanical? You've got to get the thing done, but you actually don't care about reading the words on the page and waiting for things to load and clicking links. You're just trying to get a job done. All of that should be gone.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:11Speaker 02

  What do you think about the future of media? Cause you know, one thing that's really interesting about media in general is that everything competes with everything else. So you don't really think of sports as competing with news, but it does, because it's, it's all competing for mind share.

• 29:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  And clearly AI is going to take a huge amount of our mind shares, just so engaging. And so, you know, that's got to come from somewhere, that, that time and that mind share has to come from somewhere. Do you guys think through like, how is this going to affect internet media, TV, movies, all of that?

• 29:40Speaker 03

  Attention economy, sure.

• 29:41Speaker 00

  I mean, it probably becomes hyper personalized, right?

• 29:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  Today, and there, there are good and bad things about that. There's something magical to every single person in the US watching the same, you know, two news shows at night, and we don't have that anymore.

• 29:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:53Speaker 00

  There's something cool about the shared experience of we can all, you know, the same movies in the theater for all of us at the same time and we can talk about it. But there's also something pretty cool about this movie is, you know, totally personalized to me and I'm the only one that it matters to. So, I mean, you got to think that kind of thing starts to become possible. Also, probably, though, there's always a the sort of you go to extremes. The other extreme is then you value the the thing that was created by humans that much more.

• 30:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  It's like sports are the last thing on the the the, you know, the last business model in TV that still really works well.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  Well, you're you're an ultra marathoner. You'll still be doing that.

• 30:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:30Speaker 03

  What's not going to change in the next ten years? I mean, we can list so many things that will.

• 30:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I think humans are still going to be humans, right? We're still like us connecting in person is really going to matter. The feel of this is very different. Us doing it here, sitting around a table relative to us doing it through, you know, Zoom or something. So that's still going to matter. Uh, you know, a handwritten note is still going to matter. Personal connection is still going to matter.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  I I would think it's going to matter a lot more, actually. The way things are, you you mentioned earlier, you know, you just love having everybody here in the building. It's just different.

• 31:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  And since you have so many AI force multipliers, you actually don't need regional offices all over the world. And so the the relative importance of of communication inside the team is probably higher than any company you've been in before.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  I I got run my abundance summit virtually through the year, but we're five days together in March.

• 31:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:21Speaker 03

  And then those five days are, you know, just magical in terms of the energy.

• 31:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:26Speaker 00

  So what do you guys think? What what what stays the same and what does AGI look like?

• 31:29Speaker 02

  I think one thing that after that GPT five launch that occurred to me, you know, up until this point, you think about, you know, I had my kids working with GPT two writing content and and then GPT three and then GPT four, and they've been watching this crazy progression. Now it's pretty clear that the AI community is going to try and not change too many things too quickly. Like, let the AI become super intelligent. Let it solve healthcare. Let it solve, you know, like, but don't go rampaging across San Francisco, tearing down buildings. Because because actually that's creating more more problems than good. And it's now becoming clear to me, the AI community is really small as a fraction of the world. And the last thing it needs to do is change everything tomorrow, even though it it potentially could.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  So it's starting to feel to me like, you know, the physical world won't change as much as people might think. While the virtual world will change at warp speed.

• 32:21Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 32:22Speaker 03

  I think the importance of purpose.

• 32:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  Still gonna be right, because one of my biggest concerns about the future of, you know, the endpoint here is when everything is being done for you, it can be done for you and you can just, sit back and be, you know, a couch potato.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 32:39Speaker 03

  The thing that's gonna make you live in a, in a Star Trek universe, not a Mad Max universe is purpose.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:45Speaker 03

  Like, so that importance in, you know.

• 32:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I completely agree with that. I, the, I always have a hard time with the futures that people paint when it's like, oh, we're all just gonna sit back and, you know, eat grapes and write poetry and receive our UBI. Because I just, I, I don't think that's what drives us as humans. If you go back and look at, eh, we don't have to like, you know, cross the United States on a, in a covered wagon. We don't have to, to, hang our laundry on clotheslines as, you know, very much anymore. There's probably, if you go back a hundred years ago, people look at our lifestyles today and they're like, oh, my God, everything is done for you. What are you talking about? Um, but of course, we, take those time savings and go do more interesting stuff with it.

• 33:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's all about, it's all, it's all about time savings, right? One thing that's true is every single human, eight billion of us have seven days in a week, twenty four hours in a day, right? Three sixty five in a year. And it's what you can do with that time that defines wealth, success, impact, everything.

• 33:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:44Speaker 03

  And AI is the greatest, you know, time multiplier, period.

• 33:47Speaker 00

  And I think it's the most, one of the most powerful parts of human nature, that we all strive for something bigger than ourselves. And you want to leave the world a better place than you found it. And, you know, like, that's so innate to humans. AI is not gonna change that. It's just gonna supercharge it.

• 34:02Speaker 03

  So without, you know, I won't ask you now to tell me what Johnny Ives is, is building for you.

• 34:07Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 34:07Speaker 03

  Uh, but, uh, we are gonna interact with, yeah, we are gonna interact with, um, uh, with AI in different ways. So how do you think about, how do you think about that future? Besides, uh, it, it's been typing and now voice. Voice is amazing.

• 34:23Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:24Speaker 00

  I mean, the, the, the jewel in your ear thing is, is the model in so many ways, because you, you don't want, take ChatGPT, right? It's just one of many AI products that we'll all use, but, uh, you don't want ChatGPT to just like sit inside of a phone app or a browser waiting for you to go there. You want it to be wherever you are. You want it to effectively see what you see. And have all the context that you want to give it so that it can be smarter and act more proactively for you. And it shouldn't wait for you to open a phone app to do stuff for you. It should be just sort of constantly chugging away behind the scenes, speaking about GPUs, but it should be constantly chugging away behind the scenes, taking action for you and saving you time.

• 35:06Speaker 00

  So that's going to be much more the future than today where you like go to a website and, you know, ask it questions.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  Can we come back to GPUs for just one second?

• 35:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, and let's talk about Stargate too.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, Stargate. So Chase Lochmiller is walking around, like he's our MIT classmate alum. And, you know, he's walking around Abilene, Texas with Sam and, you know, there's concrete and pipes and like stuff everywhere.

• 35:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  And but it's not up and running, right? None of the functionality is delivering yet.

• 35:33Speaker 00

  It's getting closer.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  Is it getting closer? Is it very soon or is that all secret?

• 35:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't remember what's public and what's not, but we're very excited for that to come online because we could use all the GPUs we can get.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  I'm sure. And all we know is in the Oval Office, there's a $500 billion budget. So it gives us a sense of the budget, but why stop there?

• 35:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, why stop there? I mean, I don't think we will.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  No.

