Pod Insights Moonshots with Peter Diamandis NVIDIA & the US Government Just Bailed out Intel, Sending the Stock Soaring w/ Dave Blundin, Salim Ismail & Alexander Wissner-Gross | EP #195 About this episode Download this week's deck: http://diamandis.com/wtf
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Salim Ismail is the founder of OpenExO
Dave Blundin is the founder & GP of Link Ventures
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross is a computer scientist and founder of Reified, focused on AI and complex systems.
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*Recorded on September 18th, 2025
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Transcript 14,687 words · 6 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 The US cannot let Intel fail. It's our one and only chip fab company that's truly domestic.
0:07 Speaker 01 This does remind me a bit of the 1997 investment by Microsoft. I would love to see a success story in the style of what happened with Apple after the 97 Microsoft investment.
0:17 Speaker 00 It's almost identical. Everyone's lost faith then. Apple was almost bankrupt. Everyone forgets that. And Bill Gates decides to make an investment and it reestablished its credibility. And then Apple went on to become the most valuable company in the world after that. TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., T for Taiwan, has 66% market share in the chips that drive AI. China is only 90 miles away from Taiwan and thinks it's part of their country.
0:43 Speaker 02 Where would you invest your capital, knowing what you know about the massive growth we're seeing? Who wants to go first?
1:00 Speaker 02 Everybody, welcome to Moon Shots, another episode of WTF just happened in tech. I'm here with my Moon Shot mates, Salim Ismail, Dave London, and AWG Alex Wissner-Gross. Hey, guys.
1:13 Speaker 00 Hey.
1:14 Speaker 02 So, we got on text this morning and said, "Oh, my God, there's so much news going on. We just need to spin up a WTF episode because there's breaking news that we want to share with our subscriber base." And Dave, I don't know, I want to just say thank you for everybody here rearranging your day, so I'm going to hop on this conversation. I mean, it was pretty extraordinary, and Gianluca, and Nick, and Dana, just getting all the slides together. It's just, I feel like we're going to be doing an episode of this every day at the speed at which things are happening.
1:51 Speaker 00 Hey, Peter, it's my absolute favorite thing in the world to do. And I postponed meetings with JP Morgan and a couple of public company CEOs to do this, so it's a pure win for me. Things I wasn't eager to do have been moved off, and things I love and do are right in front of me.
2:07 Speaker 02 I was talking to Alex.
2:08 Speaker 00 Super, super cool to be here.
2:09 Speaker 02 I was talking to Alex a few days ago, and I said, "How do you spend your time?" He goes, "Preparing for the pod."
2:15 Speaker 02 So sad but true.
2:17 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's a black hole in a great, wonderful way.
2:22 Speaker 00 Today in particular is a really, really big news day, so we just have to do it. Yeah, we'll cover it.
2:27 Speaker 02 And I just, you know, again, as I say to everybody listening and watching, this is a chance where I get to upgrade my IQ points by 20, and I hope you do as well. The only way to stay on top of this exponential growth, because we are such local and linear thinkers, is to constantly be upgrading or updating your, you know, belief of what is possible and where things are going. We think of our episodes here as really the news that's worth listening to. So if you want to trade, you know, the Crisis News Network at night with an hour of with us, we welcome you to.
3:06 Speaker 02 All right, let's, let's jump in. And the news here, Dave, that, you know, you texted me this morning and said, did you, did you see what's happening within someone's video? And that sort of spun up the, you know, sort of the watershed moment of, okay, time to record again. So buddy, I want you to kick us off here.
3:23 Speaker 00 Yeah, rearrange your whole day. This is such huge, huge news. And if you, if you go back to our August 13th podcast, which was called Tech Experts Breakdown the Incoming AI Crypto Collision that we did with Eric Pouliot. If you go to minute 56 of that, of that podcast, you'll see us calling this out and predicting it, including the fact that Leopold Ashenbrunner, our guy that we've, the genius we've been closely following through his hedge fund, had a half billion dollar position in options that he'd put on Intel. And so our best simulation today is that he's up about 200, 300% on those options in today only, as am I, by the way. So big, big day, big day for me and big day for him and a big day for us following these brainiacs.
4:08 Speaker 00 Who, you know, that's why Alex is here. The world is changing so quickly and opportunities are changing so quickly. So what happened here, exactly as we had thought, the US cannot let Intel fail. It's our one and only chip fab company that's truly domestic. TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., T for Taiwan, has 66% market share in the chips that drive AI. China is only 90 miles away from Taiwan and thinks it's part of their country. And so there is no way the US government was going to let Intel fail. And then after the US government invested and bought 10% of Intel,
4:49 Speaker 00 Nvidia has followed suit, and I'm sure there's some White House pressure behind this deal. But Nvidia needs chip manufacturing. It's essentially sold out for infinite future. And the constraint to all chip creation is the fabs. Intel has fabs, and they're actually starting to work really well, too. So the stock's up 25, 30% today alone, based on this news. More importantly, it gives Intel the capital to finish building out their 1.8 nanometer process, the intangstrom, they call it, process, which is, you know, absolute cutting-edge, front-of-the queue kind of process. And it takes the risk of complete failure kind of off the table in terms of Intel.
5:29 Speaker 02 I can't believe we're talking about 1.8 nanometer processes. I mean, we're getting down to atomic-level. Limited physical reality. It's insane. I mean, it's nanotechnology.
5:43 Speaker 00 It's nanotechnology. Yeah, it's fun to talk about, isn't it? Because it's one of the many things we learned at MIT that were impossible.
5:48 Speaker 02 Yes.
5:49 Speaker 00 Including, you know, anything past a gigahertz and clock speed. There's a whole litany of them. These barriers just keep falling one at a time, but yeah.
5:57 Speaker 01 Well, as Richard Feynman said, there's plenty of room at the bottom. So Peter, if you're a little bit anxious at night worrying that we're going to run out of nanometers or angstroms, there's always pico tech and fempto tech after that.
6:11 Speaker 02 You know, I love Feynman's paper. I think it was 1957 or 1958 when he wrote basically the first treatise that would become the thought experiment nanotechnology. And do you remember, Alex, the prize that he put up at that time?
6:25 Speaker 01 Well, so I think maybe you're gesturing at the Feynman Prize hosted by the Forside Institute.
6:33 Speaker 02 Yes. Well, no, no, no, this was not, this was back in 1950. I think it was 1958. He basically said, I will award a prize, I'm going to guess here the numbers, like a thousand dollars for the first team that can create like a working motor within a one, you know, some very small cubic dimension. And he expected it to be driving nanotechnology. He didn't expect it to be won so quickly. And, you know, very quickly, a graduate student comes to him with a microscope and on the microscope objective
7:10 Speaker 02 is this very small motor that he had created with fine tweezers and fine tools to win the Feynman Prize. Not the intention, and so writing rules the correct way, but we're getting to the point now where nanotechnology, and this is the manipulation of atoms one at a time, going to unlock so many different things on the back end of AGI and ASI. But back to this one, Alex, how do you think about this move?
7:39 Speaker 01 Gosh, I mean, history does rhyme. At the corporate level, this does remind me a bit of the 1997 investment by Microsoft where Microsoft, in exchange for an investment to Apple, obviously wasn't doing well at the time.
7:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, let's pull up this image here. Here's Steve Jobs at the podium in his classic This classic look, classic stature, and up on this giant screen is Bill Gates, a very young Bill Gates. And what is Steven, what is Steven and Bill talking about here, Alex?
8:11 Speaker 01 They were at the time announcing to the audience, I think, a very surprising partnership. Microsoft Internet Explorer would get bundled with every new version of Mac OS as the default internet browser. There were several other parts of the agreement, including Microsoft Office being refreshed or renewed for Apple devices. But this was also, in some sense, a turning point for Apple. So having a long history myself with Intel, in high school, I did the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.
8:43 Speaker 02 Did you win it?
8:44 Speaker 01 I was a winner of the ISF. I was a winner of the Intel Science Talent Search. I was a winner of the Intel Undergraduate Research Award. I have a lot of history and amazing, amazing feelings for Intel. And I would love to see it, love to see a success story in the style of what happened with Apple after the 97 Microsoft investment.
9:04 Speaker 02 Salim, are you jealous here?
9:05 Speaker 03 No, just I'm always in awe of the intellectual kind of fortress we have with us. So love.
9:14 Speaker 00 Well, this analogy was actually very brilliant, but it's, it's exactly 10%. It's almost, it's almost identical. So you have, you have a company that, you know, everyone's lost faith in. Apple was almost bankrupt. Everyone forgets that. Everyone's lost faith in it. Nobody wants to buy. And Bill Gates decides to make an investment. I think it was, what was it, 1 billion or 10 billion? Very similar, but it was 10% of the company. And it reestablished its credibility and also gave them the cash they needed to do the turnaround. And then Apple went on to become the most valuable company in the world after that. And so really cool to dig that out of the archives because the deal structure and the whole dynamic is virtually identical to what you're seeing today with Intel, Nvidia.
