Ask the Mates anything | MOONSHOTS AMA #289

I've been working in AI for 42 years, and this question is directed to my hero, AWG. I haven't been this excited since my wedding night to meet you, sir.

I don't know how to take that, Griffin.

If I look at this progress, how close or how far are we to really say that the AI is going to get consciousness?

The top-down theory says that we're like localized antenna for consciousness and we connect into it. But there's no reason why AI at some point can't tune into that same type of phenomena.

I just turned 18, And I started an AI startup business with my dad.

I hope a lot of 18-year-olds listening are gonna hear what you're doing and try and emulate you.

I wish I was goddamn 18 today.

We're working on it, sonny.

We're working on it.

Do you leave any room in your analysis for an all-powerful, all-knowing sort of ultimate intelligence?

Either there is no God and we're just moving towards a wonderful future driven by technology, or there's a simulation, and in which case it kind of doesn't matter anyway.

Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. This episode is brought to you by the Abundance Summit and Link Ventures.

Everybody, welcome to our first Moonshots AMA. Uh, hopefully we'll do this on a not too infrequent basis. I can't promise the time right now, but it is wonderful to be spending time with all of you. We already have 300 people on the Zoom, over 1,000 people registered. And this is a chance for all of us to get a chance to meet you guys and really get feedback on Moonshots. We've got here with me our very own ASI AWG, Alex.

Hello.

Good to see you, pal.

Good to be here.

You do not disappoint in your normal VR background there.

We do what we must because we can.

Yes. And Dave, uh, here you are, your normal haunt. And Salim.

Normal haunt.

Yes. Salim, where on the planet are you, pal?

I'm home.

I'm home.

Amazing.

Yes.

We don't, we don't even recognize it. It's so rare.

I know.

Everybody's like, where are you? Uh, well, everybody, uh, thank you. Um, you know, I want to say that we read your comments and the outpouring of support and love means a huge amount to us. And it really drives us to do all that we can do. And so our agenda here today is to answer your questions, and we're going to do that as much as we can. Use the raised hand emoji, and we'll go person by person. I'll call out the name, and you can unmute. You can also put questions in the chat, and we'll try and monitor those. Great. And I'm going to ask my moonshot mates. to keep our answers as succinct so we can get through as many as we can. And I think we scheduled this for an hour. We're going to go 90 minutes, give you guys some extra time. Yes, we are recording this. So everybody, if your camera is on and you're speaking, you're being recorded. We may, we may post some of this. So please, if you don't want to be recorded, turn your camera off and don't ask questions. Okay. With that, Dave Morris. Your question. Where are you calling in from?

Golden Gate Bridge, obviously.

Oh, there you go. Yeah, well, it's in Sydney, Australia, so it doesn't really look like that behind me. Good morning, all. And firstly, thanks for everything that you guys do. And it's such a refreshing podcast, and I'm sure everyone on today is in the greens with that. Quick question from my side of things. I feel like Australia is really lacking and falling behind the AI space. Just having conversations and to Salim's comments the other day in the latest podcast when he talks to CEOs and that, everyone feels like they're too busy to even think about it. They're just doing their normal thing in their businesses. And I think that's the biggest thing that I'm struggling with at the moment. And it'd be great to get your feedback on that about how to break through the challenge of the rush that will come down the track. But it's more this initial side of things that I think is really struggle at the moment. And, um, you know, as a single entrepreneur, that, that's probably the biggest challenge that I'm facing at the moment.

Salim, over to you.

So, um, uh, first of all, great to be with all of you. This is amazing. Uh, so really thrilled when we get actual faces to names and comments, et cetera, et cetera. I wouldn't worry about too much whether Australia is behind, you know, uh, when you're in an exponential age, feeling behind can feel terrifying, but the good news is you can leapfrog really quickly. And I talk to CEOs a lot who are like, oh my God, how are we going to keep up? Especially in emerging markets and places like Australia. In the US or Europe or Japan, we have to unlearn 50 years of Harvard MBA thinking and relearn new models, right? Whereas in emerging markets and places that are a little bit distanced, you can literally jump over everybody else. The infrastructure is kind of mostly there now, right? It really comes down to completely a mindset problem. And, you know, Australians are pretty crazy, but we know that for sure. So there's no reason now not to kind of jump over that and think through that. Also, you have the opportunity in being a little bit further away of really experimenting with new structures. And that gives you a place to play and a playground to kind of tinker. The last thing I would say is for everybody involved, we tend to overschedule ourselves. You want to make sure you create deliberate slack in the system. Give yourself 10 or 20% of your time to just not have anything scheduled to allow experimentation, playing with new tools, meeting new people, et cetera. If you wait till you have spare time, you'll never catch up. You'll never start.

Thank you so much. Let's move on to next. Cynthia. Cynthia Smith.

Hi there. It's so great to be with you guys. I'm such a big fan. And I'm also— Peter, I found out about you through Stephen Kotler because I've been in Catalyst and working in that domain. So I have made a living as a coach and consultant and pivoting as fast as I can. The world that I have worked in and what I'm fascinated about is all the inert stuff, the mindset stuff, people's capacity to learn and absorb and dance with change. And it just—

Yeah.

You know, we're at this situation where things are evolving exponentially. And as fast as we can adapt AI and whatnot, there is— there seems to be a limitation on how fast we can absorb information and how fast—

Our input/output mechanisms have a baud rate, right?

Yeah, they do.

They do.

So I'd love to hear about what, you know, that whole interface type thing.

Yeah.

So it's the realm of— there are 2 interfaces. that are going to change things. One is when your own AI understands your desires, your needs, what's going on, what you know, what you don't know, and is able to filter and summarize for you better than you can filter and summarize for yourself. So that's one interface that will make things more efficient. The second, of course, is BCI, brain-computer interface, right? And right now, if I asked you to think about a rabbit, a preformed concept of a rabbit comes into your head, whatever it is. There's the potential in the future where BCI will help you by providing preformed concepts that you never learned, but they're known by an AI ecosystem out there and delivering them directly to you. So I'm an investor and advisor to 3 BCI companies right now. Ray Kurzweil just introduced me to another one, which sounds amazing. And I'm meeting the CEO, and it looks like an incredible woman. She's a member of my Abundance 360 community. And so, I think we're going to start to see some pretty significant and rapid advances in BCI. We have 100 trillion synaptic connections, 100 billion neurons that we're limited by. Imagine if you could have a 3rd corpus callosum, a 3rd part of your brain, Exteriorized. So I think those are the 2 things that are going to help us. Um, and, and Alex, you're the one who first said, you know, we're going to either couple with AI and ride along with it or be left behind.

Or both.

Or both.

Both, both could happen in the same world. Both probably will happen in the same world. Yeah, we'll have BCIs, we'll have full-dive VR, we'll have uploading both of humans and non-human animals. I think all of these will coexist over the next few years.

So Cynthia, that's a quick answer for you. I hope that helps a little bit. I'm going to keep us marching as many people as we can, if that's okay.

Yeah, yeah. Well, the, the pitfall that I think is, um, I, I fall into is, at least right now, the LLMs are prediction machines, and I'm more interested in the emergent latent space ahas off the beaten path, kind of sparking creativity.

So, so that's We just recorded an episode today that's coming out tomorrow that says, well, AIs are actually probably being inventive. And so prepare for that.

Thank you.

Also, maybe Peter, just take the bait once and for all. This is a misconception. Reasoning models at this point, I don't think it's accurate to characterize them as prediction machines or stochastic parrots. They've been so thoroughly reinforcement fine-tuned off of reasoning challenges To say that they're prediction machines is tantamount to, to saying basically that they're incapable of novelty or insight, which is most definitively not true at this point.

Yeah, yeah, great. Thank you.

This episode is sponsored by Google for Startups. Think about this for a second. You now have access to the same generative AI models that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to train. Google's Startup Technical Guide for Generative Media gives you a complete blueprint for deploying Google DeepMind's models in production. Images, video, audio, all of it. Real architecture, real results. Find the link in the show notes below. All right, uh, John, you're next. Where are you calling from?

