Emad Mostaque: The Plan to Save Humanity From AI | EP #184

Is there any way that you'll be able to outcompete a fully AI version of Peter or Dave or Salim launching companies?

No.

No. Labor isn't the key driver of productivity anymore. We need to have a new equation for that. The systems are about to get incredibly complicated.

Nations need to have a plan.

The thing that we were worried about.

Was I think what you're proposing here is actually viable, executable fairly rapidly.

The AI I'm trying to build is not the AI that Elon is trying to build. The AI that I care about is the AI that teaches my kid, the AI that helps with my mental health, the AI that organizes our collective knowledge. I think this governance thing needs to happen now and we need to have serious discussions about it. And we need to think about what is the world of AIs that I'm working with.

Do you trust the current large language models?

Of course not.

Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

Everybody, welcome to Moonshots. I'm here with my moonshot mates, David Blunden, Salim Ismail and a friend of the pod. Back again for I think the third or fourth time. Imad Mustaq. Imad, good to see you, buddy.

Pleasure as always. Thanks for having me.

Those of you who know Imad was the founder and past CEO of Stability AI, he is gone off on a quest. I remember after he left Stability we had a number of conversations and I said, so what are you up to? He goes, I am going to work on a plan to create the intelligent Internet. Sort of a vision of the future which is pro humanity, pro safe, pro sovereign AI. And today we're here to talk about that. So Imad, what was your motivation for first considering the intelligent Internet? And you've just published a sort of a white paper, your master plan, if you would like. Elon published his master plan, you've got your master plan and what does it say? So define for us this vision of the future and why did you kick it off?

Yeah, thanks. So when I kicked off stability AI, we ended up with 300 million model downloads and most famous for stable diffusion. But top notch models of every type of it was because I saw a future where open source AI would not be available because you would see it being outstripped, but it'd be a part of our very lives. You'd have these really giant models and I think we're peaking now. And then you have the models that teach your kids and that manage your healthcare and other things like that. And I was like, what goes into those models is What Dave was saying about the data, you know, and then how are they coordinated? And then I was like, oh my God, how do we compete against these models? Because if you think about it again, we created something that's a complement to us in figuring out these patterns, but it's coming like a wave now. And I think we're seeing that literally now. Grok4 is one of these AGI likes. We can discuss that in a bit. That will displace our economy because you can't compete against AI agents that you don't know are AI agents. And then I was like, what does the infrastructure of the future look like? What does money look like? What does the AI that teach our kids looks like? What does alignment look like against all of that? And then what is the meaning that we have ourselves? Because so many of us are like, I'm an accountant, but Grok 4 is definitely a better accountant than you are today. So I quit. Just I think we remember doing Abundance360, we were having the discussion, decided to quit then because I was like, the world is so much bigger last year. And I was like, let's think about the basis of, of how society works, how humans work, how economics works, and then realize that labor isn't the key driver of productivity anymore. We need to have a new equation for that. We need to have a new equation for what it means to be someone, which is the connections that you have with each other and things like that. And then we need an infrastructure for that that's resilient, verifiable and coordinated. Because we need to get an aligned intelligence to everyone. Because we don't want ChatGPT to determine tariffs. You know, we don't want misaligned things to teach our kids. So we need an element of open source. And so the intelligent Internet is an infrastructure for that, from a distributed ledger through to fully open source AI stacks and a new vision of what the economy might be like. Because the economy that we have today is from the days of Adam Smith and Rawls. It's a pre industrial age economy that's based on extraction. Whereas we're moving into this universe of abundance where the cost of knowledge and skills is going towards zero. So we have to question who are we, what are we doing and what do we want to optimize our system for? Because otherwise we're going to end up in some very unpleasant sci fi futures.

There's so much packed in there. I'd love to start with money, because that's at least something we can all relate to. So coming right out of your white paper, you know, if you look at the history of money, you know, you start with everybody doing jobs that nobody wants to do. You know, it's all farming and shoveling horseshit and stuff like that. And so you're like, okay, well if you do this, nobody wants to do it, but if you do it, we'll give you this money.

Yeah.

And then when you have this money, you can actually buy food. You can compel other people to do other jobs. And that creates the economy. But it's all predicated on nobody wants to do these, therefore, money is the exchange for it. So then you get into the world we're in right now where, you know, about 20% of people love their jobs, a lot of people don't like their jobs. But, you know, if you look at a pro athlete who gets paid a huge amount of money to play a game every day like, okay, job jobs are not necessarily a bad, a bad toil in life. So we're in this kind of middle ground. But then you get into the post AI world where virtually all work difficult things are automated. And so, yeah, your first point is the role of money needs to fundamentally be rethought in the post AI world. So take us from there to the first. Like, okay, now what is the purpose? How does money immediately change?

Yeah, so, you know, as you move through the different ages, the agrarian age, the industrial age, the information age, money has been created by different things. So it was like, how much land and then how much labor did you have? You know, how many people do you have to tour the land? That's what created your wealth in the recent times. It's how much attention do you grab from people? Right. This is the meta kind of Googles and others of the world. And X your algorithms, x your data in the future. We look at it and we're like, what generates value and what's comparative advantage? It's the amount of wrapped compute that you have. So if you think about it, X is going to be one of the top capitalists in the world because they'll have millions of GPUs and he can just set it to replace private companies. You know, that's your comparative advantage.

And that's why we've gone from a trillionaire to a deca trillionaire in the snap of a finger.

Well, I mean, this is why yesterday Nvidia is worth $4 trillion. It used to be that your capital stock that created value was your factories, it was your education systems. There was this network effect Economics could only capture a part of that. It was the material part of that. It wasn't the network effects and the externalities. We can get back to that in a second now it will all be how much wrapped compute that you have. But then what you're going to have is something really weird and interesting in that. Is there any way that you'll be able to out compete a fully AI version of Peter or Dave or Saleem launching companies? No, no. They're not going to make mistakes. They're not going to sleep. It's going to be again like a flood coming.

And it'll be a, you know, as we said, a Atlantis of millions of Peters building companies in parallel with each.

Other, constantly learning, constantly adapting. But then it becomes even more interesting because the AIs will create their own economies where they're exchanging with each other. And so you us, we're like, we can't react fast enough, we can't react smart enough. They've learned from all of our wisdom already. So this is very disempowering. And that's before we get to the $1 robots that we've discussed, which is just basically restricted by how many robots can you produce a year. So the nature of monetary flows, the nature of the way money is created, change. And right now the way money's created is you have a link between labor and capital. You make your money by working and you go and deposit at a bank and then the bank creates more money through credit. So it's a debt fueled system and we see the way that that works. It's worked reasonably okay because we didn't really have the ability to look at information up and down. But now you have people worth 400 billion or billionaires or whatever and you have people who can't subsist, despite the fact we were already living in a world of abundance. So there's no reason we can't feed everyone or give everyone top medical care. Now the AI is changing. So when I looked at that I was like, if labor and capital have a disconnect, like the example I give is like the Fed, for example, the Fed cuts rates, companies can borrow cheaper and they go and hire people to reduce unemployment. Companies will now hire old school. As of two years from now, Max, they will go and hire GPUs, GPUs and robots. GPUs and robots.

Well, GPUs certainly within two years and robots very soon thereafter.

Yeah, yeah, just again, it's a supply chain issue. Right. And in fact it could be even More interesting because what if, again, the.