9:56 Speaker 00 Also, you have a challenge for the audience. If you want to go back and pull up ancient stock data, look at Apple's stock prior to that investment from Microsoft and then compare it to Intel's stock prior to this investment from Nvidia. And I think you'll see some incredible parallels. You know, this is related. This is me.
10:18 Speaker 02 What are we seeing here in this image for those listening, not watching?
10:23 Speaker 00 So in the image, I'm teaching class at MIT Foundations of AI Ventures. Lex Friedman, who guest lectured that day, is in the front row, which is really cool. And one of the things I'm telling the class is that Nvidia is going to become an AI company and not a graphics chip company. So this is back in 2023, February semester, fall semester 2023, or sorry, spring semester 2023. Nvidia's stock at that point, according to this chart, is worth half a trillion dollars. So it's now, what, four, four to four and a half trillion? So up maybe eight X since that day. And yeah, and on that particular day, Nvidia still had the majority of its revenue from graphics chips going into Xboxes and things like that, and not from AI.
11:07 Speaker 00 But this is an AI class, so I'm telling everybody in the class, AI is going to be so much bigger of a use case for Nvidia. And so I showed the stock ticker to the class. And the best thing about this picture is that kid in the front row, that student in the front row, who happens to be wearing a suit, which is really unusual, is on his iPhone, and I'm guessing that he's buying Nvidia's stock during, during the lecture. So I'm hoping he is, actually.
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12:14 Speaker 02 To subscribe for free, go to dmandus.com/metatrends to gain access to the trends 10 years before anyone else. All right, now back to this episode. I have a question for you guys, and we've talked about this in the past, which is, we're not going to give you investment advice. And this is not investment advice, but... If you were going to pick a stock or a field to invest in right now, okay, you can tell me, listen, I'm going to continue to go double down on Nvidia and Intel. That's fine. We've seen some incredible growth there. Where would you invest your capital, knowing what you know about the massive growth we're seeing? Who wants to go first?
12:55 Speaker 00 If I only have a very small amount of money, I'm going after seed stage startups, very smart people, building AI companies that do something useful for the world, something that changes, and you know, there's so many use cases, tens of thousands of untouched use cases. So you can't go wrong with those startup teams if they're smart people. Then if I have a lot of money and I'm trying to put it to work, it's the data center build out. There's this whole, everything we're talking about here with Intel, the, I love Alex's quote on this, the tiling of the entire earth with compute, which is inevitable. There's no limit for the appetite of AI. There's no constraint. It will just keep improving humanity as you build more of it. But it requires massive amounts of data centers. That includes real estate, includes power, includes all of the
13:39 Speaker 02 But if you're going for public companies, who are, what are the public companies building out data centers today?
13:46 Speaker 00 Well, CoreWeave, Crusoe, Crusoe's not public yet, but it will be. CoreWeave was the one you wanted, obviously. You'll see that on the next slide, actually. And there'll be many more. You know, we have a couple that are here in the incubator that hopefully will become public investable within a year or two. So, but you saw with CoreWeave, when it came out, it was overlooked for, you know, a month, maybe, and you had a great opportunity to get in. Leopold got in. And then it skyrocketed as people realized the demand is, you know, basically infinite.
14:17 Speaker 02 Nice. Salim, do you have any favorites that you would?
14:22 Speaker 03 You know, yeah, the obvious ones would be, say, Microsoft or Nvidia, but I think that just plays to the narrative. I would go with Nextera, which is exponential clean energy.
14:33 Speaker 02 Yeah.
14:34 Speaker 03 If we're tiling the world with chips, we need alternative energy to power those chips in a decentralized way. And they're the biggest renewables utility with decent dividends, et cetera, et cetera. There are two inflection points I just want to point out here. In 2016, If you're building an energy generation facility, it became cheaper to build a solar farm than to build a fossil fuel plant.
14:56 Speaker 02 I find that
14:57 Speaker 03 Almost 10 years ago.
14:58 Speaker 02 Amazing stat.
14:59 Speaker 03 That's
15:00 Speaker 02 So true.
15:00 Speaker 03 But 2019, we hit a second inflection point that's even more important, which is since 2019, it's been it's cheaper to build and operate a solar than just to operate a fossil fuel plant. So the capex and opex of fossil of solar is now cheaper than the opex of fossil fuels. So now we don't need government policy, we'll naturally deprecate fossil fuels over time. All of that renewable energy is marginal, perfect for data center power, et cetera. So low cost power generating in all sorts of weird and wonderful places is going to be the future. So that's where I'd put a bit of a long term play, but that's where I'd put it.
15:36 Speaker 02 Yeah. How about you, Alex? Any bets?
15:41 Speaker 01 Oh, the problem is, I think this is a trick question. If we believe if we're drinking our own Kool-Aid and we believe any of our forecasts about the imminence of superintelligence, recognize that most of the volume on US equities markets is algorithmic in nature. The markets are already dominated by AI. AI knows substantially all of what we're discussing here. The the market algos, the trading algos have already priced in all of the headlines that we're discussing here. So really, for me to indicate any sort of preference is implicitly an assertion that I know better than the the collective intelligence of all human traders and all AI traders,
16:23 Speaker 01 which in some sense would be contradictory to the underlying thesis that we're on the verge of superintelligence. So I choose
16:29 Speaker 03 That's a lovely and elegant, that's a lovely and elegant cop out, but I still call it a cop out.
16:35 Speaker 01 I I choose the the market overall, the superintelligence that it is.
16:40 Speaker 02 Amazing. You know, if I'm thinking about big companies right now, I'm still believing that Google is the dominant player in this and is, while it's been priced in, knowing what Google has coming.
16:57 Speaker 02 I think and seeing what the prediction markets are, Google's going to dominate. At the same time, I think Elon with XAI is going to at least claim AGI first. We'll see how that moves things, but X is not a public company yet, but Tesla is. I believe is basic. We'll talk about this in a little bit. He said for Tesla, Optimus is 80% of their future value. I mean, I think the interesting trade would have been to have gotten back into Tesla when Elon dropped out of the government and started focusing once again.
17:35 Speaker 03 I have a Google question, though. And this is for the three of you, which it's not easy to get a good answer out in the world on this. Why is Google not selling the tensor chips? Because they would make so much money if they put those.
17:48 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I totally know the answer to that. Yeah, no, the rate at which Gemini is growing and VO3 is growing, they can't. This comes back to you can't get enough fab capacity to keep up with the demand. So they're completely consuming the entire supply. Yeah.
18:03 Speaker 02 Yeah. I also think there's an interesting play to be done in uranium. You know, we're going to be heading towards a fission future. I mean, I'd love to go solar, but I don't think we're going to be building solar rapidly enough. If I look at the fusion timelines today, you know, Helion's coming on with a small fusion plant, 2028, 2029. Commonwealth Fusion's coming on in 2031. We have a real problem in the United States. Eric Schmidt called this. He said, we're not chip limited, we're not intelligence limited, we're electron limited. And so we need to build as quickly as we can SMRs and Gen 4 nuclear reactors, and
18:46 Speaker 02 we need uranium for that. So I might be making a bet on uranium-related ETFs. Alex, do you not?
18:55 Speaker 01 Well, let me play the question. So two points. One, completely disagree with the premise of particular bets. Again, commodities are relatively efficient markets as well. If you subscribe to any variant, any approximation of the EMH, the question doesn't even make sense. And then to Salim's point, there have been headlines over the past couple of months that Google is exploring potentially selling TPUs outside of its own cloud offerings, for what that's worth.
19:26 Speaker 02 Dave, you were gonna say before Alex was able to tell us how silly we were in such a beautiful and gentle fashion.
19:35 Speaker 00 Yeah, I know when Bill Gross was on our podcast, he pointed out that, you know, with this power supply issue, you know, hydro pumped hydro is a huge way to store solar. Every piece of land on the planet that has a lake with a mountain next to it has already been purchased for this. I was like, what? Like, this stuff reacts so quickly, but the opportunity to make money on that actually came and went, you know, in 2024, early 2025. So this stuff, you know, the other, the real estate, Alex was the first to point this out, actually, the real estate that surrounds nuclear power plants, which normally nobody wants, right? You don't want to live right next to a nuke. It's gone way up in value.
20:18 Speaker 00 So, you know, because that's the best place to put the data center, you know, right? Because of power transmission costs and whatever other reason.
20:25 Speaker 03 I have a nuclear question.
20:26 Speaker 00 So these trends are coming really, really quickly.