• 35:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. It was about 18 months ago that I partnered with one of my closest and most brilliant friends, Dave London, to start Link Exponential Ventures. At Link, we manage about $1 billion of seed-stage money based out of Kendall Square in Cambridge, right between MIT and Harvard. When Dave and I both graduated from MIT, each of us immediately started companies. But at that age, everything is working against you. You have an idea, you're challenged to raise money, and you can't afford rent. And even with all the accelerators out there, you're competing against thousands of other startups for the same pool of investors. Both Dave and I have spent a big chunk of our lives focusing on how do we inspire and support founders

• 36:30Speaker 03

  to knock down those barriers, to go big, to create wealth, to impact the world, to build and scale as fast as possible, especially in today's AI everything world. We're seeing so many companies reaching multi-billion dollar valuations in just two to three years faster than ever before. Some companies are adding millions or tens of millions of dollars of value in just weeks. So we started asking ourselves, how do we help these founders go faster? And not skip a beat. As an example, a couple of months ago, we bought an apartment building adjacent to MIT, where a graduating entrepreneur can move in immediately without slowing down their tech build while they search for a place to live. And so we're doing everything we can to accelerate builders and their super smart teams.

• 37:13Speaker 03

  Of course, funding is part of it. Mentoring is part of it. Connecting them with my personal network of abundance minded CEOs and investors is part of it. We house sixty six thousand square feet of purpose-built incubator space and twenty six AI startups call Link XPV their home. And the returns have been amazing. I have nothing to ask, but if you are building a company in the AI era, check us out at linkventures.com. Now, back to the episode. So I just got back from Brazil. So I was there delivering five keynotes, talking entrepreneurs, builders, and they're all asking how, what will AI, what will, what will sovereign AI look like for us?

• 37:54Speaker 03

  How do we make sure we're not passed over, right? Same question being asked probably in India and other parts of the world. How, you know, speaking to those entrepreneurs and they're extraordinarily passionate, what's the advice to the, to the leadership in those regions, South and Central America?

• 38:10Speaker 00

  I mean, a part of this is why we try and offer everything. I mean, AI ChatGPT is a free product.

• 38:15Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 38:15Speaker 00

  Download it from the App Store or on the web. You don't even need to sign in. You can just go and get access to the greatest intelligence the world has ever seen for free on your phone at all times. And like you said, we launched GPT five. We cut prices dramatically. Like if you look at prices today relative to what, you know, GPT four costs when it came out, even as models have gotten way more intelligent, they've gotten like a hundred X cheaper. So you're on this crazy cost curve and we want to keep going because the more intelligence we can put in people's hands,

• 38:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  the more they can do with it.

• 38:47Speaker 03

  Did you feel like that ever would have happened if OpenAI hadn't forced the timeline? Because you know, you, you've been at Meta, you've been at Twitter, you've seen, like if, you know, if this stuff had stayed inside Google's labs.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  And OpenAI hadn't come into the world and said, hey, we're gonna make this available right now. Cause right now, you know, Google is throwing it out there the same way OpenAI is, but that's because it's a it's a reaction.

• 39:10Speaker 03

  It was a reaction.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  So you think, where do you think we would be if OpenAI hadn't existed in this? Would it all be hidden somewhere still? We wouldn't even have access to it?

• 39:17Speaker 00

  I mean, we shouldn't, we wouldn't be where we are, right? Competition is great.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:21Speaker 00

  As a friend of mine likes to say, capitalism is undefeated. It's like this, it's amazing to have competition. By the way, Google is competition for us. They're moving very quickly and building good models. So is Anthropic, so are a bunch of other players and that, that, you know, it it's motivation for us to also go faster.

• 39:39Speaker 02

  Do you remember the moment?

• 39:41Speaker 00

  Consumers and businesses benefit. It's great.

• 39:43Speaker 02

  Do you remember the moment in your life when you first said, I wanna go work at OpenAI? I need to, I need to go get in that building and meet Sam and get there?

• 39:50Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah, I, so, uh, I've known Sam for a bunch of years. Not super close, but just, you know, we were friends, we could text, that kind of thing. And I would call him whenever I was like, thinking about going from one job and, you know, doing something next. Because he's such an incredible thinker and futurist and, you know,

• 40:11Speaker 02

  He's connected, yeah.

• 40:12Speaker 00

  Highly connected, but he's also just involved in interesting things. So I'm a physicist by background. And, um, before my previous jobs, like four or five years ago, I called him and he introduced me to, uh, some companies building fusion.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 40:26Speaker 00

  And I almost went and, and worked at one of those companies. So I just, you know, periodically would talk to Sam. And this last time I called him, he said, well, actually, uh, and so I, you know, I hadn't even really thought about it. And then I came in, met a couple of people and was just like, this is the most interesting thing I have ever seen. Like, I will work for free. Please just let me in the door.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  So you could literally be working on magnetic containment for a fusion, fusion reaction somewhere completely unrelated.

• 40:51Speaker 03

  I mean, but it's pretty amazing, right? Like, like thirty seven venture-backed fusion companies. I would have never imagined.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  Are there thirty seven?

• 40:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:58Speaker 00

  That's, I mean, I love hearing that, by the way.

• 41:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:00Speaker 00

  I'm so glad that there has been a renaissance in deep tech and investment.

• 41:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like, you know, they're, they're venture-backed rocket companies and fusion companies. It's like, you know, okay, this stuff is becoming real.

• 41:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, we need more of it.

• 41:10Speaker 03

  Exactly. I, how do you, how can you possibly keep up with the speed of change? I mean, I I I think in your role, trying to keep up with how rapidly the tech is progressing.

• 41:27Speaker 03

  How do you think about that?

• 41:28Speaker 00

  Part of it is staying as connected to our research teams as we possibly can.

• 41:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. How big is the research team here?

• 41:34Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 41:35Speaker 03

  Order of magnitude.

• 41:37Speaker 00

  Few hundred, something like that. So.

• 41:40Speaker 03

  And it's a very, it's a very, so it's a very independent, what you're saying before, it's it seems very independent, right? People can work on a project and and sort of begin to launch features.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, I mean, there's kind of a spectrum. Parts of the research team are super academic. They're doing like, you know, novel research that may or may not, may or may not work out, may or may not see the light of day for a while. Because this is such a new field, there's a lot to discover. You're not just productionizing things that somebody else figured out. You got to figure out this stuff from scratch. And then there are parts of the research team that are much closer to product. Where, you know, you're taking a model and helping to post train it and making sure that it's good at certain things that are really important for for our customers in various shapes. And you kind of have everything in between.

• 42:25Speaker 00

  So the, one of the things that I think differentiates OpenAI is how closely product and engineering and research all work together. It's like I said, there are parts of research that are very, they're very separate, but the parts that, when we work closely together. And we get a tight iteration loop from like, building model capabilities, turning that into a product, getting feedback, taking that feedback back. Improving those model capabilities and iterating that way, like that's how we built deep research. That's how we build agent functionality, like the best stuff comes from that.

• 42:57Speaker 03

  So in your role, you know, so here's research, you know, ultra science, and then here's product features and functions, you know, this voice, this this button. Then over here, you got data centers. Do you span all of that as a C P O?

• 43:10Speaker 00

  No, no, just the the products that you use. So think the API, I think.