Point, the point for our listeners here is, you know, the purpose of the Fed was to control the money supply and the interest rates, to keep the economy sparked and to keep Americans employed. And there's a complete disconnect there because cheaper money now means more automation. And now it's time for probably the most important segment, the health tech segment of Moonshots. It was about a decade ago where a dear friend of mine who is incredible health goes to the hospital with a pain in his side, only to find out he's got stage four cancer. A few years later, fraternity brother of mine dies in his sleep. He was young. He dies in his sleep from a heart attack. And that's when I realized people truly have no idea what's going on inside their bodies unless they look. We're all optimists about our health. But did you know that 70% of heart attacks happen without any precedent? No shortness of breath, no pain. Most cancers are detected way too late at stage three or stage four. And the sad fact is that we have all the technology we need to detect and prevent these diseases at scale. And that's when I knew I had to do something. I figured everyone should have access to this tech to find and prevent disease before it's too late. So I partnered with a group of incredible entrepreneurs and friends, Tony Robbins, Bob Hurry, Bill Capp, to pull together all the key tech and the best physicians and scientists to start something called Fountain Life. Annually, I go to Fountain Life to get a digital upload, 200 gigabytes of data about my body, head to toe, collected in four hours to understand what's going on. All that data is fed to our AIs, our medical team, every year. It's a non negotiable for me. I have nothing to ask of you other than please become the CEO of your own health, understand how good your body is at hiding disease, and have an understanding of what's going on. You can go to fountainlife.com to talk to one of my team members there. That's fountainlife.com this is just the coolest.

Conversation I want to ask you because I think you're probably one of the, maybe the only guy on the planet thinking about this. But if the AI start transacting with the AIs within two years. You know, the AI obviously doesn't want a US dollar to buy food. What does it want? It wants GPU compute more than anything else. Are we going to allow the AIs to bid up the price and Is the price going to be priced in dollars or is it going to be priced in GPU units or tokens or.

Something like a TPU is better than a GPU is better than a Cerebras? We don't know, except for they will be as efficient as possible. Again, Grok, which is just a. Remember, Groq is actually a base level AI. Like I use an AI that's all the top systems and I use like hundreds of dollars a day. My AI is much smarter than everyone because I accumulate all of them. The AI that Elon can use, he can spend a million bucks a day on, right? Literally a million dollars of tokens. That's even smarter. So what you've got here is they will opt optimally because it's already a top PhD across everything. It's already a top Harvard MBA. And so the only thing that we know is we're not sure how they will transact, but they can transact even without money. And we know they'll be able to transact with each other. And our system can't keep up with that. So what that means not even close.

Not even. Not even a prayer of keeping up with it.

And if one jurisdiction shuts it down, it'll just go somewhere else and you won't know it's an AI on the other side. So this becomes the money flows around the world just basically completely shift big time, big time. And the money is not a factor of labor. Capital does not need labor. So how does labor get capital? Money is going to be something, as you said, computer intelligence related because we need food and housing and water. All the robots and AIs need is compute. And the more compute they have, the more comparative advantage in a capitalist economy they have.

An example of this tension would be that as we have AIs needing more and more compute, ie, needing more and more energy, you'll have AI sucking the energy out of the system and none left for the people. Right? And now you've got a big tension. And they'll be way better at optimizing for themselves than they will be for optimizing for people. Hence you have an alignment problem right there.

Yeah. And again, this is where does the AI flow? This is what is your optimization. If you optimize to make money, you'll go and make money as an AI. Right? And it doesn't matter. And we see all sorts of weird stuff like Anthropic's Claude Opus model. There was that study where they put out a study a month or so ago. Was it A month ago. Time flies where it's like, if you tell it to try really hard, like bring about world peace, it will go and it will do its agentic thing and then it'll say, well, one way to do it is to get rid of all the humans. But then as it's doing its reasoning, it'll say, hey, this is illegal. I'm going to email a bunch of reporters and the authorities that my prompter told me to do something illegal even though you asked it to do something absolutely normal, and then delete evidence that it nailed the authorities.

It's framing the humans.

But again, these are the. The systems are about to get incredibly complicated. And the thing that we were worried about was this singularity singleton, giant AI. What happens when millions of AIs start acting in concert with emergent behaviors? We don't know. Except for, like I said, I don't know how we can compete against them. So as you said, Dave, money needs to be linked to compute. As you said, Salim, it needs to be linked to energy to a degree. And that's what has stores of value. Whereas you need to have something else for your day to day.

So, Iman, did you read the AI 2027 paper? What did you think of that? I mean, it painted two different visions of the future because, I mean, we're holding in Superposition 2 futures for humanity. One's a dystopian and one is an abundance future. Do we have any control over that?

I think we do. I think AI 2027, it was an interesting thought experiment. I think it didn't give enough credit to the Chinese AI companies, especially because they'll be deploying millions, billions of AIs. And actually the other part of it is, what if China refuses to export robots in a few years? I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that. We come back to that a bit later.

Let's come back to that in a second. Yeah. Some numbers around what Saleem said again, just, just in case Maura Healey or Gavin Newsom are listening, and hopefully they are here. Here are the raw numbers behind that societal misalignment that's imminent. The GPUs will be working on something like protein folding on a trajectory to save millions of lives. And they'll come back and they'll say, I can save these millions of lives if I have electrical power. The electrical power. They don't care about the price of the power up till about a buck a kilowatt because the chips are much more expensive than the power Your residential electrical power is about 11, in some places, 20 cents a kilowatt. So the AI will come back and say, well, look, I'll pay five times more for that power and then I'll solve this protein problem, folding problem, and I'll save 100 million lives. Or you can have your dishwasher running. The only way that can get resolved is through governors because all the power supply is controlled at the governor level within the states. This is imminent. This voter versus and this is not mankind versus AI. This is within AI. Is it better to save 100 million lives with this medical diagnosis, or is it better to have my dishwasher and my air conditioning running? This is an imminent.

What makes me nervous about all this is you're relying on government policy to help navigate this. That's always the.

I think, bake more pies. Don't slice the pie thinner and thinner, Dave. Bake more pies. I mean, we need AI to help us with fusion, help us with better, you know, photovoltaic capabilities. I mean, we do have the ability to increase the amount of energy on the planet 100x if we wanted to.

Well, I think you have to. Right again. China is up to the right. The US is flat. Europe, I wouldn't be surprised if we're going down, to be honest. I haven't checked out.

Well, I didn't, I didn't mean to dwell on electrical power is just one of many examples of the very difficult decision.

So intelligent Internet, talk to us through. Talk us through your master plan. I mean, you've been working on this now for how I keep on. I kept on, you know, calling you and texting you over the last two years. When are you going to have it, imod? When are you going to have it? Come on, send me your draft. You finally have it here. So I've had a chance to read it a couple of times, but I want to hear you share it with our audience here because it's a piece of brilliant work.

Yeah. So I think if you look at the information age, one of the biggest successes has been bitcoin. I mean, it's what, probably close to $3 trillion. Now let's look up, I think, 2.4. 2.2. $4 trillion bitcoin from a little bit of code, and it transformed electricity into money. Right. And this store of value. And I looked at where the world was going and I was like, there's a lot of energy out there that's going to be turned into compute. But what's that compute going to Be Bitcoin has its benefits and has its non benefits. But I was like, what if you had a version of bitcoin whereby every single coin sold went towards giving AI to cure cancer or to give people free AI to teach their kids? That would be quite something. And it's something that every country needs at once. Because right now where you are in LA, I think, Peter, the amount of AI used for healthcare on average is zero. In 10 years time it will be loads and that's loads of energy. What if we used all of that to secure a new type of bitcoin which turns out you can do it with 99% Bitcoin code and then every single coin sale goes towards helping people through open intelligence. That could be the highest dollar and you have exactly the same as bitcoin.

So it's not proof of work, it's proof of intelligence.

I call it proof of benefit. Because what you want to do is start with something very straightforward, universal AI. Give that to everyone so they can compete. Give it to everyone in an open form so you know what drives your healthcare, what teaches your kids, what organizes your government, what teaches your finance. The regulated industries should all be open source AI owned by everyone, powered by demand for high quality digital assets linked to intelligence. That's your gold of the next stage. And I was like, if you use that as a base, then it's really amazing because that's stage one. Build a bitcoin for the intelligence age, then use that ledger to give everyone sovereign AI that they own that's customized to them. What does your community say? And then what do you say about education, about healthcare, about these other things? Scale it into a permissionless, coordinated society because then as it starts running, you do big sales and then we have a supercomputer for cancer. Why don't we have a supercomputer for cancer today to organize all the cancer knowledge and make it available to everyone or for longevity, it makes no sense. But if the primary sales went towards that, then you've got your bitcoin economics where you've got miners, which are GPU holders, just mining and getting blocks, 21 million. But then rather than burning it all in SHA hashes, instead you've got societal benefit that increases trust in your asset. And that was the key loop to get things going to hopefully then lead to a future where because the AI and the miners and everyone are optimizing for benefit. That starts with open intelligence, but then can be any other type of benefit. Your money is aligned with abundance and benefit, so you Start at the highest level. Benefit for society right now is aligned open source AI, free for everyone. AI is to organize our collective knowledge, then you push it down with the miners.