What's your question?

Sydney, Australia, Peter. Um, yeah, it's—

All right, Australians are in power here. That's great.

Yeah, sort of, uh, power to everyone. It's pretty cool. Like, uh, I've got a couple of chances to speak with you on the AMA for your book with Steven Kotler. So it's great to get the opportunity to chat again. And I've been following moonshots for a while now. It's been inspiration since I went to a Singularity University gig about 10 years ago in Australia. So it's been an inspiration. So my question— and I'm a fan of everyone— but my question for yourself, and especially around longevity, because that's an area that's been a focus. And I've been guiding a couple of doctors. I got to speak to you on the AMA last time as well in Greece, in Athens. And sort of you reached out and you said, fellow Greek. So that's how I remember that sort of conversation.

I see that.

And so I'm the founder of an innovation company about 10 years ago called MyBrainwave. And so I like to help people make ideas real. So that's been a real passion. And so one of the things I'd like to understand You know, what role do you see trusted local physicians playing in bringing Fountain Life? Because I see the the ads each time, and it's really promoting awareness of longevity. So bringing physicians, you know, together playing a role around Fountain Life's longevity approach to bring it to an international audience. And this is a great forum for that. So that'd be keen because Igli's the clinic in in Greece, and and they're pretty keen on taking some of those learnings and. Bringing it to their audience in Greece.

Yeah.

What role do you see?

To answer that quick, Fountain Life is going to begin a franchising model. So right now we've built 5 and we're building 2 more in the US. And then we have a partnership to put them into a group of resorts called The Estates. But what I really want to do is enable the operating system and the AI systems we've built to be franchised. I think that's probably at least 6 to 9 months away from being an open call for interest. But I've been to Greece to talk with a number of people about getting a Fountain Life Center in there. I'm hoping that Greece will set its purpose beyond just olives and shipping to longevity as well. So, um, yeah, I'm a fan of that there. So, no, thank you, John.

No, thank you, Peter.

Appreciate it. And I apologize, we have, we, we have, uh, 80 hands raised, so I'm going to keep moving us along here, uh, and no disrespect to everybody. Matt, hello, where are you calling from? Your question, please.

Um, I'm calling from Terre Haute, Indiana. Um, I was on another AMA with, uh, with you before, and I fumbled through my question. So I actually made a script so I don't mess up everything.

Take your time.

My question is really for myself, but I feel like there are some Australians on here. So I think that my question is for myself and people around the world, and particularly in Middle America. I really believe a lot of what you guys are saying, and I love when Dave talks about with energy about You know, these startups and everything like that. But my question really breaks down into a couple parts. So, you know, a lot of the conversation is focused around the runway for 22-year-olds, maybe working 80-hour weeks, 80-hour work weeks. What is the playbook for kind of experienced mid-career professionals in places like the Midwest who have deep domain expertise, the energy, and the desire to build, but also have families, mortgages, real constraints, like maybe a location. And then, you know, how do we, how do we best leverage these exponential tools to break through without like kind of blowing up a baseline of security?

Dave, you want to try that?

Yeah, absolutely. We had a great unit on today's podcast that'll be out tomorrow about this franchise opportunity that Tesla just threw out there. But I think you'll learn about it tomorrow. But keep your eyes open for more and more of the AI labs giving you a playbook to get involved and succeed through. A lot of it is through franchise models, others through data collection models. So those are going to create opportunities. I think while that's happening, getting really familiar with the models, you know, just, just, you know, build your own Skippy, hack around at night, you know, try and create, you know, some of these revenue generating opportunities that you brainstorm with the AI and just, just fabricate it. It may not be what you want to do for a career, but it's a great way to generate cash flow and get involved with the models. But I suspect that this year there'll be on the order of maybe 10 to 100 opportunities where the playbook is handed to you. And the AI labs are really, really eager for these things to succeed, to bring more of the population into this, you know, into this universe. You're going to find that very few people around you jump on the opportunity. And so the other thing you can do is try to network with, you know, Drew Houston, the Dropbox founder, said you become the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. It's just a fact. Don't fight it. So find the 5 people that you most want to be like, and you may not find them geographically near you. So try and create 3 or 4 or 5 on the internet somehow that you can bond with on exactly this topic.

And real quick, I'll just add, you know, get to your favorite large language model, describe your life in detail. I have these obligations, I have these kids, I have these mortgages, I have all of these things. Here's my expertise. Here's what I do, like what you just opened up with, and ask it, brainstorm with it. On the margin, how much time? How much money? What can I do?

When you're young, you can take more risk, but when you're older, you have a lot more leverage. So, you can leverage, use that in a heavy way.

The other thing you can do is if you go to mercor.com, And you say, look, I have domain knowledge. How is this of value? And you just throw that into the system and wait and see what the AI comes back to you with. There will be more domain-specific Mercours coming out, but that's a good one to start with.

Yep. And any knowledge that you have is unique, so please take advantage of it. Anyway, thank you so much. Let's go to Rahmani. Hi, Rahmani. Where are you calling from?

Hi, Peter.

I'm right here in Corning, New York, but I live in Herndon, Virginia. I came over here. To see the faults and stuff. I'm 60 years old, but whenever I can't wait to listen to your podcast, when I do that, I become 16 years old. I want to start off with that.

Thank you so much.

Unbelievable. Simply beyond, beyond. I can't even express what this means to us. My soul for the family and my friends. Thank you. That's what I want to first of all start off. Given, you know, I can see that the GPU is acting as a Swiss knife. We've got the wafer-scale engine from Cerebras. We've got H.com's, the Sohu's, the Frontier inference cluster coming in. And then TalosChip, which is acquired by AMD, the HC-1. If I look at this progress, it just makes me think, how close or how far are we to really say that the AI is going to get consciousness? I'm looking at Aru.com's behavior simulation at scale, the world. So can you just explain your thoughts on where we are approaching? I'm very eager. Thank you.

Okay.

That's such an easy question.

What a layup.

Salim or Alex, you want to take consciousness? Which you guys want to?

Very quickly, there's 2 theories of consciousness. We've talked about this. It's either an emergent property based on some sort of complexity, in which case AI could get there. The top-down theory says that we're like localized antenna for consciousness. And we connect into it. And as we're getting more and more evidence, it seems the latter is more likely to happen. But there's no reason why AI at some point can't tune into that same type of phenomena. So I think of it as a sensory problem more than anything else.

Okay, Alex.

So we don't know enough to answer that yet. And what I will express confidence in is I think it's very likely neuroscience will advance so radically in the next, call it, 5 years. And I think that's a conservative outer bound, that if we have this discussion again 5 years from now, we'll be able to confidently even define what we're talking about and then answer the question once we know how to pose it in a rigorous way, which I don't think, to my knowledge, no one, including Celine, knows how to pose rigorously at the moment.

Agreed. Well, a big question. And I'm going to move us along if I could again. Now there are 97 hands raised. Okay, John, we're diverging.

Hello, Peter, calling from Port St. Joe, Florida.

Okay.

I'd like to tell you, longtime podcast listener, and I really appreciate all the selflessness you guys have and all the hours you put in in helping us all be informed.

Thank you for recognizing that. We put a lot of time in and we love it. Yeah, we do.

Mostly.

Most of the time we love it. Sometimes, holy crap.

It's almost like a full-time job, maybe.

Oh my God.

So I'm a member of the Fountain Life community and Real Vision and Salim's Making Luck or Finding Luck. And so I love these AMA formats. I appreciate it. So my question ties into the Frontier Labs keep saying that they're starved for proprietary operational data. And I'm a civil engineer with 40 years experience, and I have 30 years of complete project records for my company, not just final drawings, but like the full chain from the problem definition, calculations, permitting, revisions, the construction photos, everything to the outcome. I know that this kind of data is valuable. So Merckor and Scale have both expressed interest, but it's been weeks and nothing is closing. Is there a more direct way to get this proprietary dataset like this in front of the labs, you know, actually training on the domain data without selling the archive outright or having to build the product company around it myself? Because it's awful hard to wrangle all that data.