• 43:15Speaker 03

  So Mark, Mark Chen is, Mark Chen is overseeing all the.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, Mark, Mark leads research, Greg leads everything, sort of data center, infrastructure, scaling, all that kind of stuff.

• 43:25Speaker 03

  Got it. Okay.

• 43:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a lot going on. So so we we divide and conquer.

• 43:31Speaker 03

  You know the feature I'm looking forward to? Is my BCI connect.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 43:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. So a friend of mine is involved in, you know, merge that was just announced leaked, I guess. So, you know, we have a hundred billion neurons, a hundred trillion synaptic connections.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:48Speaker 03

  And being able to have a feature set that lays on top of my neocortex. Do you actually, do you think that far ahead in your conversation?

• 43:57Speaker 02

  Is merge, by the way, is merge doing, are they going invasive or is it sitting on your scalp? Or how are they doing it?

• 44:02Speaker 03

  I know the details of the company. I don't know what I can say about it.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 44:06Speaker 03

  But there are a multitude of companies that are invasive and a number that are external. And there are those that are sub cranial, but above the dura, the brain. So lots of different layers there, but.

• 44:20Speaker 02

  I'm super excited about that, too.

• 44:21Speaker 03

  So.

• 44:22Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I mean.

• 44:23Speaker 03

  I would do it in a heartbeat. Would you?

• 44:25Speaker 02

  No, no, absolutely not. But that's only because, well, look, I use AI literally six, seven, eight hours a day. Yeah. And it's getting so far ahead. There's no, there's the original vision there was I need to increase the bandwidth of communication between my brain and this really slow laptop. But now the AI moves so fast that it's clear that I can give it a concept and it can just run with it. And I haven't had the next concept yet. Like the increasing the bandwidth between my brain and the laptop no longer matters. The AI is just, just way too fast.

• 44:55Speaker 03

  So listen, Alex Weiser Gross, who's one of our friends and partners, was on my stage at the Abundance Summit. And he was talking about the importance of coupling. Like if AI is taking a real takeoff and humans are linear, can we couple with them, right? And that coupling is going to need to have this kind of an interface. So here's the question to you. Would you, would you do a BCI coupled to OpenAI?

• 45:17Speaker 02

  Uh, I would, I would personally do it. I would, I would personally do BCI.

• 45:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, so would I.

• 45:22Speaker 02

  Like when it's safe, I'll do it in a heartbeat.

• 45:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. I just think like. I tend to do experimental things in the first place.

• 45:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was gonna say, says the man with a RFID chip in his hand, but uh, no, I would totally do it. I think it'll be amazing when you can access the world's information, not by like typing into one of these things, but at the speed that you can think.

• 45:41Speaker 00

  And then you have like this, I mean, we will be a different species. It'll be super cool.

• 45:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, and we are going to speciate. And there'll be those who decide they want to, you know, I like it the way it is. I don't want that in my head. And others that I want to see this, I want to understand quantum physics. I want to have infinite knowledge. I want to be able to.

• 46:00Speaker 00

  I don't see it.

• 46:01Speaker 03

  I'm shocked.

• 46:02Speaker 02

  I don't see it being that for like, yeah, I understand what you're saying completely. Like you got the Amish over here and you got the technophiles over there. That's not what I'm saying.

• 46:09Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  I'm saying that when you surround me by monitors.

• 46:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  And it's creating things on those monitors at the speed of AI.

• 46:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:15Speaker 02

  Right now, there's no, there's no bandwidth increase beyond, well, I can't absorb any more information than that anyway. I'm at the limit of what I can think about.

• 46:24Speaker 00

  But maybe not with your eyes. And not, maybe not when you have to type it in to a thing and then, you know.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  But we've talked, I mean, it's really hard to be.

• 46:33Speaker 03

  But we've talked about the fact that visually visually you can, you can look at an image and get whether the data is correct or not, right? Versus if it was text, you have to read every line. So anyway, we'll see, we're going to find out.

• 46:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I guess you, you and I will be the, the A B test and, or we'll be there and he'll be the B.

• 46:51Speaker 02

  You'll be the A.

• 46:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:52Speaker 02

  If you're still alive, you'll be the B.

• 46:55Speaker 03

  If I'm still alive, yeah.

• 46:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, Peter's having it done tomorrow. I might wait a year and then we'll see how that goes.

• 47:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, as long as you can upgrade. You don't want to get version one and.

• 47:04Speaker 00

  That is true.

• 47:05Speaker 03

  So, you know, you've worked at some amazing companies. Um, you know, I, I, I love what planet's doing as well.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:13Speaker 03

  Putting a layer of imagery on top of the planet. Um, but there's, I can't imagine that the speed of iteration of products is. Are any place faster than it is here.

• 47:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, nothing in my experience is compared to OpenAI.

• 47:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:27Speaker 00

  Uh, I thought Facebook, Instagram, when I was there, moved quickly and they do.

• 47:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:32Speaker 00

  But nothing compares to OpenAI.

• 47:34Speaker 02

  Do you feel like, so you're doing what a ten, twenty billion dollar capital raise at five hundred billion, something like that? I'm just reading the news. I don't wanna.

• 47:40Speaker 00

  No, you're just reading the news. You tell me.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  Okay, but um, do you feel like, you know, Google's got about a hundred billion of free cash flow, you know, Amazon's huge. And they have massive data centers in advance. Do you feel like there's a vulnerability at the, at the raw compute and budget level?

• 47:56Speaker 00

  I mean, it's why we are so focused on building out our own capacity. Um, they've got big data centers. They've been doing this for a long time. They've built great technology. They also support a whole host of things. Um, they also, you know, they, they, Google builds a lot of products that we all use. We build one product. We have one mission. Building AGI is existential for us. I think that's an advantage.

• 48:18Speaker 03

  I love that simplicity, right? It really goes back to Google's earliest roots where they were just, just a search engine. Just a box on a white page.

• 48:26Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 48:27Speaker 03

  Right?

• 48:27Speaker 00

  There's something, you know, if you're a researcher, there's lots of places you can go work that'll pay you a lot of money. But if you wanna work at a company that is maniacally focused on getting to AGI, you work at OpenAI.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I asked, asked GPT, how many core researchers are there at Google? You know, just, just in the AI team core, Jeff Dean, Demis Hassabis, and it's like five, six thousand, roughly, assuming GPT is right. Um, so it's a much bigger force, but then it feels like they're working on protein folding. They're working, they're, they're very dispersed in what they're working on. And it wasn't clear to me how many just like right down the fairway, working toward AGI there were relative to. Because it feels like, you know, with that GPT five launch, the coding completely caught up or passed everything else out there at, at a fraction of the price. So the momentum seems to be great. And so, but you know, the headcount is gotta be smaller.

• 49:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, but that's, I mean, that's every startup's advantage, right?

• 49:25Speaker 03

  Agility.

• 49:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:26Speaker 03

  It's all about agility.

• 49:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:28Speaker 03

  Uh, we've had some conversations on, on the Moonshots podcast about benchmarks.