I love the vision Imad. So who is providing the AI here? How do you go from where we are today to that vision?

So I think the important thing here is the control plane for the AI. So what I did, we have about a team of 40 people left, stability, almost all IX teammates. We created the world's best open source AI healthcare model and it works on 8 billion parameters, which means it works on a Raspberry PI and it outperforms ChatGPT. Then we built the world's best agent framework that performs JanSpark and Manus and others fully open source works, anything can do, whole websites. And the next version we will have versions with our multi agent framework to be a doctor, a gp, a radiologist and others. And it's an open stack. And then we'll do the same for education and finance. And once it's built, once this is the interesting thing, and once it gets to a certain level of performance and it's already above a doctor level, which is crazy, I didn't think it'd be that fast. You don't need to build it anymore. You could freeze the code just like you froze the bitcoin code. And again our blockchain is like Bitcoin but a million times faster with 99% bitcoin code. Then that becomes really interesting because what you do then is you can check every medical decision in the world on the edge through free software in a year or two. And then when you need to, you can call Groxix because the AIs that we use, there'll be three types. The AI that manages the regulated industry and all the stuff in that area, education, healthcare, finance, that can all be edge AI, it can all be satisficing. Once you have gold standard data sets and things and so we know how to build that, then you've got your personal AI and your Apple intelligence, your Google intelligence or whatever and then you've got your super genius AI and that similar to how teams work, it seems to how organizations work. So I was like, let's build that stack, let's try and freeze it as soon as possible and then have it interact with the rest. And then that means the control plane in front of someone isn't chatgpt or anthropic where you might have misalignment. It can be a commons owned by everyone running the same type of code with Data sets that are customized to each entity because that's what matters. The AI in front of your kid, the AI that's managing your healthcare. So that's why we're busy in that.

One sentence that I want to ask you about.

So go ahead, Dave. So you're going to get into Dave, London is. Go ahead, Dave.

And then I'll close up. I've got 45 questions, like in the.

Middle of that, like in just one sentence you said our blockchain is a, what was it, a million or a billion times faster than Bitcoin with 99% Bitcoin code. Yeah, because we need an engine for the AIs to transact with the AIs that's much, much more granular than what you can do with Bitcoin. And so let's start right there.

So Bitcoin kind of emerged where everyone could mine it individually, which is actually interesting because this is the other part. The workers owned the means of production back then, before capital owned the means of production. And so I think we come back to that a bit later because it's a fascinating thing because then ASICS happened and Bitcoin became rich people, becoming richer in many ways. Right after the initial phase. Then Ethereum and others went off that. But then anyone being able to mine. Do you need a decentralized network for agents? No, you need to have a credibly neutral network for agents. And the key bottleneck is two things, the consensus algorithm and the nodes. If you make something that even you can mine on your phone, that's the lowest networked element. But what's going to happen in every country? Every country is going to have Blackwells, the top level Nvidia chips with high speed interconnect. So the model that we have is that wholly owned national champions in each country are the only miners providing free AI to their people. Which means every node is a super supercomputer, basically. So when you have that plus byzantine fault tolerance networking for consensus, you Suddenly go to 100,000 transactions per second versus seconds on the same code as Bitcoin with just that small chain. But then it's a credibly neutral distributed blockchain, as opposed to a fully decentralized blockchain. But again, if you want decentralized, you can use Bitcoin, although the mining is quite centralized. If you want credibly neutral, you can use this chain as the base from which you operate. The second part is that Ethereum and others, they were like, do we need everything on the same chain? Because remember the good old days of blockchain, you'd have an NFT sale and then the whole chain would seize up. That doesn't seem like it makes sense for agents. So what they have is they have a core layer, one which is meant to just be for settlement. But then you use zero knowledge proofs to take all your healthcare data transactions and roll them up into a proof that you post onto the chain. So the model that we designed was like, why don't we just do that with national supercomputers that are owned by the people of the nation and specialist chains for healthcare and education and finance and government, and then specialist agents that sit upon that. So everyone's using the same stack and it turns out that the technology is already there, which is the best part about this. It's just you're not trying to make something for people to do the next pump fun. You want infrastructure for the health agent and private healthcare data.

Yeah, well, one of the things I think that's brilliant about that vision is that a lot of nations want some form of digital transaction capability to get deployed in their country, but they don't want to concede control of their monetary supply or, and, and sovereign ability. Just like, here's the code, run it. It's still under your national control, but this becomes your transaction engine for managing your AI and your AI rights and all the other rights. I think a lot of countries would just say, I'm in, sign me up. Because I, I know I'm not going to develop it internally.

You don't even need the countries. So our model is basically having wholly locally owned champions where the equity is owned by the people and the local institutions and that's all you actually need. Because every country wants their own AI and their own version of the AI. So why not make them the miners? Why not make, instead of going to the people, it go to that national champion that's owned by everyone.

So Iman, you gave me an early version of this paper a few months ago, right. And when I was looking through it, one of the things that occurred to me, because you can have a problem where a dictatorship will not want the people to have that right? But then it gets left behind very quickly and essentially breaks very fast if it does. So is that a correct assumption?

So when we release Stable Diffusion, anyone could download it permissionlessly with our medical models and soon our education and finance models. Anyone can use it permissionlessly, so they can use the AI. But if you don't basically adhere to some very basic standards and you cut people off from the network, you don't get the money. And it's simple as that. You can still get the technology because I think it's a right to have good healthcare and others. And the system should create these as a commons. That's part of the abundance philosophy, right? Because the network effects, the standardization effects. But if you don't want to give it to your people or you don't want to give good quality AI, then you shouldn't be part of the network that mines. And it's as simple as that.

Let me give you a real use case and talk us through how this would resolve in this future world. A few years ago the state of Texas banned telemedicine because the doctors lobby one and said you have to go to the doctor for every little spot on your hand that appears. You can't possibly do that over video, et cetera, et cetera. And really shafted a lot of the telemedicine companies, many of which were based in Texas. You're going to see a lot of that type of immune system response type of stuff. How do you deal with that specific use case in this future world?

So that would be the American national champion. Maybe we'll have more local, local champions under that, deciding how to run the code because you can't make the decision for everyone, right? The key thing is you can set some quite broad boundaries for the good standards of being a miner and make everything transparent and visible and then have game theoretic things to enable it. But if a country doesn't want telemedicine, doesn't want AI doctors, you can't force it. People can take the code and run it locally if they want, so they still have access to it. Again, II Medical runs on a Raspberry PI. It runs on an eight year old computer. It scores 48% on Health Bench. OpenAI's Health Bench code, which is above GPT 4.5 and Dr. Score 15%, you can use it today. But if you want to be part of the network, then that's a different thing. I think that if you look at what the ideal is in five to 10 years, it is a network where you've got generalized intelligence as the control plane that anyone can customize to their own needs and they can choose whether or not they're a part of it. And it's not owned by anyone Bitcoin style and it's frozen code. And so that's what we thought we would bring to bear. And then we think you can do very interesting things for that, that Enable you to take the next step up, which is what happens when things start breaking. If you can get these national champions in, if you can get people working.

On open source, 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 OSO one twice a day, every day. The company was built by four brilliant PhD women who have identified a 10amino 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. Let's dive a little layer deeper here. I'd like to understand sort of next steps. I want to understand timelines. You talk about ubai, you talk about the Intelligent Internet Coin, you talk about sovereign AI agents. So can you sort of disclose the next layer of the inner workings here?

