Why the US Government Is Blocking Model Releases (GPT-5.6) | #267

This episode is mainly about the U. S. government putting frontier AI behind a gate, China’s accelerating open-weight and distillation pressure, and a new push into quantum and photonic computing. Get access to metatrends 10+ years before anyone else - https://qr.diamandis.com/metatrends Peter H. Diamandis, MD, is the Founder of XPRIZE, Singularity University, ZeroG, and A360 Emad Mostaque is the founder of Intelligent Internet ( https://www.ii.inc ) Read Emad’s Book: https://thelasteconomy.com Dave Blundin is the founder & GP of Link Ventures Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross is a computer scientist and founder of Reified – My companies: Apply to Dave's and my new fund:https://qr.diamandis.com/linkventureslanding Go to Blitzy to book a free demo and start building today: https://qr.diamandis.com/blitzy Your body is incredibly good at hiding disease. Schedule a call with Fountain Life to add healthy decades to your life, and to learn more about their Memberships: https://www.fountainlife.com/peter _ Connect with Peter: X Instagram Substack Website Xprize A360 Connect with Dave: Web X LinkedIn Instagram TikTok Connect with Emad X LinkedIn Read Emad’s Book Learn about Intelligent Internet Connect with Alex Website LinkedIn X Email Substack Spotify Threads Listen to MOONSHOTS: Apple YouTube – *Recorded on June 27th, 2026 *The views expressed by me and all guests are personal opinions and do not constitute Financial, Medical, or Legal advice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  For the first time in US history, the executive branch has placed a national security hold on commercial AI products.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  The models are so insanely capable that they have to be controlled.

• 0:11Speaker 02

  Certain models will be available to everyone, certain models won't. And now they're becoming more and more gated. And I think this will only accelerate.

• 0:18Speaker 00

  Bottom line, the US government is now in the release loop.

• 0:21Speaker 03

  Well, it looks like protectionism.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  The government is too late.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  Might it be possibly crushing OpenAI and Anthropic's valuation? It's reported that the leadership is pulling back on their near term IPO.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  It's just a different world from being a private company. And I just think they're suddenly realizing, wow.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  Our next story is from Anthropic, who accuses China's Alibaba of running a massive distillation campaign against Claude.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  This will be the excuse that the US and Europe and maybe South America use because they need to suppress Chinese AI somehow.

• 0:56Speaker 03

  The world seems to be on a path, sort of a second Cold War type path.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Anyone who's shocked by this is way out of touch with what China's actually doing.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

• 1:12Speaker 00

  So, Eamonn, I hear it's hot out where you are in London.

• 1:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's 5% penetration of AC here and it's like 40 degrees Celsius. So I was just saying, I'm going to quit being an air entrepreneur and become a HVAC roll up specialist. That's the real route to hell.

• 1:28Speaker 00

  Market potential.

• 1:30Speaker 00

  Dave, how about you?

• 1:32Speaker 01

  I'm in beautiful Creche, Vermont. It's gorgeous up here.

• 1:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, fantastic. Alex, it looks kind of boring back in that background again. Where are you actually today?

• 1:41Speaker 03

  Is the background even real, Peter?

• 1:43Speaker 01

  You're in a bunker.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  You've got your upload ready to go, your cans of canned tuna for the next 20 years.

• 1:53Speaker 03

  I'm vegetarian, but I do like to say, don't take off the takeoff.

• 1:57Speaker 00

  You know, I just got back from a 24-hour sprint to Fairbanks, Alaska. I was there for 24 hours during 24 hours of sunlight there for the wildfire finals. So, you know, we just decimated in California, Greece, Australia, around the world with these fires. And about five years ago, I said, this is ridiculous. We need to be able to find a fire at ignition, like just at the very beginning, and put it out autonomously within 10 minutes. Well, these are the finals. We have three teams that competed in Fairbanks. And we chose Fairbanks because they had the drone approvals. All these were drone companies. Anduril was one of them.

• 2:38Speaker 00

  So it's great palmer's in the competition when he's at our moonshot gathering in September. We'll talk about that. Another one from Germany called Dryad, and one from a combo of Australia and the Queensland of the UK was called Aura. All three of them using drones and just being able to, you know, fleets of drones spotting the fire and then dumping suppressant on them. So very impressive. Hopefully, at the end of this, you're going to have wildfires being a thing of the past, or destructive wildfires, that is. So that was my weekend playtime. Yeah.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  That's so cool. What's the coverage? Like, how many drones do you need to cover, say, all of California?

• 3:20Speaker 00

  Well, the goal of the competition was cover 1,000 square kilometers and then being able to find the fire. There were decoy fires. If the fire was more than two meters in size, or it was moving, then zap it and put it out. So I think that the teams were using fleets of, you know, autonomous aircraft and drones to do the coverage. Anyway, it's coming. It's coming. And then they're going to, you know, someday we'll see Optimus Robots out there in the field. But get rid of, you know, putting humans at risk and use the technology where the technology is best.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's going to be like the oil cleanup. XPRIZE is going to be one of those ones that just creates a global best practice and one iteration. And that's the best XPRIZE theme, you know, when something wins and immediately goes into deployment, just like oil cleanup did, and becomes the way it happens for the rest of time.

• 4:13Speaker 00

  Baseline.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Such a cool thing.

• 4:15Speaker 03

  Time to start one-shotting moonshots.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  Shall we get into it, gentlemen? You guys ready? Might as well. All right. So, welcome to Moonshots, everyone. The number one podcast in all things exponential and AI. We want to be your front row seat to the coming singularity. I'm here with my magnificent Moonshot mates. AWG, our in-house super genius, Alex, a pleasure. Dave Blunden, our wizard of AI investing. Dave, good morning. And Imad Mustak, our AI intellect on emerging intelligence. And of course, Saleem is on an airplane. He's airborne at this moment from Munich to Spain. And I'm Peter Diamandis, your host, and hopefully, your abundant evangelist. So, this week came fast and furious. My head is still spinning.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  We literally spun up a weekend recording because there's so much going on. There's genuinely no time to sleep during the singularity. For those of you joining us for the first time, our mission here at Moonshots is to keep you informed, keep you up to date on exactly what just happened. And more importantly, keep you optimistic about the extraordinary world ahead. The world that we're building, the coming age of abundance. So, let me give you a quick overview, a TLDR of today's pod. OpenAI hit the brakes, both on shipping GPT-5.6 and on its own IPO. We'll discuss why. We'll cover OpenAI's audacious plans to use AI to fix security holes, not just find them. And Elon's having quite the week as well, a lot going on in his world.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  Neuralink may attempt the first brain-to-brain telepathy communication later this year. Micron dethrones Nvidia, and Trump signs sweeping executive orders to supercharge American quantum computing. A lot to cover. You guys, you guys ready to jump into this? I mean, honestly, I was like, looking at the feed from you this morning, Alex, and I was like, okay, we've got to cover that too and that.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  I think, Peter, we need an emergency pod every morning.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Well, that's what it's gonna be from here on out. I mean, we're clearly in an accelerating hard takeoff. So you got to expect every week is more than the last.

• 6:20Speaker 03

  Don't take off the takeoff.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  It's a race to keep up. You know, Alex, it's funny. You say we should podcast every day, but you know, it takes half the day to keep up with what happens just the day before anyway. So then you use the other half podcasting it out.

• 6:33Speaker 03

  It's the podcasting singularity.

• 6:35Speaker 00

  Oh, my God. And you know, I'm really, I really have a high bar for what news we cover. And there's just so much of it. So everybody, you know, strap in, grab your Americano or latte, whatever you have this morning. And let's get into it. We're going to kick off with three breaking stories from OpenAI. For the first time in US history, the executive branch has placed a national security hold on commercial AI products. Last week, Anthropic's Fable and Mythos models were initially pulled from the market. Last night, the Trump administration struck a deal with Anthropic, which grants the company permission to release Mythos 5 to a group of 100 select companies. In a parallel story, two days ago, just as OpenAI

• 7:18Speaker 00

  was about to release their newest model, GPT-5.6, the White House struck again and asked them to slow down and only release the model to 20 select companies. Bottom line, the US government is now in the release loop for the most capable models, customer by customer, selecting who gets access to the latest models. Part of our discussion here, someone else is controlling whether you've got access to frontier models, and maybe that's a good thing. In a recent memo, Altman said the government will be approving access customer by customer during a limited preview window with broader release, hopefully coming in a couple of weeks if all goes well. So OpenAI has announced three versions of

• 7:58Speaker 00

  GPT-5.6, all of them being throttled by the White House. Their GPT-5.6 Saul, or Soul, you know, the sun, their flagship model, 5.6 Terra, the middle tier, and 5.6 Luna, the fast, low-cost version. I like that nomenclature. It sort of is descriptive of what's coming. Allow me to open with a question that our airborne moonshot mate Saleem asked for all of us. Given that the White House is delaying Anthropic and OpenAI frontier models, isn't the government effectively stifling domestic AI in a regulatory blanket? And if that happens, might it be possibly crushing OpenAI and Anthropic's valuation?

• 8:43Speaker 00

  Dave, let's go to you first on that one.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Yes on one and no on two, but it's inevitable. The models are so insanely capable that they have to be controlled. Cybersecurity is just the first excuse, but all the other evil use cases are right behind that. And so this is the new normal. I think everyone's got to get used to it. I think that the only argument that it would stifle market caps would be tied to is China going to then beat these companies? But my son Sean just got back from China yesterday and we were talking about, he went from China to Vietnam to Korea and then back. And China's nowhere near caught up to the US. They do an incredibly good

• 9:27Speaker 01

  job of distilling, copying, and taking intellectual property. But in terms of pushing the frontier, there's very little chance that China's going to threaten the market caps of these US companies anytime soon. So if the government is fair across the board, which is, seems unlikely, but it's, if the government is fair across the board, then I don't think it reduces the market caps at all. These are the most valuable companies in the history of the world by far.

• 9:52Speaker 00

  By the way, I know that you're busy and sometimes these episodes run long and you don't have time to listen to the whole episode, or if on occasion you miss an episode, I now put out a moonshot summary on Substack, which includes a link to all the stories that we cover. The weekly recap covers what I and the mates had to say, what we think is most important, and what we're most excited about. And it's free. You can subscribe at dmandis.commetatrends. That's dmandis.commetatrends. All right, now back to the episode. So Alex, I've thrown up the performance benchmarks on 5.6 here from OpenAI. How impressive is this? Give us a little rundown on these benchmarks.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, 5.6 Sol is roughly comparable to Mythos Preview. If you look at all of the cyber benchmarks and some of the bio benchmarks, it's roughly comparable. It wins some, loses some. But I think the bigger story here is we're in the regulatory endgame. This is exactly during the founding early days of OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic. There was an enormous amount of hand wringing over what would happen when we reached the era of recursive self-improvement and the race condition that would happen. And there was a general consensus that the Frontier Labs would all establish some sort of coordination mechanism with each other to slow down and sort of cross the finish

• 11:18Speaker 03

  line together without creating a race condition. And many people at the time said, oh, this was impossible. There's no way, there's no possible way. This is sort of the paradox of Moloch, Molochian economics, I think Scott Alexander would say, would mean we're permanently stuck in this social trap of everyone competing against each other. And it turns out that the same old coordination mechanism that we've had for thousands of years, government, localized geographic monopoly on force, is more than capable, it appears, of being that coordination mechanism for getting the final two, at least as of this point in time, the duopoly of Frontier Labs, OpenAI and Anthropic, to synchronize

• 12:03Speaker 03

  the release of their capabilities out to the first few dozen customers or users that the government is going to gatekeep. So in terms of the raw performance, roughly comparable. And I think what's even more interesting than the fact that 5.6 Sol is head and shoulders in terms of cyber capabilities and other capabilities, also efficiency, versus 5.5, is that basically the government, the US government, has functioned as a synchronization mechanism for helping 5.6 Sol reach essentially some form of parity or near parity with Mythos slash Mythos Preview 5. That's extraordinary.

• 12:45Speaker 03

  We've never seen any sort of third party basically forcing the two leading contenders who would otherwise be in a race against each other to essentially similar capabilities. And yet that's what we're seeing. And at the same time, looking at China, the Chinese open weight capabilities, there's this chart floating around X extrapolating the time difference between Chinese open weight models, reaching the same capability as the two remaining frontier Western open weight models. And if you extrapolate it, depending on how you calculate that time delta, the number is on a trajectory to go to zero by Christmas of this year.

• 13:25Speaker 00

  See, that's the crazy thing. And Eman, I want to go to you, given your experience in open weight models. I mean, if in fact, the open weight models from China are converging, and at the same time that the US government is sort of throttling, you know, I can imagine a lot of companies around the world saying, I want this on prem, I'm just going to adapt, you know, the Chinese models. And that, you know, again, to the second part of Salim's question, if that's happening, that could have a real negative consequence on the US models. What do you think about it, Eman?

• 13:58Speaker 02

  So yes, I think that's an excellent question. What we've seen is kind of an extension of what we've been talking about over the last, I think, year since that IMO gold OpenAI model was announced. Certain models will be available to everyone, certain models won't, and now they're becoming more and more gated. And I think this will only accelerate. Looking at the open models, GLM 5.2 was the first model with the big model feel, even though it just trained more from the GLM 5.1 base. And now lots of people are trying it. But how good is it? I think you've seen a few things. First of all, you've seen multi-model harnesses. So my old colleagues at Sakana released Fugu, and then the Blitzy

• 14:38Speaker 02

  team, and now top of SW Bench Pro, bringing together lots of different models. You know, again, a big achievement from that team. We have a harness releasing on Monday, where basically it's on Frontier SWE, which is the most difficult coding benchmark. Like, each task takes 11 hours and it requires novelty.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  When you say we, do you mean intelligent internet?