20:28 Speaker 03 I have a nuclear question. Why aren't we looking more at thorium, which is safe and a decent alternative? Worrying about uranium seems redundant to me.
20:36 Speaker 02 Thorium is a, you know, the work, the work that Gates is back in that in the thorium reactors.
20:43 Speaker 03 Yeah.
20:44 Speaker 02 They are. They are.
20:45 Speaker 01 To first order, I think a good mental model is everyone is looking at everything at this point.
20:54 Speaker 02 Yeah. So Alex, your investment advice, by the way, just to repeat it once again, this is not investment advice. We're just sharing what we think is sort of hot areas that are going to have value creation in the world. Whether you invest or not is up to you. But Alex, so you're just saying buy the, buy QQQ, what?
21:16 Speaker 01 I'm not saying do anything or don't do anything. I am saying that my own outlook is if you, as I think that the market is collectively super intelligent, it's difficult to rationalize trying to think that you have a better insight into the market unless you have insider information than the collective intelligence of the market.
21:41 Speaker 03 This is a Schrödinger cat approach to investment advice.
21:46 Speaker 02 All right. Dave, we added this slide on Leopold Ashen Brenner's holdings.
21:54 Speaker 00 Yeah, let's disclose this out real quick because I don't want to dwell on Leopold forever. But you can check this out at 13f.info. All hedge funds need to disclose their holdings every quarter. And so this comes right from that website. You can see a quarter ago, he had a billion dollars. You see in the middle of the slide there. Now it's 2.1 billion. That's some of that is inflows, some of that is gains. When you look at his holdings under the covers, you can see his core weave investment went from about a $50 million investment to probably 150 plus million dollar value. So he roughly tripled his money, made $100 million plus gain on core weave alone. And then on the right, I asked perplexity to try and simulate as best it could what he might own in Intel.
22:37 Speaker 00 Because his biggest holding, you remember when we looked at this in August, his biggest holding was Intel and it was listed as 500 million, which is half the fund. But it was options. So that's the, you know, that's the if converted shares times the price is that. So what does he actually own? And it came back with this options ladder on the bottom right. So, you know, these high risk call options, which at the time were trading for under a dollar. And so I just went out and bought exactly what perplexity said he must have.
23:06 Speaker 00 And so now today I have the biggest one day gain in my entire life, actually.
23:09 Speaker 02 All right, buddy. You're buying dinner next time. Sure.
23:14 Speaker 00 But you can see on the bottom right corner, just today, those call options are up 255, 250%. That was earlier this morning. So it's up a little, a little bit more from, from there. So brilliant. I mean, he saw it coming. He executed on it and congratulations to him. We got to get him on the pod.
23:30 Speaker 02 Fantastic.
23:31 Speaker 03 Well, more importantly, you called it out in July, Dave. So that's huge.
23:36 Speaker 02 All right. You can't sit back and sort of just be watching today. It's taking action. MIT grads help build NeoClouds. Back to you, Dave.
23:49 Speaker 00 Yeah, so I just wanted to throw this in there because I think it's cooler than cool. You have Kush Bhavaria on the bottom right there who's here at Link Ventures, has decided to co-found this company, working closely with Chase Lockmiller, who we had on stage last week in Palo Alto. Chase is on the on the top right in that chair. Chase is building out Stargate, remember the $500 billion data center in Abilene, Texas? And Peter, I think you committed for us to fly out there and podcast him.
24:16 Speaker 02 Yeah, we'll do an episode of Moon Shots from Stargate. Sit down with Chase and talk about, you know, again, one of the most critical assets we have, which is which is power and data generation together.
24:31 Speaker 00 Alex, are you going to come for that?
24:32 Speaker 01 Absolutely. I wouldn't miss it for the world.
24:34 Speaker 02 Yeah.
24:36 Speaker 00 That's so cool because I've seen some big data centers recently, but this thing is bigger than big. And when you see things of that scale, it's kind of like a SpaceX launch. It's just you can't get it out of your mind ever again, just the raw scale.
24:48 Speaker 02 Dave, I noticed you didn't you didn't you only asked Alex, you didn't invite Salim.
24:51 Speaker 00 Salim, you're going to be there for sure. I have no doubt about that. Although you're always bopping around India these days. No, no, I'm back for a bit, but my schedule is a bit crazy.
25:01 Speaker 02 So what's a NeoCloud, buddy?
25:03 Speaker 00 Yeah, so NeoCloud is a it's a new age data center built entirely for AI, you know, from the ground up for AI. And, you know, some of them are locals so that you have low latency for things like voice AI. And some of them are central for like training, and that's what Abilene is, just massive training data center. And these things are just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger as quickly as we can create the chips and the power supplies. So they've decided that the thing I really wanted to say about this story is that Wayne Kush's co-founder there is leaving his quant trading job where he's probably printing money to do this because he absolutely hates quant trading. You don't talk to anybody. You're not changing the world and everything around you, all your classmates never But you're doing something world changing.
25:47 Speaker 00 You know, it's curing a disease, saving lives, building things that make the world smooth and seamless and entertaining. And you're just trading all day. And I love that because I know, no offense to the quant traders out there. They're, they're great. But I like the builders and I'm passionate about the builders. So I'm so glad that Kush was able to pull one of them away and put them into build mode. So they're going to, they're going to build a basically a NeoCloud. It's a company that will use a combination of crypto and options, CBOE listed options to help NeoClouds fund massive build outs to create more and more of these things. And that's, that's all I can say about the plan so far, because it's, it's still in stealth.
26:26 Speaker 02 It's fascinating. We're living in a world where we are tiling the world, both in energy and in, in data and intelligence. And ultimately, we're literally, if I think about this, we're literally turning electrons into cash with Bitcoin and crypto. We're turning electrons into intelligence with our data centers. And it's accelerating. I mean, I cannot even imagine where we're going to be a year from now, let alone five years from now.
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28:01 Speaker 02 Let's jump into the AI wars. Okay, here we go. DeepMind and OpenAI achieve gold at the Coding Olympics. Over to you, Alex.
28:10 Speaker 01 Gosh, this is such an exciting development. If you look at the past six or so months of developments from the Frontier Labs on the International Math Olympiad, IMO golds, which several American and Chinese labs claimed credit for with their models, with the International Olympiad in Informatics, I O I, I was on, once upon a time, I was on the US Olympic team for the I O I, and now for the ICPC, which is a collegiate Coding Olympics. It's absolutely incredible to see. If you remember, think back to the original Q-Star model.
28:52 Speaker 01 This was this reasoning model from OpenAI that was then renamed Project Strawberry and renamed from Project Strawberry to the O-class of models, O1 and O3. That was like the, in some sense, the last major overhang to collapse, the last major jump in capability from the Frontier Labs, the jump from models that couldn't reason to models that could reason. And this smells to me like the next major leap after reasoning models, which is to say, models that are able to reason without the ability, without having been trained on easy to verify problems. If you're solving a math problem on the IMO, you don't have the luxury of being able to
29:36 Speaker 01 take a partial result, a partial solution, and go up and ask a judge, "Am I correct?" And similarly here, in these Coding Olympics, we're starting to see AIs that are strictly superhuman, that do better than all of the humans in the competition on problems, on tasks that are difficult to verify in the middle of the contest. So my prediction here is sometime, perhaps by the end of this calendar year, we're going to see the next major Strawberry-Q-Star.
30:10 Speaker 01 O series moment when some of these models start to get broadly deployed, generally available. And you know, Peter, my my modal hypothesis regarding the future is first we solve superintelligence and then we use superintelligence to solve math, science and engineering.
30:26 Speaker 02 Solve everything.
30:28 Speaker 01 Solve everything. I think this is like the key building block.
30:31 Speaker 02 That's the war crime. That's humanity's war crime.
30:35 Speaker 01 It is.
30:36 Speaker 02 Or AI's war crime. So Alex, a question for you. So Dario, I don't know, six months ago went on record saying he expected we'd be at 90% everything being coded by AI and in 2026, we'd reach 100% of all coding being done by AI. Your thoughts on that?
30:54 Speaker 01 Depending on which rumors you believe coming out of the frontier model developers, the frontier labs, it seems like we're very much on trajectory for that. You you read stories of now that almost every frontier lab has its own agentic code generator. You read stories about people in these frontier labs yelling at their agentic code generators to to do their work for them rather than writing code at this point themselves. I think we more or less found our way into that part of Dario's future.
31:27 Speaker 02 Incredible.
31:27 Speaker 03 Can I throw in a metaphor here, Alex, and tell me if you agree with this or not?
31:31 Speaker 01 Sure.