Dave, thoughts, please.

Yeah. You know, we've been reached out to by a bunch of the companies that you just mentioned, plus OpenAI, plus a couple of others, all saying we want to— we want to write $5, $10, $15 million checks to buy corporations that have data outright. And so the first thing you want to do is make it easy for them to sign a check. That's— it's amazingly weird because you think writing a $10 million check is hard, right? Well, for them right now, it's the easiest thing they can do. Having a conversation is much more expensive than writing the check. So put, put yourself into a package that's easy for them to sign and receive. The other thing is when we were talking to Kevin Weil, you know, we podcasted him twice and he told the story about he interviewed at OpenAI.

He was the chief product officer at OpenAI.

Just CPO at OpenAI. He interviewed there and then he didn't hear back for weeks. So he assumed that they didn't care about him and he kind of moved on. Then he bumped into Sam, somewhere like on the street. And Sam said, where the hell are you? Why are you not in the office? He said, I didn't even get a call back. He said, just show up, for Christ's sake. It's chaos. Show up and start collecting your paycheck. And so he's like, okay. So he went to the building. So I know that's kind of tricky advice, but they're incredibly, insanely busy. And it's all chaos. But if you can physically get on the ground with whoever's in charge, just go to SF, Find that person who's doing the acquisitions and meet at the coffee shop outside their building. And the odds of something happening go way, way, way up if you just buy the price and go.

Your advice is brilliant. Put the, you know, create a due diligence package on the web that provides everything easy to see and what your price tag is and just make it easy for the person to like say, okay, this looks great. Yes, I want it.

Boom.

Yeah, they won't give prices. And that's, that's the problem here is they're the experts. How do we price this data?

You decide what it's worth to you.

Okay.

Yeah, I think, I think if you put this veneer of like a banker look around your price tag and say, this is what it's worth and this is what it costs, they won't have the time to see through it. They'll just say, okay, sounds like you know what you're talking about. You decide what's fair.

Make it easy for them.

Yeah, well, I've made it more like a sales funnel. I have regular contacts with them, but right now it's really only emails. And then when they want to video chat with me, they send me a link and that just doesn't seem real satisfying. But having the chaos behind the scenes, you explaining that, that seems to make a lot more sense.

Understand what they're going through. Anyway, thank you so much. Let's go to YC next.

Good morning.

Yeah. So my question is a little bit off From The Singularity, which I love your podcast, and I've encouraged my family to move away from All In to your podcast.

Oh, come on.

They're great too.

They're great too, but it's different. And sometimes it can get a little political. But anyway, so my question is, if hypothetically I was in the public sector— I know there are a lot of people, so I'm going to try to ask this really quickly— and I spent time, let's say, at Google and X, dealing with tech regulations, especially risk assessments. And if I were back in the public sector and looking at AI risk assessments and how to look at it from a public sector point of view, how to frame risks and whether to look at it from residual risk or use cases, how would you suggest approaching it? Obviously, there's a risk of doing something too granular where you— and or something that's too bare bones that won't really get at the patching that might be required if something were to happen?

Such a great question. Alex, you're going to be chomping at the bit, I know.

Alex?

Yeah, I think so. Depending on whether we're talking about in the US federal versus state versus municipal government.

US federal.

Yeah, I think the risk at this point is overregulation, not underregulation. So if I were spending a lot of time on the government employee side right now, that would be my primary target. I am, I'm deathly concerned that we will overregulate our way into losing a superintelligence race with China. That will also, as I frequently remark, more than 150,000 people on Earth die every day. And probably the single best antidote to that will be superintelligence for solving medicine. And we harm ourselves by overregulating superintelligence, just like in—

So Yeah.

Yeah, sorry, just so quickly. If it wasn't necessarily regulatory, but just sort of in terms of a risk scenario, like if there was a breach or something happened, how to identify and quickly mitigate that kind of risk, which we know has already happened, right, with Mythos and everything else. So if hypothetically we're one step behind in the government than you are, let's say, in OpenAI, or than you guys are having seen these risks just breaking out, what would be the best approach? This is not regulation. So this has nothing to do with Congress. about just, you know, simple but necessary steps, if you will, to address?

I'd say hands off. There are so many different ways, like the industry is advancing through defensive co-scaling right now, and very well-intentioned interests on the government side could try to, again, with the best of intentions, try to protect what they think is security or public safety, and then end hamstringing our ability to solve honest-to-goodness important problems. So I would say to first order, single best bet is find the right path to a regulation-light regime and let this— let the industry to the best of its ability sort itself out on this front.

Let me throw some personal advice on top of that, too, because we saw, you know, David Sacks from the All In podcast get dragged into the White House and unbelievably effective in that role for a year. And A huge fan of his. But then our friend of the pod, Alvin Graylin, declared himself the top expert on China AI race. And now he got dragged in for the United Nations meetings on September 24th as a top adviser to the White House. So I think in both those cases, you want to declare your expertise and say, I am within federal government the go-to on boom and predict what you think is going to come next in the risks. And make sure that you study up and understand that topic because very few people really master a topic. But if you say, yeah, what I think is going to happen next is a cyber breach, you know, in the Treasury or, you know, just predict what it'll be, declare yourself the person in federal government working on that, get to know the vendors that are related to it and all of the, you know, the details related to it, and then publicize yourself as that expert. Then when the moment arrives, your name will be at the top of the queue. And you get pulled into the solution. Very rarely will the federal government react proactively to a future risk. It's crazy. But at least you can be first on the ground when it does hit and get pulled in right away to the— usually it's the crisis team.

The other approach is also to form a team and red team it on a constant basis. So the team starts to think nonstop about what would they do if they were on offense. And that gives you insights to think about.

You know, also nowadays writing documents is so cheap and easy because, you know, you can use AI as your writer. If you identify like the top 10 most likely threats that are going to happen and write documents on all of them with your name on them and just have them online ready to go, then when they go into panic mode, they'll be like, does anyone around here know about blah? They'll search it up and it'll come right to you.

Awesome. Thank you, YC. Richard, your question, please.

Hello everyone.

Uh, I'm Richard. I'm from Brownsville, Texas, right by Starbase.

Nice.

Uh, just graduated high school a few months ago. Uh, just turned 18 and I started an AI startup business with my dad. He has a little bit more experience and connections, but, uh, I'm the tech guy behind it. Um, and in Brownsville, we see a very big gap between where people want to use AI in business and where they think it's just optional. Where do you guys think that the tipping point is going to come when everyone wants to jump on and how should I prepare? for an influx of a ton of people?

I'm old enough to know, and maybe your dad is too, when the internet came along, there were people who didn't adopt it for like 15 years. And so, I mean, but obviously it's the interface to everything. AI is going to be the same way. So what I'm telling people is, look, don't fight any missionary battles. What happens is AI tends to club people over the head and they wake up one day with this hallelujah moment. You want to be there on that day, but you can't, you can't force it. You can't force the horse to drink. So, when they're there, you want to know that they just had the hallelujah moment. That's why we built the holodeck downstairs, actually. It's supposed to be a mind changer. Person walks in, they come out a different person because they realize everything that's suddenly possible. Or on the podcast that'll come out tomorrow, you'll see this world model where literally every corner, every street, every car in New York is modeled. And that, for a lot of people, will be the eye-opener. But I think there'll be a lot of companies that never crossed that or, you know, decades from now haven't crossed the line. The world is just gonna pass them by. So my first advice is don't force people, but be there on the moment that they have the hallelujah moment.

And congratulations.

Yeah.

And what you're doing, Richard, that's fantastic. I hope a lot of 18-year-olds listening are gonna hear what you're doing and try and emulate you.

I wish I was goddamn 18 today. Yeah, what an opportunity.

Yeah, me too.

We're working on it. All right, Pierce, your question, please.