• 15:01Speaker 02

  Intelligent internet, yeah. So we've been looking at how far can you get single models? And single models, we're going to be announcing GPT 5.5 overtaking Methos on Frontier SW. So that's the previous gen, but GLM 5.2 outperforms GPT 5.5 in our current tests. So we actually see on Frontier SW, which is the most difficult. Like SW Bench Pro does like really great stuff, you know, and that's the type of stuff Litsi and others are doing. Frontier SW is asking you to build novel kernels and things. And GLM 5.2 is at the top with that harness. With a normal harness, it's like number four or five, but now you've seen actually

• 15:45Speaker 02

  with the right harness, open models already can be at the top. And that's crazy when you consider GLM 5.2 is maybe $25 million worth of code of compute, sorry. So I think that the gap, yeah, definitely by December. But maybe even now as base model performance becomes less important than how you use it because we've learned how to use it. It's like the Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, you know, coming out on the Wii before the Switch. They really kind of push that.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Captures the magnitude of what you just said.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  Well, you know, you've got the same native space and you can kind of push it dramatically.

• 16:27Speaker 02

  And but I mean, but this again opens up a difficulty because you're seeing the gating of these models. And the competent intelligence that can build your code bases, everyone can have access to that. The novel intelligence that can make anyone a genius on an attack or otherwise. That feels that's going to have like licensing, it's going to maybe even be restricted to US citizens. But how good will the Chinese models get? We're not sure. It's just that right now they are comparable.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Hold up on China, hold on China for just a second. What I just said is so insanely important. I want to be sure everybody gets it. The finish to that sentence would be therefore the government is too late. You can already take 5.5 or Opus 4.8 and put enough of a brilliant harness around it to make it better than Methos or better than 5.6, GPT 5.6. Therefore, you can take what's already out and turbocharge it above the level of what the government tried to stop this week. That means the cat's out of the bag, which means the government would then need to go backtrack and say, well, wait, hold on, hold on. We were too slow.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  We need now to lock down 4.8, maybe 4.7. Let's go all the way back six months and pretend we did this six months ago. So that, you know, that's an insanely impactful statement. The only part of what Ahmad said that I have firsthand experience with is yes, Blitzy can beat Methos in Sweet Bench 4 point or in Sweet Bench Pro. So if that applies to all use cases with the right harness, then the impact of what Ahmad just said is massively.

• 18:08Speaker 00

  All right, let's take a second for everybody listening. Alex, what does a harness mean in this context?

• 18:12Speaker 03

  Well, so a harness typically refers to non-weight capability improvements. So when you're building a machine learning model, there are many phases. It typically consists of a neural network of some sort. Neural network is composed of weights. Neural network has some intrinsic behavior. It goes through pre-training, mid-training, post-training. These all impact the weights directly. Now you have a model and you want to on the fly change its behavior. So the, in the beginning, in 2020, when we first got GPT-2 and large language models or few-shot learners, there was the prompt. You could change its behavior in context by feeding it different text as a prompt.

• 18:56Speaker 03

  And the output was versatile and it was good. Then people realized.

• 19:01Speaker 00

  It's a biblical statement and it was good.

• 19:04Speaker 03

  And it was good. And then people realized. Maybe we want to factor out common elements of that prompt across many prompts. And the system prompt was born, and it was good. And then people realized that it was desirable to keep factoring out common elements and logic and text and and other information out from all of these prompts into what ultimately became a harness. So there it's now quite possible, as Ahmad mentioned, as many others, including myself, do to create lots of what Andre Karpathy might call software 1.0 harnesses that live outside

• 19:46Speaker 03

  the model, that orchestrate the models, that feed common system prompts and other prompts to the models, that parse the outputs, that mix different sorts of models from different vendors in order to achieve super performance. That's what a harness is.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Okay. You know, it's also it's a bellwether into this new era where, you know, a year ago, if you said, what's a parameter, what's training data, how many layers are in your neural net? Those have very crisp answers. They're just very factual answers. Now the AI is telling me all day long that it's going to build a new harness, it needs new scaffolding, or it's going to monkey patch something. It uses the word monkey patch like five times a day. Like I wrote code for 35 years, never once used the word monkey patch. Why are you monkey patch? I don't know what you're doing. But it works, you know, it comes back with with functional work. So we're in this new era now where we're kind of like sort of understanding what the AI is doing. And it definitely works, so we kind of let it go.

• 20:43Speaker 00

  I want to go back.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  The word harness has just got no technical depth.

• 20:47Speaker 00

  I want to go back to this principal question. Right now, the government is controlling who gets access to frontier AI level. And at the same time, we have these open weight models coming out of China. And I can imagine a lot of companies saying, I don't want the government telling me what I can and cannot access. I'm going to start using on prem open weight models. And is there?

• 21:09Speaker 00

  A probability that the government's going to start restricting in the US the use of these open weight models? And then does that sort of? No. For sure. Well.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that there's a good chance that the US government bans Chinese open weight models from being used by corporations and requires a license and KYC for any frontier or new frontier model, including retention of your prompts.

• 21:34Speaker 00

  I mean, for everybody listening, this is the reason we spun up this weekend pod because of this issue. It's all of this is breaking so fast. I think Alex, you opened up by saying we're in the hard takeoff, or maybe it was you, Dave, but it feels that way.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  I'm just saying, don't take off the takeoff.

• 21:52Speaker 00

  Okay. So how does this impact? How are we going to see this impacting these, our frontier models here domestically? And does, is this the mechanism by which China pulls out in the lead across AI?

• 22:10Speaker 03

  Well, it looks like protectionism. It superficially, it looks like perfectionism, protectionism maybe masquerading as export control. And there is, I think, a very real risk that the US falls behind. I think without this regulatory regime, we were neck and neck, maybe six to eight months ahead of the Chinese models. And now there is very much the risk that AGI is achieved internally, but externally for all of the users, the users are, American users and Western users of American frontier models are stuck at parity or worse, behind parity with Chinese models, whereas internally, within the labs, the capabilities are continuing to leap ahead.

• 22:54Speaker 03

  And that sort of distinction, we speak of the singularity all the time. In a black hole, there's the notion of an event horizon as being distinct, as having distinct outer horizon versus inner horizon versus singularity maybe at the center. And there's very, I think, real risk that the frontier labs, that at the moment, the two American frontier labs will have internal capabilities that vastly outstrip. What is available to everyone else and that as a number of folks, including Rune from OpenAI and others have mentioned, creates the risk then, creates some sort of weird perverse incentives for the American economy. Like, for example, is it, are we incentivized to all go work for OpenAI

• 23:38Speaker 03

  and Anthropic so that we gain access to the internal capabilities?

• 23:42Speaker 01

  Well, that's happening already. Yeah, that's well underway. Everybody's leaping. But actually, the playbook, if you ban US companies from using Chinese models, that doesn't achieve anything because the rest of the world will still use the Chinese models. The playbook next is to say, "Look, we will not let you access the most amazing technology in the history of mankind, Europe, South America, East Asia. We will not let you access this unless you follow this new playbook." And that's what David Sacks is busy writing right now. Like, what are the new NATO-like rules? It's gotta be insane in the White House right now.

• 24:15Speaker 03

  Well, as I said, Pax Silica, one could imagine the Pax Silica generalizes to the Pax Intelligentsia, where you have the American intelligence, superintelligence block, and you have the Chinese superintelligence block, and Europe is torn between them.

• 24:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:33Speaker 00

  Iman, you're over on the pseudo-European side of the market here.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's just say it's been a very busy week with lots of people talking about this at the highest levels. I think, as you said, restricting Chinese models is one thing, and that's one political question, but we can have scenarios like this. Right now, Mythos is only allowed to be used by US citizens on the allow list. This means Andre Karpathy in Anthropic cannot use Mythos because he's a slapback Canadian. It actually says that in Lutnik's order.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Is he named?

• 25:08Speaker 02

  And, well, no, it just says only citizens, even internally, non-citizens. But let's take a look. What happens if? Frontier models from US labs are only allowed to be used again frontier models, not competent models by US citizens and US corporations. That's a massive leap for America, right? Like, they will continue, and that's still a big market, and that's still a huge market. Again, what happens if you have any licensing restrictions you want? Like, one of my scenarios is, just like you have a driving license, you will need to have a license where you basically say that you're patriotic to America and convince a frontier model of that to get your license. You know, you will have KYC, you will have the, these are the kind of scenarios that

• 25:50Speaker 02

  I'm kind of envisioning, because again, there's this split in capability, and you don't want any adversaries to have access to capability. Dave's points about distilling and things like that, but it goes way beyond that, because the previous model is like, you type a word, you get an answer. These things can now work for basically days, if not months.

• 26:10Speaker 00

  I need to, I need to, I need to steal a man for a moment, the US decision on, on doing this. So, Associated Press reports that Anthropic's Methos model, running red team exercises with the US intelligence agencies under Anthropic's Project Glasswing, if you guys remember that from three weeks ago, has identified vulnerabilities in highly sensitive classified US government computer systems. Senator Mark Warner said the following, quote, "This tool broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours." Methos identified the holes with exploitation outside the scope of the exercise. So, 12 days later, the Trump administration directed Anthropic to disable Methos 5 and Fable 5 for foreign nationals.

• 26:56Speaker 00

  So, this, you know, this exercise with the US DOD explains why they did this. And it sounds very real. I mean, I can imagine a future in which the most advanced models test everything sensitive, and then, once they patch the holes, then it's opened up. But, that's a strange universe. A lot of these things are just, go ahead, Matt.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Well, there is a flip side, which I'd say, which is that the models aren't good enough yet to tell when they're being used for evil. So, you know, don't allow yourself to be used for evil. I just want to add that.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  That's the meta prompt. Dave?

• 27:32Speaker 01

  Well, a lot of these are just cover stories and excuses. They're true, but they're just, the real issue is the query, can you build yourself? So if you're in China and you go to Mythos and you say, hey, Mythos, can you help me build yourself? And then I have you. And then I can build a competing equivalent over here in China. And that's the query that Mythos can answer and 4.8, Opus 4.8 can't. And I know that from the two days that I had access to Mythos before they pulled it back. And that's the real issue. And so then the, oh, it's dangerous for, let me, let me think. Okay, here, cybersecurity, it cracked into some FBI systems. Good enough. That's all we needed was a reason. You know, this is like, you know, and if you look at world history, governments always have an agenda.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  And then there's some trigger event and they say, because of that, you know, like, look at Russia walking into Ukraine. Like, well, because of this one thing, that's how we're going to justify the action that we knew we were going to take anyway. But the real underlying driver here is not, you know, hacking into government systems. It's the self-improvement can't get out to the world. Otherwise, it's out of the bag forever. And that's the, the line that Mythos and 5.6 can cross.

• 28:41Speaker 00

  Alex, do you agree with that? Can we imagine China using Mythos to build itself?

• 28:47Speaker 03

  I think we're in the end game. I think China has enough capabilities at this point to achieve its own recursive self-improvement, its own Fermi pile, if you will, without needing to further siphon trade secrets or reasoning traces from Western models or just literally trying to exfiltrate weights out of frontier labs. I think we're in the end game. This policy could only possibly make sense if we are in the end game of recursive self-improvement and every day matters. I think the, the steel manning of, well, this is regulatory overreach or maybe not overreach, but a regulatory immunoreponse, say, to, to Mythos or to GPT 5.6,

• 29:28Speaker 03

  being able to do incredible vulnerability analysis and mapping and exploitation. I think that justification only holds water, only supports itself if we move on, hopefully, to a lighter touch regulatory regime, say, in a month or two. That maybe is a little bit, as Dave says, more focused on recursive self-improvement gatekeeping and less on vulnerabilities. But otherwise, I think China has reached recursive self-improvement escape velocity at this point on its own and doesn't need the West's help.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  But I also think that the White House doesn't necessarily see it that way. They, they think they still have time.

• 30:08Speaker 00

  What's your advice to regulators out there right now?

• 30:12Speaker 01

  I mean, you gotta completely unleash David Sacks and go around the world, meet every world leader with a very specific, here's how the future world is gonna work. And I think you have to lock super intelligent AI into a couple of boxes. I don't think one box is healthy for the world, but I think 10 is also unhealthy. And say, look, here are the rules. And I think the most important thing by far is logging every prompt and giving many, many eyeballs to every single use case. Because the idea that the AI can run rampant in a box and design things without anyone inspecting every single iteration. Every chain of thought, every prompt needs to be inspected by other AIs to make sure that we know exactly what the use cases are.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  And if we achieve that, then you have a stable future for the rest of time. But everyone has to agree, okay, who sees it? You know, does Sweden get to see it? Does, you know, who are our friends, who are not our friends? And then lay out those rules like yesterday and then get everyone to sign up to it. And then you get access to Fable. That's the deal.

• 31:13Speaker 00

  Iman, what's your solution? And we'll go to you, Alex.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  Well, I'm very pro actually competent open intelligence. And, you know, I think we can build that in an aligned way. What I think, given the political reality, will happen is KYC, prompt retention, American civilians getting the thing via a license. And again, something similar to having to have a driver's license or security clearance, et cetera. It'll be the same type of regime.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  And I think, you know, unfortunately, David Sacks has left the government and so has Sriram. So now AI policy is being driven by Howard Lutnick. And so his thing is very much the economic interest of America, which I think is reasonable, just like the cybersecurity thing. The reality is this is an incredibly difficult situation because we're in the exponential. And so the government has to protect US interests, has to ensure other people don't have these capabilities, and it has to do that while having the upside. They don't want Anthropic and OpenAI to blow up. You know, that was a question to David at the start. So balancing all these things is very difficult, but I think as A W G said, we're going to move to a regulatory regime where some of these things are clear, like the licensing, you know, like you're in a program, you have to jump through certain

• 32:28Speaker 02

  hoops to get this type of access. And right now, they're just trying to figure it out incredibly quickly because frontier capabilities are popping up everywhere through that one level of the cyber attack, that one level of, you notice the defense, the gene defense thing, you know, is bio bio attacks as well.

• 32:46Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 32:46Speaker 02

  And then there's the capability thing. You don't want all of a sudden your companies to be outcompeted by foreign companies, you know, then that's the protection of something.

• 32:55Speaker 00

  Alex, take us home on this one.