31:32 Speaker 03 When we started having AIs create art, they were kind of very much poo-pooed at the beginning. And then over time, if they were anonymous, they started winning art competitions, right? And and art is really kind of generative at its core. When you're a high functioning software developer, you're essentially an artist. You're kind of pulling together libraries to try to figure out how you're going to solve particular problems. It feels to me like that same tipping point has been achieved in coding where they're using kind of constructs that most human beings wouldn't kind of consider, but they're bringing it to bear on a particular problem and solving it very, very elegantly. Would you agree with that metaphor?
32:12 Speaker 01 It's an interesting question that I want to construe as a question about benchmarking. So with the early generative art, arguably, other than sort of binary taste tests between competing models on various arenas, to my knowledge, there wasn't really a benchmark for superhuman art generation. Whereas for coding, for math, for some of these other relatively straightforward to verify problems and tasks, there very much is a goalpost, a benchmark that one can, or waterline, if you will, that one can say, oh, this is superhuman versus subhuman, which is why, you know, we've talked in the past about how we just zoomed right by the Turing
32:53 Speaker 01 test, even though the Lobner Prize, you know, rest in peace, isn't even active anymore. We just zoomed right by superhuman conversational agents. Why did we do that? Arguably because we didn't have a strict rigorous benchmark in place to be the red flag sign that we've just passed at.
33:11 Speaker 03 This goes to our earlier conversation where like the little benchmarks are all gone now, so now what do we do?
33:16 Speaker 01 Yeah. We need harder benchmarks.
33:18 Speaker 02 And we'll talk about that. I think benchmarks give us targets to shoot for and they allow us to measure our progress. And we humans do our best work when we're competing against each other. I'm going to say perhaps future agentic AIs are going to do good work when they're inspired to motivate, motivated to compete against each other too. We'll see. All right. Other breaking news, just in the last 48 hours, new Meta Ray-Ban powered display glasses and a Neural Band. So this is the first ever private in-lens display controlled by a wristband where you're using basically finger movements and you're picking up the EMG, electromyographic signals
34:00 Speaker 02 coming out of your forearm to be able to type silently, right? So you're talking to your wife or girlfriend or boyfriend and you're having an in-depth conversation and you're responding in your text at the same time. What could possibly go wrong? Let's take a look at this video. One moment.
34:23 Speaker 02 So we can see here the graphic, you see the person's hand basically manipulating in the display.
34:33 Speaker 02 So you're looking off into the distance and you're typing at the same time.
34:45 Speaker 02 Thoughts. First of all, let's talk about, you know, how's, what's the fashion statement here? What do you think of the glasses? A little bit too thick on the rim?
34:53 Speaker 00 Good enough. People are gonna wear them. They're close enough. I mean, the prior, you know, look-through goggles, no, it was never gonna happen. These are close enough. Actually, you know, if you think about how your phone got smaller and smaller and smaller, and then somebody said, you know what, I actually want more screen space, and now they're getting bigger. I think the glasses will do the same thing. Because as people get used to them, you're like, well, I want a little more battery life. And they're actually gonna, they'll be fine.
35:18 Speaker 02 At the Abundance Summit, I don't know, five years ago, I had a company called Mojo Vision there that had basically created a display on contact lenses, which I think would be super cool. And I think we'll probably get there eventually. But Zuck is predicting, you know, that these glasses will replace phones. The challenge I have is I lose so many, my sunglasses, all the time. I'm concerned about losing a thousand dollar piece of equipment.
35:46 Speaker 00 You know what's really eye-opening for me is, if you want to grab a picture, I didn't quite get this until somebody showed me, if you want to grab a picture, you just hold your fingers like that. And that takes the picture instantaneously, and then it files it. And it's like, oh, my God, these gesture controls are gonna get really ornate. You'll see people at the airport, kind of waving their hands around, and like, what is going on there? But it's like, take that picture, file that picture, whatever. But it's a great way to control the machine. And so, it's like, wow, now I suddenly see where this is going.
36:14 Speaker 02 So, I love your glasses, buddy.
36:17 Speaker 03 These are the Meta AI glasses you handed out a few years ago at Abundance, Peter, the first generation of which was surprisingly useful. Really great to have conversations with and walk around, etc. As long as you're in the sun. If you're in the dark, it gets a little harder. I've got a prediction, this is a very temporary thing. I think we'll get so many more efficient ways of getting signals from noise out of the body, like those that recent development where you could mouth, mouth what you're trying to say, and it would just speak it for you. But I think this becomes irrelevant before it gets traction.
36:49 Speaker 02 You're saying that the EMG on your wrist, the neural band's gonna become relevant?
36:55 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think we'll find much more elegant ways of getting straight from the brain to what you're trying to do.
36:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, BCI baby.
37:00 Speaker 03 Rather than having to go through physical manipulation, et cetera.
37:02 Speaker 02 Alex, what are you thinking about these glasses?
37:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, I tend to think that the glasses are lovely, but they're also a bit of a red herring. The input methods, I think, are far more interesting. So it may start with these neural, meta-neural bands, wristbands that looks like a smart watch that is effectively directly interfacing, albeit non-invasively, with the peripheral nervous system. But this here in plain sight is the beginnings of, I think, a brain-computer interface. You start with the peripheral nervous system interface around the wrist. It's going to work its way up to some sort of extension of smart glasses, probably, or a headband that does a non-invasive brain-computer interface.
37:47 Speaker 01 And the future, Werner Vingi wrote about this extensively in Rainbow's and other novels, we're finally living in the future where silent messaging that results from non-invasive peripheral nervous system computer interfaces is a reality, and this probably ends up being the first mass-market, effectively, BCI.
38:08 Speaker 02 Yep. You know what I find exciting?
38:10 Speaker 03 There's a visual in my head of it slowly crawling up closer and closer to your brain as it gets smarter. It's a great horror movie waiting to be.
38:19 Speaker 02 Injecting nanites through the ear to connect to your temporal lobe. What I find fascinating here is a future in which we are constantly uploading our visual input, right? So imagine that we have enough memory, enough bandwidth, which we do, where we're dribbling bits all the time, and whatever we've seen, whatever we've heard, every interaction we've had is available to your AI and available for a full recall on the cloud. You know, how many times have you had a conversation with your spouse in which you said, "You said, 'No, no, no, I didn't say that, I said this.'" Well, you're never going to have that argument again. It's all going to be on record.
39:04 Speaker 01 But Peter, also, I think even putting aside the various sort of Black Mirror-esque scenarios enabled by that, this is going to be amazing, amazing for fleet learning and training of humanoid robots. Imagine a world, yeah. Yeah, imagine a world where a billion of these plus are deployed and now you can do fleet learning at scale of every sort of long tail occupation, manual labor task just off of first person video data coming out of these smart glasses.
39:37 Speaker 02 And that's what Elon said about, you know, training up Optimus 3. We're no longer going to do it in, you know, full body suits where we're, we're tracking the movements and 3D position of the fingers and hands. We're going to be doing it from just visual learning, the same way that, you know, self-driving was picked up from visual learning. This is also going to be a massive value to the elder population, people who have degrading memory. I simply want it so that when someone's approaching me, my AI does facial recognition and calls up the last conversation and reminds me to ask, you know, how's your son or daughter's birthday? I mean, it's going to create a very rich social interaction.
40:20 Speaker 03 Independent of the gesture stuff, the broader implications of this are so huge, right? It's like to all the stuff that you talked about, Peter, the cognitive enhancement, the memory enhancement. I think the, it's just the interface that needs to be solved. Just a humorous memory here. I remember coming back from, you were talking about marriage, Peter, and trying to recollect conversations. I remember coming up from one of my business trips and I was a bit disheveled and a bit jet lagged and Lily looks at me and goes, the user interface around you right now is really bad. I've forgotten that.
40:51 Speaker 02 I love that. So this is a, I mean, this, for those listening, this is a window into what's coming rapidly. We've been saying for some time that the form factor of the phone is going to disappear. It's going to come into headwear. It's going to become, yeah. Go on, Dave.
41:09 Speaker 00 This occurred to me. Well, based on what Alex just said, I always wonder, why do I look forward to this podcast so much and canceling all my meetings to do it? But what Alex just said just made me realize something that I hadn't realized before, which is, you know how when the laptop first came out, everybody wanted to attach a mouse to it because you're used to using a mouse? And then the trackpad, you know, on all the iPhones came out and everyone's used to swiping. So then they backported the trackpad. To the laptop. Now, everything works the way it does on your phone. You swipe left, swipe up, down, whatever. So now the new interface is going to be waving your hands in the air because that's the only way to control the glasses. And then people are going to fall in love with that. And then the keyboard and the trackpad will go away because we'll be like, well, why can't I use my gestures on my laptop? It's got a camera. And so it totally didn't dawn
41:52 Speaker 00 on me till just now, based on what Alex said, that that's how it's going to evolve.