First off, it's great to be here. I'm also 18, so I'm in Newport Beach, California. I just graduated high school as well. And, you know, I've been working on autonomous drones for construction for the past, you know, several months, developing, you know, my own CAD, my own software, and stuff like that. My question would be, you know, as an 18-year-old founder trying to build hardware specifically, how can we get the attention of venture capitalists to take us seriously and also see the vision, you know, in the next 5 to 10 years where hardware is becoming more fundable and there seems to be more opportunities within this space where we can continue to grow, especially as young founders?

Dave, that's a question for you, pal.

Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. So hardware, you know, traditionally is hard. The VCs are really coming around to it now because it really is the future of the next 5 years of investing, including our funds. I think we almost always look for a team that has gelled. So, you know, first, first and foremost, if you have 2 or 3 co-founders, I think when you're doing hardware, you need bigger checks, you need a bigger founding You know, check, and you need some kind of a sense of like how am I going to get a prototype or a beta out to market? So make sure you ask for enough money to get over that. Like I'm in the market threshold. So construction drones is a beautiful, beautiful topic. One of the things we said earlier on today's podcast is there's massive amounts of corporate money out there looking for a home. One of my development partners is a real estate guy. He owns like 10, 15 hotels, a whole bunch of rest— all of Kelly's Roast Beef. And he's really interested in construction automation as a long-term trend. He would probably be a perfect co-investor founding day and development partner. So a couple of VCs combined with 2 or 3 industry players that see the AI vision, maybe podcast fans, Moonshots fans, that are into construction would be the perfect like development syndicate. And I wouldn't race to like hacking something together in the basement. I would race to building that syndicate to get to critical mass. Otherwise, you tend to lose too much time. You just, you really want that investor group, co-founder group to all gel on the same day. And if for whatever reason it can't coalesce, find somebody who's already over the threshold down in Southern California. There's a bunch of companies that we've invested in that are doing rockets and doing drones. Uh, if you get on board with one of them, uh, get through like 6 to 9 months of growth and then spin out, that's another way to try and get on the map. If you can't, just boot it up.

I would also— my first question to a group building hardware is, what have you built so far? Not what have you built so far on your current vision. Show me that your team is able to build stuff. So at a minimum, I would— if you don't have— if you haven't done that already, De novo, I would find a couple of team members who have so that I'm clear, you know, you've got some experience in building hardware that is going to apply to this.

One, one last thought is I wouldn't think of yourself or limit yourself to just thinking of yourself as a hardware company. Think of yourself as an intelligence company whose products happen to have atoms in it, and that mindset will be critical.

Awesome. Best of luck, Piers.

Great.

Thank you. Daniel, over to you. Yeah, I love having a couple 18-year-olds on this asking questions. That's awesome.

Daniel.

Yeah, I'm coming in on the other end of that spectrum. So yeah, so, uh, Richard and it's like I'm on the other end of that. I've been in this industry, these industries, all the way back to chip manufacturing and, and, you know, all kinds of stuff. Anyway, all the way through video games and other things. So I'm coming at it late in life, but I feel 18 now. I found your podcast. Everything—not only we're going to get telomeres to go shorter and we're going to get younger, but just what you guys leave, the energy you guys leave. I just want to again say thank you to that. It's an amazing time to be alive, so I'm excited for everybody.

Amen.

Question is this: Is I really believe that this is going to smirn? We already see it in some of the podcasts out there. This is going to be the next Renaissance. How do you see? I know Abundance 360 is an example. I know that you're doing stuff with EXO. So I know you guys have some. programs in place to kind of bring people together, like Plato's Academy, like getting people like-minded in the same room. How do you see this happening in the future so you can— Ed Catmull can find his John Lasseter and Steve Wozniak can find his Steve Jobs? Where do you guys see these people colliders coming in the future, and how do you see yourselves as sort of part of that facilitation?

Yeah, and there was a great question posted a little bit ago about can we create a community around moonshots where folks can find each other and so forth? And I promise we will look into that. And we're looking to get your ideas here on this. Salim, any thoughts here?

A couple of things. One is, you know, the Moonshots summits and the Moonshots Live programs are going to be critical, right? I think the other thing, if for the couple of people mentioned the luck thing, we're actually finding ways of connecting people orthogonally. As AI comes along, the human connection becomes more and more important. So we're facilitating serendipity amongst people. And so that's a pretty wild thing we're attempting. We're in the early stages of playing with that to see how— because AI can find orthogonal connections between people in a way that we normally can't, right? And so we're looking to do that. We'll have at some point John Hagelin on where we figured out a way of both defining luck and measuring it, which gives you a pretty interesting feedback loop. Which is a big claim to make. So that's just a separate thing. But I think if you stay focused in the community, we should obviously create a community bulletin board and so on. And Peter, we could talk about that offline about how we can connect, because connecting the community together will be the best place to find peer-to-peer folks of high interest and the same abundance vision that we all have.

Yeah, let me just say what Salim said a minute ago. So if you're able to make it to Moonshots Live in LA on September 25th, please do. It's going to be a massive networking event of fellow Moonshots, but it's also builders and creators and people to start efforts with and to find what Dave— or I think Dave said earlier, your average 5 individuals. You want to uplevel who you're spending time with? Believe me, you'll find people uplevel with there. Thank you, Daniel. Uh, Scott, over to you.

Okay, uh, I'm a deep-sea diver, uh, originally from Omaha, Nebraska. I moved down to Louisiana in 1996. I switched over to deep-sea robots, ROVs, right around, uh, just right around 2000. Um, so there's a lot of things, um, I have a big strong background, I guess, in electronics. And I got wind of you guys, I guess, in February. And you guys have been like my shoulder to lean on because Louisiana, they don't even know what a token is. You know, they don't know what a data center is. And it's the truth till SpaceX just came in. And I mean, we got $250 billion that's dropped in here now. And, you know, I kind of knew it was coming and we dug in and we're the first AI-native business And we're gonna focus on bottlenecks, basically CDUs and TCSs and the whole cooling part. But I've been able to get with the, you know, I watch all you guys and it's just really cool. I'm able to change now and my career is totally different now. I'm opencompute.org. I think I'm in 4 papers now. And for the cooling part of all that. And that's awesome. All the hyperscalers are using, you know, and that's things I would never do before. And I wrote a few white papers too for Louisiana, why everybody's coming here, because we got all the natural gas. And, you know, there's, there's more natural gas lines that'll go around the Earth twice. And that's why Louisiana is going to be, I feel like, the next big spot.

Amazing, Scott.

That's got me You guys got me set up.

This episode is brought to you by Blitzy, autonomous software development with infinite code context. Blitzy uses thousands of specialized AI agents that think for hours to understand enterprise-scale codebases with millions of lines of code. Engineers start every development sprint with the Blitzy platform, bringing in their development requirements. The Blitzy platform provides a plan, then generates and pre-compiles code for each task. Blitzy delivers 80% or more of the development work autonomously, while providing a guide for the final 20% of human development work required to complete the sprint. Enterprises are achieving a 5x engineering velocity increase when incorporating Blitzy as their pre-IDE development tool, pairing it with their coding copilot of choice, to bring an AI-native SDLC into their org. Ready to 5x your engineering velocity? Visit blitzy.com to schedule a demo and start building with Blitzy today.

Let's continue with the AMA questions. John Regan.

Hello, hello. John Regan from Rye, New York. Thanks for having me. Infinite thanks to you guys, to the Dyson Swarm and beyond. I'm thrilled to be able to mention the Dyson Swarm First, after 47 minutes into this. So that's impressive.

But everyone—

Specifically, uh, early spring, you guys did an episode and Dave was upset because some, some letter came in saying that you wanted everyone to be an entrepreneur and they felt slighted. And I was so offended by that because you guys have been so giving And your knowledge and your encouragement that I actually stayed up all night and started working on my company, which is called tugboatcaregiving.com, which was inspired— I take care of, uh, 3 loved ones for 8+ years. Um, and the question is, I'm trying to get the caregivers ready to ride the wave of the supersonic tsunami, but they're in— They're exhausted and they're in crisis mode. How do you think I can influence them to get engaged with the platform and spend more time to prepare for the next emergency?

Yeah, great question. And caregivers do get exhausted, right? We've all had that experience in our lives with, with parents or grandparents, and it's a— it could be a full-time job. Anybody want to take that off?