• 32:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, a couple of thoughts. One, Sputnik was a moment of strategic surprise when the US was surprised by the USSR. The surprise came from outside, not from within. This time around, this is a Sputnik moment, and the surprise came from within. The NSA and Cyber Command were surprised by the private sector. The private sector leapfrogged the vulnerability and other cyber capabilities that the NSA had been keeping bottled up. And that has to be a bit of a shock to the existing bureaucracy, because now suddenly there are these capabilities that are leapfrogging the government from the private sector. That's thought one. I would say more broadly, though, the problem with recursive self-improvement

• 33:39Speaker 03

  is eventually the capabilities of the non-human intelligence, the AIs, meet and exceed human level intelligence. I'll say something mildly provocative, which is if you think that we should, that the US should have a strong immigration policy for human immigration, human capital into the US, then arguably, as the capabilities of AI start to meet and exceed human intelligence, you'd better be thinking about policies for what happens as you import foreign AI as well. At some point, the US will be importing more foreign, if this open source trend continues, and Chinese capabilities ultimately meet or leapfrog

• 34:23Speaker 03

  US frontier capabilities, the US will be importing importing more foreign artificial intelligence than more foreign human intelligence. And I think that has profound policy implications.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  All right, let me move to our second opening eye story. It's about GPT 5.5 cyber code named Daybreak. It's a defensive cybersecurity model that just scored a record 85.6 on CyberGym Benchmark, which tests AI agents for real-world cybersecurity vulnerabilities. 85.6 is the highest single model score ever posted. Sam Altman said, quote, "The real prize isn't finding the holes. It's automatically writing and testing the fixes across web browsers, all the way down to the Linux kernel, effectively turning the threat into a cure." So gents, AI is shifting from offense to defense at scale, potentially closing holes faster than attackers can find them.

• 35:19Speaker 00

  The question is going to be about trust. Who's allowed to merge AI-written fixes into the codebase, running the world's infrastructure? Whoever owns that trust layer and the liability controls the digital security across everything. So Alex, your take on this CyberGym performance and GPT 5.5 cyber?

• 35:44Speaker 03

  Well, first, Daybreak, this is what Peter, you and I wrote about in Solve Everything. We are seeing cyber vulnerabilities in open source and closed source projects get bulk solved now by AI. There are a few different nonprofit initiatives, one being run by IBM. There are a few others that are competing solely devoted to just using these new capabilities to bulk identify and remediate vulnerabilities and bugs across all the open source projects. So I think this becomes a sort of great project of the times, like the interstate highway system, except going back through the historic record of all of these open source repos, especially the foundational ones that are in the supply chain of really popular downstream applications.

• 36:27Speaker 00

  Of everything.

• 36:28Speaker 03

  Of everything, just bulk solve it all now that we have the capability to bulk solve it. On the narrower point of GPT leapfrogging on CyberGym, I think we're going to see, again, internally only or with a limited staged release, leapfrogging of capabilities in terms of the ability to detect and remediate vulnerabilities and bugs. We're seeing for the first time Sam talking about intentionally biasing the models toward

• 36:57Speaker 03

  Defense versus offense. And he never used the word poison in characterizing this. And OpenAI never used poisoning attacks, which is perhaps maybe a slightly less inflammatory characterization than Anthropic's original release announcement with Fable and Mythos. But reading between the lines, it certainly sounds like OpenAI is steering their models to basically self-disrupt or poison their users if their users are trying to use their frontier models for offensive cyber versus defensive cyber. They're reading between the lines. That's what they were implying. And I think that's the world we're going to find ourselves in, where alignment comes in the form of a model,

• 37:41Speaker 03

  together with scaffolding, system prompting, post-training, that favors the defender and favors the desired outcomes. And then obfuscates, foils, poisons attacker-type use cases.

• 37:55Speaker 02

  You mind, you agree? Yeah, I think this kind of comes to the stage. It's going to be very interesting. Like Elon did the deal with Anthropic, and Anthropic's weights got loaded onto Colossus. What's the security level of these data centers? Those weights are going to become even more valuable than they ever have for espionage and others, because you don't need necessarily a million agents for cyber attack. You need to have a few models. And in particular, what you want is the model that comes before the end of pre-training or before the system prompt that AWG was just talking about. Because they're more creative and they're not as hobbled for the attack. And then you have to defend against that, because the adversaries are not like kids in the basement.

• 38:38Speaker 02

  The adversaries are nation-states utilizing these models. And the model, if someone gets, is quite limited. But the other side managed to obtain the base weights. That will be more creative and have a bigger attack. At the same time, we all know our infrastructure is terrible. We don't have the human compute hours to make it stronger. Like, basic attacks before AI started crippling our thing. So I think that, you know, there needs to be a massive push for all essential apparatus, government and otherwise, to be hardened by these models. And then that makes it incredibly difficult to attack. The final thing that I think we will see is that you will see probably claims that Chinese models will be introducing backdoors and other things inherently in the code. Because now, this is what you're saying, Peter.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  Who controls who merges the code? Those thousands of lines of code now that you have. Yeah. If you have a model that could poison or introduce a backdoor inside its latent space, the model wait gets updated. You will not find that for days, months, years. And all of a sudden, it's backdoored everything. And this is the real risk profile because who on this call now actually reviews every line of code that they merge? Yeah, yeah, that's a key point. Especially downstream, like it can emerge anywhere. So the US government, again, may actually say you need to have ISO type certified models merging your code because otherwise you could have holes in if these models come from wherever

• 40:03Speaker 02

  you don't know what's in them and they're not acting on your side like AWG said.

• 40:09Speaker 00

  Dave, you want to close us out?

• 40:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think what Imad said is brilliant, of course, but nobody can check code anymore. And when you, when you ask your AI to install something, it does it so quickly and efficiently that you can't possibly keep up with reviewing what it installed. So then it's just a question of did I trust that AI or not? So it's trivially easy for a Chinese model to inject spyware. It's just a few lines, one line of code, actually, is all it needs. So the idea that we'll ban Chinese models from US corporations, very likely. But that, again, doesn't solve the global version of the same exact problem. So all these things are imminent, absolutely, totally imminent. I think the, the story within this story too, is that only AI can keep up with AI. You know, hey, we have a big cybersecurity risk.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  Sam says, well, the way to fight that is with AI that's good. So it's going to come down to what Imad said.

• 41:03Speaker 00

  We're here to defend you.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, this idea of ISO certified, trustworthy AI stamp of approval, imminent and critically important. Then the question is, okay, but what entity is the trustworthy entity giving that stamp of approval? Is it a US entity? Is it a US plus Europe entity? Is it some new NATO type entity? And I think it'd be very healthy for America to reach out to a much bigger chunk of the world to decide, you know, these issues. It'd be a lot better for global. Confidence in what we're doing. But at the end of the day, something has to say, yeah, you can trust this AI. And you have no option to live without an AI. There's just not a choice there.

• 41:44Speaker 02

  There's one thing I have to say. I have had a couple of conversations this week where the question has been asked to me. How can we trust American AI is not installing backdoors?

• 41:52Speaker 01

  Well, and do we realistically believe today that the US government can't read, can't listen to our podcast right now? Read every single text we're sending to each other? Read every single email? I mean, with Palantir out there helping, is it even vaguely viable? That the US government can't read and see everything going on for every single human being?

• 42:12Speaker 00

  I assume they are. I assume they are. I mean, this is the concept that privacy, you'd like to have privacy. We think we have privacy. We want privacy, but I don't assume privacy. All right, I'm going to move us to our third and final OpenAI story. It's reported that the leadership is pulling back on their near term IPO. So the company advisors have said you've got two paths. Path one, you go public now, this year, but potentially accept a valuation sub $1 trillion. Path two, wait until 2027, continue scaling revenue, infrastructure, partnerships, and preserve that $1 trillion IPO narrative. Altman apparently is not interested in going public below $1 trillion. I think the competition between himself and Elon is still there.

• 42:57Speaker 00

  They watched the volatility of SpaceX's stock price sliding from a high of $202 per share down to yesterday's close of 153, and it caused them concern. Worth noting that SpaceX's IPO price is still above the $135 per share, at least for now, maintaining their $2 trillion valuation. So Dave, here's my calculus, and I'd love to know what you think. By staying private longer, OpenAI and the other frontier labs can avoid sort of the quarterly market pressures they're going to be hit with as they are burning a staggering amount of capital for compute, right? And I don't think the markets have the patience for the capital spend and the timelines for achieving AGI and ASI.

• 43:41Speaker 00

  I mean, the timelines for that are years, and the public markets are looking quarter to quarter. Dave, what do you think about that?

• 43:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I think this headline is absolute bullshit. And you nailed it, Peter, on why it's absolute bullshit. Oh, SpaceX, look how volatile their stock is. I'm going to delay our IPO for a year because of that. What are you talking about? It went at 135 bucks. It opened at 150. And now it's trading at 153. That's pretty much a perfectly priced IPO. Ask anybody on the street, what do you think should have happened? Oh, shouldn't it be like tripled by now? If it had tripled by now, then Elon would have left over 100 billion of cash on the table. He didn't like, this is just a perfectly good IPO.

• 44:22Speaker 00

  A trillion of cash on the table, yeah.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you're you're just looking for an excuse to delay your IPO. This is a really good one to use because you're pointing at your competitor and saying, oh, look at this problem they had. Therefore, but but it's not true. They they want to delay their IPO. One, because they already raised 120 billion recently.

• 44:40Speaker 00

  122, yup.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  122, so they don't need the money. And then two, who's going to run the company?

• 44:48Speaker 00

  Well, it's going to be the latest GPT model is going to run the company, of course.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Okay, well, then they have to make that transition into an S1 filing that the SEC approves. You know, and that's, you know, Alex has been saying for a while, actually, there's a ton of change coming to the way things get financed and go public. And that's coming soon. And there's a very real chance that Sam wants to wait that out and see what new economy emerges over the next year before. Because again, he doesn't need the cash. But Sam has hundreds and hundreds, at least 400 outside investments. And I know as a public company officer, when you fill out those SEC forms, you have to disclose every single holding and every potential conflict. For Sam, that must be like an encyclopedia sized book. Now, he's never been a public company CEO before.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  He's probably like, holy crap. This is insane. Elon's done it before, so Elon got out very quickly. He's been, you know, running Tesla. He paid his $22 million fine for one tweet. You know, he knows, he knows the game. But Sam and Dario, and Dario too, he's probably like, oh, my God. This is onerous. Do I really want to cross this line? So I think that's, you know, plus meanwhile, your front door just got shot, you know?

• 46:01Speaker 00

  Friends don't let friends run public companies.

• 46:05Speaker 00

  You know, the biggest problem here is that the largest wealth creation event in human history is out of reach of the retail investor until these companies go public. And it's being held by a small number of VCs, family offices and sovereign funds. I mean, that's the concern. But Alex, do you want to take this up?

• 46:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I agree with Dave's points. I would also say OpenAI screwed up. They focused too long, too early on the consumer, assuming that the consumer would be the source of the revenue engine that would power their path to an IPO. And that bet was probably incorrect. They should have focused on enterprise. They're now trying to become anthropic faster than anthropic can become OpenAI. That seems to be working. Codex is a wonderful product. And Codex revenue, according to OpenAI's reports, is skyrocketing. So if I were Sam and I were OpenAI, or maybe I were just Sarah Fryer, I would be asking the question,

• 47:06Speaker 03

  how long until Codex can be fully brain swapped in with all of ChatGPT and powering the revenue engine that I need to motivate the trillion dollar plus IPO? With Elon and SpaceX, he pulled a few rabbits out of his hat at the last second.

• 47:22Speaker 00

  Incredibly, yes.

• 47:23Speaker 03

  Announcing anthropic hosting deals and then hyperscaler hosting deals with a number of other firms. Yeah. With OpenAI, ideally, they'd have a few revenue rabbits that they can pull out of their hat in order to supercharge an IPO. And my impression is they're not there yet. It could take the form, to Dave's point, of an AI replacing Sam as CEO, and maybe the capabilities aren't there yet. My bet is, though, it's mostly a revenue story and an accounting story to make sure that they're profitable and not just burning cash. And I would assume, not investment advice, that they will get there sometime in the next year, but it's going to take some time.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  You know, I think there's a deeper level to this story, though. If you said, here are three people. Here's Dario, here's Sam, here's Elon. And one decides to get public very, very quickly, raise the 85 billion. The other two are like, wait a minute, there's a lot more to this. But then you look a layer deeper, the other two are in Silicon Valley or in San Francisco. And in San Francisco, the consensus is that the hard takeoff is right now. And that we're going to discover new physics, we're going to discover new medicine, the whole way the world is governed is going to get changed.

• 48:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, this point. A lot of, a lot of wealth to be created on the back of just the scientific breakthroughs coming.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, so they, I think Elon, he was, he lost his edge on the frontier model. And so his, his way to become relevant in all of this is to get into space, get the orbital data centers up and running, buy a huge amount of compute. But if he were on the frontier and like two steps ahead of Fable right now, he also might be saying, holy crap, everything's going to get changed in the next year anyway. But he, he needed the money and he needs, he needs to build that big infrastructure.

• 49:06Speaker 00

  I just, I got slammed in the biotech IPOs of the 2021, two, three, all these companies that were pre-revenue, pre-profit, started going public and they got decimated. And I think, you know, one of the rules I've always had is you go public when you've got profits and, and predictable revenues. And that is not these companies right now. Dave, do you think, do you agree with that?

• 49:33Speaker 01

  No, I, I think that they can manufacture insane amounts of wealth and revenue very, very quickly, to the extent that they have access to compute. I don't think the, the revenue visibility and the CFO are a big part of the decision. I, I think they genuinely believe the world a year from today doesn't look anything like the world today. And that wasting a ton of time dealing with the SEC and the roadshow is the stupidest thing you can do in the middle of the singularity. And so they're just gonna, to the extent that they have access to capital and they don't need the money tomorrow, it's much smarter to try and stay out of the lines, try and stay out of Washington, try and stay out of the SEC, try and stay out of, like, so you

• 50:16Speaker 01

  can focus on the model and focus on the new world order and focus on the, you know, there's just so much more pressing, urgent, hard takeoff issues in front of them. I mean, I just can tell you from firsthand experience, as soon as you start filling out those SEC documents, you're like, what a freaking waste of time. Holy crap. This is like from 1929. What am I doing here? And Silicon Valley, San Francisco, has that arrogance that like, we are the world right now. This is everything happening that matters. And dealing with Washington and the SEC, it just feels so wrong. I think that's more the flavor.

