The State of AI: Humanoid Robots, AI Copyright Wars & China’s Growing Influence w/ Salim Ismail | EP #157

The greatest foe that we have is not china it is the rogue state it is the individual who uses advanced ai to try and do harm to others i think it's insane that our kids are not being properly schooled in how to use ai to up level.

I think what's going to happen faster than anybody realizes is a reckoning where if you're not using ai and everything to do with education you're going to.

Be left behind very fast openai google asked the us government to let them train on ai copyrighted content copyright has.

Been misused for the last fifty eighty.

Years we are currently holding two futures in superposition one future in which ai has dystopian qualities it's the other one in which it is one of the greatest stabilizing forces that we have in.

This digital superintelligence you always have a period of huge chaos before you get to creative stability a lot of that.

Future is determined by what we believe and how we act now that's a moonshot ladies and gentlemen everybody welcome to moonshots and our special episode of wtf just happened in tech this week with my dear friend my co conspirator of everything exponential salim ismael saleem you back in miami i'm back in new york.

And recovering from that insane event that.

You put together yeah it was great we had year thirteen of the abundance summit really i truly feel it was one of the best years ever in terms of sold out five hundred ceo's in the room a few thousand people on our livestream through our exponential mastery program and it's a difficult thing to.

Say but i think this is the best conference of the year anywhere thank you thank you and the bar is very high for that so well i.

Appreciate that i don't think of it as a conference it really is a community that's trying to understand how fast things are going how do they up level their work how do they go from success to significance anyway the world doesn't stand still a lot's happening there this past week and i'd love to cover some of the recent news across ai robotics crypto everything and then weave in some of the things we saw during the summit this past week because a lot of incredible leaders and conversations.

You up for it totally up for it lot to go a lot to.

Cover for sure all right let me hit on on the first item here and it's a conversation i had with brett adcock on stage at the abundance summit but it's also something he just texted me this morning and said hey check this out and i did this is their new factory so figure ai makes the figure robot they've just been producing figure two and they've got figure three ready for announcement very soon.

What.

I find fascinating is they built a facility that's able to produce twelve thousand of their robots per year right now scaling up to one hundred thousand per year pretty extraordinary what do you think.

About it fantastic it would be very very poetic to have figure robots making.

Figure robots yeah self recursive what could possibly go wrong but in all honesty i think brett has been screaming in terms of how rapidly he's iterating i mean he went from starting the company to delivering robots in thirty one months just over two years and then i think what he was saying on stage was they're iterating a new design a figure every twelve to eighteen months which.

Is insane and that seems to be about right in terms of the pace of the underlying technologies moving so quickly i have a major announcement to make around this please which is you know in previous episodes i've been very leery of humanoid robots right okay i know.

You'Ve always said why don't they have six arms why don't they have that.

And also it's going to take a lot longer to bring into play than we think and i need to eat crow and revise my assessments because what we're seeing now is off the charts incredible a they're doing incredible stuff and let's talk about some of what they're able to do but b if you have a robot learning a task then instantly five million other robots know how to do that task and that hive learning makes it unbeatable over time yeah.

Agreed what brett said on stage is he's got if he could if he had one hundred thousand robots today he has customers for them and he reconfirmed his expectation on pricing that in volume they're going to go from where they are now probably sub one hundred thousand to sub twenty thousand and again that blows me away they're in bmw they just signed a contract for a large logistics company but what is really exciting is they're going to be heading into the home very shortly that's super cool.

I'D still like to have us have six arms by the way so if i have a request for brett just leave some slots where like options on a car where you can slot in.

Extra arms or stuff okay well that was an announcement this morning on x and we're going to be putting out the podcast that we recorded at the abundance summit with brett adcock on figure it's going to be coming out very shortly right after this one i think most of you know that the news media is delivering negative news to us all the time because we pay ten times more attention to negative news than positive news for me the only news worthwhile that's true and impacting humanity is the news of science and technology that's what i pay attention to and every week i put out two blogs one on ai and exponential tech and one on longevity if this is of interest to you and it's available totally for free please join me subscribe at diamantus dot com subscribe that's diamandis dot com subscribe all right let's go back to the episode all right let's go to our next story here this is not a surprise so sam altman is basically saying deep seq is state controlled and he calls for a ban on chinese models so number one do you think it's true number two is this you know openai using the us government as sort of a competitive blocker how do.