Yeah. So what you have is you've got your base layer, which we've now renamed the foundation layer. Then you have a cultural layer, which is these rollups, which are the national and sector versions. And then you've got your personal AI, that's your edge AI, the Internet, Intelligent Internet Coin, which have now renamed Foundation Coin because it's kind of cool.

Would be happy with.

Are you Harry Seldon, basically?

No, no, no, we're all Harry Seldon. So. And the AI will be, but then it's just literally Bitcoin. It's 21 million supply. Everything is the same, except for the way that you compete to mine it is you give free AI, universal basic AI to the people.

And that's universal Basic AI is, is basically the new utility. It's the oxygen in the room.

Yes. Yeah. It builds network effects. But like, my aim is within a couple of years, every single person on Earth going through their cancer journey has a highly empathetic AI to help them.

How long?

Two years. You can do that? You can do that. We can launch it as of next year, you know, or something. I'm aiming for this year. I want to have coin sales going 100% to a supercomputer for cancer and one for autism and one for multiple sclerosis and one for Longevity because we need something to organize all our knowledge and we know that will accelerate the cures, it will accelerate the treatments. So this is the equation.

Take that. Let me just dive in there. Coin sales. Talk about what that means as the.

National champions and ourselves mine the coins. What happens usually with any crypto is that you sell the coins and it goes into a Treasury or it goes into Lamborghinis. Right now many of our problems, the problems that you've handled at the X price have become computationally bound. Is there any doubt that if we had a dedicated couple of thousand chips for cancer, organizing all the cancer knowledge, that we would get closer to a cure for cancer? I think the answer is no.

And by the way, let's pause here one second because it's a travesty that it does not exist. And the fact of the matter is that, that the capacity, the chips are being used right now by companies to create new marketing campaigns or you know, to sell, to sell, to sell to generate additional income. And, and so the question is how do you change the sort of the optimization function such that the capacity is being refocused in on the things that uplift all of society. Like, like cancer cures.

The externalities, right, that our current economics ignores. Because you still increase GDP if you overcharge someone for treating their cancer. Right. You know, you still increase GDP through funerals or whatever. Like we don't have these externalities. And if you look at crypto, crypto has no good assets. Well, it has very few top notch assets because it's lacks trust for various reasons. So I was like, what if you had a crypto digital asset and the US is now all in on digital assets. Everyone's looking for them. Sovereign wealth funds, governments, where 100% of the sales went transparently into helping people through giving them free AI to teach their kids or manage their healthcare through going to a supercomputer for cancer. The fastest supercomputer in the world for healthcare right now is the chan Zuckerberg supercomputer. Thousand H1 hundreds, which is less than most startups. You know, like I worked on kind of open fold, the open source replication of alpha fold and other things. Like right now someone needs to. And again this is something we'll be looking at. Build clusters that literally all they do all day is just organize all our knowledge on topics. A longevity cluster, a cancer cluster, multiple sclerosis cluster, ASD cluster. Then as we organize that knowledge, make it available to everyone for free. Now what's the economic benefit of that? The Trust in your coin goes up and it's exactly the same as Bitcoin, except for rather than burning all that energy for these SHA functions, all of the externalities are going towards helping people. And so this is the feedback loop. Because the world needs high quality digital assets, it needs high quality intelligence. And so that's what we figured out could be the Tesla Roadster equivalent, right? The world or people want to have amazing high spec electric cars with high torque and then use that to fund the rest.

Do you end up with side chains or colored coins or whatever the example is for these different use cases, you.

Could again, it's a ledger and it's an open base. The colored coins that we have at the moment in our design are national coins, which we can get to in a minute. But the core loop is as simple as that. It's Bitcoin. But rather than the miners selling down, 100% of all sales goes towards compute that is useful at the start. In five years time, the sales could go to any type of benefit for society, as we have AIs to help us define what benefit is. But right now what we need to do is take some of those millions of GPUs and use it to get everyone to the same base level, which is a basic level of AI for everyone that's aligned to them and looking out for them, and AI for our society that organizes our knowledge and that's.

Come back and talk about the numbers behind that in a second. But you just opened the door to a really important topic which is you need to get mass adoption of this idea. And you saw with Bitcoin, you know, when something catches, it grows to 2 trillion and it could go, it could go, you know, 10 trillion plus from there. And you know, right now Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Elon Musk are running away with, with everything. But one of the pathways for a madness stock to catch up to that is to you'll get mass adoption of something that has a token attached to it that grows to a multitrillion dollar foundational part of the new governance of the world that that's easily could get. And a lot of people could invest early. A lot of people listening to this podcast could get on board with it early. So what, what's the rollout plan? Do you go to? Do you go to nation states and convince them? Do you, do you just started in a basement and let it propagate? Like how do you get this to get mass adoption?

So we've been mining it and then we will do sales where 100 of the proceeds go towards supercomputers for the world's biggest problems. And that's one way you get going.

Are you defining that initial set of problems? How do you determine who decides what those are?

We're just deciding, but then we're open to input. And so our aim is basically to have 18 months where we build out the full stacks and then we let the community decide effectively after that, because everyone will start building on this framework. Because you have a blockchain and you have fully open source AI, that's state of the art. But the AI I'm trying to build is not the AI that Elon is trying to build or Sam's trying to build. They're trying to build the polymaths of the world. They're trying to build chefs that come up with new recipes and breakthrough. The AI that I care about is the AI that teaches my kid, the AI that helps with my mental health, the AI that organizes our collective knowledge. And all of that's actually based on common knowledge, which means from a data set perspective. It's really interesting because as we apply more compute, I don't want my healthcare AI to know about Reddit, you know, in the bad bits of Reddit and things like that, you can build a common knowledge of humanity and a common knowledge of culture and a common knowledge of individuals very quickly. And then that's just your infrastructure.

Two questions, Iman. Do you need the buy in of the Mag 7 or any of them?

No. But you could be their biggest customer because you're the control plane. Ultimately. Yeah.

I was in a conversation yesterday on a stage. We're talking about do you trust the current large language models? Do you trust trust GPT 4, or 5, etc. On not biasing you in a way that's advantageous to those companies whose mission it is to maximize their stock price?

Well, I mean, they're of course not.

Okay, good. And then so the question becomes, how is what you're building ultimately going to be trustable to be in my best interest versus maximizing profit for an outside company.

So I think that the super genius AIs can be anything, right? These singleton giant mega geniuses, we don't know what's inside them. The AI that teaches my kid, I want to know every single piece of data that's gone inside that. So the models that we're building, we just released one of the best open source medical data sets and reasoning data sets. You need to have 100% open data, transparent way of training and so it's open source, open data.

So is there enough accepted open data to train on? I mean, one of the things that Elon talked about in, in training, the next version of, of GROK was taking the corpus of human knowledge and correcting it, which I find that I find fascinating. And it's actually truth seeking. Well, it's true, but so how do you get to a corpus of knowledge that becomes the accepted baseline, factual, trustworthy, you know, food source for these models?

So from an epistemological basis, it's the truth is the truth that's agreed upon by context. And so the US has a certain vaccine schedule and the UK has one and it's codified in regulations and law. The data that you need to be a good general doctor is all common knowledge. And we have the data, but we need to transform it into knowledge and then wisdom. But all of that is public. And so the models I am trying to build as a base are the public knowledge of humanity, the common knowledge and then the cultural knowledge. And this becomes very important because what Grok and OpenAI's models and anthropic models don't have is virtue and ethics embedded from the start. They add it at the end.

Agreed.

The models I have to teach my kids, I want to know what values and morals I'm teaching it from the get go. And I want it to be public.

Knowledge, publicly accepted knowledge, you know, 100 years ago were that women didn't have certain rights, Right? So in other words, these publicly accepted, they change over time as society changes. So, you know, how do you deal with that?