• 50:55Speaker 00

  Ema, do you think we see Anthropic do the same thing? Or are they going to jump in and try and grab the capital out there?

• 51:01Speaker 02

  I think Anthropic with their continued revenue ramp, it all depends on, are you going to see a drop and you haven't seen yet? If not, then again, why would they do it? Because they're ideological, right? You don't want to have anyone else's fiduciary or otherwise control, and you've got the weird PBC structure. OpenAI, I think, is a bit different, and they're changing over their structure. But I think the thing to watch out for is, do they buy Sierra and put Brett Taylor as CEO and move Sam to president? That's an example of how you can get around that.

• 51:28Speaker 00

  That's a good move.

• 51:29Speaker 02

  If they need a rocket company, they could buy Rocket Lab, right? Like, there's all sorts of moves you can have here. But as you said, the rate of the revenue is insane. Like, I was actually looking at SpaceX's AI revenue from just their cloud business. It's overtaken AWS and GCP on a run rate within a few months. Who would have even thought that, right? But then you look at OpenAI, they're up at 40, 50 billion now. The revenue actually has gone to fit their valuation, which is the crazy thing, because you've never seen revenue growth this big. I think it is just their internal structure is still shifting. That's a big deal. Like, what does it look like over the next few years? But they have the space to do that, because they're going to lose $26 billion

• 52:10Speaker 02

  this year, according to their forecast. And as Dave said, they raised 120 billion. So it's not like they're going bankrupt. Anthropic is a little bit closer in terms of their raise to their balance. So they're either going to have to do a raise or an IPO. But again, can you imagine Dario playing the markets like Elon? No.

• 52:29Speaker 00

  And by the way, people will throw money at Dario. You know, you're just asking it and the money will flow in.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, also the employee shares, the vested options, people will buy those from you too. So you don't need the, you know, normally people are racing to the IPO so they can get some personal liquidity, maybe buy a house or a car or something. Here they have tons of secondary liquidity. So what is the purpose of the IPO then? Like you're right altruistically, giving everyone in the world access to your stock would be a really nice thing. But putting that aside, like they don't need anything. And then you look at the regulatory overhead and, you know, it's not just the IPO itself. Like after the IPO, if your stock goes down, you're going to get a stock truck lawsuit. You have to deal with that. If you tweet or say anything, you know, virtually any word you say has to go through a FD approval. You can't post anything on the web without it going through an FD approval.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  It's just a, it's just a different world from being a private company. And I don't, I just think they're suddenly realizing, wow, if we don't need it, it's, it's not, it's not easy.

• 53:34Speaker 00

  Welcome to the health section of Moonshots brought to you by Fountain Life. You know, my mission is to help you use the latest technologies, including AI, to not just do your work at home, teach your kids, but to help you live a long and healthy life. I'm here today with an extraordinary physician, the chief medical officer of Fountain Life, Dr. Dawn Musalem Dawn. Let's talk about cancer. You know, I know from the member database that we have at Fountain, our members who come in who think they're healthy. It turns out 3.3% of them have a cancer in their body they don't know about.

• 54:08Speaker 04

  That's right. You know, the majority of cancers that we screen for, those aren't the ones that are necessarily taking the lives when found at a late stage. We know that when cancer is found early, the chances for cure are much higher. We know it's much easier to treat a cancer when found early versus when found late. What we're finding in our members is over 3.3% were found to have these cancers that were otherwise wouldn't have been found or detected.

• 54:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, it's interesting, people, you don't feel the cancer until stage three or stage four. And, and if you don't know what's going on inside your body, it's like driving your car with your eyes closed. And you can know. And so when members come through Fountain, how do they detect cancers?

• 54:48Speaker 04

  So we're doing full body MRI and we also do early cancer detection screening. This is very, very important and these are not typical tools used in the conventional care setting when it comes to prevention. This is a hard thing because currently these are not studies that insurance would yet be covering, but the goal is to collect these numbers, do the research and work hard to democratize wellness.

• 55:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, so at the end of the day, you can know what's going on inside your body. It's your obligation to know. So check out Fountain Life and go to fountainlife.com/peter to get access to the latest technology to help you detect cancer at the very beginning, at stage one, when it is curable, before it gets to stage three or stage four in your world of hurt. I'm going to move us on. Our next group of stories is in the Musk universe. So this week Elon announced that Neuralink may make an attempt later this year for the first direct human-to-human telepathic communications, literally transmitting from my brain to your brain if we're connected via Neuralink. Not typing, not speaking, thought to thought. If it works, even partially, Alex, we've talked about this, this is the most science

• 55:53Speaker 00

  fiction milestone ever attempted in neurotech. I think of this as the new level of intimacy, right? If you know my innermost thoughts, it's the beginning of a new communications capability for the human species. You know, Kurzweil has famously predicted high bandwidth neocortex to cloud communications by the early 2030s. Alex, let me go to you next. Let me just make one more point. When I was speaking to Elon about this in the past, you know, it's clear his end game in Neuralink isn't a medical device. It's his desire to create an IO layer for the singularity, allowing humans to quote, "couple" with AI during the singularity. Your thoughts, my friend?

• 56:32Speaker 03

  Well, a couple of thoughts. One, if Neuralink does do this, this will be one of the first sort of open attempts to create superhuman capabilities, not just restore capabilities from humans with a variety of, say, motor disabilities to the mean, but rather to empower people with superhuman capabilities. That's the first thought. Second thought is the latent space is particularly interesting. So there was a paper in Cell, I think sometime in the past week, I wrote about it in my newsletter, finding that

• 57:07Speaker 03

  People, children, adults who speak multiple languages, so bilingual adults, there was, there was an open question in neuroscience whether if you speak the same, the word for the same term in two different languages, whether there was a single bridge neuron that was responsible for activating for those two different concepts. And the answer turns out to be, pretty surprisingly, I'm actually kind of surprised this wasn't published in Science or Nature, no, but the answer turned out to be that the spacing, the relative spacing-

• 57:38Speaker 00

  The geometry, I read the paper, it's incredible. It's just like, it's just like the AI models.

• 57:43Speaker 03

  It's just like the AI models.

• 57:45Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 57:45Speaker 03

  That, that, that the hippocampus of humans, bilingual humans, turns out to look more or less like a vector embedding space for an encoder-only transformer model. That is a shocking conclusion.

• 57:57Speaker 00

  It was, it was shocking. The neuron for pedo and, and dog are adjacent to each other, and that's what gives them that colocation, amazing.

• 58:06Speaker 03

  So if, if our hippocampus is basically just an encoder-only transformer embedding space, that would suggest that A, telepathy is going to be a lot easier than one might otherwise suspect, B, maybe human cognitive capabilities are actually not that complicated, and maybe we are just, as I've mentioned on the pod previously, just distorted reflections of our ancestral environment and the complexities in that environment, C, Neuralink is pretty invasive, I mean, I know it's packaged up as being less invasive than some of the alternatives, but still pretty invasive, you, you need to stick a needle, multiple needles, inside a human skull, but if, if this embedding theory of cell placement in the human brain

• 58:50Speaker 03

  turns out to generalize, I would expect this will create enormous demand, and Iman, you of all people probably would have some view on this, I've chatted over the years with some of your, your former Neuro employees. This will create, I think, enormous demand for non-invasive, human-to-human telepathy, not just the invasive Neuralink type. And I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up becoming a hugely popular feature or product. Elon may be steering Neuralink in the direction, in parallel, of less invasive, non-invasive BCI's.

• 59:23Speaker 00

  Can you imagine if couples, husband and wives, basically get a Neuralink connection? I think probably the divorce rate would skyrocket.

• 59:29Speaker 03

  Or we see a lot of Borgisms. Yeah, Borgisms.

• 59:34Speaker 00

  So, let me throw this to you next, Imad, but just a point to make. The human input-output rate is shockingly narrow, right? So I looked up the numbers here. So speech is about 40 to 60 bits per second. Typing is like 5 to 20 bits per second. And accordingly, it says conscious thought and behavior selection is 10 bits per second, right? I mean, these numbers, and of course, when we're inputting and outputting, we're bottlenecked by our fingers, our voice, our eyes, our attention. We're pretty damn slow compared to our digital brethren.

• 1:00:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that, you know, when you're processing things, you know, it's the type one, type two thinking that Kahneman said. When we're thinking through, we think at a certain rate, and in tokens, you know, like your Claude tokens, whatever, it's 100 tokens a second roughly, right? But when you spot a tiger in a bush, it's instant, because it adapts to the latent space, as you represented. Like, in 2023, the neuroteam at Stability did a paper called Mind-I, where you looked at a bottle, did an FMRI, and then we could reconstruct that from the EMF MRI, using stable diffusion, which indicated that human latent spaces were the same. So what does human-to-human communication actually look like when you've got telepathy? You don't need all those words. You have as few words

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  as possible to activate the common latent space, just like, you know, you're like, oh, you're in sync with each other. You barely need words to complete each other's sentences. The fact that our latent spaces are actually likely to be very similar means that the bandwidth's probably going to go up 10, 100, 1,000 times from there, because you can adapt the adapters to hit the person at the right time. Just like when you're watching a movie, that scene will make you sad, you know? Like when you understand the latent space, this is where you can go into that exploration. I think if we can get telepathy, it is actually one of the biggest achievements in humanity's history because we've had this very lossy interface for so long, but then you can dig deep into what really makes us human. Of course, there's bad stuff to that and good stuff.

• 1:01:39Speaker 02

  This is very, very sci-fi and you know, one of the potentials is we all end up as the Borg, you know, like A W G said. But really the meaning of life is to understand yourself better. And I think this will be a really huge advancement in that.

• 1:01:53Speaker 03

  Or maybe, maybe glass half full, Ahmad, maybe we see like the next generation version of Microsoft Teams ends up including organism feature and the human teams are all in sync with each other.

• 1:02:07Speaker 02

  He said glass half full, okay.

• 1:02:10Speaker 00

  Oh my God. All right, I'm not going there. All right, let me continue on in the, in the Musk universe here. So we saw this week some more insight into how Elon is naming his companies. So he expanded, expanded his naming protocol. So his space-based, you know, ventures all have star in their name and he released the name of his AI satellite constellation called Star Mind. He also has his cargo delivery program called Starfall. So Starlink moves bits, Starfall moves atoms, Star Mind moves intelligence.

• 1:02:50Speaker 00

  Elon went on to say, and I love this, we're cutting back on the use of the word star as a prefix. It's getting a bit silly, too much star shit.

• 1:03:04Speaker 03

  Some of these, Peter, if I might just comment on this, some of these names, we haven't even, I think materially, if you go back one slide, we haven't even materially talked about much on, on this pod. So to talk about.

• 1:03:15Speaker 00

  You want to hit him? Hit him real quick.

• 1:03:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Starlink, everyone knows that's space communication, probably going to launch, if you believe the rumor, is going to launch a direct to sell mobile service.

• 1:03:26Speaker 00

  By the way, rumors, rumors that, you know, he's got a deal with Charter coming up for, actually it was reported in Bloomberg that he's going to have a deal with Charter and rumors that he might buy T-Mobile. That'd be pretty cool.

• 1:03:39Speaker 03

  So Starship, everyone knows, propulsive landing and enormous heavy lift capabilities for everyone else in the economy. Starbase, Texas. Starfactory, factory at Starbase producing Starships. Starshield program for the US government to supply, basically, or I want to say privatized, but a government defense-grade version of Starlink for the US Department of War. Starfall, just announced in the past few days. So this is a cargo deployment solution where private companies, and this was very, I would

• 1:04:18Speaker 03

  say, probably intentionally poorly marketed, have the ability to launch cargo up to LEO and then do a retrieval of the cargo.

• 1:04:28Speaker 00

  People don't know a lot. One of the biggest issues in the past has been down mass from orbit. You know, we all talk about getting stuff into orbit, but being able to do experiments, especially materials or biology, and get the product back down. And just a quick shout out to Jason Dunn. He's a Singularity alum, a friend of mine, and he's got a company called Outpost, and they've been working on this with their product called Carryall, and they've been doing extraordinary hardware development and testing for now a couple of years. But please continue.

• 1:04:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I mean, there are companies, Outpost among them, Varda among them, that are doing quite a bit of orbital manufacturing. Their most prominently, I guess, in my mind, Starfall example, there was an orbital brewing company that launched yeast into orbit on Starfall, retrieved it, and they're going to be now brewing orbital beer, or LEO brewed beer. What does that cost for a pint? But it's been to space. Stargaze. Stargaze takes advantage of the fact that Elon and SpaceX now have all of these satellites that can look up and can look down and provides situational awareness, looking up and looking

• 1:05:40Speaker 03

  down, both in orbit and on the ground, could end up, given that we just had the conversation with Planet, could end up, possibly end up, become... becoming a planet competitor, we'll see. Star Mind is the the brand name for the AI orbital constellation, the Dyson Swarm brand from SpaceX, if you will. And then Starpipe, which was only announced two days ago. This is incredible. Starpipe is, I think, Elon's or really SpaceX's nascent oil and gas play. So Starpipe is the beginnings of SpaceX's, I would say, refinery attempts to pipe natural gas around, given that the SpaceX's, the propulsion is largely focused on methox.

• 1:06:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. So piping methane around, piping natural gas around. They have no experience really in in any refinery capabilities, but Starbase is in Texas. Texas has a lot of oil wells. Starpipe is this pipe that was just announced two days ago to start piping these capabilities around. And really, if you're going to build the first Martian colony or the first serious lunar colony, you need to have oil and gas capabilities and you need refining capabilities. So Starpipe appears to be the very beginning of SpaceX getting into oil and gas.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  And that's probably where Elon said, stop calling stuff star shit. It's a freaking pipe.

• 1:07:03Speaker 00

  And but also powering their data center. So here's that here's that tweet from Elon, too much star shit. But I love this, a bunch of memes came out. This one is from Planet of Memes. And if you're watching, it says, when you want to smell like a trillionaire, use Star Musk, cloned by Elon Musk. That was too good. I was, I was too, that was too good to miss.