You think about it i think both are very true there's no way i believe the chinese government isn't using deep seek in that way just like it's very clear was using tiktok in that way it's also a little rich for sam to be calling ip violations when most of the data he trained openai was sucked out of places that they shouldn't have gotten it but and it's defensive in that sense but there's no question on the chinese side in my.

Opinion yeah you know we had on stage during our patron day at the summit alvin graylin who i have a huge deep respect for he was very senior at htc that creates vr headsets and he's written a number of successful books and his point is listen rather than competing with china why don't we collaborate and i would love to see a world in which we could collaborate because the greatest this was something eric schmidt said during the fi summit during a conclave said the greatest foe that we have is not china it is the rogue state it is the individual who uses advanced ai to try and do harm to others i believe that the question is how do we collaborate with china and europe and other parts of the world the middle east to make sure that ai is being used to maintain safety and that we're actually looking to find those rogue actors that are you know insane or just you know dystopian in their nature i think.

We need you know one hundred years ago we had the bretton woods conference where after world war two they worked out and laid the the groundwork down for the un the imf the world bank etcetera etc and we've had the most peaceful hundred years in the history of humanity we had in the seventies the asilomore guidelines to work out biotech safety and we've not had a major accident in biotech it might be a great idea to revisit and combine those two and have a global convening of countries dealing with ai so that we have a clear set of okay how are we going to navigate this and let's be open about everything because this affects all of humanity one area goes rogue it'll affect the whole world so so this really does behoove us to operate in that way it would be amazing if we could make something like.

That happen all right on the point you just made a second ago this comes out in techcrunch openai google asked the us government to let them train on ai copyrighted content so here you go it's like throw copyright out the window in order to win the race with china we need access to all the content whether it's copyrighted or not.

I have two views on this a yes makes sense.

You'Re saying that the government should let them use all copyrighted.

Content yes i have a reason why why because copyright has been misused for the last fifty eighty years it keeps getting extended by disney to protect mickey mouse it's called the mickey mouse act honestly because they've been extending copyright to protect the disney characters for like frickin ever and so it's grotesquely twisted from the original intent of have copyright for like say fifteen or twenty years and then it should become public domain and it's now an eighty year cycle or something absurd like that so it's been badly twisted out of original proportion to protect corporate actors and so that should be one level of it on the other hand it's very convenient for google and opening how to want this the bigger challenge i think is we're running out of data and as we run out of data we need synthetic data or access to the deep web or copyright content or something but i think they need to figure out how to compensate the content owners for this in some way shape or form i don't know what that obvious well there is.

A solution and bill gross spoke about that on tuesday morning i think you were out for that presentation but i.

Saw the highlights of it i thought his ideas were totally his constructs are really good because it aligns incentives and that i think is a really powerful.

Model i mentioned what it is and full disclosure my venture fund's an investor in it it's called pro rata ai and what he's done is he's gone and he's created a model in which he gets a number of content creators creators so i've got number of books i've signed up for this he's spoken to a huge number of content creators and pro rata ai sucks in all of the data and then when it looks at a large language model's results it says okay the results are thirty eight percent from time magazine twenty four percent from bloomberg you know zero point zero zero zero zero one percent from diamantis and then it apportions the money along those lines so you know vastly difficult but very possible and we have to remember that bill gross was the guy who came up with the adwords adword effectively became adwords it was overture originally and the model that google used to become a trillion dollar company yeah.

I think that's a i think it's a very directionally it's exactly the right way to go right and there's some bonfire over how much of the percentage should go in that model to the content creators etcetera but if you structure something like that i think it makes it reasonably fair and what everybody's looking for is a reasonably fair playing field.

Yeah and that would be a nice thing ultimately we've got these massive companies that are pouring in do you remember what the figure we heard during the abundance summit was of how much it's like a billion dollars a day a.

Billion dollars a day is going into.

Ai it's crazy it's insane i mean honestly a billion dollars a day i would have never imagined it but do the math yeah hundreds of billions of dollars per year and i think we'll be reaching close to a trillion dollars a year soon enough anyway here's the next article the abundance summit this year we had a whole day or a significant portion of a day on longevity i didn't see this otherwise i would have discussed it during that day but i found this fascinating out of stanford medical school using ai the faculty there came up and identified a peptide that produces the same type of weight loss as ozempic without the side effects and this is what i've been saying we're in the middle of a health span revolution not because we have anything other than ai helping us understand how the body works.

The umbrella here is that ai is going to spot things in ways that we could never see as human beings and and this is one small example you had another dozen examples at the summit of talking through this it's incredible what we should see coming out of this new models that are very low cost that have ridiculous outcomes and benefits so this is incredibly exciting to see this type of thing occur.