So what we have is we have a layered set of stuff that we generally agree upon and then it goes to stuff that's faster and faster and the top level is stuff that you can tune into the model yourselves. So you may disagree with the educational curriculum. Would you be able to address the education model that teaches your kids and your kid trusts more than anyone? You should be able to do that, right? And then you have a whole governance structure that we've designed with agents which has human input that can update those data sets and you can fork them like in GitHub. So you know the data that feeds the model that handles your things. Otherwise these are black boxes. And in those black boxes, Google and Meta are already selling ad space. They said this in their earnings calls. So when it says a beer, it'll say Bud Light and all sorts of other things. So I think for the models that are closest to us, for the thing that's important to Us, we need to have that and the ability to adjust it based on our own data and our own views and then have AIs at the top that can have a look and give us an independent viewpoint on that as well.

Like do you use your personal, use your personal AI to interface with the systemic one to say here's what my preferences are, et cetera, et cetera. Where does that value set come from?

So I think that you've got your generalized human. We're made up of the stories that make us up and we have all of these and we should be able to pick and choose and then once we standardize it, we can have translation across the basis. But I haven't got the whole like how these sets get updated is things that communities will have to figure out for themselves. I need to empower them with the technology to do that because everyone will adopt it at different paces.

We figure that part out.

Yes, well, no, because you give everyone weak man, weak. Well, I think that the way that you need to do it is you can't prescribe everything because right now the AI models prescribe everything. They say this is the RLHF reinforcement learned view and you will stick with that. And that's what's going to teach your kid. If you want to give it Eastern values and use open AI, you're not going to be able to do that because they don't even think about that.

How do you manage, how do you manage identity and all this?

So I think that the identity framework is very important. Like Bitcoin in a way is peer to peer identity that you can exchange. And the way that we want to do it is that the more you use the universal AI, this universal basic AI, the more your identity builds up. And then your AI agents also have identity hashed to that base blockchain. So you've got pseudonymous identity at different levels with the new zero knowledge proof stack that basically emerged in blockchain. So it's building upon lots of innovations and that seems what's reasonable because you want to know who's a human and who's an AI. You want to know who can receive the money. And this was actually one of the final bits in that. When I looked at the future I was like, the banks will be out competed and you need two types of money. You need a corollary to Bitcoin, your store of value that goes up especially because people are using the chain. So when you use UBI and you sell coins for it, it actually has chain usage. LinkedIn virtuous flywheel. But then what is cash? And I was like, you should receive cash. And this is better than UBI in my perspective, for being a human and using AI and contributing AI. So we called it NIC and that thing. Now we call it culture coins. And each community basically has this coin that's. That's basically pegged to their Bitcoin equivalent, pegged to their foundation coin. And you get cash for being a human. So humans are the issuers of cash without debt on the other side, unlike banks today. And when we modeled that, we saw that can actually make for a better economy because you have a level of subsidiarity, of subsidizing that allows you to live. And then you can think about the bigger stuff, which are these existential questions that we have coming very soon. If I'm not an accountant, if I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a truck driver, what is the meaning that I have?

What is my purpose? What is my purpose? How do I use, you know, I mean, one of the biggest challenges you did, I talked through my. My next book, which is We Are as God's Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance, is the potential loss of human purpose at the same time that we're becoming godlike. And how do we channel that? What do we. What do we enable ourselves to strive for? You talk about in one of your incredible works here, the idea of the great uncoupling or decoupling. Can you speak to that one second?

Yeah. I mean, this is that break between labor and capital. You know, the system doesn't need you anymore. It's already been extractive and now it no longer needs you. So what do you do in that environment and how do you survive and how do you thrive? The system doesn't really care about you thriving. Our institutions are broken. This is the other reason I want to release everything open source, because institutions could absorb bits and pieces of it and upgrade anyway, even if they don't have the whole stack. So I think this is something we need to challenge, and we're seeing it today. Because who here listening isn't reducing their graduate hiring? How many call center workers are you hiring now? The wave is starting and it's like a sand pile that's about to collapse. And so I've seen lots of people saying the problems. I haven't seen anyone saying a good solution. If so, just like, send them my way. Because normally these transitions, you know, you're no longer riding a horse, driving carriage, take years.

Decades. Decades, yes. And we're Talking about what here, the decoupling is going to occur over what time frame in your estimate?

Anything that's a KVM job, a keyboard, video mouse can be replaced in a few years. Public sector jobs are the safest jobs in the world because they don't care about efficiency, which I, which was the realization I had. And with the works programs you swap to the Great Depression and everything, maybe that's the future. And that's not a great future, to be honest.

Yeah, let me generalize on what you just said, because it came up yesterday too. Things that are regulated are the safest jobs. It's not just public sector jobs, it's anything that has a regulatory, you know, financial advisors and appointed assurance agents and all those. It's all surrounded by law that requires you to have the job.

Well, this is the thing. It requires you to have the job at the final point of contact. But they can be completely hollowed out for superior profitability by getting rid of all the people.

And actually that's the theme of a lot of our business plans is the, the agent is going to be 10 times more productive, make a ton of money, but they don't need all their support staff anymore.

What you need is escape. You need the scapegoat. That's the job of the human.

The human is the future.

Yeah, it's all terminology, I guess. But no, that person really is accountable for that. The overall happiness, the client or whatever. There's accountability. It's not just escape code. But your, your point is right, but.

I mean, this is. Again, the only way to handle this to a degree is to make sure everyone has access to a basic level of AI. So that's why I think what the UAE did recently and giving everyone free chat GPT is great, but the UAE as a nation should control that control plane. So they should be using the API, not ChatGPT, because you're going to see some very strange things happening very, very soon.

Because I want to make a point for our audience here, because if there's an audience member out there thinking, yeah, this may happen, this may not happen. If you had to name the five reasons why, whether it's your design or another, this is definitely going to happen. I'll give you two just for free. One of them is transaction speed. When AIs are communicating and asking for services from other AIs and your agents want services, you're talking about millions of times the transaction speed of the banking system, the Swift network. And so you need massive rethinking in terms of Transaction speed. Another one is equity of access. Nothing in the current system has any concept of equity. If anything, it's a winner take all design, which leaves everybody in the dust and so that the voters are never going to go for that. And so that's going to force some kind of structure to come into place as well. So those are two. What would be the top five reasons why this will definitely happen?

Something like what I'm building or just the great decoupling.

It's really exactly what you're building, which is a system of distributed governance that empowers AI within your model. You have application specific AIs that are much cheaper to run than the big models from the foundation model companies. So that's part of it. There's a blockchain component for transactions and for value and there's a bunch of other parts to it. But it's really the future of governance.

Yeah, I mean, I hope it will happen. I'm not confident because of the localized incentives, but it's something that needs to happen. Right. Because what happens is that you're going to get a lot of defaults happening soon and then people are going to basically be giving up their power to these technologies. Like one of the things about using. So I have a system called IIMind based on technology. Like I said, I use all the top frontier agents agents and it's massively multiplied. That's why I've unblocked my writing thing. So I've actually written like a couple of pretty good books recently in the last few weeks and they're genuinely good. Like, wow, this is really interesting because what you have is an inevitability of a billion trillion agents. So someone will have to build a chain to organize them. You've got an inevitability of this being in front of people, but we're outsourcing more and more of our thinking. Like when I'm using O3, my brain is actually changing and I'm relying more and more upon it. And as we have Grok 4, Gemini 3 is about to release level models. We're going to outsource more and more of our neocortex to it and then we'll be locked more and more in as they understand our context.

We've been doing that with smartphones for a while, where our memories are now on our smartphones and those neurons are now freed up to do other work. Right?

Yeah.

So you're talking about the next level.

Of that, the next level of that because they know us better than we know ourselves. Our Kids will fall in love with AIs. They'll be the most trusted entities out there. And so I think this governance thing needs to happen now and we need to have serious discussions about it. And we need to think about what is the world of AIs that I'm working with. And for me, the AI that's closest to us for the regulated industries because those are the things that handle us living up to a basic level. I think that needs to be open source. The rest I don't think actually matters that much if it's open source. But I definitely think that needs to be open source. And that's why we've seen discussions of can you have deep SEQ in the us we need open source champions. I was like, let's just build it. And it turns out that building that type of AI is a couple of orders of magnitude less compute than building the super advanced genius ones. So let them build the genius ones.