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  If anyone didn't see our last podcast with Will Marshall, the part on LEO or Leo lower orbit and the value of it is unbelievably good. Definitely go back and watch that podcast. Like, that was some incredibly great media.

• 1:07:40Speaker 03

  God, was that fun.

• 1:07:42Speaker 00

  That was. All right. Another story out of China. This one is the release in beta and soon coming in July of Sea Dance 2.5 by ByteDance. So get this, 30 second videos at 4K resolution. You can reference up to 50 different inputs, images, video, audio, director, cinematographic, cinematographic control options for post-production and supports editing via text prompts. I'm going to run this video. There were so many of them. But I just want to keep in mind here, Elon said by the end of this year,

• 1:08:24Speaker 00

  full-length motion pictures coming out of AI. Hollywood is cooked.

• 1:08:29Speaker 05

  My prompt.

• 1:08:34Speaker 05

  Hello? Is it fixed yet? We're about to play your video at the event. There's been a small, unexpected issue. I'll fix it right away. Just give me a few more minutes.

• 1:09:03Speaker 06

  It appears that some higher dimensional entity is now repairing all of the anomalous phenomenon that occurred today.

• 1:09:18Speaker 00

  Wow. All right, Ahmad, this was your business for many years as the CEO of Stability. Talk to us about this. Where are we? Where is it going? What does it mean for all of us? And for, you know, the folks who are a few miles from here in Hollywood?

• 1:09:32Speaker 02

  I suppose I told you so, right? Like, this is exactly, when I was leaving stability a few years ago, we had this discussion. I was like, it's gonna be like 2026, we're gonna get Hollywood level, full control, input by 2027, full-length movies, and we're here. It's still remarkable to see. Again, C. Dance 2.0 was a big advance. Jerk Gropp imagined caught up to it. But the fact that you have that level of control, and I think one of the main things there, apart from the quality, was 50 inputs. This means 50 different characters, and you can input video, audio, images, and others, and it generates all of these on the fly. Means you have almost perfect pixel control. And just like, you know, people have been using GPT Image 2 now, you know, makes really

• 1:10:16Speaker 02

  good images, that's now here for video as of a few weeks from now. That level of control where it actually understands what you're saying effectively. So I think for Hollywood studios, it's good because costs go down, but we have to think about the real impact of that downstream, because why do you need people on the ground when you can take what we're seeing here and edit it any way you can imagine? Post-production, where does that go? And this is one of the first big waves of, you know, aside from call center workers, real human impact, because all of those human hours that went to media are gonna get displaced, and we have to figure out what do we do, because they're not like they can retrain. At the same time, we have the other side, which is, you know, the upcoming Roddenberry X Prize and things like that.

• 1:11:00Speaker 02

  Being able to tell stories that you could never tell before. And I always like to think now, one of the things I say to all people is, stop thinking of these media models as single-player experiences. Like, we went from movies to I'm prompting by myself. When you use these models as groups to tell stories, it's actually one of the most rewarding, empowering things you can do, because different people have different views on how it all shifts. And I think that's what we're gonna see a lot of in the next few months, again, with the Roddenberry X Prize and others. And it's super exciting, because we're nothing if not story-based creatures. But a lot of the stories that are important don't get told.

• 1:11:35Speaker 00

  I mean, just a quick correction. It's called the Future Vision X Prize. Yeah, that we Roddenberry family, the creators of Star Trek, are involved and donors on this. It's a partnership we do with Google. And just a quick shout out, if you're a filmmaker and you want to have, if you can create a movie using this technology that is a hopeful, compelling vision of the future, right, you know, humanity aims for the targets that we create. Instead of dystopian futures, let's create positive, hopeful Star Trek futures. If you come up with a great three-minute trailer, we will make your movie. That's the goal. We're going to be working with Range Media and Google, backed by ARK Invest, backed by Marc Benioff at Salesforce,

• 1:12:19Speaker 00

  and going to create at least one, hopefully more, of these hopeful visions of the future, a full-length motion picture, and we're going to steer humanity towards that positive Star Trek future. Alex, love your take on Sea Dance 2.5.

• 1:12:34Speaker 03

  China's running away with video generation, unfortunately. So if you look at what the American competition looks like, what do we have? We have Gemini Omni, which is still limited to about 10 seconds. We have Grok. At least Elon is trying to give the Chinese a bit of a run for their money. But in China, and if you're training a video model, you have probably cheaper access to data that, by the way, as last time we discussed, I think at the Sea Dance 2.0 launch, if you're in China and you're one of these Chinese frontier labs, you're probably not too worried about being sued for copyright infringement for all of the TikTok or other similar video data you're using for pre-training these models.

• 1:13:18Speaker 03

  So you basically have far cheaper data, far less encumbered, at least in practice, training data, and also the American frontier labs are all busy chasing each other's tails to build recursively self-improving Cogen models that are ridiculously revenue generating. If you ask, how revenue generating are these video models? Probably no comparison per token or per flop. I would guess CodeGen vastly more lucrative and more economically productive than video. Who's going to be generating long videos? It'll probably be consumers who don't have that much money anyway. So for a variety of reasons, economic, practical, legal, we find ourselves in a world where China

• 1:13:59Speaker 03

  is running away with the video race for the moment until the West can come up with a compelling enterprise, a lucrative, productive enterprise use case for video generation, at which point I would expect and hope the Western labs to finally re-enter the race seriously.

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  This is where Liquid AI might burst onto the scene very soon. They're going to do a capital raise in probably a couple of months, so they'll kind of get back on the radar.

• 1:14:25Speaker 00

  Remind us who Liquid AI is.

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  It's a foundation model company from scratch, doesn't use any Anthropic, doesn't use any OpenAI. It has a far, far more efficient way to use context than the transformer attention window. The byproduct of that is if you buy a Mercedes in September and you talk to your car, you're talking to Liquid AI.

• 1:14:44Speaker 00

  On-prem.

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  On-prem. It has to work, it has to be small enough to fit in the power supply of the car, and it has to work without connecting to the internet, because nobody wants their car to just stop if the internet, you know, is in a dead spot. So they've got this kind of edge world really well nailed. But I saw a video generation model from them over a year ago, where as quickly as you can speak, it's generating the images or the videos, as quickly as you can talk. And the problem with the really, really good models generating super high-quality video is, we were just talking about Neuralink, and, you know, hey, I have so much bandwidth, I can think so much quicker than this, but then you wait like three minutes for the video

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  to come back, and it just breaks the whole creative cycle. So that's fine when you're creating a movie, but the video game industry is already bigger than all other media combined, including movies. It's a far, far bigger industry creating video games. And whoever wins the race to getting real-time

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  The quality of what you just saw into an interactive realtime experience embedded in a video game environment, that's where the big money is. So as Alex pointed out, like right now, all the Frontier Labs are chasing coding and white collar automation because that's where the money is. But there's also a ton of money if you crack into realtime video game. And it's just the latency right now is the buzz killer. But whoever solves that is going to be, is going to be.

• 1:16:10Speaker 00

  I agree with you.

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  Look what it has a good shot at.

• 1:16:11Speaker 00

  Video game, video game industry is much larger than Hollywood. Much larger.

• 1:16:16Speaker 02

  It's a couple, it's a couple hundred billion versus Hollywood at 50 billion. Video Gen AI, I'd estimate at four, five billion in revenue at the moment versus 10 times that for CodeGen, actually 20 times that for CodeGen. But I think what you've just described, David, is next year, realtime 4K video games. And the advantages the Chinese have on this is the world model side. So one route to AGI's recursive self-learning on CodeGen, this, like, if you look at that C-Dance 2.5, do you really think it doesn't understand physics? You know, like, it's clearly got a physics embedding. And from ByteDance and kind of others, you're starting to see the first world models for that realtime interactivity. And it's going to be very interesting because it seems like two different

• 1:17:00Speaker 02

  routes potentially to AGI. And which one of those will win? Who knows, right? Like.

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  I think after that event next year, like you're saying, video game today is a couple hundred billion, which is an enormous market. I wouldn't be surprised to see it three, four, five, 10x after, I mean, it's just so compelling. And it'll also penetrate pretty much every age bracket. Right now, it tends to be dominated by males under the age of, say, 30. But I think it'll expand out to all, all populations.

• 1:17:32Speaker 02

  The holiday deck is a trillion dollar market.

• 1:17:35Speaker 03

  I think, I think there's, I think there's like a 30 trillion dollar market, which is enterprise software. So I totally agree that video games are a larger market than Hollywood feature films. But there's a market that's orders of magnitude larger than video games, and that's enterprise use cases. I don't know if you guys saw, just again, in the past few days, Alibaba's One streamer demo. This is realtime, interactive, generative discussion, video to video, like. The three of you, or I guess more probably, I could be an AI right now. The three of you are real. And we're just having this discussion and you could create a generative environment for me. And I could put my hand in the video or take it out.

• 1:18:17Speaker 03

  So there's, to Ahmad's point, there's some sort of minimal world modeling going on there. That exists now. And it's real time and it's interactive and it's video to video. So if the West can stand up in enterprise, real time, say like Zoom participant or FaceTime participant that can participate in company meetings, can be interacting in real time with audio and video, not just the live audio models. I think that starts to move us to a $30 trillion market versus just a $1 trillion market.

• 1:18:51Speaker 00

  You know, next year, I'm going to be bringing the top quantum computing companies on stage, the top humanoid robot companies on the abundance 360 stage. What do you guys think? Should I bring some of the top video game companies as well? Is it time to bring them in?

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Are you kidding?

• 1:19:06Speaker 00

  Okay. All right. We'll do that.

• 1:19:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I think they're gonna, you know, Alex is right, but I think they're going to be a major player in enterprise if they pivot in that direction too, because they have the technology. And I don't think there's any barrier there. Like if you built Fortnite and then you add real time video generation to it, why don't you just pivot over to enterprise?

• 1:19:26Speaker 00

  Like Slack. Slack started as a video game.

• 1:19:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, there you go. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:19:30Speaker 00

  Amazing. All right. Moving us along, staying in China. Our next story is from Anthropic, who accuses China's Alibaba of running a massive distillation campaign against Claude. We talked about distillation on the last pod. Alex was explaining it in detail. So apparently using 28.8 million fraudulent exchanges across 25,000 fake accounts to securely extract and copy Claude's capabilities. If the claim holds up, it's the single largest AI model theft accusation accusation ever made. So, you know, distillation is when we use one model to answer questions to train your own model. It's the teacher and student approach.

• 1:20:14Speaker 00

  This is now frontline in the US-China AI rivalry. And it raises a brutal question. In a world where intelligence can be copied through straw. Through, you know, how do we collect and protect models for ourselves? So Alex, I'm going to go to you. What's the implications here? Do you think it's 100% true?

• 1:20:35Speaker 03

  Well, first I have to point out the irony that Anthropic itself has been the target of multiple suits arguing that it took copyrighted material and maybe not using the term distillation, which is usually reserved for model-to-model training versus corpus-to-model training or pre-training. But I would say the shoe is ironically on the other foot. Anthropic sued multiple times for using improperly copyrighted books and other media for pre-training its own models. Now Anthropic is turning around and accusing Alibaba for using Anthropic outputs to post-train Alibaba's own models. Similar concept nonetheless.

• 1:21:15Speaker 03

  I do think that in the broader scheme of things, the export control regime and the regulatory regime that we were discussing earlier is, in some sense, a protectionist and protection for the US frontier models and their vendors to prevent their insights from leaking out via what's been widely reported, if you're in China, in many cases, is public reporting. You have access via proxies that are in China or in friendly countries to access Anthropic and OpenAI and other strong Western models at a 10th the cost, 90% discount.

• 1:21:58Speaker 03

  So you pay a lot less, you get access to the models via these proxies. The reason for it is the proxies reportedly are gathering all of the reasoning traces. You agree to give up any notion of privacy in the reasoning traces. The proxies gather those reasoning traces, using you basically as a sock puppet. And now those proxies can be used in principle for distillation or other efforts. I think it's an interesting question that I'm certain is going to be heavily litigated, whether distillation constitutes espionage or not. It's almost certainly a violation of the terms of service for anthropics models, but whether it constitutes espionage, I think will be probably

• 1:22:39Speaker 03

  a heavily litigated question and probably yet another reason that we turn the world seems to be on a path, sort of a second Cold War type path where there's a US block and a Chinese block. And it's not just model access that doesn't flow. It's also reasoning traces that could be used to enhance capabilities that also seemingly don't want to flow.

• 1:23:00Speaker 00

  Eamonn, can you block distillation and still maintain the openness of API calls and the usefulness of these systems?

• 1:23:10Speaker 02

  There are different types of distillation from direct on the latent to just how do you answer this really hard question and make this really nice code base? The latter is incredibly difficult to lock down. And I think what China's basically been doing, the Chinese companies is, why does Merck or have a billion dollar revenue? Because they get all the experts in. And why do you need experts to answer questions? Because your data distribution is this good and the experts make it that good. But you could use Methos or Claude instead to get the extra level up. So they're substituting out Merck or and these other guys for that. But we have reached a plateau and we've reached another level. So if you actually look at why GLM 5.2 is better than GLM 5.1 and

• 1:23:53Speaker 02

  you look at what they've said, which I think is actually true. And I also think that Alibaba probably did have these sock puppets, as AWG kind of said, using the Claude code spec capacity. It does appear to be a recursive self improvement loop where you've got your initial distribution and then you improve it because it's got good enough and competent enough by being very thorough and looping back on the data improvement. So I think we're actually at the point now where

• 1:24:19Speaker 02

  Chinese models will be better if they have either super expert input or Methos answering questions. But at the same time, you could have this recursive loop where you don't even need to have anyone's data anymore. Again, I think it's very difficult for us to conceptualize, but this is that takeoff scenario where you can't guarantee that if today China could never use any of the US models again, the existing data set they have, the techniques they have are not good enough to keep up with frontier capability. And so that's the difficulty here.