• 49:33Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 49:33Speaker 03

  How much do you think about benchmarks? Cause it looks like many of the benchmarks are getting saturated. And reinventing benchmarks. You've created a healthcare benchmark that you use. And one of the questions we talked about was creating some benchmarks that are are around AI's ability to solve grand challenges, solve fundamental problems.

• 49:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love that idea.

• 49:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so like we we call it a series of abundance benchmarks, like is it, you know, and measure all of the AIs against something like it's a proof of work.

• 50:04Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 50:05Speaker 03

  Right. Instead of proof of stake, yeah.

• 50:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a it's a really interesting thing. It's really important, too, because we're we've had all of these different benchmarks that we've used for, you know, the last bunch of years in AI. And they're almost all saturated now.

• 50:19Speaker 03

  Crazy.

• 50:20Speaker 00

  Um, it it it shows how good the models are getting uh very quickly. But it also means that we need we need harder benchmarks. And there are a bunch of these things that are frontier math and Arc AGI and some of these. But increasingly, we're also looking at these sort of, I'll call them softer uh benchmarks, which is a challenge in itself, but like the the health bench. We've got benchmarks that that, you know, they're around, can you build a financial model for a company?

• 50:48Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 50:48Speaker 00

  You know, can you do, because when we talk about AGI, one of the ways that we define AGI is, or can you do um can you do economically valuable tasks?

• 50:57Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 50:57Speaker 00

  And you look at what people are doing every day, if they're a doctor, a lawyer, a banker, et cetera. And you're looking at, can you do those tasks?

• 51:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:06Speaker 00

  But they're also they're also sort of softer. It's not it's not obvious. There's not one way to build a model for a company, uh like a financial model. Um, there's you could do it in a bunch of different ways. For you're doing a math problem, there is one right way and you can grade it very easily. So at the same time, as models are getting smarter, we're saturating the things that are sort of easy to grade.

• 51:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:26Speaker 00

  We're off in these harder problems that are also a little bit tougher to grade. And they don't have to be deep science or anything. You can also look at creative writing. How do you grade creative writing? There's way more than one way to write a story about any particular thing.

• 51:39Speaker 02

  So true, so true.

• 51:40Speaker 00

  And that's increasingly important, right? Yeah.

• 51:43Speaker 02

  Like, yeah, that stuff is running wild in areas where the evals can be built. And then, you know, it can't run wilds in areas where there's no eval, because it's there's it's just unable to self-improve. But any place you score yourself.

• 51:55Speaker 03

  I saw some, yeah, a recent um metric on its ability to predict the future.

• 52:01Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 52:02Speaker 03

  So I found that fascinating, right? I mean, there's, I mean, this is going back to sort of Asimov's, you know, work in Fountain, in the Foundation trilogy. Like, can you, is there enough clues out there?

• 52:14Speaker 00

  Right, right, right, right.

• 52:15Speaker 03

  Gather to predict what society is gonna do in the next twelve hours, or, or twelve days, or twelve months?

• 52:22Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 52:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:23Speaker 02

  You know, Peter wrote a book, The Future is Faster Than You Think. I don't know if you read it. It's, it's my favorite of the Peter, but there are many great Peter books, but it's my favorite because it talks specifically about concurrent technology that nobody's figured out how to glue together.

• 52:36Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 52:36Speaker 02

  And, you know, normally there'll be two or three things, like, oh, we have lithium batteries, and we have, you know, we have control systems, let's make EV toll. You know, two or three things, but with AI, there are so many things that got cracked in the last six months.

• 52:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:51Speaker 02

  That haven't been glued together yet into products, services, or whatever. It's just, and it's just accelerating. And, you know, there, there's this flaw in human psychology where something is mind blowing, and then you take it for granted, like, three days later.

• 53:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, totally.

• 53:06Speaker 02

  And then you, then you miss the center, you miss the, the, the mental breakthrough that, wait, I can glue that together with it. Snapchat is my favorite example. It's like that company.

• 53:13Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  Twenty billion, well, John Jarvey from MIT is a, he's, it's, his favorite story is how he, he, Evan, Evan Spiegel was a roommate of his son.

• 53:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:23Speaker 02

  Uh, or frat brother of his son at Stanford, and he got first look at it, and he said, that's just too simple. There's no way.

• 53:29Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 53:29Speaker 02

  And then it's a twenty billion dollar IPO.

• 53:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  The biggest mistake of his investing, probably the only big mistake of his investing career, but it, it was like, look, the, the phone has a camera. The camera is high resolution. This functionality is just the assimilation of texting and camera.

• 53:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:46Speaker 02

  That's all you had to realize. But, you know, those two things kind of grew in parallel, and people didn't stick them together. Now you've got forty things you can do with AI that you couldn't do just a few months ago, that can be glued together in all these different. Ways, you know, all the combinatorics are interesting products waiting to be invented.

• 54:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think where AI is today, if it if it just stopped, if progress stopped, where

• 54:07Speaker 03

  It would be amazing.

• 54:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, you'd still have a complete transformation of society over the next decade.

• 54:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:12Speaker 00

  But it's not gonna stop. It's gonna keep going and it's gonna probably keep going on the same essential or exponential and.

• 54:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 54:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  Should update the book.

• 54:21Speaker 03

  Well, the the next the next book that's coming out in our in March, I'm releasing it at the Abundance Summit is called We Are As Gods. And it's a realization that what we do between breakfast and lunch is godlike to our ancestors.

• 54:34Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 54:34Speaker 03

  Right? I mean, and we take it so much for granted.

• 54:37Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 54:37Speaker 03

  But our ability to manifest the future, to to literally know anything, anywhere, connect with anybody for free. I mean.

• 54:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:44Speaker 03

  It's crazy.

• 54:45Speaker 00

  AI is one of the first things, the transformation that it'll bring about. Uh, and you gotta think it's just the beginning that it. You kind of grow up and you you're thinking back to when your grandparents grew up and you know, you're like, oh, I'm so glad that I'm living at the time that I'm living.

• 55:01Speaker 03

  Yes, best time to be alive.

• 55:03Speaker 00

  But AI is the first time, you know, you look at like what's happening in biotechnology and and all these other things. Brain computer implants. And it's the first time I've been like, man, I am jealous of my kids.

• 55:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:15Speaker 00

  Because.

• 55:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:16Speaker 03

  But that's.

• 55:17Speaker 00

  The year twenty sixty is gonna be so cool.

• 55:19Speaker 03

  Well, you'll be here.

• 55:20Speaker 00

  I mean, I hope I'm here, but.

• 55:22Speaker 03

  I mean, come on, this is why.

• 55:23Speaker 00

  I mean, the work you're doing, I hope I'm here in twenty one hundred, right?

• 55:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's the reason for me was, you know, I grew up passionate about space. I wanted to see uh, space play out, you know, NASA never did it, you know, Elon's gone heads down. And, you know, Bezos and others and so it's fantastic. But when I read Ray's book, The Singularity is Near, it was like, holy shit, this this convergence, these technologies is gonna blow and accelerate, blow everything away and accelerate it. So.