41:57 Speaker 02 Well, and it's going to be, this will be a driver for increases in BCI. So at the Abundance Summit this year, I've got two of the top brain-computer interface companies coming. One is invasive and one is non-invasive. But I think our ability to get the signal out of the noise is going to enable us to think and to, you know, say, click picture or, you know, pull up my, my schedule for the day. I, I think that this, this form of, of, of user interface is what's going to ultimately drive a need for rapid BCI capabilities. Because I don't think you're going to want to use your hands for the long run. I think you're going to want to think and Google.
42:41 Speaker 01 It's only a phase. And to the extent that you're a technological determinist and, and you think there's a sort of a preordained sequence of, of technologies that's likely to, to happen, I, I think the, the consensus among the perhaps futurist community is we go from smartphones to smart glasses to BCI's to some sort of human-machine symbiosis or, or uploads in, in roughly that order. So if, if you believe in that sequence, then this is right on the money for where we're supposed to be.
43:12 Speaker 02 Yeah.
43:13 Speaker 00 And let's note that this is like a long-
43:14 Speaker 03 The other eye-opener. Let's note this is a long progression that's been going on for, you know, hundreds of years, right? Dave, you sometimes wear glasses, like we would call you a transhumanist because you're augmenting yourself with technology. The minute you get a vaccination, you're a cyborg technically. So this has been a, a long thing. We're just accelerating the pace of it very rapidly.
43:36 Speaker 02 And we're allowing ourselves to utilize more and more extreme, you know, variations of this.
43:44 Speaker 00 The other insight comes out of this brainstorming we do together as well as a lot of people that I talk to say, "Look, I don't need my computer right in front of my eyes all day, and I don't need, I need to disconnect from it." And that's true, but as soon as it's super intelligent and it's giving you crazy great advice about where to stop and eat, where to drive, what to do next, how to live your life, then you get addicted to it so quickly. Because right now, anyone under the age of 20 has iPhone separation anxiety or phone separation anxiety. If you try and take away their phone for a weekend and they go camping in the woods without it, they're just like in shock. But once the thing is super intelligent, having, being disconnected from it will basically make you naked. And so people are gonna wear these glasses for sure.
44:29 Speaker 02 Your symbiote is gone. You know, we made a decision in our family to not get our kids, who are 14 now, phones until at least age 16. And, you know, it's so strange, because when I go to a birthday party of their classmates, you know, at age 14, they're all heads down in their phones, ignoring everything else that's going on. And I just, I just hate that. So it's been tough, but you know what's harder than not giving your kids phones? It's taking it away after you've given it to them. So I'm hoping the kids will jump, instead of a phone, they'll go directly to a BCI. We'll see.
45:09 Speaker 03 I think this is so wise, Peter, because at this age, their brains are just finalizing their final kind of construction of the neocortex. And to have it diverted away is just very, very damaging.
45:22 Speaker 02 I mean, they, just to be clear, they're not saints, right? They're on Roblox and Minecraft and all the games on their, they do have MacBooks, which they like, but I just, you're not carrying the MacBook around during social interactions during a baseball game or during a birthday party. So there is some level. So to other parents out there, if your kids don't have a phone yet, consider not giving it to them. The data is so strong about mental health.
45:52 Speaker 03 I think that's the key point. There's so much strong evidence, right? And I think one of the things we are really deep on in this podcast is evidentiary-based framing of discussions.
46:03 Speaker 02 All right, let's move on to our next topic here. And this was a tweet that went out this morning that I flagged. It's the U.S. risks losing to China in chip wars. This comes from our U.S. AI and crypto czar, David Sacks. Let me just read it. Huawei just launched a new AI chip and China has ordered firms to stop buying certain Nvidia chips. China is not desperate for our chips. It's producing its own and intends to compete globally in the semiconductor marketplace. If U.S. firms are blocked by excessive controls, we risk forfeiting the AI race to China.
46:45 Speaker 02 The hawkish position to help American companies win, not help Huawei build a digital Silk Road is so critically important. So we've talked about this. As soon as you make anything illegal or you stop trade, you're incentivizing the other side, in this case, China, to develop capabilities and then compete directly with you. And this is about who's going to buy, you know, throughout Europe, through Africa, throughout the rest of Southeast Asia. What chips are these companies going to buy? Is it Intel and Nvidia or is it from Huawei? Alex, your thoughts here?
47:23 Speaker 01 I think it's instructive to look at what happened to computing during the Cold War. And in particular, there was so much siloization in the Soviet Union of their computing stack. They were inventing all sorts of exotic architectures like ternary computers in the West and ultimately the world. We settled on a binary architecture, zeros and ones for computers. The Soviet Union, because in part of the Iron Curtain, was experimenting deep, deep in their tech stack with all sorts of exotic architectural options that the West wasn't considering. If the situation does play out in a way where there is effectively...
48:06 Speaker 01 Competition deep into the tech stack between great powers, then I would expect, based on history, that we're going to see ironically greater diversity deeper in the stack. Maybe not quite at the level of binary versus ternary computing systems, but certainly I would expect to see more experimentation deep in the stack.
48:30 Speaker 02 Does this ultimately help America by having a great capable competitor out there?
48:39 Speaker 01 Well, I think there are different sides one can take in the broader discussion. I know, Peter, you're a fan of the alternative reality television series, For All Mankind, that explores what would have perhaps happened if the Soviet Union had been the first to land a person on the moon rather than the United States and all of the follow-on consequences as that original event ripples throughout the decades. It's difficult to have a crystal ball to know what happens decades from now, depending on how the great power competition over the semiconductor tech stack plays out. It's difficult to know for sure without a crystal ball.
49:19 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's hard to predict the future, I get that. But what I'm just saying here is, if the US was so over-dominant that it was the only player, the incentive to continue innovating is there, but still so much slows down. When you've got Huawei leveling up to that of Nvidia, I think you're going to see the White House, you're going to see capital in the United States really tripling down. Is this another, in some way, is this move, is this reality about Huawei and China going to become additional fuel for the US government and the US industries to align? I mean, again,
50:03 Speaker 02 We're in a war footing here. This is a war cry that we just heard from David Sacks.
50:08 Speaker 00 Yeah, and I think what is new and interesting to me about what David's saying here is the digital Silk Road. We're not going to lose to China if it's like the US versus the Soviet Union. But if the whole world ends up partnering with China and it's the US versus the world, you know, Salim, when he got back from India and you said, hey, what's the attitude like in India? And Salim says, it's like, America. Like, what? Where's that coming from? So, you know, if Huawei becomes the open and friendly partner to the world and the US gets isolationist, that's what I think David is warning us against here. And so, you know, what is Europe going to do? What is India going to do? And that 1.4 billion people?
50:51 Speaker 03 I have, I think this is more about the politics rather than a innovation race, just because the, there's so much incentive in the world to turn away from the US right now, given the tariffs and other things, that this is a, that's the forcing function, rather than the chip wars themselves. It's a pretty bad situation right now. It's, you know, 40 years of US diplomacy tried to, was trying to keep India and China apart, and now that's gone. And so, I think there's a bigger game at play here.
51:25 Speaker 02 There's also, and I love your comment on this, Alex, the whole open source movement, right? So, when you look at different countries, everybody wants their sovereign AI, everyone wants data centers. Who are they going to use? Whose AI, you know, engines, whose chipsets are going to use? I mean, the world is going to split between Huawei and Chinese open source models, and Nvidia, and US models. We see, in the last few WTF episodes, we've talked about OpenAI going aggressively into India, into the UK, into Greece, into other places, right? Because if you embed yourself there and people grow up with your models, they're
52:10 Speaker 02 likely to stick with them. I think this is a land grab in a lot of different ways at a very critical time over the next two or three years. Alex, is, you going to tell me I'm wrong, or do you agree?
52:21 Speaker 01 I'll half agree. The world is hungry for intelligence in general and maybe superintelligence in particular. But I also think there's a sense in which this being accelerated compute is the geopolitically significant scarce resource of the moment. If we were having this discussion 10 years from now, maybe we'll be bellyaching over, oh, Mars colony is running out of resources or lunar colony has a lot of competition on the moon. So I think in some sense, it's important to jump up a few levels and abstract out the principle that as long as we're in a pre-general abundance world in civilization, there will
53:02 Speaker 01 always, by power law statistics alone, tend to be a one maximally geopolitically important and scarce resource at any given time. And at the moment, it's accelerated compute.
53:13 Speaker 02 Everybody, there's not a week that goes by when I don't get the strangest of compliments. Someone will stop me and say, Peter, you've got such nice skin. Honestly, I never thought, especially at age 64, I'd be hearing anyone say that I have great skin. And honestly, I can't take any credit. I use an amazing product called OneSkin OS01 twice a day, every day. The company was built by four brilliant PhD women who have identified a 10 amino acid peptide that effectively reverses the age of your skin. I love it, and like I say, I use it every day, twice a day. There you have it. That's my secret. You go to oneskin.co and write Peter at checkout for a discount on the same product I use. Okay, now back to the episode.