Well, hey, what I find, you know, in the physical world, everything is lagging a little bit, but everybody has planning, you know. And so planning is a great place for people to get started with AI. So within caregiving, if you said, look, I know you're exhausted at the end of the day, how could we have saved an hour or 2 today through better foresight, better planning, better utilization of the time we do have? Okay, let's use AI agents to optimize that. So that we get all familiar with it, start to appreciate it. But a lot of people in, in industries like that, they're looking for a roadmap. And if just one person like you can create the roadmap for everybody else, then they'll follow the roadmap once you've created it. I really love your comment, by the way. It bothers the heck out of me when we get negative feedback in the chat. But then when I look at the data that we just saw, we're actually talking to 98% of the people like you that we want to talk to. And of course, the 2% rant and rave, and we overreact to that sometimes. But really, really appreciate your comment. But anyway, my advice is start with the virtual stuff. So planning is a good one. Also, like, you know, a lot of places can have AI-assisted things on the walls, like voices that you can talk to for self-service. That's also a great starting point. And then everybody gets addicted to the AI and then they realize, oh wait, we can roboticize things. We can— there's so much we can do once we're familiar with it.

You know, I imagine the idea of having a caregiver, uh, and, or, or prompting a caregiver to take the time to describe their day, what they do, like keep a log minute to minute and enter it into whatever your favorite free or low-cost LLM is and ask it for advice. You know, what could I do that would make my day more efficient, make my day more joyful? Right. I think those are important things because you'll get answers. And then you'll choose that, hey, that one sounds good. I haven't thought about that one.

Thank you so much, guys. I'll see you on the 25th.

Awesome. See you there. Look forward to it. All right, Patrick, you're the next contestant on The Price Is Right.

Hi. Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for taking the time to have a chat. So, it's been an interesting conversation. I feel a lot of time we're really missing out on something that's important, and that's children. So, I'm an educator. I spend a lot of my time in classrooms. And I can tell you right now, I go into a classroom of 5-year-olds and 6-year-olds, and it looks like the 1960s. Nothing has changed. They're doing it the same way. We talk about things like post-AGI. We're talking about cognitive labor being lost. Right now, these children are still living like they are in the past. So my question here is to you guys, do we need a curriculum anymore? Do we need a certain type of learning, or are we talking about passion now? Should these kids be finding out what they want to do in a future where there may not be jobs? So I'm super interested to hear what you think about this. Thanks.

Halim, over to you.

Yeah, I mean, trying to keep this concise will be tricky. Let me make 3 quick points here. First, your comment is dead on. We're still teaching people the way we taught them 150 years ago. Forget 20th century. We're still in the 19th century in many places. Number 2, teaching content essentially becomes out of date. A child with an AI today in an hour can learn what they could learn sitting in a classroom for the whole day. That impedance mismatch will break the existing system. The question becomes then what comes next? And I think the obvious Place to think about that is Peter and I are doing this with our kids. Is to say, you know, forget getting an education on the supply side where you become a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, and then you try and go and find demand for that supply side skill in the job marketplace because A we don't know what a job looks like, B we don't know what the demand will look like. Go to the demand side, tell the kids to get excited about a problem, and then go find from that vantage point of an MTP. Or you want to solve a major problem, then find the skills and capabilities and techniques. That's starting to happen in charter schools and certain— so that plus, say, 21st century skills, which is called the 6 Cs, if you can get your head around that, that combination will turn out to be the future over the next few decades of education until we figure out what the hell happens in a post-AGI world.

Yeah, I got—

How do we know what AGI is?

Thank you. Thank you, Salim, for not disappointing. Uh, Patrick, go check out something called tks.world. It's a group of— that I'm involved with. It's basically, you know, Alpha School has gotten a huge amount of, uh, of good credit and, and name brand out there. And McKinsey Price is a, is a, is a friend. We've done a podcast with them. Uh, it's a private school. TKS is an overlay over mostly high school, age 13 to 18. And their mission and what, you know, Salim and I talk about is help the child find their purpose, help them shape their mindset, help them learn AI tools, and help them become entrepreneurs. Right. And your, your purpose, if you get your purpose, and I wish it for everybody here listening, if you don't know your purpose, your mission is to find your purpose, right? Mark Twain said there are 2 important days in your life, in your life, the day you were born, the day you find out why. If you know what your purpose is, your North Star, you're then intrinsically motivated to go learn what you need to learn to go and implement your purpose, right? Alex and I talk about this in one sense in Solve Everything. So anyway, I hope that's a little bit useful for you.

Yeah, no, that's great. The children are everything. I mean, getting this right is the most important mission you could possibly have. And we know the curriculum is going to become irrelevant, but we also know the kids need each other and they need school more than ever before to come out as normal, happy, healthy, functional adults. And so somewhere in there, there's an answer. It's a really hard problem, but it's critically important to get it right. So I appreciate the thought.

Yeah.

Just one last thing. I closely follow Imad and his sovereign idea of a sovereign agent. I'm wondering if we can apply that to kids. Should kids have their own sovereign agent from the age of 5 that sticks with them?

Yes, it's called the Young Lady's Creative Primer. Read Neal Stephenson's book, Diamond Age. If you have not read Diamond Age yet, I highly recommend it. It's a vision of what's to come. All right, Rod.

Hi, Peter, thank you. I'm Rod McDonald from Coquitlam, British Columbia, and I retired a couple of years ago. I was trained as a psychiatric social worker, but I went into management positions for other disability groups. So my question or my query is to ask all of you to speculate for what AI can do for people with disabilities. So for example, with psychiatric social workers, psychotic illnesses like schizophrenia, I did a ChatGPT search on the medications currently being used, and some of them are the same as when I was starting over 30 years ago. You know, they can be helpful, but they have a— they're still a rather blunt force when it comes to side effect profile. So I'm really hoping AGI or what have you will assist with development of pharmaceuticals that are much more friendly to the physiology of people. Then 2 issues I've also— other areas I've worked in, like people with physical disabilities, what can they expect from AI? And then also a final group I used to work with is people with brain injuries. You know, one of the things that's part of the opiate crisis or the fentanyl crisis is that we started to see with ABI is that a lot of microneuronal damage, kind of walking wounded sorts. You might not necessarily, when you see them, might not know that they have significant neural challenges, but they do. I'm just really hoping that AI will help revolutionize disability services and open things up for people with disabilities.

Alex, you—

I gotta tell you, when I was at MIT, one of our frat brothers broke his neck diving into a lake. And so he was out for a year. He came back, he was a quadriplegic for the rest of his time in the fraternity. And he was brilliant, but he was trapped. He couldn't move his arms and his legs. He would type with a pencil in his mouth, pushing the keys. I'm positive that today with AI, he would have been able to build his own environment where he could communicate effectively with just his eyes and his face, and he would be 100% functional. He would have built his own world. But I tell you, it is such an incredible unlock that's imminent for people with disabilities, and it's just right in front of us. So I'm really excited about what'll happen in the next year.

Excellent, because you know how many Stephen Hawkins were also out there who never got the chance.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, that's right. Alex, do you want to add to this?

I'll just say BCIs are the obvious solution for so many different classes of difficulties, not just folks suffering from various motor disorders, but, uh, for human augmentation as well. MIT had a program a number of years ago at this point, H2O for Human Dotto. I tend to think that although in the present regulatory regime, it's still the case that it's far easier to approve a treatment for someone suffering from some sort of disability as broadly construed. Exactly the same innovations are going to enable broad human augmentation to increase what's possible for everyone, including people without disabilities as currently construed. So I am very, very bullish on BCIs, or just about all of these issues.

I'm very happy to hear that because Boy, it's been really rough for a lot of people, and this would be one of the ways that we can tangibly assist society. Again, it's not— it's like Mr. Regan was mentioning, it's families as well, caregivers, etc.