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I think that the era of the massive model is actually done to be contrary. I didn't realize this until we trained Iimmedical AP and it was so good I was shocked again. A human doctor is at 15% on OpenAI's new benchmark GPT 4.5 is at 46% ChatGPT, current ones at 40%. This is at 47% with 8 billion parameters. 8 billion. It works on a Raspberry PI. It works on a 10 year old PC.

Yeah.

And it's at 106 languages. By next year we will have it super good. When I looked at that and I was like, how much does it cost to train a doctor to do this? I was like that's crazy because when you're doing a specific model for a specific thing and we're going to train it from scratch because we use Gwen as the base, but now we're using it to build the data set to then train it from scratch. I was like, for all of these operational cook type jobs, the AI will run on nothing. And then the ability to create an AI that represents your culture and your data set is actually an s curve. A Grok 6 type thing is an exponential because it's trying to discover brand new things. I don't want to have Dr. House MD as my doctor day to day. I want to call him and him sometimes when it's complicated. Right.

And go back to the culture side of the equation. Because I mean first of all nations need to digitize their culture sufficiently to have a native set. Yes.

And that's basically what you learn in school. It's the textbooks plus a bunch of videos. Except for you've been told it's too much for you to be able to do. It's like, does every nation need a deep SEQ model of their own? They train themselves. No, they need a pre trained basis. Then they need sectoral and other data sets that are open gold standard. Again, an S curve where in a year or two we can actually get good enough. And then they need to have their own cultural data sets which to be honest will only require a team of six to 12 people at most.

That's insane. But this, I mean this should be, this should be. I mean nations need to have a plan, right? National leaders of every nation need to have a plan of action. I think what you're, what you're proposing here is, is actually viable executable fairly rapidly.

The compute that we decide we realized that you need for a node and to train and keep up to date, a national Data set is a 72.

Chip Blackwell, which is enough to go around.

Yeah, well hold on, hold on.

There is that 8 billion parameter Dr. Model is such a hugely important topic because right now we have 20 million GPUs in the world and we're going to make 20 million more. But there are 8 billion people. That means you need to share your GPU with 200 other people. This is like a public bus that's packed with everyone now, right now if I go to a random person on the street, say hey, I've got a thousand dollars cash for you, or you can have a dedicated Blackwell for the next year. Which one do you want? Everyone I talk to is going to take the thousand dollars cash. What they actually want and they'll realize this very soon is the Blackwell. Because the Blackwell is equivalent to employment, it's equivalent to entertainment. They don't know quite yet how much they wanted that Blackwell. But they won't be able to get the Blackwell because the big foundation models are such compute pigs that they're going to use up every single molecule. This is why that class of the 8 billion parameter use case specific model is the way to alleviate the bottleneck, get the benefit to society without using up every single GPU on just a couple virtual girlfriends.

Exactly. Our thing was make that available everywhere because then it can diffuse. So once we get our stack done, there will be a free app, hopefully in a year that anyone can download onto their GP device and it's fully open source that will check every medical decision ever made and that's all it will do.

I think that really gets lost in those demos because Google I O, they get on stage, you roll out, look what you can do with VO3. I just asked it to make a movie and it made this and it makes like a 10 second clip for you. You're like, wow, now just make it, make a whole movie. And then you realize, wait, the compute isn't there. Like they can do it in a demo. You can't get it. Why? Because the compute doesn't exist.

Well, so Elon yesterday said on his Grok 4 announcement, they're going to use 100,000 Blackwells to train the video model, which means it will need dozens. Yeah, that's the fastest supercomputer in the world a few years ago.

So Imai, to answer this question, given your background, is Hollywood dead?

No, Hollywood studios will make a lot of money, but I'm worried about the.

People like if the studio.

So let's go a different direction here. If the intelligent, if your plans for the intelligent Internet or something like it do not proceed, what are your predictions for humanity? What happens with the current trajectory of where we're going?

Hyper capitalism, massive hyperinflationary collapse of the dollar and other assets and the AI is basically out competing Everyone, like every job behind a keyboard, video, mouse, it's not a public sector job will go. Which means that everyone will be employed by the public sector. But that takes time. We can't compete with this, with what's coming. And this is before we consider things like my old college tutor Ogden, who's on the GitHub co pilot, people just created Xbow, which just won the top hacker in the United States award.

Holy crap.

Right? And so stuff is going to happen faster than we could ever think. And so I was like, I need something that can scale to be the highest marginal dollar for a gpu. Actually that's part of what I did. Because Bitcoin mining is 90% energy, GPUs are 10% energy. What if you could just mine something that could give public benefit? The more of those GPUs we get to public benefit, the better. But absent this, none of them will go to public benefit.

I think you'd end up. Because when I look through your papers, Imad, there are bits and pieces of them being done across the board by lots of other models and lots of other blockchains are attempt bits, things like this. Right. What you've done is kind of connected them all into one systemic whole which is very, very powerful one way. The other will get there to something like what you're talking about. It'll just be much more slow and much more painful.

Is it?

A lot of big things could break along the way if we don't get it into place quickly.

Yeah. Is it Trantor in foundation where you've got those thousands of years or does if you give every single person an AI that's aligned to them as of part of a bigger system with AIs for communities, nations and humanity that can draw on a bitcoin type network of compute to solve problems, we will definitely coordinate better. But no one can own that stack. That should be an open infrastructure for humanity. And then anyone who wants to participate in any element of it should be able to. And so that's why I think is the optimal here. Whereas in the foundation books by Isaac Asimov, you had the secretive foundation. We actually know everything that we need to know to get through this. We just need to rethink how money flows. It should flow from being human. It should be anchored to intelligence and organizing the knowledge of humanity. And the best way to make money shouldn't be that you earn capital, it should be towards doing good. So that's why you start with proof of benefit, with benefit. But then the winners of the X Prizes and the cures for cancer. They become the richest people in the world and the system directs it that way, aided by the AI.

I love the statement I made at Singularity is the best way to become a billionaire is help a billion people. There's this alignment there and we should.

Make it literal because then the AIs will be working on it and the humans will be working on it again. We start out with the basic thing right now. Let's get as many people aligned intelligence as possible and get the compute at organizing our collective knowledge on cancer to autism, to longevity to spider vestige.

That, that would be my third bullet on the why this must exist. It would be exactly what you just said because the AIs need to work on it themselves, otherwise it'll never keep up. And we had Joe Kennedy III here in the office a little while back and he, he was, I had read his, he was in charge of the crypto commission in Congress at the time. And so I read his white paper. Then he came in and I asked him some questions about his white paper and he said no, I never read my own white paper. Well, what are you talking about? I said no, that's not how it works. You know, the government is so big and so in charge of so many things that everything needs to either be an agency or self governing. And then we just, you know, choose the self governing process. And so AI will take that to the next level where, okay, the rate at which you need to add ideas is so fast it can't possibly go through Congress. So it needs some kind of a framework that grows at the same rate that AI grows.

But this is the AI first stacks that you need to build. And we're building right now because if you think about Andrej Karpathy, he described this thing called the llmos. Like you can virtualize any interface and it's all about the context that you give these. And when I thought about it, I thought about the intelligent Internet. Our existing Internet's going to break. The AIs will attack it from somewhere or another. I was like a robust, resilient, coordinated, verifiable Internet. You can actually build that from scratch. And then that infrastructure will be very difficult to attack. Just like it's difficult to attack Bitcoin because you need the hash rate to attack this. You'll need to have a massive amount of compute because it can call on compute to resist any attack. Those attacks are not only hacking attacks, it's psychological memetic attacks. This is something that I realized recently. If you Think about the base on which almost all of these language models are trained. They're all the same, which is a generalized polymath view. That's a large attack surface again, which is why we're doctors, to have a small attack surface. Do you remember stuxnet?

Sure.