53:55 Speaker 02 I hope you guys all appreciate these conversations. I want to take a moment and just say to our subscribers, thank you for subscribing. If you want to hear about our WTF episodes when they come out, because the speed at which we're putting them out has increased, take a moment to subscribe to this channel. Lets us know you love what we do and allows us to really keep you up to date because we're starting to record these WTF episodes when there is breaking news rather than just once a week. Sometimes we'll have this twice a week. So, and again, thank you for that. Our goal here is to make my two boys proud, which they've said will happen when we reach a million subscribers, so what the hell.
54:38 Speaker 02 All right, here's our next piece of news. And it's fascinating. It's part of our Solve Everything.
54:48 Speaker 02 Alex, I'm going to ask you, so AI discovers new solution to century-old fluid dynamics problem. How critical is this? How valuable is this? Why should people care?
54:57 Speaker 01 Oh, it's incredible. So we've spoken in the past, Peter, about this notion of AI solving everything in math, science, and engineering. And there are million-dollar prizes for solving particular problems in math, science, and engineering. And this development, which was launched literally a few hours before we recorded this episode by Google DeepMind, is one such task. So this is progress towards a general solution to a million-dollar problem. It's one of the so-called Clay Millennium Prize problems. It's referred to in math and mathematical physics as the Navier-Stokes problem.
55:40 Speaker 01 And the problem is basically, if you have a fluid, does the fluid ever have infinite densities or other unnatural properties? Is it possible to stir a fluid in just the right way that a singularity appears in it? And the approach that Google DeepMind has taken is really, really interesting. So for those who haven't followed the Navier-Stokes problem, which I would say parenthetically, this is a key signpost, I think, that we're on the verge of solving math. When AI is taking these grand challenges in math and just knocking them out, it's a constructive approach. So mathematicians like Terry Tao and others have been knocking on the door of this problem for a decade plus.
56:25 Speaker 01 And the proposed solution to this problem, which it appears is going to be a construction of a way to create singularities out of fluids, could, as Terry and others have pointed out, enable us to build nanomachines and computers out of just pure fluids. Imagine... Imagine if you could stir a glass of water in just the right way such that it formed circuits and those circuits performed general computations. And even more exotically, imagine you could stir a glass of water in just the right way such that it created nanomachines out of fluid flow patterns of turbulence in that in that glass of water that created copies of themselves.
57:09 Speaker 01 So imagine creating self-replicating fluid nanomachines out of a given fluid. If you could just position the initial velocities and densities of a fluid in just the right way. If if there's a constructive solution for Navier-Stokes that results in singularities, as Terry and others have studied this, it could literally unlock our ability, and granted, this is on the more exotic, and undev applications, to to build self-replicating fluid nanomachines. Wow.
57:38 Speaker 00 I know that sounds far-fetched, but if you go to alexwg.org, there are a whole bunch of essays that Alex has written on computing substrates. And people used to think about this a lot. Alex mentioned back in the Soviet era, you know, when computing was new, people thought about this all the time. Now everyone takes for granted that it's all going to run on Nvidia chips, but the neural algorithms, the new algorithms that matter are just a couple hundred lines of code. They're very simple, and all the complexity is in the parameter file and the self-organization. So the idea of computing substrates that are self-organized is very viable with these new algorithms. So it's it's a it's not as far-fetched as it sounds at all.
58:18 Speaker 01 And to Dave's point, maybe just to to build on that, at the moment, we build our GPUs based on silicon CMOS. Maybe at some point in the future, if if Navier-Stokes and other problems, related problems have constructive solutions, maybe we'll be building our future accelerated compute out of plasmas or out of fluids. Even, you know, a cup of coffee might be more powerful computationally than an off-the-shelf Nvidia RTX. Visuals of Terminator 2000.
58:50 Speaker 03 And it reminds me of the
58:53 Speaker 00 Yeah, exactly.
58:54 Speaker 03 The hitchhikers got to the galaxy, or the whole world is essentially one big organic computer.
58:59 Speaker 01 Key is asking the right questions.
59:01 Speaker 02 Yes, I love it. All right. Next item here on our docket today, study shows AI model can forecast a thousand plus diseases. Researchers built Delphi dash two M that can predict how a person's health changes over time based on medical history. AI models can forecast risks for over a thousand different diseases and simulate what someone's health might look like in 10 to 20 years, shaping how doctors and healthcare systems plan to treat and prevent illness. You know, so we're reaching this singularity in health. We've seen Demis Hassabis predict the end of all disease within the next 10 years.
59:43 Speaker 02 We've seen Daria Amadee talk about doubling the human lifespan. And again, all of this is happening, not because we humans are becoming smarter or that our biology is getting simpler. It's just that we're able to use, you know, advancing AI and soon ASI to understand what's going on in your 40 trillion cells running two to five billion chemical reactions per second per cell.
1:00:10 Speaker 02 Who wants to jump in on this? Alex, you want to jump in again?
1:00:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'll take this one. I mean, this was a lovely paper in this week's Nature from a German team that I think underlines that these foundation models that we're training aren't just about text. It's not just text models or image generation with nano banana, as we've discussed previously, or even video or audio. Now this paper is widely popularizing the notion of literally disease as its own modality for foundation models that can be trained with disease token sequences, just like a sentence is tokenized into a sequence of almost word length tokens and then fed to frontier model like ChatGPT.
1:00:53 Speaker 01 This is a model that tokenizes the electronic medical record history of many, many patients into disease tokens and then can reason over a person's entire history of health and illness as if it were a sentence in some language and the upshot. Out of all of this is you can, as with a conventional frontier model that does next token prediction in text, it can predict the next disease token that a person is likely to incur. And at some point, you get sort of a medical time machine that's able to extrapolate out entire contingencies and contingency trees of a patient's future medical history. And as they say, if you tell me where I'm going to die, I'll make sure I'll never go there.
1:01:35 Speaker 01 If you can extrapolate out a contingency tree of a person's entire future history of health, you can make sure to avoid branches that you'd rather not spend time on.
1:01:44 Speaker 02 That's incredible. You know, just the sequence of words you put forward here. If you went back in history five years and spoke them like, you know, disease token sequence, people go, what in the world are you smoking?
1:01:57 Speaker 03 You know, there are two things that struck me here. One was the tokenization of not just text, but the medical history, what Alex is referencing. The second thing that struck me was this was done on a population of like close to 1.9 million people. It's still a big number and it suggests that diseases can be modeled across large populations in a really powerful way.
1:02:20 Speaker 02 Isaac Asimov, baby. Yeah.
1:02:23 Speaker 03 And it did take.
1:02:24 Speaker 00 It's incredible and I encourage people not to be intimidated by it either. We're seeing more and more business plans of people that are building topic-specific foundation models. And, you know, the funding is there and the people who jump in are succeeding wildly. Because, you know, it sounds really intimidating because it sounds ultra-complex. But the AI is such an incredible assistant and the underlying algorithms are just very understandable. If you're willing to jump in and study.
1:02:51 Speaker 03 So this seemed to me, this seemed to be one of those kind of things. Like if you look at the previous conversation about, you know, computational structures in a GLASP, if we solve that problem, it's a little bit down the line. This seemed to me like immediately usable because any single person could take their medical history, throw it into this thing and say, okay, project out where I'm going to be, right? Is, am I wrong on that?
1:03:13 Speaker 02 No, you're not. Can I encourage folks? One thing that you can do is if you want these slides from this episode, we make them accessible. If you go to diamandis.com/wtf, you can download the slides from this episode or other episodes. And, you know, go to your Gemini 2.5 voice AI or go to, you know, OpenAI's GPT-5 voice AI and have a conversation and say, you know, on the WTF episode, there was this notion of Delphi 2M about forecasting disease and then have a conversation with the AI
1:03:55 Speaker 02 and go deep. It has this data in it and ask it, what does that mean and what's the implications for me? I think your ability to have follow-on conversations after this podcast to dive in deep on a particular element, you know, Alex is our own personal AI on this podcast.
1:04:16 Speaker 03 That's right.
1:04:17 Speaker 02 You can magnify that.
1:04:18 Speaker 03 He's our native LLM.
1:04:19 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure.
1:04:20 Speaker 03 You could also use it to say, hey, class that episode and tell me where I should invest.
1:04:24 Speaker 02 Yeah. Not investment advice. I'm gonna say that again. Yeah, I think that's, this is really exciting. So at Fountain Life, you know, when I do my upload, I got 200 gigabytes of data and I have that data on my phone, upload, uploaded into our Zori AI, which allows me to interpolate on my current medical information. I think what this is saying is it's going to enable me to extrapolate beyond my current medical information.