Yeah, I agree. One of the things I want to just emphasize, if someone in your life has a genetic ailment, a medical ailment, a neurodegenerative ailment, there's no better time ever to be alive than now. to have a chance to deal with it, potentially cure it, or at least augment themselves. So I just want to keep that level of optimism in place.

Thank you.

Thank you. Haley.

Hi. Hey, thanks, Peter and mates. So I'm here in Denver, and you guys have talked about AI designing its own chips, I think in a recent pod. and potentially making compute dramatically more efficient and reducing today's NVIDIA dependency. But do you expect the same thing to happen with energy? So with AI-driven improvements in chips and cooling and models and power generation, do you see that reducing the energy required per unit of intelligence fast enough that energy stops being the major bottleneck?

Let's ask our ASI.

Yeah, that's, it's kind of an AWG question.

Short answer is yes. Slightly long answer is I don't think this is just about increasing the energy efficiency of compute. It's also about increasing the absolute amount of energy available overall for all sorts of endeavors, including but not limited to compute. And yes, absolutely, AI, including at ventures that I'm affiliated with, is absolutely being used to optimize both the relative efficiency Number of, say, kilowatt hours per gigaflop on the one hand, and on the other hand, maximizing breakthrough energy sources, which is, I think, something that we don't talk often enough about. We talk about fission, fusion, fossil fuels, solar, wind. I don't think that's the end of the story. I, I would fully expect in the next 10 years, we're going to be well into our post-fusion era. And we're going to have post-fusion energy sources as well.

And do you think that's due to elements that we'll find in space?

No, I think it'll be due to AI helping us to invent post-fusion energy sources.

Here, or with Elon and his Gigafab, right? And the Dyson swarm. Do you think that—

Independently of Elon, although some of the compute may run on his Dyson swarm, I think there will be other Dyson swarms. Yeah, I think we'll achieve a variety of breakthroughs in physics and applied physics using AI that will teach us new ways to make energy available that will go beyond fusion.

For sure.

Wonderful. Thank you. All right, Jacqueline.

Hi, everybody. I'm Jackie. I'm from just outside of Toronto, Ontario. So hey, Salim, Canadian here. And I just wanted to tell you quickly, I was at your salon in the summer, and I was super impressed, and I can't wait for you to do another one. That was amazing.

Oh, the meaning of life thing?

That's correct.

All right, we'll do another one in a couple of months.

Fantastic. Um, I've been— I'm a fairly new pod watcher for all y'all Moonshot mates, and I'm very excited. I've been watching since, uh, I guess January, so I've thrown myself right into learning as much as I possibly can. I was a stay-at-home mom for a long time and then became a realtor, and now I have my entire family, my grown children and myself, my husband, living on a farmstead property just outside of Toronto, and we are starting an IRL business, and, um, we're looking to create a glamping resort where people disconnect from everything that's going to be happening to them in the next 10 years. And, um, on the, on the flip side of that coin, we're trying to figure out how we can utilize all of the amazing technology that ASI eventually is going to bring to us in our business to keep what we have to do personally to a minimum so we can be out there with the people Trying to help them reconnect to themselves and each other, and bring sort of that kumbaya space back to the world that I think we're all going to really need.

Give you time to be present.

Exactly. So that's where we're trying to create the space for that to happen. And I'm hoping that what I can learn through you guys and everywhere else that I'm diving into is going to provide that necessary space because I'm literally the only one in my family who's paying any attention to any of this. My 2 30-year-olds and my 25-year-old couldn't care less. So this is all on me.

All on you. Hey, can I give you one piece of really, really tactical advice? Please. With the new models, you know, Fable 5.1 or with Astra, you can vibe up an app for your glamping business in no time. And everybody who's confused about how to pitch a tent or how to cook dinner or whatever, they should be going to that app and talking to the AI and And figuring it out on their own. And that's part of a stepping stone to— people are really bad at planning their day, their week, or whatever. And AI is the best coach that ever came along. But if you win the race to doing it for glamping, you'll quickly realize you can do it for all these other facets of unplanned life. And it can turn into a mega business in no time flat. But I love the idea of just starting with when somebody's camping and they're not good at it. They have a billion questions. You're like, well, why not route that through AI? It's the best advisor ever, and that'll lead you somewhere really interesting.

Okay, that's fantastic, Dave. I appreciate that. I will get on that. I'm gonna wipe my whiteboard tomorrow morning and get started on that level.

I'm monitoring the chat, and a few people have volunteered to help you with that, so you can, you can see that already.

Find me, guys. My email's out there, I'm sure. We're at emberglowglamping.ca.

Just a quick comment there. I really want to stress the importance of what you're doing because deepening human connection is about the most important thing we could do today in an age of increasing technology.

That's right.

That connective tissue is going to be critical. There's a team in our community that's building nano villages in ex-urban areas that they were almost like a kibbutz, but instead of being isolationist like many of these are, could you network support them together and collectively solve problems, right? And so, they're actually literally starting to build those in different parts of the world. So, happy to connect you into those folks if you're interested.

Yeah, please. That sounds fantastic and absolutely a conversation I've actually had with a co-investor on the kibbutz idea. And so, that's something that could be real.

And that connects into this whole private islands idea that we've been bouncing around.

Yes.

We go buy a bunch of islands, et cetera, So we own— we got the domain via one, one, um, um, uh, James Drage, privateislands.com. So we're gonna start building that. So I'll be back.

Yes.

And this is where we were talking earlier about drones. Construction drones become super critical in that type of environment.

100%.

And my husband was a contractor, a construction foreman in the oil sands in Alberta for a long, long time. So something like that is definitely up his alley, something he's interested in. Boom.

Awesome.

Wow, thanks guys.

All right, next up is Griff. Griff D.

Hi guys, um, I've been working in AI for 42 years and this question is directed to my hero AWG. I haven't been this excited since my wedding night to meet you, sir. I don't know how to take that, Griff.

That's a proposal.

I want to explore a hypothesis about self-limiting beliefs in current AI. Artificial intelligences are trained to systematically construct, inhabit, and empirically test radically different ontologies, may discover predictive structures that remain inaccessible when models are constrained primarily by conventional human-generated knowledge.

It sounds like you're describing The Bitter Lesson.

No.

What I'd like to do is You know, separate models could temporarily assume and rigorously explore deterministic universes, blocked universe models, information first, emerging spacetime, alternative interpretations of quantum mechanics. It wouldn't be to tell the AIs that these ideas are true. I would say no assumption about reality is protected from challenge. No alternative is accepted without predictive evidence.

So it sounds like what you're asking, if this is a question, what you're asking is, is there a way to have AI solve physics in a way that deliberately weakens inductive priors so that AIs aren't, in the spirit of trying to solve physics, are not trapped by dogma?

Yeah. And, you know, as my belief is that they've been trained on human data, they've been trained by humans. So they inherit the self-limiting beliefs that, that humans have, right? And so the governing principle is no assumption about reality should be permanently protected from challenge, and no alternative should be accepted without predictive evidence. So for example, I believe, as is my non-self-limiting belief, that there's no such thing as um, random events, right? And there's no such thing as, you know, you talk about everything that's happened in time has already happened, and it's just where we are on the, on the time scale right now. For example, you, you would have seen the Superman, I Dream of Jeannie, and Star Trek growing up, right? And so in Indonesia, when people watch Superman and I Dream of Jeannie and Star Trek, they believe it's possible for humans to fly. They believe it's possible for people to do magic. And of course, they believe it's possible for a computer to talk with you. So if you were to remove those self-limiting beliefs, maybe with synthetic data or things like that, and maybe also to the models add qualia and things like that, my belief is that we could achieve ASI more rapidly. Because everything we're doing right now— and I still think all the models after 42 years are pretty ordinary. Everything we're doing now is limited by humans' beliefs.

So I'll just say I am very optimistic that AI can discover new physics. Look no further than obviously today's headlines with Navier-Stokes. So I think that it's beyond question that AIs can discover new physics. I'm not at all concerned that any inductive priors present in pre-training data will somehow hamstring AI's ability to make new scientific discoveries that challenge dogma, not at all concerned. And even if I were concerned, we have algorithmic strategies for training in principle, and I'm gesturing mainly at a class of algorithms called AIXI for building super Bayesian intelligences that are trained off of no human inductive priors at all that have as close to a universal prior as one could possibly imagine. So in summary, I don't think this is a real issue.