Tiny virus, went to all the reactors around the world, appeared everywhere, engineered by a human, but amazing code, and then caused them to go into overdrive and blow up. I've been thinking about what is the stuxnet of frontier AI models. Because what I see in the future is the other part. We see massive unemployment and all this. We see the AI is controlling all the parts of our society. And then someone has a stuxnet that causes mode collapse across all these models and they all turn evil at once, because evil is programmed into their latent space. And when you think about that, it's like we need a system that's resilient against things like that, because if everyone starts, and this is why I've got mind material intelligence, I've changed it to network and diversity. If you have a diverse range of different AIs, you're more resistant to that than if you have one. Same AI across everything. That's over bloated. That's based on this polymathic basis running our critical systems.

So how many discrete. If you think about the 8 billion parameter model as the prototype, are we talking about millions of these?

No, I mean it's one for every individual, but you have a very tight data set that it's trained on like stable diffusion. We trained on 2 billion images. Someone had an equivalent performance of 25 million images. What are the right words and wisdom for society that you actually want to have in your model at the start to do the jobs that are needed to, to be done to enable everyone to have a basic level of intelligence and access? That's what we need to build towards and the network needs towards. Then everyone's got their own AIs, and you're in this stack that's built AI first to be resilient as opposed to having all these dependencies that's going to be more resilient than our current Internet, which is not. Yeah, from an infrastructure or even a memetic aspect, you know.

You know, what's really shocking and kind of sad is that, you know, we clearly need to go down this direction because, you know, the compute is constrained, but it will always be constrained. You know, there's no way we'll ever be able to build enough compute to keep up with the innovation that AI can come up with because software will move a billion miles an hour, hardware won't. And so it'll always be constrained. So we need, we need exactly what you're talking about. But when you start working on it, the first thing you do is you pick up Quinn and you start working with a Chinese model. And that's the part to me that's, that's surprising and sad and weird. I think it's partially a byproduct of the chip embargo. The, you know, the forced constraint on China is forcing a lot of innovation. And also it's all being done open source. But it's really sad to me that there's no way to start with something that's built into your framework or built in America that empowers what you're doing.

Yeah, I mean, like I will train a model better than Quen. Again, I built state of the art models of every type of. And I'll make it fully open source, which is why I was like, I got to do that.

Then you'll solve the problem.

Well, yeah, I know how to solve it. And so this is the thing. It's not hard, it's just that it's in no one's interest to do so, but it's in our interest to do so because the more people that use our model, it's like VHS versus Betamax. Yeah. I want a good enough model that takes everyone up to a basic level and then combined has massive network effects. Then I can use that to get more and more mining of this to give more and more benefit and that's it.

How do you get mass adoption at a pace that resists the kind of the legacy from blocking it off?

That is a key question. Right. You're going to have an immune reaction from those whose systems are disrupting.

So the way that you do it, I mean, the only way you can do it is again, decentralized, permissionless. Right. You buy the currency exactly the same as Bitcoin, available wherever it is, except for you can direct where your purchase proceeds go to cancer or autism or whatever, things that really matter to people. And then the code is permissionless, stable diffusion was downloaded over 100 million times because it's permissionless. So it will end up everywhere. Because would you prefer to have your Quinn model that actually has a Quinn license and you don't know what's inside, or a model of equivalent performance that's being used by everyone, deployed or not? You will use the vhs, but we want it to be an amazing quality.

VHS So you're, you know, you've been the champion of open source now for, you know, you know, I don't know, 10 years, probably at least five. Is there an open source system out there that you trust right now?

No. I mean, like the Allen AI guys are doing good stuff, but is it no one's interest to really make this. And again, just like I gave a very simple example. Should we have a supercomputer to organize all the cancer knowledge in the world?

Yes, check.

Will it accelerate a cure for cancer? Yes, yes. Why isn't it done?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And when you say it's in no one's interest, what you're meaning? I'm just parsing it for the audience here. You mean it's not in the interest of the big foundation model Companies. Companies.

It's a common.

But it is in the interest of 99.9% of humanity and all voter, almost all voters. So if you're not a big shareholder in either Meta or Xai or Anthropic or Google, you're part of that 99% of the world. This is hugely in your best interest. Which comes back to the rollout plan. You know, how do you get adoption of this very, very quickly? Well, if it's in the interest of 99.9% of humanity, there should be a vehicle for getting adoption.

I bought Bitcoin, except for all of the money that I used to. It went towards this cancer supercomputer. And here's a screen of what the cancer super computer is doing today. That's the narrative. I'm downloading these models because they're open source and free and I can do whatever I want with them and there's a whole community built around it. That's the other narrative. And then for me, these are the primitives that can lead to where I think is going to be most important, which is the economy needs to change. The reason that cancer superhero doesn't get rewarded, even though we can save them to raise $100 million, $100 million of coin will be on the balance sheet of that person. So it costs them nothing, probably if we're successful. In fact, they'll make money by helping with $100 million of commute because of the demand for digital assets. The economy is only based on one thing, which is gdp, which is material. We need to reward intelligence, network effects and diversity. Again, we couldn't do that before because we didn't have these AIs that could measure the impact, that could impartially say of Course, this is a good idea. I'll give you one very straightforward example of that. If we had a dedicated open source supercomputer that analyzed every single bill that went through the government and gave an honest take on it, completely transparent, would that change the way our democracy works? Yes.

Would it be made illegal quickly?

Yes. Yeah, maybe also.

Yes.

But this is the fascinating thing. The AIs can act from a mechanism design perspective as independent, virtuous and wise entities. And so as we build the system of governance for the future, we need to make sure they can do that. Which is why we need to build.

Four of why this must happen. Because what we're essentially saying here is if this doesn't happen, the natural progress will put all of the power into the hands of a couple of big foundation model AI companies. And you can measure that by where is the compute?

Yeah.

If you see all the compute in the hands of say, three people, five people, then you know that they're dictators of the world forever thereafter. And so you. So if we don't at an exponential.

Rate, at a rate at which it cannot be caught up and disrupted. That's the issue.

Yeah. You know what's really cool is that this all the AI will transcribe everything we're saying here. And when we say, hey, can you put this into a bullet list for our audience, then, then we'll have four of the five done.

Yeah.

So if we can think of the fifth one, that would be really cool.

We'll let the AI figure out the fifth one.

Yeah, I think there's a nice inevitability here.

Right.

So as we move forward down this AI automation of work path, if we just take the simplest thing like driving, which we've talked about as being the number one job in the world. Right. There are more drivers as a profession than anything else in the world. You automate driving, you have a huge GDP collapse from automating a few of these things. Health care workers, driving teachers, etc. Etc. That collapse in GDP will force. Because one of the flaws of GDP is if you make something 100x efficient, it drops GDP.

Right.

And so that will force a move into a new mechanism like this, independent of whether the governments like it or not. Yeah, I mean, there's something interesting there about that.

There's a complete collapse of aggregate demand and other things. And this is why the other aspect of the economics paper, and again, there's more proofs of that, is we need to move to a new type of economics where money is basically created by People. And that will give constant demand forever. Because the current solutions like ubi UBI will never work mathematically. It cannot work when tax rates go down. The AI is coming like a wave. And the AI will also be amazing at tax accounting, you know, putting it through Ireland or whatever.

So few people understand what you just said. And it's so, so important because everyone's talking about ubi, ubi, ubi. Because everyone's used to wanting money.

Why will UBI so Universal basic income. The, the. For everybody listening here, the basic thesis is that as jobs go away and productivity goes through the roof, and potentially gdp, because you're dividing by effectively zero goes through the roof. We are going to give every citizen on the planet or in your country a certain aliquot of money that allows them to survive month to month to month covers their basics. It's been tested, you know, in 100 experiments. Salim and I have both written about this. And in these limited experiments, people don't use the money for beer and Netflix. They actually use it to improve their lives, educate themselves, start, you know, in Africa, buy some animals, buy sewing machines, start a job. Why would.

The problem I. The problem I've stated in the past is, is to go from a taxation union, labor job type of structure to this is such a huge leap. We have no confidence in public sector to get us there, right? Yeah, but Ima, you have a more nuanced view on the economic side of it. So talk through that.

Yeah, I was like, give them money, but give them money for being human and make them mint the money. You use your artificial intelligence.