1:04:55 Speaker 03 If you take that data from Fountain Life here and map it onto this, I mean, right there, you can get instant usage out of it, instant value, right?
1:05:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure.
1:05:04 Speaker 01 At some point with these, the ability to extrapolate contingency trees for health, my expectation is healthcare becomes almost like a game of chess where you're playing against an opponent biology, or at least uninterrupted biology, and the goal is to win. And if you can map out to high confidence the contingency tree of interventions, those would be like game actions and the underlying course of biology without that interaction, the goal of winning is longevity.
1:05:37 Speaker 02 Absolutely. I'd like to move to our next category, which is robotics. A lot of news in the robotics world this week as well. Let's jump in. The first piece is a friend of the pod, Brett Adcock, who's been with us a couple of times. He was on my stage at the Abundance Summit last year. This year, our theme at Abundance Summit 2026 is the rise of digital superintelligence in humanoid robots. So I think if successful, I'll have five different humanoid robot companies there with their robots where you can play and touch and feel them and see what it's like. Well, Brett just announced this week
1:06:19 Speaker 02 that he raised over a billion dollars in a Series C at an extraordinary valuation. Good on Brett, $93 billion. Full disclosure, I am an investor in Figure through my bold Capital Partners Venture Fund. The investors include Nvidia, Intel Capital, Brookfield, Parkway Ventures. And thus far, Figure has raised $2 billion over the last two years, making it one of the fastest growing startups. And what's interesting enough is that Brett is investing this money really into manufacturing, right? We'll see that. Another company, we
1:06:59 Speaker 02 did a podcast, Dave and I were up in Palo Alto with Bernd Bornek, the CEO of One X Technologies that makes the Neo Gamma. They're in the midst of their raise right now and wish them the very best of luck. An incredible company. And they're going to be investing their capital once again in building out manufacturing. And we're not at the point yet where it's going to be robots building robots, but we'll be there in the near future. But Dave, do you remember the conversation we had with Bernd about? Sort of the iPhone scaling goal that he had.
1:07:35 Speaker 00 Of course, of course I do. Yeah, he had it all mapped out brilliantly in his mind, actually. And he was, he's a phenomenal guy and actually Brett Adcock is too. Brett Adcock is the most down to the, down to earth, salt of the earth, midwestern, you know, snow shoveling guy made good. So really, really cheering for both of these guys. And they're both wrestling with the supply chain of parts, you know, the, the supply chain for robotics parts is terrible. China's way out of us on that front, by the way. But, um, but that has got to get figured out really fast and it just takes capital and focus and now they have capital. So, so I think it'll get built out very, very quickly now. Humanoids first and then, you know, as Salim has been saying, it'll branch out from humanoids
1:08:16 Speaker 00 very, very quickly. I think, I thought it was kind of funny, the burnt made a big, big deal about the soft skin and the friendly, you remember the shirts they gave us or they're, they make their own fabric?
1:08:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, they're really great.
1:08:29 Speaker 00 Super comfortable.
1:08:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, I love it.
1:08:30 Speaker 00 Yeah, your robot is better dressed than you are. And so Brett is going down the Terminator look here. I don't know what the difference in philosophy is driven by, but if you look underneath, you know, the 1X robots that we saw in Palo Alto, they look just like this. They're very Terminator looking under the, under the soft exoskeleton.
1:08:50 Speaker 02 It really is, it's built to, you know, 1X's robots are built to be soft and approachable, I would say almost huggable in that regard. But you know what I found so impressive about, about Brett Adcock? He's a consummate engineer founder. You know, he was, he was running Archer Aviation, which is one of the flying car companies that went public for multiple billions. And when, when Brett left Archer to start this, He committed a couple hundred million dollars of his own capital to get it going. And that ballsy move enabled him to hire extraordinary talent from around the world
1:09:31 Speaker 02 and really up level in, you know, level after level. And I was lucky. We got bold capital in very early.
1:09:39 Speaker 00 It's so cool to see people like this succeed too, because I had a great conversation yesterday with two MIT sophomores that are course six, five, which is chips and software meshed together. And they're so excited about the physical world. But for the longest time, there was no way for people who like physical things to become this successful. You had to do software, you had to do software. And that was fine. You know, America.
1:10:03 Speaker 02 Elon was the only one.
1:10:04 Speaker 00 He was the only one.
1:10:05 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:10:06 Speaker 00 Now, actually Elon has inspired a whole generation. These sophomores are wicked excited to build physical things using all this AI technology.
1:10:14 Speaker 03 I think there's something else here, though, that's worth pointing out, right? Which is that these folks, Brett and others, are not interested in the money. They're interested in making a massive difference and transforming.
1:10:24 Speaker 02 Yes, exactly.
1:10:25 Speaker 03 And when you have that purpose, and then you can have a success and you can deploy that capital back in, the positive feedback loop and flywheel that creates inspiring, as Elon has done, inspiring the next generation, and Brett was inspiring others several sets of generations. It's incredible to see. And it's hard to become pessimistic about the world when you see this.
1:10:46 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:10:47 Speaker 00 Yeah, totally, totally agree. I mean, there's this feeling, you see it in the posts, actually, in the podcast, of just fear and fear and fear and fear. And a lot of the people that rose to the top, you know, were kind of whack jobs. There's no doubt about it. But then you meet these guys that are the new generation, and they're so focused on world good. And they're so, so inspiring. So it does make you feel confident that the good things are coming.
1:11:10 Speaker 03 I have a funny story. I have a funny story here. I remember meeting one of the founders of one of these level two blockchains. And I said to him, you know, he's like 18 or 19, this kid. And I go, you know, why, why would you do this on Ethereum when you could build your own layer one blockchain? And he goes, well, according to your own book, um, you're a new innovation has to be 10 times better than the market, otherwise the market ignores them. So, you know, and I'm like, holy crap, this little 18 year old guy is quoting my own book back at me. It was so impressive. And this whole new generation are all like that. So they're so with it. It's incredible. It's very, it's very annoying that I wasn't that alive now at 18 to do take on this kind of crazy risk.
1:11:53 Speaker 02 Don't worry, buddy. You're gonna, we're gonna give you an extra 50 plus years of extra lifespan here.
1:11:57 Speaker 03 Oh yeah, I have to get myself to found life.
1:11:59 Speaker 02 One thing, one thing that's important here is people are hungry for optimism. People are hungry for a positive, optimistic, hopeful future because they're so decimated. You know, I had two tweets go viral and get like five, 8,000 likes, like within two days. And they were both about optimism. It didn't, it helped that, you know, Elon retweeted both of them. But it's people want optimism. They really do because we had so much negative news on the planet. So.
1:12:30 Speaker 03 Elon, you said, you said in your tweet that the only time more exciting to be alive than today is tomorrow, which I thought was great. And Elon said, better to live life as a retweet of yours saying, better be wrong, optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right.
1:12:46 Speaker 01 I would go further and say even beyond optimism, it's difficult for me at least to imagine a future where real growth, real economic growth and wealth of our planet grows significantly without passing through a humanoid robot or some other substantially similar robotic stage where manual labor is scaled up by orders of magnitude. It's almost an instrumentally convergent goal, I think, for achieving some of the more ambitious futures.
1:13:14 Speaker 02 And I want to remind people, you know, your mindset is your neural net, right? You're the way, what you see, what you hear, who you speak to, the way you see the world is constantly shaping the way you react to opportunities and challenges. And you need to be surrounding yourself with people who see the world in a positive, can-do, optimistic, abundance-minded future, which is why we do this podcast, why we spend the time, why I love, you know, my moonshot mate so much. So hopefully this is helping you shape your purpose-driven, abundance exponential mindset as well. All right, you can't talk about robots without talking about what Elon is doing.
1:13:54 Speaker 02 So he has teased Optimus 3, provides some predictions. So in this image, if you're watching this on YouTube, which I hope you are, there's an image of Optimus 2 Gen 2, or Gen 2 and a vision of Generation 3, much sleeker, looks like Optimus went on a little bit of a diet and were in sort of a trimming.
1:14:20 Speaker 03 Sticking GLP-1s.
1:14:22 Speaker 02 But here's some of the details. The first ever OLED face display for expression and having stronger hands. And I think one of the things, we talked about this, Dave, with Burnt, about the whole element of the face and how close to the uncanny valley we allow it to go. Walking speeds are closer to humans with better balance and navigation. Prototypes by the end of 2025, mass production in '26 with a goal of 1 million robots per year. I'm not sure if that's for '26 or '27, but a $25 trillion market.
1:15:05 Speaker 02 And as Elon has said publicly, he expects this to be the reason that he gets his pay package. Remember, he's got a trillion-dollar pay package if he can grow Tesla to $8 trillion, which is an order of an 8 to 12x of where it is today. Thoughts on this, gentlemen?