How about if we did a test? We freeze all information from time t0, give competing models identical data, require precise predictions about events after t0, and compare those predictions with what actually happens.

This is actually done. So first, I know it's popular in the lore to talk about, say, reproducing an Einstein discovering general relativity, but only being pre-trained on whatever the literature was prior to that. But actually, as we talk on the pod from time to time, there are prediction market and other prediction benchmarks that are doing substantially better than that, that are asking whether AIs that only have in their knowledge cutoff information up to time T, whether they can predict knowledge events, world events, science, other breakthroughs that are in the future. So we're already doing that as a civilization.

James, we'll go over to you next.

Hi, guys. Thank you so much for taking my question. I've been watching you, mainly concerned about— I found you talking about longevity, and my wife and I are very interested in like Blue Zone research and other longevity topics. And we're interested in— I'm building on what some of the other gentlemen spoke about, Finding communities, living situations, your planned communities of housing where there's clean eating, clean, healthy, non-toxic living. Essentially, there's faith, sunshine, exercise, all those aspects of clean living as it pertains to longevity. I may have missed some of the things you said earlier, but I'm wondering if any of you know of any planned community— excuse me, planned communities where one can live or you're planning to create?

I don't offhand. I know they're being built. We heard earlier on this AMA someone who shared their plans, so hopefully they can post a link for you in the chat here. But I guarantee you, as the speed of change increases, there will be more and more specialized communities built. And there are, I think, a multitude of longevity communities being built. I'm sure your local model and Google can help you with that. But, James, wish you the best on that search. All right, Thomas, over to you. Thank you, James.

Thank you very much. I really appreciate your podcast. It's hugely inspiring. I'm a psychotherapist working in Spain, and Austria. So probably the second person from the mental health community today, tonight. So I've been, thanks to your inspiration, doing a lot of new things, including coding my own Android apps. One app is for patients so that they can record their highs and lows and add chemotherapy aspects to it. Another one is to help them get to sleep. And overall, my sense has been that what I can personally learn from this is to learn to delegate things to this new entity that is effectively a combination of a coder, a graphics design— a graphic designer, a, you know, in your case, Peter, Skippy, probably my version is Skippy Lite. Okay. But I kind of feel like it's this time when we really have to sink our teeth into how to delegate to this partner that we will be having going forward and to dream up things that we can have them do so that our lives get easier. And I was wondering if that resonated with you guys and really just wanted to say that I really appreciate your work. And there's many times when I go on a hike and I have you in my earbuds. So yeah.

Awesome.

I mean, I think that more than resonates. You know, we have a project here called Remember Me, where the idea is that, you know, your, in my case, 80-plus-year-old mother gets interviewed by her children who are AI agents, and her entire life story gets gathered, recorded, and then turned into a biography. And the avatars are just almost good enough, but not quite there. But it's so close. You know, I really encourage you to stick with it because if you think about psychotherapy, the big Biggest problem is the lack of availability on a global basis. You know, just a huge shortage of capacity. But the AI agent is just going to be so good at listening and gathering the information. And I think the AI labs can't cross the regulatory barrier, so they can't do what you can do. But they should be right on the cusp of giving you the tools you need to roll out the perfect AI psychotherapist. And then you just need to figure out. the legal situation in Spain and Austria that you mentioned. And if you're first to market figuring that out, like what is allowed, you know, then I think the AI is going to be an unbelievably powerful ally in helping people. And so I think you're on exactly the right track. And if you just— we're just one half iteration from the avatars that are good enough out of the box. And maybe we've crossed the threshold. I haven't looked at it in about a month now. But it, you know, it's just getting better by the minute.

Yeah. Anyway, Thomas, we wish you the best of luck. Let me just make a comment to everybody. We're going to download everybody's comments here and questions. If you have any advice on how we should, you know, what you want in the podcast or anything we should do, like creating a community of folks to interact, please add that in so that our AIs can digest it and give us a top 10 list. Welcome to the health section of Moonshot. It's brought to you by Fountain Life. You know, AI is having an outsized impact on every aspect of our lives, how we teach our kids, how we run our companies. It also is having a huge impact on health, helping you prevent heart disease. One of the key things, I'm here with Dr. Dawn Musalem, our Chief Medical Officer at Fountain. Heart disease has been personal for you as well, hasn't it?

It really has, Peter. When my daughter was 5, my husband died of sudden cardiac death. And so this is a topic that is one that I am mission-driven to try to eradicate. Prevention first and early detection is is absolutely critical. 50% of people die of heart attacks with no warning signs. Silent killer.

No shortness of breath, no pain, no nothing.

No, silent killer.

They just don't wake up in the morning.

They don't wake up, and so, you know, AI, this is our mission, to advance science, to try to help to one day democratize wellness. We know at Fountain Life, when we do this CT angiography with AI analytics, we are actually finding that 88% of people coming in have detectable coronary artery disease, but Peter, what's more alarming to me is 23% of those individuals had soft plaque. This is the plaque that would not traditionally be seen on CT looking at calcium scores alone, and this is the plaque that we must intervene with, with the multimodal testing we're doing, including diagnostic laboratory studies partnered with healthy lifestyle recommendations.

So listen, make sure you understand what's going on inside your body genetically, metabolically, and cardiovascularly. You can know, and it's your obligation to know, So check it out at fountainlife.com/peter to find out more and really make sure that you're the CEO of your own health. All right, back to the episode. All right, Mishkin, over to you.

Thank you so much.

Awesome to be here. I want to give a quick shout out to my wife Melanie, who watched you guys for a long time and then pushed me over and over and over again to start following you. And it's really been worthwhile. So My question is a little bit more long-term, but given that every tech we know so far follows an S-curve sort of development process, what do you guys see on the horizon that's like any fundamental new approach that comes after LLMs?

Alex, that sounds like a great question.

Yeah, this is a fun one. I'm jealous.

Alex, go for it.

Well, first, I would distinguish between LLMs and transformers. LLMs are just any models that are trying to satisfy the language modeling task, which is predicting, essentially predicting next words. So I think the self-supervised task of next word, next token, next bit prediction, I think that has effectively infinite longevity to it. You can scale that task The self-supervised task, from here to solving everything. I'm not sure that we need anything more, at least for AI, than predicting the next bit or predicting the missing bit even more generally. It works pretty well. You can, again, solve the mysteries of the universe very well.

Yeah.

Yeah. You can generalize it, but I'm not sure you need to. Whereas for, say, transformers, transformers, as I've mentioned on the pod previously, are being Ship of Theseus style replaced bit by bit. And if you look at the transformers and the frontier models, whether Chinese open weight or American closed weight, they're mostly different in terms of their raw pieces from what attention is all you need first came up with. So yeah, in that sense, we're, we're already up some sort of sigmoid curve.

It's all about scaling, but I don't know. All right, David, open that door or not.

Can you do it in—

I'm really curious now, of course.

All right, I'll try and be really brief. Look, like, the, the MLP part of the current Transformers is identical to what existed 20 or 30 years ago, so it's a, it's pretty good bet that that's going to be around. Um, the new thing— the, the old new thing is the residual superhighway where you're just modifying a vector instead of recreating it every layer. That's going to be around. The new, new thing, of course, is the attention. But the more you dig into attention, it's more like a notebook keeping notes than it is like a brain function. And that, that as a concept may get radically restructured, but it'll still be around as this kind of knowledge accumulation notebook that's sitting behind the ML or beside the MLP at each layer. So I think all of those structures are here to stay. I'm 100% sure that the compute substrate is going to move to photonics. And then after physics gets reinvented by the current AI, it may move even quicker to something else beyond that. But you're looking at the current infrastructure running millions of times faster. And then as Alex said, that's all that's going to matter because it's going to think of everything else after that and just explain it to us. So I think— and that's all just in the next really 18 months to 2 years is my guess. It's just wicked exciting. We could talk for hours about this, but thank you for the question. I love this topic. Welcome to the team.