• 55:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:52Speaker 03

  I want to see. I want to see the interstellar missions. I I want to see what uploading consciousness looks like. I want to see all of these things. And there is. I don't think there's any limitations beyond the laws of physics as we know them of what we're going to be able to do.

• 56:08Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 56:08Speaker 03

  So.

• 56:09Speaker 00

  And and it's gonna keep accelerating and like, yeah.

• 56:11Speaker 03

  Talking about your your twins are whole now.

• 56:14Speaker 00

  Eight, almost nine.

• 56:15Speaker 03

  And mine are fourteen.

• 56:15Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 56:16Speaker 03

  And so I think about their future. Um, and I am, let's, let's, you know, speaking to the parents listening, how do you think about educating kids today in an age of A I? Um, you know, I'm just livid about the schools that are saying can't use A I.

• 56:35Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 56:36Speaker 03

  It's like, you know, listen, my kids are going to be using it the moment they graduate every place, everywhere.

• 56:43Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 56:43Speaker 03

  And I think one of my challenges is that if you give a eighth grader, you know, eighth grade homework to you with A I, it's meaningless. But if you give them like graduate level work to go and, you know, design a starship and and figure it out, I mean, that's amazing.

• 57:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:01Speaker 03

  That's what we should be doing.

• 57:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, like assume that chat G P T exists and use it to take to make students A learn how to use the technology, but B. Go deeper than they ever would have been able to do in a classroom setting.

• 57:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:13Speaker 00

  Like, they should emerge stronger with using A I with their education. Actually, the best book that I've read on this at least is by Ethan Mollick. Have you ever read his book?

• 57:22Speaker 03

  I have.

• 57:22Speaker 00

  It's called, um, it's called Co-Intelligence, I think.

• 57:25Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 57:26Speaker 00

  Um, short book, it's like a ninety page read, you do it in an hour, but um, he's a, he's a professor at U Penn, I think he's a warden.

• 57:33Speaker 03

  Try it now for me, guys.

• 57:35Speaker 00

  And uh, just a, just a great quick read, super practical, the way he uses A I. He he leans into it, he's actually a very good Twitter follow as well.

• 57:44Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 57:44Speaker 00

  Um, but he's incorporated into his class and has just sort of changed the way he teaches to assume that everyone's using A I. And to to use that to take them way deeper into a topic than they would have been able to do. And raise the expectations on the final work product as a result.

• 58:01Speaker 03

  Exactly, but and I think that's true for all of society.

• 58:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:05Speaker 03

  You know, so as we get to, let's forget about A A G I and we talk about A S I, right? Where intelligence is a million fold or a billion fold more more capable. What do we do with that? All right. And so I was inspired by Star Trek and Apollo. Those two things lit my fuse and I I, you know, my first. What I call massive transport of purpose was making humanity multiplanetary. Built a whole bunch of companies, built the university in space and then focused on on other areas. I, you know, as we start this incredible capability.

• 58:41Speaker 03

  Humanity needs to go for these grand challenges. We need to have these epic visions.

• 58:45Speaker 00

  I couldn't agree more.

• 58:46Speaker 03

  Otherwise, we will will fade into insignificance.

• 58:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a um. Uh, oh, yeah, it's another book that's that I really loved is by Robert Zubrin, The Case for Space.

• 58:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. Bob Bob's been a friend for many, many years.

• 59:02Speaker 00

  He he makes this point very eloquently in the in the book about like the the human need for frontiers.

• 59:07Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 59:07Speaker 00

  As one of the reasons why space is so important, because there are. You know, the the bottom of the ocean is kind of still a frontier on Earth, but there aren't that many of them left.

• 59:14Speaker 03

  And when there's a frontier, no matter how you screwed up wherever you live on the frontier, you can start again.

• 59:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it's it's space for innovation and refresh and renewal and like. Um, yeah, so when do you think that we will be multiplanetary?

• 59:29Speaker 03

  So I listen, I well, we'll see. There's a hopefully a Starship ten launch this Sunday. Um, you know, Starship will get us to the moon on a recurring basis by hopefully end of twenty six, definitely twenty seven. And then Mars, you know, my my guess is boots on Mars by twenty thirty, but there'll be Optimus robot boots on Mars.

• 59:48Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 59:49Speaker 03

  Um, and then.

• 59:51Speaker 00

  And you're limited in your iteration speed there because you only have a, you know.

• 59:55Speaker 03

  You are, but.

• 59:55Speaker 00

  Launch once every eighteen months or so.

• 59:57Speaker 03

  But you're gonna send robots in advance. You'll send the robots to the surface of the planet. You'll send robots to the asteroids to go and. Mine materials. And the way I think about it, right, everything at the end of the day is one way or another driven by economics. And everything we hold of value on Earth, metals, minerals, energy, real estate is in infinite quantities in space.

• 1:00:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:17Speaker 03

  And so, you know, the the Earth eventually will be a crumb in a supermarket filled with resources.

• 1:00:22Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:00:23Speaker 03

  Right? And that's a beautiful, that's a beautiful thing.

• 1:00:25Speaker 00

  That's like an award because, you know, Mars is an obvious target now. Everyone's been. Working on it.

• 1:00:30Speaker 03

  I like the moon better personally.

• 1:00:32Speaker 00

  Be better than Mars?

• 1:00:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I mean.

• 1:00:34Speaker 00

  It's like stepping stone or is a place to set up?

• 1:00:36Speaker 03

  No, go start, go start a city. You know, there's these lava caves under the surface of the moon where you get protection for radiation. If you fill them with air. At one sixth gravity, you can strap on wings and you can fly.

• 1:00:48Speaker 00

  That's awesome.

• 1:00:49Speaker 03

  I did it. I did it so much fun.

• 1:00:51Speaker 00

  It's much fun. How how big are the caves?

• 1:00:53Speaker 03

  There are a lot. Huge. There are huge caves. Yes.

• 1:00:56Speaker 00

  You could you could build you'd have thousands, millions of people in there?

• 1:00:59Speaker 03

  Uh, I I don't know that. I mean, I can imagine easily imagine thousands or ten to thousands. And then, of course, the recent announcement that NASA is planning to go put a nuclear reactor on the South Pole of the moon.

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:01:13Speaker 03

  So cool, right? In order to literally hydrolyze the ice that's on the South Pole and create water and oxygen. And yeah, so.

• 1:01:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:20Speaker 03

  I mean, we're finally living into that science fiction future, and it's accelerating.

• 1:01:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, and hopefully fusion soon.

• 1:01:27Speaker 03

  And hopefully fusions.

• 1:01:28Speaker 00

  It'll solve a lot of problems here on Earth and open up new vistas for space.

• 1:01:31Speaker 03

  So Sam is like, what, twenty twenty eight for Helion, I think, is the current current target dates and and and Cambridge. Is coming on in twenty thirty thereabouts. So.

• 1:01:45Speaker 00

  It's amazing how, you know, a lot of these things bust loose when there's a single person that's just got an idea and they're incredibly passionate about it.