1:15:28 Speaker 01 Well, I think colonizing the, colonizing and developing the solar system is going to entail lots of dirty, dull, and dangerous jobs. So I, for one, will be delighted to, to live in a near future where the solar system is populated by lots of humanoid robotics, of, of general AI capacity. I, I think on the other hand, going back to the discussion we had last time, at some point, I, I would predict the personhood discussion is inevitably going to happen. This is, we're, we're, we're just trotting into various sci-fi futures. At some point, if we reach some threshold of AGI personhood and AGI is embodied in
1:16:08 Speaker 01 human form factors or human-like form factors, someone, somewhere will surely want to, to, to push on the, the personhood question. And if, if the, the sort of the, the mature embodiment of, of these vision, language, action, VLA models ends up becoming more and more human-like, I, I think that will push the discussion even more so.
1:16:30 Speaker 03 I have a question for the three of you. The best kind of conversation around personhood in this that I've seen was Star Trek: Next Generation with Data. We had several episodes talking about what rights and humanity, emotions, he had a chip, emotional chip embedded him. Has any one of you seen a better treatment of the personhood question?
1:16:52 Speaker 01 This bicentennial man did a good job.
1:16:54 Speaker 00 Oh, in, in sci-fi?
1:16:57 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:16:58 Speaker 00 Huh. Oh, Data's, Data's gotta be the best, though, right?
1:17:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:17:03 Speaker 00 That's what I thought.
1:17:04 Speaker 01 I, I would say Accelerando by Charlie Cross.
1:17:06 Speaker 00 Data's journey of self-discovery.
1:17:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, so, so.
1:17:08 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah, actually, you should repeat that, Alex, by the way. Yeah, no, everyone should read that. And you also meant, mentioned Verner Vinge, Rainbow's End, and anything else that comes to mind. You know, the, the vision and the terminology from those books, please read the book or at least skim through it to get on the same page with Alex. It's absolutely worth making the investment.
1:17:28 Speaker 03 We should put a list of those in the show notes. And just to be, just to give credit here, Verner Vinge was the first person that coined the term "the technological singularity."
1:17:35 Speaker 01 Actually, he popularized it.
1:17:37 Speaker 03 God damn it.
1:17:40 Speaker 01 So the notion goes all the way back to IJ Good and Intelligence Explosion as a mathematical singularity, but Werner was the one who first popularized the technological singularity as such.
1:17:52 Speaker 02 Yeah. So. My prediction was boots on Mars by 2030, except they're going to be robot boots.
1:18:03 Speaker 03 Right? I mean, I hope they have wheels. I hope they have wheels.
1:18:06 Speaker 02 Now, they're not going to have wheels, for God's sakes. They're climbing on rocks and across, you know, Martian soil.
1:18:12 Speaker 03 Both, have them have both. You can have the optionality, for God's sakes.
1:18:17 Speaker 02 Nope, nope. They're going to do, and they're going to help us do what humans do best, explore. But here's what's interesting, right? So you send the robot fleets there first, and they build the habitats. They get everything ready. They, you know, us squishy carbon life forms don't want to end up in a harsh environment. Let the robots go set it up for us, and then we'll go join them.
1:18:41 Speaker 01 Or hybrid solutions, tele robotics. The problem is, of course, latency, but there are various compensations for that.
1:18:49 Speaker 00 Yeah, you know what? What I totally, the one thing I totally don't get, and you can explain it to me if you can, and Peter touched on this a second ago. So I had this feeling in my chest the other day of just this raw enthusiasm, but I don't think I've had that actual feeling since I was playing high school soccer and you're about to win a game like this. It's like this, this physical enthusiasm vibe, and it was, I was working on a neural net, and it's a neural net that's designed to build neural, other neural nets. And it just freaking worked. It just flat out, you know, cracked the code and worked. And this is all part of this new quantum company that I'm working on with Alex. And so you take that same thought process, and you say, well, within robotics, all three
1:19:31 Speaker 00 of these companies are working on these humanoid robots, but wouldn't the first thing they want to build be what Peter said a second ago? The robot that's manufacturing the robot is far more important than the robot itself because of the self-improvement effect. And I don't know if they're doing it, just doing it very quietly and not showing anybody, or if that thought has, because, you know, when you talk about 1X, Figure, and Tesla, I haven't seen them talk about that at all, but that's the first thing I would do, is build the robot that's manufacturing the robot.
1:19:59 Speaker 01 Well, for what it's worth, I mean, I think Elon has made several comments about the importance of the machine that makes the machine and has said on several occasions that some of the earliest deployments of Optimus will be in Tesla factories. So to the extent that Tesla factories are turning out not just cars, but also robots, I think that sort of self-licking ice cream cone or recursive self-improvement cycle is either already started or about to start.
1:20:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, for everybody listening, the important thing here is to realize that recursive self-improvement is now happening in AI and will accelerate and will soon be happening in mechanical systems and will accelerate. And this is where we have this intelligence and exponential explosion that I still feel like Ray has it wrong on the singularity. I think it's too far out there. I don't know. It's like I feel a singularity every moment of the day.
1:20:57 Speaker 03 It depends how you define it. I'd like to throw in the following comment that when you think about recursive self-improvement, that's actually the fundamental basis of evolution. So we're just continuing the trajectory that's been happening for billions of years.
1:21:08 Speaker 02 Just a billion times faster. Yeah, and accelerated.
1:21:12 Speaker 00 To me, the singularity is like it's a nuclear reaction. It's pretty much happening or not happening. It's not like, you know, strong AI needs a definition and AGI needs a definition, but the singularity, it's obvious when that's happening.
1:21:25 Speaker 02 But there are.
1:21:26 Speaker 00 Because the rate of self-improvement is just crazy. It spirals, you know, it's feeding itself.
1:21:30 Speaker 02 It's amazing.
1:21:32 Speaker 03 I don't think it's going to be that obvious.
1:21:33 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:21:34 Speaker 03 We're getting past the singularity.
1:21:36 Speaker 02 Remember the framing, just like the Turing test.
1:21:40 Speaker 03 Exponential. It looks vertical in the future and it looks horizontal behind you. And we're kind of there now in a sense.
1:21:46 Speaker 00 I think what we're going to see, the singularity is very soon, and you're going to see an immediate 1,000x step up in performance of neural network software. And the results of that are going to be unmistakable. Instant solving of diseases, instant solving of impossible math problems. It's all going to happen within, say, a 30-day window from self-improvement to the other side. With no, no change in the chips, just purely software advances.
1:22:13 Speaker 03 But then you have a distribution problem, right? This is where the William Wood skips in, quote, "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed." We talk often about Mad Max and Star Trek as two framings for the future. And in an ideal world, you end up with one rather than the other, but we can see them both happening. Ukraine and Gaza are Mad Max and we have Star Trek in many other parts of the world. And so I think it'll end up with that uneven distribution, which was going to cause a lot of stress and chaos.
1:22:41 Speaker 02 I don't want to end on a negative note like that.
1:22:43 Speaker 03 No, no, I'm just, I'm just fundamentally optimistic because the positive will drag along the negative, right? We talk a lot about the fact that if you can lift the bottom billion, and now most of that has smartphones with AI built into it. I mean, the potential for humanity is like incredible.
1:22:58 Speaker 02 I think the important, the important note here is that in a world in which every mom knows her children have access to all the food, water, energy, healthcare, education, right? You have more to lose by, you know, by warring than you have to gain. If you're, if you're, no, seriously, if you're a population that has nothing to lose, I think that's where we get this, this negative.
1:23:27 Speaker 02 So everybody, listen, if you'd like these slides again, please go to WT, go to diamandis.com/wtf, pull up your favorite O M, have a conversation with it, drill down deep into any of these. We spend a good 20 hours a week prepping for this episode. I love my moonshot mates. I hope that this helped you see the extraordinary world and the pace of change, and that you walk away with a hopeful, compelling and abundant vision of your future. For our subscribers, thank you. For those who haven't yet, join us, get the news as it comes out.
1:24:03 Speaker 03 I, but just to echo Dave's comments, I always feel so much smarter after this hour and a quarter that we spend conversing about this than before. This is great.
1:24:11 Speaker 02 Yeah. Yeah. All right, guys. See you very soon. Big hug. Take care, everybody. Big hugs. Every week, my team and I study the top 10 technology meta trends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from humanoid robotics, AGI, and quantum computing to transport, energy, longevity, and more. There's no fluff, only the most important stuff that matters, that impacts our lives, our companies, and our careers. If you want me to share these meta trends with you, I write a newsletter twice a week, sending it out as a short, two-minute read via email. And if you want to discover the most important meta trends 10 years before anyone else, this report's for you. Readers include founders and CEOs from the world's most disruptive companies and entrepreneurs building the world's most disruptive tech.
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