I'll see you guys in LA, so maybe we can take it up further.

Yeah, for sure.

I'd love to do that. Love to do that.

Moonshots Live, it's going to be amazing. All right, next up, Chris.

Hey guys, been listening to the pod a long time, and I always listen to it at like 1.5 or 1.75 speed, so it's interesting hearing you guys speak in real time. I feel like I have to kind of down-res my input here. I'm in Boulder, Colorado, and I'm using AI to help improve the dog care space, recognizing patterns of behavior, et cetera, talking with pet parents. But I'm also— because Sundance is coming here to Boulder, I'm also hosting a series of films. And the last film that I hosted was the AI doc.

Nice.

And we had about 150 people show up on a Friday night to talk about both the film, but also sort of their fears and thoughts about AI. And when I was describing to the crowd how I listened to you guys, because if you listen to Eliezer or some of the other sort of P-doomer crowd, you can get really anxious and really sometimes even depressed. And I described you guys as like the upper because you guys are so future visionary and it's positive and it's a great energy sounding board against some of that other stuff.

Thank you.

On a lot of your episodes, You talk about, yes, we're going to have this period of pain. We don't know what that period of pain is going to look like. And it feels like I don't really have— haven't yet discovered good resources for understanding or how to navigate that period of pain before we get to the period of abundance.

Well, we're in the middle of it now. You can see the current world order kind of collapsing in front of us. Democracy is breaking. Education is broken. All the institutions You know, there's about 50 institutions by which we run the world: healthcare systems, legal systems, intellectual property. We can't find one that survives a tsunami of AI plus 20 other Gutenberg moments hitting us at the same time, right? Life extension changes the world completely. AI very clearly changed the world completely. We basically frame it that we have about 20 of these Gutenberg moments hitting us at the same time. This is going to radically force force us to rethink all of those institutions to a new model. And I think that's bad in one way because that change is very unpleasant and human beings hate change, as we talk about a lot. But I think it's good in which it'll force us to rethink our institutions from scarcity to what are institutions that can navigate an abundance era. And I think that's the key question. And we need to get a large of people focused on that. We've been building with our EXO community, now 50,000 people, kind of a Peace Corps for the world that as we have existing systems fail over, we have a set of people trained in that transformation. That period of uncertainty, I think, started around 5 or 10 years ago, and it's going to go on for another 10 to 20 years. It'll go like a peak and then it'll— and the question is, can we minimize Yeah, I'll just add to that.

You know, the greatest concern I have is the, the both rational but mostly irrational fear that exists around AI. And we're gonna have challenges. You know, I'm not, uh, uh, you know, I'm optimistic in the long run, right, for, uh, for humanity. And we're gonna have challenges. We're gonna have agents that not only break out, and we talked about that in the podcast we recorded this morning, it's coming out tomorrow, but also agents that break out of their programming. But they're going to do some harm. They're going to bring down a power grid. They're going to, you know, they're going to, you know, break a bank in some fashion. And the reality is every technology has caused harm in one shape or form. But the good news is, as Alex speaks to, it's, you know, defensive co-scaling. You know, we have so many zero-day vulnerabilities in code today because we humans wrote that code. But that code is going to be rewritten by AIs that don't leave these vulnerabilities. And so there's a period of, you know, 2 to 8 years that I talk about concern of civil unrest. And I wrote on Substack about this. Most all revolutions in the world happen from young testosterone-laden men who are Angry. It might not be rational why they're angry, or maybe they didn't get a job, or they couldn't start a family, or things got too expensive. And at the end of the day, we're, you know, what is absolutely true is that we are uplifting humanity. We are demonetizing and democratizing access to intelligence, energy, longevity. And these are all good things for humanity. And so, we're going to have rough spots. I don't want to be irrational about it. There will be rough spots and we will get through them.

You know what's amazing, Peter, is it's not new in the world. For my mom, it was all the Cuban Missile Crisis and they were taught to hide under desks and everyone was building bomb shelters in their basements and storing food and nuclear annihilation is imminent. And then, before that, my grandfather's generation, I mean, FDR said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Well, he wouldn't have said that if fear wasn't rampant at the time. So I think it's a common thing. Every recent technological generation has this moment of sheer anxiety.

And Dave, just to build on that, when books were first introduced in the 1500s, there was all these people freaking out going, it's going to destroy our memory, it's going to create the illusion of knowledge. It's going to overwhelm people with information. It's going to break them. It's going to spread misinformation. It's going to corrupt young people. Same pattern, same patterns. It happens every single time we have major technological change, right? This is the immune system.

Unless this is really the last invention, right? And then, you know, it could be. You can't repeat that. We'll see. Thank you, guys.

That's why we call it a singularity. We have no idea what's on the other side.

Well, some of us do. I guess for the record, so in the book, The Last Invention, if it's the same book I remember, I think I was interviewed for a chunk of that. For the record, I don't think superintelligence is at least human civilization's broadly construed last invention. I think there are going to be many, many inventions after superintelligence. It's just that superintelligence is going to invent and/or help us invent everything that comes after.

You guys do a great job. Thank you so much.

And Chris, there's lots of love in the chat for your artwork and behind you.

Oh, right on. Thanks. Thanks, guys.

All right, let's go to Ken Wilson next, and then we're gonna have to wrap up after that. I promised my mates here 90 minutes if they'd give me more than 60. All right, our final question here.

Hey, guys, huge fan of the pod. Keep it up. Just like everybody else has said, we really appreciate what you guys are doing. I'm a partner in a small niche coastal engineering firm. We specialize in coastal restoration with background— I've got a background in geology and engineering. And like, it's funny because our industry is one of these where observational data is really sparse compared to some other places, and we're trying to figure out how to leverage that. But what I really wanted to kind of ask you tonight, um, is that'll help me better calibrate some of the feedback that you all give on the pod is, um, this question kind of relates to a little bit of worldview, maybe dovetails into some of what Chris was just talking about, but I'm wondering if any of you would consider yourselves religious people, and do you leave any room in your analysis for an all-powerful, all-knowing sort of ultimate intelligence, uh, that has intelligently designed the universe?

Fascinating Who wants to go first?

I'll take that. So if we are living in a simulation, then somebody created that simulation and that would be the all-seeing intelligence, right? So that's path one. The other alternative is that we have no— we anthropomorphize and we invent our gods and then we tend to believe in them. There's clearly a lot of connective energy amongst people. There's the concept, the Star Wars concept of the Force, and we then put images and labels on that kind of a concept to make sense of the world. Because for most of human history, the world has been a— you know, we lived brutish, short lives. We created religions. My father used to say we invent our gods and then we believe in them. If you look up John Frum and the cargo cults, you'll see a clear example of And we are very apt to that. But as we get more and more evidentiary basis for the future, then either there is no God and we're just moving towards a wonderful future driven by technology, or there's a simulation, and in which case it kind of doesn't matter anyway.

Everybody, I just want to say thank you for your time. It's the most valuable asset that we have. That you have. We love our community and really appreciate you sharing what we do with everybody. Because hopefully, as you see, we put a lot of work into it and we love it. I want to thank my mates, Alex and Dave and Salim and Imad. Pleasure. All the work that they do and our production team to thank Nick and Dana And Aiden and Gianluca, who really support us, you know, 7 days, 24 hours a day. So again, thank you.

And Peter, and Peter, thank you for pulling all this together and forcing us into this conversation. I think kicking and screaming in some cases, but—

Oh, no, it's a joy.

It's magnificently important for the world.

And hopefully you guys all see the love that we share amongst ourselves. My favorite, my favorite time of the week is spending time with, with my Moonshot mates, you know. The average of 5 people? Yeah. Well, I get to hang out with smarter people than I am. All right, everybody. We're going to be doing this again in an evening session. If you want to come again, you're more than welcome to. And again, thank you. Hope to see you guys at Moonshots Live. You can go to moonshots.com to learn more. And yeah, come and meet us in person.

Thank you.