• 1:01:52Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:01:52Speaker 00

  And now with AI as a force multiplier, the odds of those passionate people becoming empowered and actually achieving that mission is so much higher.

• 1:01:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:59Speaker 00

  Than it was two years ago. Yeah, and then you get the right density of startups and you have competition, you have different approaches, you have the ability to learn from different approaches and the probability of success grows.

• 1:02:10Speaker 03

  And and just trying to outdo each other and have fun and you could be and in this future, like where it really is a Star Trek future instead of a Mad Max future, it's like, what? What ambitious, super cool thing can you go for?

• 1:02:21Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:02:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it used to be just small number of people. It used to be just the kings and the queens and the robber barons could do anything impacting people. Now it's anybody using these tools.

• 1:02:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:32Speaker 03

  It's amazing. So a question. As a chief product officer, who who names your models?

• 1:02:41Speaker 03

  Because it's like, you know, okay, I'm trying to understand the logic and the rhyme and reason.

• 1:02:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We we take a lot of well deserved flack for the naming of our models.

• 1:02:49Speaker 03

  Sorry. Sorry to give you a dig.

• 1:02:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. By the way, no, totally fair. We we lean into it.

• 1:02:56Speaker 00

  The the fact that we had both O four mini and four O mini at the same time is uh. Yeah. Something to be proud of. And then make the user choose those if they have any. Yeah.

• 1:03:05Speaker 03

  And then on the other side, there's just chat G P T simplicity.

• 1:03:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:08Speaker 03

  That's good.

• 1:03:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, in all seriousness, because I, by the way, we deserve all sorts of flak for that. So um totally, totally acknowledged. But one of the reasons that you have that is the philosophy of iterative deployment. Yeah, we could have waited. Like you have some new capability, like reasoning, for example, you know, the up until you we launched G P T four O. And it could do a bunch of new things like, you know, you could speak to it rather than just type to it. It's amazing. Yeah. We'd been working on the ability for models to reason, right, to not answer right away, but to to actually sort of think through the problem, try a bunch of different approaches.

• 1:03:50Speaker 00

  Test them out, you know, just the way you you would if I asked you to do a crossword puzzle or a Sudoku or something, right? You would, you don't just like spout out the answer. You've got to try things. You're like, okay, if that was a that was a, you know, six letter word starting with A there, but it's got to have a B in this. Okay, it could be that. No, not the right. And you're you're testing hypotheses, refuting some of them, uh, accepting some of them and then kind of moving on. We it took a while to teach the models that is one of the big, you know, breakthroughs uh from coming from OpenAI.

• 1:04:23Speaker 00

  The first model that could do that was O one. Hmm. And it was easier for us and faster for us to launch a model that just did that. And like wasn't an ideal model to ask for relationship advice or to, you know, ask who is the third. Right. Holy Roman Emperor or whatever, like all the all the sort of normal things that you can ask chat G P T. It was easier for it to be a very specialized model. It was very good at like thinking hard about, you know, scientific problems in particular. Yeah. And launching it as a separate model allowed us to iterate faster and allowed us to put to put this thing in people's hands. Yeah. And see what they did with it and what they wanted to do and, you know, what its shortcomings were and where it excelled. And so then we iterated a bunch that way. So you have G P T four, you have O one and then O two and all that.

• 1:05:09Speaker 00

  And then you have the mini models, which are sort of smaller, faster versions of those things. And G P T five for us was the moment where we kind of brought all of this stuff together and had one experience.

• 1:05:19Speaker 03

  Elegant is is.

• 1:05:20Speaker 00

  But I expect in the future that we'll have other things that where we have some new capability and we want to test it out faster than we can like integrate it into one massive thing. So I wouldn't be surprised if we have these kind of offshoots again in the future and then we integrate them as they work and we kind of gain mastery over them.

• 1:05:37Speaker 03

  Eric Schmidt talks about learning loops. Right? The speed of innovation is the speed at which you get learning. Put it out there, see how people think about it, give you feedback.

• 1:05:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I mean, especially with these, these, we're all kind of uncovering what these models can do. So it's especially valuable for us to get it out in people's hands and let them build.

• 1:05:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, the reasoning was just shocking. Actually, I don't know if, was that true here too? Like, nobody prior to O one would have thought the chain of thought reasoning was going to be such a huge unlock.

• 1:06:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:06Speaker 02

  I mean, it's just, it starts with iterative reprompting, which just worked far better than anyone ever would have guessed. And that evolved into O one and then O three and I guess O two was oxygen. I don't know what happened. O two was a trademark issue.

• 1:06:18Speaker 00

  Trademark, yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:20Speaker 02

  But yeah, I'm sure there'll be other offshoots because, because again, the capabilities are always surprising, like even, even the best researchers in the world don't know exactly what's going to come next.

• 1:06:30Speaker 03

  So I'm curious, it's interesting, right? We, we just cruised through the passing of the Turing test and didn't notice.

• 1:06:37Speaker 00

  Isn't it amazing?

• 1:06:38Speaker 03

  It's crazy.

• 1:06:38Speaker 00

  It's like, it was held up for like fifty, sixty years as this pinnacle and then we just like whooped by it.

• 1:06:44Speaker 02

  Well, that's the effect.

• 1:06:44Speaker 00

  We don't talk about it anymore.

• 1:06:45Speaker 02

  Like so quickly and they miss, they miss the implications because they're already on to the next, oh, I took it for granted. Like, no, no, you got to think about what, what can you do with it now? It's, it's, it's like right here in our hands.

• 1:06:55Speaker 03

  Will, will we pass through A G I the same way? It was like, oh yeah, it happened.

• 1:06:59Speaker 00

  I think so. I, I really think so. Cause arguably A G I is here. It's just unevenly distributed.

• 1:07:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:07:06Speaker 00

  Right? And there are lots of ways where the model is way smarter than me already. And I would never choose myself over the model. And then there are lots of places where the model is definitely not smarter than me yet and I would choose myself. But over time, I'm kind of staying, you know, I'm improving a little bit, hopefully. But the model's getting better a lot faster. The, the level of water is rising.

• 1:07:27Speaker 03

  So I just saw GPT, uh, GPT five pro.

• 1:07:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:31Speaker 03

  Was measured at an IQ of like one forty eight.

• 1:07:34Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:07:35Speaker 02

  Just raw IQ.

• 1:07:36Speaker 03

  On the Mensa, on the Mensa, Nori Mensa scale.

• 1:07:38Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:07:39Speaker 03

  Uh, that's impressive.

• 1:07:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it won a gold medal at the IMO, right?

• 1:07:43Speaker 03

  Congratulations.

• 1:07:44Speaker 00

  It was second, uh, at the.

• 1:07:47Speaker 03

  But.

• 1:07:47Speaker 00

  One of the programming competitions, I mean.

• 1:07:49Speaker 03

  I, I have to, so it, yeah, I was interested, right? So I looked at the IMO, the International Math Olympiad stats. And, you know, the US came in second. Um, and, uh, I think it's out of, uh, how many, is that a thirty six points, I think?