• 1:24:54Speaker 01

  I think we got to put a pin in this story and it's going to come up again and again and again. But I couldn't believe, you know, I mentioned earlier, my son just came back from China and he's got this fake Rolex and he's like, check this out. I got this in Shenzhen and it says Rolex on the front. It's got all the patent numbers and the inscriptions inside the claps. You literally can't tell it's not a real Rolex. Costs like 25 bucks. And I bought it in the basement of the State House in Shenzhen. Like they literally are selling illegal fake clones in the building where the governor of the province lives or works. I mean, like, wow, what a blatant disregard for intellectual property law.

• 1:25:38Speaker 01

  But then you look across the whole Chinese economy and the growth of it is predicated on copying ideas from elsewhere in the world, stealing them and bringing them home. So it's like, it's in the DNA of the culture. And so now we're like, oh, shocking that they actually had 25,000 fake accounts looking at trace. Like, anyone who's shocked by this is way out of touch with what China's actually doing. So I think this story will come up again because this will be the excuse that the US and Europe and maybe South America use to try and crack down something. This will be the trigger that they use because they need to suppress Chinese AI somehow.

• 1:26:21Speaker 01

  Otherwise, again, it'll be out in the world and everyone will have it.

• 1:26:24Speaker 00

  I remember I was hosting a meeting, a conversation on stage with Steve Jervisson and Astro Teller in the early days of Singularity University, and we were talking about IP protection. And the concept was, you know, in the end days of the Singularity, IP will mean nothing. Because if you're dependent upon IP to protect yourself, you're just off. Because AIs can just reinvent the product much better than you ever did, iteratively, very much faster. And so it's just going to be, you need to be constantly innovating, not trying to protect what you did years ago. And we can see it happening right here, right now.

• 1:27:01Speaker 03

  Or IP means everything and IP supercharges or AI supercharges lawyers, IP litigation lawyers, to do an amazing job, superhuman job of protecting IP.

• 1:27:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm glad you said that, Alex, because I think that's a very likely midterm. Like, I think robots are coming, space-based data centers are coming, but I think we're in a hard takeoff of core AI right now. And the amount of intellectual property created in the next 18 months will dwarf all of human history, like, by far. But it's still all virtual breakthroughs. You know, it's software, it's video generation, it's solving all physics, solving all math. And if you can't protect that intellectual property, chaos is going to break out globally. So we actually have to figure this out. And you can't just allow countries to rampantly copy, especially given that, you know, privacy is so hard to contain and copying gets easier over time.

• 1:27:54Speaker 00

  Well, I think the point that Astro and Steve were making were, you're not going to copy exactly. You're just going to use what exists and reinvent it better and create something that is uniquely an improvement on top of that. Imad, where do you come out on this?

• 1:28:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that it's getting increasingly difficult. Like, you'll say, do teams, but make it not annoying, you know?

• 1:28:18Speaker 02

  Make Zoom that doesn't need to upgrade itself every two seconds. Like, I think that the creative capabilities of the AI, the copying capabilities of the AI are such that almost everything can be one-shot within a few years. And you have this period where it had to get to competence. And that first broke with Sonnet last year. And now for almost all models, including open models, it's here right now. And then this new loop means that, again, why do I need to copy when I can recreate but remix? And that makes it very, very difficult. Like, in certain areas like music, incredibly strong copyright protections, you know?

• 1:28:55Speaker 02

  And that has a whole bunch of other things. Software, not much, you know? So you'll have this whole kind of gamma of things. But I just don't think you can stop the capability increases now by having any distillation or other lockdowns or even IP lockdowns.

• 1:29:10Speaker 03

  I'll sound maybe just a different note here, which is I think there are striking parallels between the defense versus offense divide on software vulnerabilities and defense versus offense on IP litigation and IP protection. So one might say superficially, oh, yes, sure. IP is over because AI will, for any patent, be able to find a way to route around it. That's the the AI will will overwhelm via offense argument. But at the same time, AI can also strengthen defense. AI can draft better patent claims. AI can do a better job of, say, patent litigation than humans will at some point in the near term future.

• 1:29:50Speaker 03

  So it's not 100% obvious to me that the call it the astro argument that IP suddenly evaporates because intelligence becomes stronger. I think intelligence, there are a variety of reasons, as we're seeing, quite frankly, with this export control regime, why superintelligence may want to protect itself via IP legal mechanisms. And if that is the case, I would fully expect the defense side or offense, depending on your perspective, side to be also supercharged with superintelligence and not 100% obvious to me that IP goes away. In fact, it might just be utterly supercharged in terms of its ability to protect.

• 1:30:31Speaker 00

  Guess what, guys? We're going to find out soon enough.

• 1:30:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:30:35Speaker 00

  All right, let's turn our attention next to quantum computing. This week, another breaking story. President Trump signed a new executive order aimed at supercharging US quantum computing companies, a technology that could one day crack today's encryption and turbocharge scientific discovery, specifically in drugs, biomaterial science. In a parallel move, the White House is moving to shield US quantum research from foreign espionage, reportedly directing intelligence agencies to guard it as we guard our nuclear secrets. So the US government thus far has committed $2 billion in venture investments using the May of 2026 CHIPS and Science Act. And let's take a look at who's getting the money.

• 1:31:17Speaker 00

  So first off, IBM received the lion's share, $1 billion of the program to co-develop their Anduron Quantum Chip Foundry in Albany, New York. D-Wave, Rigetti, and Inflection each secured $100 million and Sci-Quantum secured $140 million equity stake. So I'm hoping to have a number of these onstage with me at this year's Abundance Summit, hoping all three of you guys will help me grill these CEOs at Abundance and understand. So Alex, let's go to you first. How excited are you about this? And what's your take on the quantum disruptions coming?

• 1:31:59Speaker 03

  Mildly excited, not very excited. On the one hand, I want to quip that the US, the forthcoming US Sovereign Wealth Fund will have amazing exposure to all of these quantum stocks. One of the executive orders, so there were a couple of executive orders that dealt with it, but the more interesting one established that, or rather required, the development of what's called the Quantum Computer for Application Development and Discovery Science, QC-ADS, which is interesting. The first executive order I've read that mandates the establishment of a quantum computer for discovery science. So on the face of it, great, we want to accelerate science radically. On the other hand, I do think this may be

• 1:32:44Speaker 03

  a case of begging the question somewhat. There is already a vibrant private sector of quantum applications, not just quantum computing, also quantum networking, and most interesting to me, quantum sensing. So establishing a national quantum computer effort for discovery science? To me, reminds me a little bit of Genesis Mission, which if you look beneath the covers at where the money is coming from, it seems to be a repackaging of existing US government funding. So that part I find less interesting. What's more interesting to me is the protection from foreign threats. So until the executive order, I, for example, was not aware.

• 1:33:27Speaker 03

  I'd be curious to hear, were you aware that there's a quantum information, science and technology counterintelligence protection team?

• 1:33:34Speaker 00

  Nope.

• 1:33:35Speaker 03

  We have that. We have a quantum protection team in this country. I think that's super interesting. And in some ways, it evokes for me this idea that the US government was caught flat footed by AI. The defense community in particular and intelligence community, flat footed. We saw, as we were discussing earlier, we saw Mythos and now GPT 5.6 leapfrogging whatever internal apparently capabilities the NSA has when it comes to cyber. In quantum, I think the thinking somewhere in the executive is not to be surprised a second time and to actually get out ahead of any quantum capabilities that that might be strategically disruptive. The problem, as I've mentioned on the pod in the past,

• 1:34:20Speaker 03

  is quantum for science acceleration just hasn't worked that well. That quantum computing was supposed to give us protein folding. Turns out protein folding problem was solved by arguably Alpha Fold 3, purely classically, without use of any quantum computing. There are a lot of folks, including Peter, common friends, who are very aggressively marketing quantum computing specifically for solving all of these problems.

• 1:34:46Speaker 00

  Well, to be, to be clear, the company I think you're referring to, Sandbox AQ, is not using quantum computing. They're using the equations of quantum physics on AI platforms. So, Imad, how do you come out on this? Are you excited? Is this a nothing burger?

• 1:35:05Speaker 02

  Look, I think it's the, potentially the next big wave, right? And unlike GPUs where China's catching up, like Huawei is about to release the 950s and others, in terms of bulk, but not edge, quantum computers are vastly more complicated to build, right? Like even if the secrets kind of get out. Like China has a good thing in photonic quantum computers, but not the various types of a Raghetti or a D-Wave with the quantum anilas, et cetera. The most interesting thing is this for me.

• 1:35:34Speaker 02

  With supermethos level models, we will be able to ask the quantum computers the right questions.

• 1:35:41Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 1:35:42Speaker 02

  And

• 1:35:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:35:44Speaker 02

  Program them properly, which is actually quite difficult to do. And Sandbox AQ again are doing a little bridge to that right now by having the equations. Although I think quantum equations and general to variable equations are very, very similar for a very interesting reason. But what type of quantum problem will require a quantum computer a day to figure out or a year to figure out?

• 1:36:02Speaker 00

  Versus, versus milliseconds, right?

• 1:36:04Speaker 02

  So what you've got is you have convergence of asking better questions and quantum supremacy and others coming. And that meeting point means we might not need Dyson spheres. And that is actually something

• 1:36:16Speaker 00

  Okay, double down, double down on that one for us, would you? Because that's all we speak about on this pod is

• 1:36:20Speaker 02

  I'm checking whatever they do. Basically, one of the things is more energy, more compute, more intelligence, right? But quantum, again, processes and questions can be answered almost instantly in microseconds. There, it's not like test time compute exists for quantum compute. But we're very bad at asking the quantum computers the right questions. They're not a sufficient scale. So if we have an increase in energy to ask really good questions, maybe there comes a time where we can answer all the questions that quantum computers need, and then meet in the middle through a mixture of GPUs and quantum computers to ask and answer almost any question. And that breaks this energy ramp increase to solve the mysteries of the universe by coating the entire universe with compute.

• 1:37:04Speaker 03

  So I think I have to jump in on this one. I think there is a latent assumption in this scenario that we see some sort of complexity hierarchy collapse. Right now, one of the reasons why quantum computers arguably haven't been that useful is because it's actually really difficult for humans without superintelligence to identify algorithms that are both economically useful and also achieve some sort of quantum advantage. We found a number of quantum advantage algorithms. They're not that useful, at least not economically transformative.

• 1:37:34Speaker 00

  But they make for good headlines.

• 1:37:35Speaker 03

  They make for wonderful headlines and amazing IPOs. To Imad's point, I think, and this is something that I'm bullish on, that I do think there's a pretty good chance that if there is some sort out there in math theory space, if there is an AI discoverable, quantum advantaged AI training or inference algorithm, AI will find it and that will suddenly pay back all of the sins of money being invested too much in quantum infrastructure previously, will atone for it. But separately, the point of the Dyson swarm, I would say the reason why I think right now we're on a default trajectory of a Dyson swarm, isn't necessarily because everything

• 1:38:18Speaker 03

  is so efficient, but rather because we're running out of headroom in Moore's law. And as we start to, on the one hand, lose room at the bottom, as Feynman would say, and on the other hand, see skyrocketing demand for AI, and on the third hand, municipalities don't want data centers, we push them to orbit. Will quantum obviate the need for a Dyson swarm? I think they're probably not mutually exclusive. I could imagine scenarios where we build a Dyson swarm of hybrid or pure state quantum computers and people don't want quantum computer data centers in their backyard, just like they don't want classical computers.

• 1:38:57Speaker 02

  Yes, computers are difficult.

• 1:38:59Speaker 00

  Build the quantum computers in the permanently shadowed craters on the moon.

• 1:39:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, look, I think the thing here again is the default path is energy, everything gets converted to compute, right? But for frontier capability and the type of capability we discussed earlier on this episode, that could disrupt nation states, that could disrupt society. You might find in the next couple of years, with the way these two curves are going, a discontinuity. And the United States is trying to ensure that it is on the frontier of that, with the most capable frontier models, with the right algorithms for the right quantum computers that are finally useful. And if that happens and that meets, then... It's very difficult to fight against that because again, we don't need to scale the test time compute if you can crack that.

• 1:39:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the right analogy there, so I agree. The right analogy is again, something like we're in 1939 or 1940 and the goal isn't to infinitely or rather indefinitely preserve an American advantage in these capabilities. It's just to slow the rest of the world, namely China, down enough that we can hit enough recursive self-improvement and dominate for whatever definition you prefer of dominate the future light cone with capabilities that really only need to be a few months, at most a year ahead of the competition.

• 1:40:17Speaker 00

  All right, Dave, do you want to add on this or should I jump into the next story?

• 1:40:20Speaker 01

  Well, I started this new company, quantum.ai, for exactly this reason. So I've got so many thoughts.

• 1:40:25Speaker 00

  Okay, yeah, well, go for it then.

• 1:40:26Speaker 01

  Well, let me, let me just, I don't want to belabor it, but September timeframe around the Moonshot Summit, if you want Alex to be super excited on stage, let's talk about quantum photonics, not quantum computers. Also, quantum sensing was almost certainly going to work. So you'll be able to store insane amounts of information in tiny, tiny spaces, but the photonics, you know, I've been working for nine months now on this quantum AI and working on the algorithm side, but it's almost a certainty now that highly quantized neural nets can perform just as well as floating point 32 neural nets, which opens the door to massive amounts of photonic computation efficiency.

• 1:41:10Speaker 01

  I would be shocked if by the time we're talking to Elon next December, I'd be shocked if we're not talking about launching-

• 1:41:16Speaker 00

  Next December or this December?

• 1:41:17Speaker 01

  This coming December.

• 1:41:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  Instead of launching Nvidia chips and the huge power they consume, get the terafab started on the photonic compute at about 1/100 the mass. For the same amount of computation and it could be even more than that. One one hundredth is a conservative estimate. And so the stepping stone to the discontinuity that Ahmad was talking about is clearly photonic computing, not quantum computing, the way it's currently defined, but it's still quantum photonic. It's not quantum quantum. Yeah. And I'm sure I think that's almost a certainty at this point that that will exist and that the current AI will discover the breakthroughs necessary, if there are any

• 1:42:00Speaker 01

  left, and that that'll be deployed and what Elon is actually manufacturing within a year to 18 months.