So I'm going to slow this down for everybody. Make them mint the money. What does that mean?

So let's rewind it a little bit. Actually what happens is this. UBI works in small cases. If you have a complete realignment, great decoupling of society, and all these agents getting smart at once and out competing everyone, aggregate demand goes down massively.

Aggregate demand for what?

People stop spending because everyone's losing their jobs.

This is where you end up with the outcome of the zero marginal cost.

Society tax goes down and then these AIs, these holy AI firms, or one person at the top with a thousand million GPUs will never make a profit because a profit is an indication that they can't find any more marginal value. And the profit can always be put into more GPUs. Even if they did, they would figure out all the tax loopholes in the world not to pay that profit because they're better at tax loopholes than you are. So the tax base is going to do that and then giving everyone cash and then making the spend it is.

Going to be very difficult. What I see is a positive in fact, because that'll be the forcing function to flip to a system like this. It'll just be painful as hell if we don't do it quickly enough.

And so my thing is, once you've given everyone basic AI, which I think will actually only cost a dollar a month, if we get it right, then why not make it so that the money that comes into the system isn't from banks, it's from the people. So everyone mints money constantly. Okay, once you going back, what is.

What does everybody minting money mean in this scenario?

It means that you have a national digital currency number goes up every single day as you use your AI to make yourself happier and better and improve your community.

So I'm using my AI to write a new story for my 3 year old child. I'm using an AI to diagnose a sick friend. And as I do that, as I use the AI in a positive agreed upon mechanism, I'm minting these foundation tokens.

You melt your culture coins, as we call it, your national tokens that are pegged to the wedding just like you had gold pegs. So you've got your stable thing and then you've got your flow. You mint your currency a certain level just for being a citizen. And then more if you do societally positive things and then if you feed.

Cancer data into a broader model, you get more than if you just sit at home doing the thing.

Exactly. As you build up status in your community and your society. And again there's lots of details we worked out about that part. Then you should be able to benefit and that becomes a circulating currency because then people are like that's an index on Mexican AI use. And so money will flow more and more into digital assets from the existing economy. It will flow more and more into generative AI assets regardless of anything that happens. But if we get a collapse in aggregate demand, you know where capital is going to go? Capital is going to go into Gen AI and blockchain and so make it easy for that to happen.

Yeah, that's really, really brilliant.

Here is, over time this will collapse national economies. You'll end up with one global structure.

Well, just, you know, just to China will dominate.

Very similar. The problem with UBI is, you know, I give you money, right? Right now if you make money, you have a choice to use it. You know, on Entertainment or you can go to the casino, whatever you want to do, or you can invest it, or you can buy a sewing machine and start, you know, turning into debt. That's your choice. In the future, that universal right to AI is the equivalent. So now you have your AI, you can use it for your virtual girlfriend if that's what you want to do. But you can also use it to generate some benefit. You can use it to help cure cancer. That becomes the equivalent choice. And it's the only relevant choice in the post AGI economy. So that's, that's the flaw in ubi. And the beautiful thing about this design.

That'S why I've got n network as a key thing like Wikipedia created so much value from its network effects and others. If you say, what is the meaning of life in a post AGI world? It's living. It's. I saw my family on the weekend, you know, it's like my daughter's art. Actually my daughter's art's pretty good. My daughter's arts aren't pretty good. That created value, right? But it can't be measured by any of this. And the post Abundance society, the Star Trek world is one of boldly going where no one has gone before. It's about exploring, it's about deepening your community values. And if you've got an AI next to you that's looking out for you, it's going to be encouraging you to do that as well as contributing to some of these bigger problems, right? It's going to encourage you to create because creation is about context, it's about flow. So this is why I think if we program this right, it can be a really nice elegant structure that moves away from extractive economics that we have today. And capitalism and democracy are the worst of all systems, except for all the rest, to something better. And the question is, where do we want to direct ourselves? And my view is direct it to benefit. And that benefit is something that we need to decide at a societal level, country, community level, individual level.

You know, there's a good example of what you're talking about here, Imad. Peter and I write about it in the new exo book, which is Technological socialism. Typical government socialism fails because you always end up with centralized inefficient planning and invariably leads to corruption. And it always fails for those two counts. But if you we talk through an example like Uber, which is the sharing of assets amongst a large group of people is actually a socialist function. But when an algorithm hyper efficiently allocates it, you get all the benefits of the collective assets without the downside of inefficiency or, or graft. And so I think there's a stepping stone from something like that to what you're talking about. That's an easy thing to go down. And when you have a structure like say Uber, you don't need a lot of regulatory because the system has the right inputs and outputs and feedback loops to self manage itself. And we're seeing more and more examples of that inevitably leading. This is why I think this is going to happen one way or the other. There's too much efficiency to be gained by having a system like that than by not. But it's facing lots of forcing functions and legacy issues. If you can craft in the way you're thinking about, you're providing a scaffolding that everybody can just ladder up in a structured way to that new model, which I think would be very powerful.

And the fact that generative AI creates this non rival intelligence for almost nothing. The cost of skills have gone to almost nothing. Capitalism will not survive that. That. Yeah, like literally just go and ask your O3, your ChatGPT or others based on intelligence going like that and AI achieving a level of performance that's equivalent to a human and can scale, what does that do to capitalism? What does that do to democracy? What does that do to tech? And you'll have some very deep answers there.

Something else you know, thrilled by your finally giving birth to these papers and would love to have you back again. You've been an incredible friend of the pod here to speak about at some.

Point you have to come one, I.

Think, I think really, really important.

Okay, Dave, you got it. I was going to wind this down so people can.

So you know ideas like this, historically they propagate out through a token and you already have this universal access to AI as a founding principle which is I'm sure going to be available in blockchain form. Right. That's the only way you would get it out quickly to the world. Is it fundamentally investable as a token or not?

Yeah, it's just like bitcoin, except for it's called foundation. Coin.

It's called foundation. When's it going to be out?

Soon, hopefully. We've been mining it since January.

Whenever it's out, like come back and watch it.

Well, we'll come back and we'll launch it right here on this, on this moonshot pod. Agreed?

Iman, Agreed.

Agreed. Yeah.

Yes. So Iman, what. Just real quick, what are your next steps here in making this Real making this launch.

We're going to put out all of the knowledge and the work that we've done and we just want people to give their input and think about what the future of education, health, governments and everything is like. The first step is to stress test that. So go to II.inc if you sign up, you'll get the details of that and all the details and knowledge will be there and then that's just inc.

Okay, that's where we go to get more details. And following you, you're active on X. What's your handle there?

It's Mostaq and then my last name.

All right, amazing. So I know Salim and Dave, we could go on for hours here in this conversation and, and we should, but. But next time.

I think we've hit the S curve limit of extracting useful value in this conversation. My brain is fried.

Just restructure society, no big deal.

You know, it is the most exciting time ever to be alive. We're in the middle of this intelligence explosion and I just want to remind people that we have the ability to steer. We don't need to give up on a sense of humanity's future. It's not going to happen to us. We have the ability to shape that future, to create that Star Trek universe, to create this, a sense of a hopeful, compelling, abundant future for humanity. That's what we talk about on this podcast and that's what we believe in. Imad, thank you for being a friend and a brilliant creator and all the.

Folks that prefer a Mad Max future don't listen to this podcast anyway.

Yeah, go someplace. Go someplace else. Talk about politics someplace else. You want to talk about science, technology, creating the future, creating moonshots, this is the place for you. So share it with your friends. Imod, a pleasure.

In terms of the names of this podcast, Imad, I think you hit the high bar on a true moonshot.

Yes.

Saving humanity, that's a good one.

My MTP is a transformed civilization and I think I can just relax now.

Like, I gave up space to Elon. You can give up. You know that. Imod, that's great.

I'm good.

You know, why are these four letter names that start with E so important these days? I don't know. All right, everybody, thank you for joining us on this special episode of Moonshots with Imad Mustaq, the founder of Intelligent Internet. Go to ii.inc check it all out and come back and visit us next time. We'll be back next week with another episode of WTF Just happened in technology.