• 1:08:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, thirty six.

• 1:08:05Speaker 03

  Oh, no, no, four, out of forty two, out of forty two, and the, the US had like between thirty two and thirty six. Uh, the Chinese team that came in first had perfect score across all six Olympiads. Wow.

• 1:08:17Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:17Speaker 03

  That was impressive.

• 1:08:18Speaker 02

  So our podcast mate, Alex Wisner Gross, who's total genius, uh, he's been tracking that IMO score as the benchmark for self improvement. Cause you know, solving those problems is very, very correlated with, with also iterating through the algorithm.

• 1:08:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:34Speaker 02

  So I think there's a lot of belief now that we're going to go into this really rapid acceleration of capability because of self improvement. Until the GPUs run out, you know, there's some.

• 1:08:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  Some, but, but.

• 1:08:44Speaker 03

  Or the, or the electricity runs out first.

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  Well, I think, yeah, interesting, because the GPUs are constrained, the electricity won't run out quite yet, because we can't make the GPUs fast enough.

• 1:08:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:54Speaker 02

  To keep up. But the software improvement is unconstrained, right? There's, there's this period of time, I think it's coming right now.

• 1:09:00Speaker 03

  The algorithm.

• 1:09:01Speaker 02

  Algorithmic improvement that we swagged it on the podcast at between a hundred and a thousand X. But recently there's some new news coming out that indicates maybe it's even higher than that.

• 1:09:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:11Speaker 02

  I don't know if you guys have a theory on that internally or not, like.

• 1:09:13Speaker 00

  Well, there's now, there's two dimensions now that we're scaling intelligence, right? One is via pre-trained, which is kind of the traditional thing. And now it's test time. How, how long are you willing to give the model time to think? And how long can you kind of keep it on track as it does?

• 1:09:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:27Speaker 00

  So with oh one oh three in chat G P T, you kind of get, you know, the model will think for like sixty seconds. And then it'll come back and give you an answer. Most people don't want to wait too much longer than that. Deep research, though, will take sometimes twenty, thirty minutes to go do a bunch of research and iteratively compile everything that it gets, figure out what it's missing, go back and get more. But there's no reason that you can't have a model think for two days, two weeks, two months, two years. You know, Andrew Wiles didn't solve Fermat's Last Theorem by thinking for five minutes. He worked on it for seven years. And and we see continued evidence that the longer the models think, the smarter they get, the harder the problems they can solve. So I mean, there's this other dimension of scaling that today, at least, we don't see any.

• 1:10:09Speaker 02

  Do you have a whole?

• 1:10:11Speaker 00

  We see a lot of continued growth there.

• 1:10:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a lot of work going on for a custom chip design that's designed by A I to.

• 1:10:17Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:10:18Speaker 02

  Do you have a whole strategy around that? Are you working with with, you know?

• 1:10:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's, I mean, that's one of those areas where um where you can let the model think. And it's a pretty well constrained problem.

• 1:10:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:30Speaker 00

  Right, there's there's an.

• 1:10:32Speaker 00

  That you can go climb on and you can run tests and understand if your layout is better than the previous layout.

• 1:10:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:37Speaker 00

  And the more time you give the models to think about it, the more breakthroughs they make. So I actually, I I'm with you. I think that's one of the areas where we're gonna see. I mean, we already are seeing real innovation, right? I believe Google has been public about the fact that they've designed their T P U's and improved them with A I. You know, we're doing similar things.

• 1:10:56Speaker 02

  I think if you if you talk to Noam Shizier or anybody over there, the the historically, the T P U team has been way the hell over here and the algorithms team is way the hell over there and trying to translate your algorithmic idea into something that the hardware guys understand is just a nightmare. So that's been a very slow process. But now, because the A I will do it for you, it'll do the chip design right off your software design.

• 1:11:18Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:11:18Speaker 02

  That's going to be the big unlock. And I don't know if it's like this month, it's not, it's not more than.

• 1:11:23Speaker 00

  Oh, I think it's already happening.

• 1:11:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:25Speaker 00

  It's already happening.

• 1:11:25Speaker 02

  And you have a, do you have a team here doing specifically that?

• 1:11:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're working on our own chips. And we would be crazy if we weren't also using AI to improve our chip design and layout and everything.

• 1:11:34Speaker 03

  Do you have all the manufacturing and fab all figured out too? Is that?

• 1:11:37Speaker 00

  We're working with partners on that for sure. But, uh, but yeah, it's, it's, there's this classic problem where you have a fairly well, it's a, it's a specific problem and you have a way that you can grade it. In this case, you know, speed of, of the chip that you design. And in problems like that, we have, you have these well specified problems. You can just iterate and iterate and iterate and apply arbitrary amounts of GPU. And so far, I think we're going to see arbitrary amounts of improvement.

• 1:12:06Speaker 03

  I totally agree. It's, it's crazy exciting. Is, is that fertile area for startups or should they stay away from that because it's just where the big boys play and?

• 1:12:13Speaker 00

  Uh, I totally think it's fertile area. It takes a lot of technical talent to do it.

• 1:12:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:17Speaker 00

  Uh, but, but I think that's an interesting spot. I know some startups doing, uh, some exciting stuff there, material science and others.

• 1:12:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. Material science, unsung hero, and it will be a huge unlock.

• 1:12:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. Everybody, there's not a week that goes by when I don't get the strangest of compliments. Someone will stop me and say, Peter, you've got such nice skin. Honestly, I never thought, especially at age 64, I'd be hearing anyone say that I have great skin. And honestly, I can't take any credit. I use an amazing product called OneSkin OS01 twice a day, every day. The company was built by four brilliant PhD women who have identified a 10 amino acid peptide that effectively reverses the age of your skin. I love it. And like I say, I use it every day, twice a day. There you have it. That's my secret. You go to oneskin.co and write Peter at checkout for a discount on the same product I use. Okay. Now back to the episode.

• 1:13:12Speaker 00

  Oh, it'd be amazing. Yeah.

• 1:13:13Speaker 03

  Lieutenant, Lieutenant Colonel Leo.

• 1:13:16Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:13:17Speaker 03

  So June 13th, you're inducted into the army.

• 1:13:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. Uh, super excited about it.

• 1:13:22Speaker 03

  Super excited. Did you go through army basic training?

• 1:13:25Speaker 00

  Uh, we did a version of basic training. It was kind of an accelerated version.

• 1:13:28Speaker 03

  Me, you're an ultra marathoner. So, I mean.

• 1:13:30Speaker 00

  Probably not.

• 1:13:31Speaker 03

  Probably.

• 1:13:31Speaker 00

  Probably. Yeah. So, but you know, we've, we went and we've, uh, we've all passed our army fitness tests.

• 1:13:38Speaker 03

  So tell us about that. How did that materialize? Did you get a call one day?

• 1:13:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. Uh, I got a call from Shom who, uh, Shom Sankar, who is CTO of Palantir. He's been there forever. Um, and he and some of the folks, uh, at the top of the army were thinking about this program. Um.