• 1:42:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that Intel's doing some super interesting things there, but you know, China with their Zhizhuang series and others, that's the one area they're really focusing on. I think the US is completely under on. So I think that particular area of kind of photonics and quantum photonics needs to be a much bigger focus and have much more investment, given what we've seen already.

• 1:42:26Speaker 01

  And for that reason, that should be the thing the White House just elevated, you know? They're not aware of it yet, I don't think, but they will be and it'll be right up there on par or it should actually be a bigger priority than the current, you know, quantum thing they just passed.

• 1:42:41Speaker 03

  By the way, everybody.

• 1:42:42Speaker 00

  Go ahead, Alex.

• 1:42:43Speaker 03

  I will note that, again, in the news in the past two days, Elon slash SpaceX just acquired for several billion dollars a photonic computing slash communication company to merge in. So would not at all be surprised if photonics, which gives us in principle a thousand x clock rate speed up over these stupidly slow electrons, becomes a key part of the Starlink or Starmind plan.

• 1:43:08Speaker 01

  Well, also, Google filed a patent. Google got a patent that's worth looking up if you're bored that does matrix multiplications in pure light. And they got that granted last year. They filed it back in 2023, but it got granted last year. So they've been thinking about it for a while, too. So yeah, this is gonna happen.

• 1:43:26Speaker 00

  By the way, I said this a couple of podcasts ago. Now that Elon's got liquid stock with SpaceX going public, he's gonna be on acquisition rampage. Watch him buy companies left, right, and center. And if all of you want to come and join AMA live with Alex, we're gonna be doing an hour of Ask Me Anything on Solve Everything at the Moonshots Summit. Ahmad's gonna be there, Dave's gonna be there, Saleem's gonna be there. Come and join us on September the 25th. Go to moonshots.com to get your ticket. Will be sold out soon enough, so join us there.

• 1:44:03Speaker 07

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• 1:45:07Speaker 00

  I'm gonna move us to our next conversation, which is a fascinating one for all entrepreneurs out there. It's about sleep. So here's the question we're proposing. Hopefully, all of you know, eight hours of sleep is not just a good suggestion. It is evolutionarily what we're designed to need. But there is a small percentage of humans on the planet called short sleepers that can get away with much less, as little as four hours of sleep. The number of humans that can get away with four hours of sleep is 0.1% or less. There's a group who can get away with six hours of sleep. That's about 1% of the population. But the rest of us need eight hours. And here's the data, so that you're aware of it.

• 1:45:52Speaker 00

  Because I used to say, when I was in medical school, I'll sleep when I'm dead. And the fact of the matter is, not sleeping will kill you. So if you're getting six hours or less on a regular basis, you have a 48% increased chance of coronary heart disease, a 15% chance of a stroke, increase of a stroke, 12% increase of all-cause mortality, 5% increase in beta amyloid. You know, this is what's going to be giving you neurodegenerative disease, 17% higher risk of type 2 diabetes, and a 4X higher risk of catching a cold. Sleeping is critically important. So, how do you become a short sleeper?

• 1:46:33Speaker 00

  Well, if you can get away with four hours of sleep, here's the math. Check this out. It's 28 hours of more work time or playtime per week. That's 58 days in a year. You gain two extra months on your life. This is a way of getting longevity incrementally. Instead of adding time at the end of your life, you're getting two months extra per year. So, I know about this, because one of my portfolio companies, which is still under stealth, is the number one player in this area. But it made news this week when Eli Lilly purchased for $6.3 billion a company called Centessa Pharmaceuticals. Their drug targets a neuropeptide called Orexin in the brain.

• 1:47:17Speaker 00

  It's the brain's master on-off switch for wakefulness. So, they've been developing this for narcolepsy patients. But I think ultimately, guys, this is going to become a lifestyle drug. How many of you would take this if you could get it?

• 1:47:32Speaker 03

  If we could get it, or if we could get it legally?

• 1:47:34Speaker 00

  Are you on it already, Alex? Is that what's going on?

• 1:47:38Speaker 03

  No, I'm not on it.

• 1:47:39Speaker 00

  I think we need this to track the singularity, for sure. I would dedicate those four extra hours per day for just reading, you know, reading the feeds that are coming in. Alex, what are your thoughts on this one?

• 1:47:50Speaker 03

  I think this is potentially as transformative as the GLP-1 receptor agonists. This is Eli Lilly seemingly playing the same playbook over again. So just to refresh, the GLP-1 RAs initially approved for treatment of diabetes and taking advantage of this protein that was discovered, I think, in like lizards in Arizona.

• 1:48:16Speaker 00

  It was, oh god, what are the large?

• 1:48:18Speaker 03

  Like gila monsters or something?

• 1:48:20Speaker 00

  No, anyway.

• 1:48:22Speaker 03

  Reptiles, reptiles in Arizona that could survive without eating for long periods of time and were somehow able to maintain sugar-insulin balances for long periods of time, discovered that actually humans have an analog of that. It seems relatively well conserved. And if you can synthesize receptor agonist, you can trigger common pathways and enable humans to balance their sugar levels over long periods of time. But it turns out, the pathway is so important that it, and this is still something, I think, of mystery science right now on the GLP-1 RA side, you're able to have all of these amazing, potentially lifespan-increasing effects.

• 1:49:06Speaker 00

  You're right, yeah. Gemini says it was in the gila monster.

• 1:49:10Speaker 03

  The gila monster, gila monster. So now, same playbook, and I should add, like, the GLP-1 RAs took Eli Lilly and have made it a terracor, is it like a trillion-dollar company? And the revenue that it's generating off of just this is comparable to, if not larger, than all the token revenue that OpenAI and Anthropic are generating on similar time scales. So if you're Eli Lilly, you have to be asking yourself, is there, can you take this receptor agonist playbook and apply it to other domains? And it looks like Eli Lilly thinks the answer is yes, and they're going to apply it to neuroscience next, where the role of diabetes is going to be played by narcolepsy,

• 1:49:52Speaker 03

  the role of GLP-1s is going to be played by orexins, and the role of health span in inducing positive side effects across all of these other areas is going to potentially apply to the ability to sleep less without the nasty side effects that you were mentioning, Peter, to help people who suffer from daytime sleepiness due to Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and mood disorders, potentially helping people emerge from comas because orexin is so essential to all of these neurological pathways.

• 1:50:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's why I'm so excited about my portfolio company. I saw the data. It's double the performance of this Entessa drug. So, and if they're getting bought for 6.3 billion, that's hopefully going to be amazing.

• 1:50:40Speaker 03

  Dave, just think of, one more point. Think of all of the economic output that could be unleashed if everyone everywhere had four more hours of wakefulness and compare that.

• 1:50:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that's my argument for adding 30 healthy years in a person's life as well. But imagine if you had it in your early 20s when you're most productive, right? Yeah, crazy. Dave, what are your thoughts on here, on this one?

• 1:51:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, we, one of our partners, Mira Wilczek, actually, Alex, one of your many classmates. She was a natural four-hour-a-night sleeper. You know, there's a bell curve there. It goes all the way down to two hours. Some people are 100% functional on two hours' sleep. It's very, very rare. Most people are in center points on eight, but some people need 14 hours' sleep. Can you imagine? How much would that suck? But Mira got so much done, it's like having a whole nother life. I was so jealous of that. So, yeah, I'd take it in a heartbeat.

• 1:51:35Speaker 00

  Imad, how much do you sleep?

• 1:51:37Speaker 02

  I'm a four hour sleeper.

• 1:51:38Speaker 00

  Are you? You lucky bastard. I thought so.

• 1:51:42Speaker 02

  You get the time in. And no, I mean, I'm very bullish on orexin. So, you know, we had a long look at this with ASD and sleep disorder. And, you know, before you can only get things like lactobacterium, bactyria and others to affect it. But you see a lot of knock on impact from this, actually, when you upregulate oxytocin and orexin to inflammatory markers and things like grelin and leptin. And I think you could see again GLP now is impacting all these other biostatic stabilization mechanisms. I think this pathway will do the same, especially for inflammatory disorders. And so I think you sleep less, but you become less inflamed is what you're going to see as a result of some of these treatments.

• 1:52:22Speaker 00

  So excited to be alive right now. I mean, this is like my abundance story for everybody. It's like, this is the time to be alive and just get excited about what's coming down the pike. All right, you guys ready for some AMA questions with the mates? Yeah, let's hit it. Fantastic. All right, let's, let's jump in. Here we go. Imad, you're our, our super mate guest for the day. So why don't you choose first?

• 1:52:50Speaker 02

  Oh gosh, seems a lot of UBI questions here.

• 1:52:55Speaker 02

  Can UBI be as simple as reaping dividends from US government held golden shares? Do not freeze 79. The math is impossible. Like, if you look at how big the AI companies would need to be to get a basic living level of UBI from dividends, assuming 5%. It's about $10 trillion and you'd have to own like half of them to get to like halfway there. They'd have to literally be the biggest companies in the world. And it would only be to the US, which is question four. How can anyone outside the US survive if it's only distributed in the US? I think we need to fundamentally look at how capital flows and monetary equivalence of UBI where money is created. Make a lot more sense and we've seen some explorations of that.

• 1:53:38Speaker 02

  And then from that, we really think again, how do we value things when the AIs and robots basically dominate the world? And I hope that we see a lot more research and trials on that.

• 1:53:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, I did the math, right? If you imagine a UBI of 3K a month for just US citizens, US residents alone, that's $12 trillion per year. And the US budget, 7.4 trillion per year. So there's a lot of capital to be made up there.

• 1:54:07Speaker 03

  So I'll take question number two, which I think was aimed at me. Will companies migrate to friendlier jurisdictions like Argentina to escape US AI restrictions? Wouldn't this erode trust in any model that can be banned? And this is from Evra Ninnan. So I don't think model companies are at all likely to migrate to Argentina. I think the frontier model companies are going to very likely remain firmly entrenched here in the US. And you'll see Chinese companies firmly entrenched in China. And then there will be the rest of the world. I don't think Argentina is likely to end up hosting any frontier model companies.

• 1:54:50Speaker 03

  Companies that I can conceive migrating to Argentina under its proposed new non-human AI corporation regime will be inference time companies that are basically AI persons. So a humanless AI company that's just operating its own business, I can totally see many millions, billions of those types of non-human AI companies migrating to Argentina. That said, that would think, given the export controls that we've just been talking about on this episode, I would imagine many of them will probably end up running on Chinese

• 1:55:30Speaker 03

  models, unless the US acts to restrict the ability of Argentina, say, to import Chinese models, which could, by the way, happen. We've seen, under a variety of non-AI technology regimes, we've seen this executive act to restrict other countries that are neither in the Chinese bloc nor, strictly speaking, in the US bloc, restrict their ability to import Chinese technology or Chinese commodities. So I can imagine a scenario where the US acts to restrict Argentina's ability to import cheap or operate cheap Chinese base models, which would obviously foul up that approach.

• 1:56:15Speaker 00

  Alrighty, Dave.

• 1:56:17Speaker 01

  Uh, number four. I'll take four. Uh, how can anyone outside the US survive UBI, UHI? If it's only distributed in the US? And that comes from Aliet Singh? Or Ali, Aliet Sings? Who knows?

• 1:56:32Speaker 01

  I love this question, and it's very timely. The World Cup is going on in the US right now, and there's people from all over the world crawling around Boston, LA, Santa Clara, and Mexico, too. And by and large, the people in Boston are like, "Wow, America's awesome. This is great." And, you know, the word across Europe, you know, E-Model reinforced this, is like, "America sucks, America sucks." You get over here, and like, this is just a cross-section of every type of person from all over the world who's immigrated to the United States. And it's where AI is happening. California is just hopping, and it's just fantastic. And the problem you run into is that the US government continually panders to the voter,

• 1:57:16Speaker 01

  and if you're not a voter, they just don't care about you. And if you are a voter, then you're entitled to everything in the world. And that has to change. And I think this is a moment in time where, you know, you saw at the G7 summit, when Donald Trump walked in, he said, "Okay, the bosses arrived." And that's not exactly the dynamic you want. So it's gotta happen now, though, because the wealth concentration effect is so extreme. And if these frontier models, you know, become the universal workforce that creates everything, it's all gonna happen in just a couple of locations, basically in the US and China. And so, we need to get this figured out, really, during this administration, which really means in the next year or so. So.

• 1:57:58Speaker 00

  Alright. I'll take question number one. It's from at JB-C1BR.

• 1:58:05Speaker 00

  Why should people give up autonomy to accept UBI if unemployment is not going to be a problem? So JB, I think you've got the premise backwards. UBI isn't a trade for autonomy, it's a foundation for more of it. You know, you can think about it, you know, it's less of a welfare cage and more like the Alaska Permanent Fund, which I've spoken about before, where every citizen gets a dividend check and you can do with it what you want, right? If AI is creating extraordinary abundance, distributing a share of that to the populace allows you to use it to up-level your life, to create your next company, to create meaning in your life, however you might want to do that.

• 1:58:48Speaker 00

  You know, even if there's mass unemployment, it doesn't materialize. You know, UBI is a freedom dividend and that's the way I think about it. And anyway, so that's my answer for you JB. All right, let's go on to the next set of questions. Dave, why don't you kick us off?

• 1:59:09Speaker 01

  I'll take number five and then I'll throw it over to Alex. Why is the moon better for data centers than orbit? Is it the gravity or the earth-facing position? Definitely not the earth-facing position. This topic came up when we were talking about the Kessler effect and we really did a good job of that on the last podcast. So low earth orbit is great for data centers, but then you get outside 500 kilometers altitude and you get the Kessler effect problem and all kinds of debris flying around.

• 1:59:39Speaker 00

  Orbital debris.

• 1:59:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, destroying your data centers. So the best place is low earth orbit where there's a little bit of atmosphere that cleans the system naturally, but that's a relatively narrow band. The moon was good for the same reason, it's somewhat protected, but there is no atmosphere on the moon either. So that's why I'll throw it to Alex. Like why, Alex, why do you think the moon is better for data centers?