• 1:13:55Speaker 03

  I mean, it's really smart. I mean, I was impressed.

• 1:13:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, and uh, I mean, kudos to the army for being willing to take a risk on some crazy people like us. But I think it's awesome. Um, you, a- and by the way, I hope it's, there's four of us today.

• 1:14:09Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:14:10Speaker 00

  Um, so it's myself, it's Shum, it's Boz, is the CTO Meta, and then Bob McGrew, who used to be the head of research here. Um, the idea is to bring us in and um, you know, basically to create a group, like bring tech and the military, the DOD closer together.

• 1:14:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:27Speaker 00

  Uh, take a bunch of expertise that you get from, you know, working in the tech industry, a bunch of expertise that you get from being in the DOD and um, and doing all the incredible things that the army does and merge them together so that, because we, we will be better together.

• 1:14:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I have, I imagine the Navy, the Air Force need to do something very similar.

• 1:14:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, and there's a huge push across the DOD to integrate AI, as there very well should be, like, does us no good to have the best models in the world if they're sitting on the shelf.

• 1:14:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:55Speaker 00

  While the, you know, the PLA uses inferior models, but integrates them everywhere.

• 1:14:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, no doubt.

• 1:15:00Speaker 00

  So it's super, super important. Um, the idea here was, because there's lots of efforts, you know, uh, to bring AI across the DOD, but the idea here was like.

• 1:15:08Speaker 03

  Palmer Lucky's a friend and he's been doing an amazing job.

• 1:15:11Speaker 00

  Oh, totally.

• 1:15:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:12Speaker 00

  Thank God for them. Um, but uh, but uh, you know, you could have done this as a consultant, but I think getting us in on the inside, first of all, I mean, wearing the uniform, you feel a responsibility, you go hang out with people who are um, who are, I mean, literally giving their lives. But also just, it's such a, it's such a incredible institution that you wouldn't get that sense on the outside. I didn't have that sense before. And I respected it, obviously, but you, being on the inside is a different thing. Obviously, I have a ton to learn. We're just getting started. Um, but. Uh, I think us being on the inside will allow us to to be more effective. Um, and when we go to wherever they would like us to go to help.

• 1:15:57Speaker 00

  I I will have that much more of a sense of how everything works and will be a part of the team as opposed to being a con- consultant from the outside.

• 1:16:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:05Speaker 00

  So, um.

• 1:16:06Speaker 03

  Did you have to go through the whole top secret clearance process and all the background checks and all that? Was that a?

• 1:16:11Speaker 00

  I I had one already.

• 1:16:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, did all four of you have it already?

• 1:16:14Speaker 00

  Uh, not all of us, but um, but yeah, they had us go through.

• 1:16:18Speaker 03

  So then, once you're inside, you know, on base, whatever, just access to everything is it? How's that work?

• 1:16:23Speaker 00

  I mean, it's still very, uh, you know, when top secret stuff is pretty heavily compartmented, so there's a, there's a need to know basis for most things.

• 1:16:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:31Speaker 00

  So they certainly don't just, you know, open up everything, but.

• 1:16:33Speaker 03

  But it's weird.

• 1:16:34Speaker 00

  Things that are important for us to know, we can know and we can help in deeper ways than if we didn't have that access.

• 1:16:40Speaker 03

  Is there a schedule where like you, you, you go once, uh, whatever and?

• 1:16:44Speaker 00

  It's a little more ad hoc than, you know, normal reserves duty. You're kind of like a weekend a month and two weeks in the summer, and this is much more, um. Uh, just because of the jobs, like it's harder to be a weekend a month, but it's also, we can go, you know, maybe deeper, longer for specific, uh, things. We're also each going to take our own kind of focus.

• 1:17:06Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 1:17:06Speaker 00

  Um, uh, obviously, we have to watch out for conflicts and so, um, we've, they've designed our focus areas based on that.

• 1:17:12Speaker 03

  Oh, what's your, what's your focus is that?

• 1:17:14Speaker 00

  One of the things I'm going to focus on is, um, uh, uh, like physical performance. And how, because you can imagine a lot of ways to use AI to monitor and improve physical performance.

• 1:17:24Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 1:17:25Speaker 00

  You know, like I've got a whoop, I've got an aura, I've got an Apple Watch.

• 1:17:29Speaker 03

  By the way, which gives you better sleep data, you think, or a whoop?

• 1:17:32Speaker 00

  Um, you know, they disagree and I never quite know.

• 1:17:35Speaker 03

  I know, I've got my, I've got eight sleep as well. I got one of my best night's sleep last night. I got a ninety-four score.

• 1:17:41Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 1:17:41Speaker 03

  I was like, yes, that was great.

• 1:17:43Speaker 00

  That's amazing. The one thing I might agree on is I need to sleep more.

• 1:17:47Speaker 03

  And deep sleep more.

• 1:17:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:17:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, um, let's, let's wrap with, uh, advice for entrepreneurs right now. So a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of builders here, um, you know, as a chief product officer and they're building products. How would you? How, what, what sage advice do you have for them?

• 1:18:07Speaker 00

  Oh, man, I think lean into the AI in every way possible and assume that it assume that it will continue on the super sharp, steep curve that it's on.

• 1:18:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:17Speaker 00

  Um, and if you're

• 1:18:20Speaker 03

  Build experiment.

• 1:18:20Speaker 00

  Just imagine things that should be true and are not possible today. And I think a lot of them are going to be possible to build six months from now, a year from now, two years from now. And the people that see that and are building for that future, counting on the models to get there, like that's going to pay off because the models are going to get there.

• 1:18:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. All right, I, I do have, I do have an important last question for you. Um, and it's this, has OpenAI reached, fully reached AGI? And what is Johnny Ives delivering for you?

• 1:18:55Speaker 00

  Oh, man, I've been waiting to talk about this since we started.

• 1:18:58Speaker 03

  Really? Okay.

• 1:19:00Speaker 00

  All right, so.

• 1:19:05Speaker 03

  And that's a cut, ladies and gentlemen. So that's a wrap. Obviously, we didn't get information from Kevin that's exclusive on Johnny Ives or AGI as much as I would love to. But hopefully, if you're a builder and entrepreneur at home, this was super useful for you. I know it was for me. Every week, my team and I study the top 10 technology meta trends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from humanoid robotics, AGI and quantum computing to transport, energy, longevity and more. There's no fluff, only the most important stuff that matters, that impacts our lives, our companies and our careers. If you want me to share these meta trends with you, I write a newsletter twice a week, sending it out as a short two minute read via email.

• 1:19:49Speaker 03

  And if you want to discover the most important meta trends 10 years before anyone else, this report's for you. Readers include founders and CEOs from the world's most disruptive companies and entrepreneurs building the world's most disruptive tech. It's not for you if you don't want to be informed about what's coming, why it matters and how you can benefit from it. To subscribe for free, go to dmandus.com slash meta trends to gain access to the trends 10 years before anyone else. All right, now back to this episode.

• 1:20:30Speaker 01

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