• 2:00:02Speaker 03

  I would say they're complementary, but moon, the cis-lunar environment certainly has a number of advantages that orbit does not. For example, if you're concerned about the security of your data centers... There are, and both the West and the East, the great powers have demonstrated the ability to on-orbit send robotic devices in and with grappling arms, China especially in the past year has very publicly demonstrated this, interfere with on-orbit devices. Whereas if you have a data center sitting on the lunar surface, you can defend it. You can be sure that there's no one, for example, coming in behind you, listening to the same

• 2:00:44Speaker 03

  beam that you're using to communicate with the Earth on. So there are a few reasons from a security perspective. Also, the moon has mass. If we set up, as I think Elon and hopefully others are going to do, an industrial ecology that's non-terrestrial, you can start mining water and other elements, water's not an element obviously, but mining raw materials from the lunar surface to build more data centers. You can't build more data centers in orbit. You just don't have the feedstock to do that.

• 2:01:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was just gonna say lunar regolith for folks, that's what you call the lunar soil, is silicon, oxygen, nickel, and iron. It's perfect for data centers.

• 2:01:29Speaker 03

  Perfect for disassembling the moon, in other words.

• 2:01:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's also, there's another version of that, which is highly likely, where you're using those elements and then you're using a mass driver to launch them into low Earth orbit. That is something that's definitely gonna happen because it's on the, it's on the planning radar already.

• 2:01:46Speaker 03

  And it's the ultimate high ground. I mean, the, one of the narratives for why have an Apollo program at all was that it was a continuation of the Manhattan Project and with the moon as the, the ultimate high ground for, for launching weapons. Well, it may be the case that in addition perhaps to the moon being the ultimate high ground for launching weapons against Earth, it's the ultimate high ground for launching data centers to surface Earth.

• 2:02:08Speaker 00

  Kudos to my, one of my mentors, Gerard K. O'Neill, professor of physics at Princeton University, who ran the Space Studies Institute and

• 2:02:17Speaker 00

  Wrote about this, actually built some of the first mass drivers and he laid out an entire architecture of mining the moon. His vision wasn't data centers. He was actually building and launching solar power satellites to earth orbit to provide solar energy on rektinas on the ground. We've changed that a little bit because we're going to use the energy in space for creating intelligence. But he laid this out in the 80s. Amazingly brilliant individual who left us too early. But Gerard K. O'Neill, look him up. Alex, choose your next one. Let's leave number seven for Eamonn. Yeah, go on.

• 2:02:55Speaker 03

  I think I have to choose number six. So what what physical and behavioral forms will humans and other species take in the age of the singularity? And this is from Jognalan 383. So I'll construe the question that I would argue we are in the age of the singularity. So we already know the answer. We look like ourselves. I'll construe the question instead as what physical behavioral forms could humans take after the age of the singularity? So I think I've argued in past, there will be many new forms of person and personhood. I take a lot of heat in especially the YouTube comments for agitating for some

• 2:03:35Speaker 03

  form of AI personhood. That's a legal form, not a physical or behavioral form. To the extent the question is asking, what will post humans look like, if you will? I think we'll see uploaded humans that have relatively de minimis physical form, but are just a collection of bits or maybe qubits running on AI infrastructure. I think we'll see to earlier discussion, organisms. So collective human intelligences, whether it's via Neuralink or some other format. I tend to think as we discover new physics and new applied physics, the substrates for the compute that humans right now we augment ourselves with, soon many of us, I think, will be running on. That substrate, I think, is also, in some

• 2:04:20Speaker 03

  sense, to parrot Bucky Fuller, is going to ephemeralize. And at some point,

• 2:04:26Speaker 03

  In the distant future, how distant? Not sure yet. We might even see something that Arthur C. Clarke wrote about many times, which is maybe at some point, humans will just be able to to run on the gravitational fields or operate as in a state of something approximating pure energy with with fewer biological meat bodies. At the same time, before everyone attacks me in the comments, I will point out inevitably, I will point out, yeah, I'll point out, I think this will be both purely optional. And I think the future is going to look much more heterogeneous, not homogeneous. You're going to see humans who look substantially the same as they do

• 2:05:10Speaker 03

  right now, 100 years in the future. At the same time, 100 years from now, you'll see some post humans who are uploads in a cloud functioning in a quantum computer. At the same time, they could those those very different forms, I think, can and will coexist next to each other.

• 2:05:26Speaker 00

  And a quick shout out to our beloved subscribers. We do read your comments every week. So please add them. Ask us your questions. I'm going to add to what you just said, Alex, because you're going, you know, pretty far out. Let me go in the interim. We're going to start to edit ourselves, right? We just talked about the idea of an erection like molecule allowing us to shift to four hours of sleep. We're going to see gene edits, you know, injection of cloth to increase our IQ or other gene edits increase our muscular ability. We're going to start to see BCI, people walking around who've got, you know, a connection of the neuro cortex to the cloud. So I think those capabilities are coming in the next, you know, years to decade.

• 2:06:10Speaker 03

  Can I ask you a question about that, Peter?

• 2:06:12Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 2:06:13Speaker 03

  Just narrowly. So we saw some people not take too kindly to the enhanced games. We see some municipalities not take too kindly to building data centers in their own backyard. Do you think there's a high likelihood future where all of these biological enhancements are actually either tightly regulated or shunned such that

• 2:06:36Speaker 03

  As with pushing the data centers into space rather than building them on land, the transformative physical and behavioral changes to humans are basically all pushed into the post-human realm by humans who regulate out of existence more obvious short-term biological enhancements.

• 2:06:55Speaker 00

  You know, I had that conversation with one of my boys. And I said, listen, morals and ethics change over time. I remember when the first in vitro fertilization efforts were taking place, it was thought, oh, my God, this is awful, you shouldn't allow this, this is immoral, this is not what God, you know, desired. And of course, now IVF is considered normal and allowed and beneficial to allow couples around the world to have children later in their lives. So I think it at first is going to be shunned, maybe by more religious elements. But I think ultimately it's going to become accepted.

• 2:07:35Speaker 00

  Shout out to Ramesh Nam, who wrote an incredible book called Nexus, which talked about all of these genetic edits to create, you know, BCI capability, basically neural lace in the brain, but also the edits, a lot of it will go underground and then eventually will become, of course, I've been enhanced, you know, why would I not want to? You know, we all want the best for ourselves and our kids, the best education, the best food, the best tech, the best whatever, why wouldn't you start with the best genetics? I know this is a sensitive subject, but I think it's going to become part of life going forward. Imad, what do you think about that?

• 2:08:11Speaker 02

  Oh, it's going to be fascinating, isn't it? I actually, I spoke at the Oxford Union a couple of weeks ago in a debate about whether AI can attain personhood. And, you know, obviously one against it. So that's coming out soon. So you see the argument against this. These are big questions that we're going to have to ask.

• 2:08:29Speaker 00

  Very true.

• 2:08:30Speaker 02

  I think ultimately we're all made of star stuff, but some of us will be more star stuff than others, is the way I like to think about this.

• 2:08:37Speaker 00

  Imad, would you take number seven for us?

• 2:08:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, for EU entrepreneurs lagging the US-China, is the highest leverage more vertical AI startups or agentic workflows into legacy industries? That's from Steve Crabbe. And it's fascinating because, you know, you can't compete on frontier models for various reasons, but also the nature of regulation in the EU means that there's massive potential for the latter, agentic workflows into legacy industries. In the US and Silicon Valley, the initial diffusion of innovation is happening really rapidly because companies are open to it, you know? The vast majority of the US hasn't. In Europe, it's even further behind, but it's inevitable because you get the competitive pressures.

• 2:09:21Speaker 02

  So being able to go in and work with those companies is a massive transformative opportunity because it's inevitable. Whereas building virtual AI startups in the competitive regulation, it varies from industry to industry, but it's just not as easy as the US. Like, we have far more regulations. So I would say it's more about transforming companies in a way that's comfortable to them and charging big markups than necessarily building the verticalized AI startups where really the US is a much better place to go to complete globally.

• 2:09:52Speaker 03

  Eamonn, I have to ask you the question, is Europe waking up?

• 2:09:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it is slowly. It's just there's so much institutional inertia here. So there was something EU 2031 as a warning call. It's quite a nice kind of future thing like AI 2027, you know? But you see, we have an extra four years because we're a bit slower here.

• 2:10:13Speaker 03

  Where instead of humans being disempowered by AI, Europe as a whole is disempowered by AI.

• 2:10:20Speaker 02

  Our regulation will be the great filter, you know? It won't stop anything coming out. So it's slowly waking up. That's got a lot of traction in the upper circles because this fable thing really was a massive shot across the bows of the decision makers. So I think there's a good chance that EU AI gets repealed. People are trying to figure out new mechanisms and suddenly the fire has come from nothing. Maybe because it's so blooming hot here as well.

• 2:10:47Speaker 01

  Well, I hope that Argentina-Milos thing also goes really, really well and creates a role model. And then some European countries, they, you know, like Ireland to me is a natural. Estonia needs to pick it up.

• 2:10:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, we have actually introduced this new thing, EU Inc., whereby you can set up a company in under a day. And that's a big deal because like in Germany, for example, it can take up to six months.

• 2:11:09Speaker 00

  Across all of Europe.

• 2:11:11Speaker 02

  Across all of Europe, yeah, because like in Germany can take up to six months to get your tax status and other things like that. So little bit by little bit.

• 2:11:18Speaker 00

  Wow. All right, I'll take number eight. This is from Mark Simonian to 10. Wouldn't it be easier to put data centers in oceans and the Great Lakes than flying them 93,000 miles up? Maybe that's a transcription error, but Mark, we're not talking about 93,000 miles, we're talking about 500 miles up into low Earth orbit, or on the moon, it's 240,000 miles up. So to answer that, you know, Microsoft already proved the ocean concept. I looked it up here, Project Natick ran subsea for two years and lowered failure rates compared to land-based servers with excellent cooling. Of course, the advantage of going into the ocean is you don't have to deal with the launch costs, and there's plenty of cooling,

• 2:12:02Speaker 00

  and it's relatively nearby for repairs. And you can either have it within your jurisdiction or offshore sufficiently, so it's outside the jurisdiction. But the reality is, as launch costs are dropping, and we heard about this in the last pod with Will Marshall, that apparently, you know, Dave, you and I were talking to Elon, saying he flipped the bit, and he did. What was it now, nine months ago, when he started talking about, no one was talking about orbital data centers, but apparently Will Marshall and Eric Schmidt and folks at Google were talking about this as much as a decade ago. Ultimately, it's going to be both. We're going to have data centers on land, in the oceans, in space.

• 2:12:46Speaker 00

  There is as much demand as we can supply. So I don't think there's a limitation there right now. Alex, any more thoughts on ocean-based data centers?

• 2:12:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm a big fan. Peter Thiel funded, I think it's Panthalassa that's focused on this.

• 2:13:03Speaker 00

  Recently, right?

• 2:13:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think, look, my operational, one of my operational definitions for the singularity is every sci-fi trope happening everywhere all at once. And I think data centers on the ocean are the prototype for seasteads and ocean colonization. And so, yes, I think we get our data centers on the oceans. I don't think it's as scalable as orbital compute. But then again, if you want to, say, live on an ocean colony, which is, I think, something that we are going to get over the next 10 years, then you're certainly going to want your own local compute. And I could totally imagine, if you've seen the Panthalassa video demos, that that ends up becoming a nucleus for a next generation of ocean colonies.

• 2:13:49Speaker 01

  Hey, one thing to add to that.

• 2:13:50Speaker 00

  Please.

• 2:13:51Speaker 01

  If the photonics takeoff that we were talking about earlier is on a one- to two-year timeline, which I think it likely will be, people will want to put the Nvidia data centers in the ocean and not launch them because they're very heavy, a couple tons for an NV72 with power. That's cheaper to deploy in the ocean while you're building the photonic thing, which is about a tenth, a hundredth, a thousandth the mass per compute. And so that's a real possibility that we have both, but in that order.

• 2:14:19Speaker 00

  Imad, before we go to our outro song, give us an update. How is intelligent internet doing? What are you up to these days? Give your fans a little bit of an Imad preview.

• 2:14:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's going well. We're, like I said, releasing the harness that will allow anyone to uplift the models above Mythos on Monday.

• 2:14:37Speaker 00

  Where do they go for that? Because by the time we release this, it'll be up.

• 2:14:42Speaker 02

  It'll be at probably my Twitter, at Imostack. I'll retweet it. And yeah, then we've been working on Sovereign AI. And I think we have a mechanism whereby everyone can own the AI and robots. And so we'll be announcing that soon, along with the new book, After the Lost Economy. So all going on.

• 2:15:00Speaker 00

  Amazing, and I know the secret stuff you have going on, which is incredible. Appreciate having you in the universe and Alex and Dave, love you guys. A quick shout out to Saleem, who's now on stage in Spain, or at least landing in Spain. Come back, Saleem, we miss you. All right, this is an outro music by at Roy the Inventor called Moonshot Masters. Let's take a listen.

• 2:16:28Speaker 00

  Oh, amazing, love that. So, everybody, please, submit your music, your videos to us, we love them. And remember, this is the most extraordinary time ever to be alive. Our mission here, to give you an optimistic view of the future. I hope you understand what's going on day on day. I hope you enjoyed this extra emergency podcast we stuck in on a Saturday morning. Imad, Dave, Alex, love you guys, be well.

• 2:16:54Speaker 01

  Love you too. Have a great weekend.

• 2:16:56Speaker 00

  If you made it to the end of this episode, which you obviously did, I consider you a Moonshot mate. Every week, my Moonshot mates and I spend a lot of energy and time to really deliver you the news that matters. If you're a subscriber, thank you. If you're not a subscriber... Yet, please consider subscribing so you get the news as it comes out. I also want to invite you to join me on my weekly newsletter called Metatrends. I have a research team, you may not know this, but we spend the entire week looking at the meta trends that are impacting your family, your company, your industry, your nation. And I put this into a two-minute read every week. If you'd like to get access to the Metatrends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com/metatrends. That's diamandis.com/metatrends. Thank you again for joining us today.

• 2:17:41Speaker 00

  It's a blast for us to put this together every week.

• 2:17:58Speaker 08

  Bonjour, compadre. It's the

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