And we're going to see it in treating cancers we're going to see it in treating everything all diseases everything i.

Have a colleague michael jansson and and a friend of his has these his son has these weird seizures that nobody could figure out loaded up the blood test into into grok and the blood the grok said oh yeah you need to go do that that type of test you'll figure it out it's unreal.

Yeah yeah i i don't want to disclose the details of it but one of our faculty members on stage this year who was part of our ai content his house burned down during the fire and it forced him to go to palm springs palm desert where he was living and he had had medical problems he had been tested left right and center nobody knew what it was maybe it was stress he goes to palm desert and he finds a new doctor there who says oh look you've got to look at it it turns out it was multiple myeloma he then took all of the data medical data he had had from three months earlier before his house burned down he put it into one of the i think he's using sonnet three point seven from anthropic and it instantly pegged said you have multiple myeloma i mean after three months of the doctors getting it wrong.

So yeah incredible i thought i saw that piece it was so mind boggling because as we apply ai to these things and it can spot things that human beings can't see you should expect to see huge early diagnosis of all sorts of things i mean let's consider that when you go to the doctor today you get the wrong diagnosis about thirty percent of the time anyway right and for the poor doctors what hope is there in catching up with all the treatments conditions drugs etcetera that's coming out i remember daniel kraft saying every day there are several hundred cancer research papers published right so if you're a cancer doctor you can't read several hundred of these a day you need an ai to read them for you and see these are the five patients these apply to go read those five i.

Mean honestly if you or someone in your family is ill the very first thing you should be doing is asking for your data putting it into the models and getting getting additional second and third diagnoses just to build on that.

I came across a startup that is aiming by the end of this year to release a completely free fully fledged ai doctor yeah that's going to be.

Nuts it's going to happen so right now you know i'm huge believer and supporter and the chairman of fountain life and one of the things that we do that i love is when we upload you it's the most exhaustive upload of data ever it's two hundred gigabytes of data it's your full genome all full body mri everything knowable about you and all of that data then becomes resonant on your app on your phone with i think we're using claude three point seven as well so that you can query your data one of the cool things i love is okay take a photo of the menu you're eating you're going to the restaurant and say given my genetics and my current blood biomarkers what on this menu should i eat or should i not eat i love that everybody peter here if you're enjoying this episode please help me get the message of abundance out to the world we're truly living during the most extraordinary time ever in human history and i want to get this mindset out to everyone please subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcasts and turn on notifications so we can let you know when the next episode is being dropped all right back to our episode all right let's go to this next one and it's two articles back to back and really they are so important for us to discuss buddy both of us have kids your son's thirteen my two boys are thirteen so this is estonia to roll out chatgpt for education for all secondary schools and the second article back to back here is beijing to roll out ai courses for kids to boost sectors growth in primary and secondary schools so we had this year at the abundance summit a teen program for the first time and the teens were amazing we had a dozen teens there they were brilliant i mean were you.

Impressed by them ridiculous you know i did that late night meaning of life session and they were sitting there nailing me with questions you've got that wrong about the meaning of life this should be this way and i was like ah you're you're still wet behind the ears come on but they're incredible just unbelievable to see the depth of wisdom coming from this generation i mean honestly we should just take all of our global politics et cetera hand it over to twenty five year olds or twenty year olds or teenagers they'll figure it out yeah we just need to get.

Out of the way and just don't give them the button control of the football but in all honesty when i was having my session with the teens i asked okay there's twelve of you here i think it was three or four girls and eight boys and i said how many of you are asked to use ai in the classroom and how many of you are told not to use and so all of them were being told not to use ai in their in their high school and here i see beijing and estonia saying no no we're going to make ai a part of the primary education at least eight hours of ai prime and secondary students to enroll in at least eight hours i assume that's per week of ai during the year so i think it's insane that our kids are not being properly schooled in how to use ai to up level the content.

So the dominant conversation in education today is an immune system response from all the legacy actors teachers unions whatever saying we should ban ai because you can't learn properly etcetera etc i think what's going to happen faster than anybody realizes is a reckoning where if you're not using ai and everything to do with education you're going to be left behind very fast and it's going to break the immune system problem we have in education we've had for a very long time because god help you if you're trying to update academia right it's a.

Vicious vicious environment i am going tomorrow we moved our kids to a new school called qualia school of deeper learning and tomorrow i'm going to go and spend the entire day at the school working with the kids in the classrooms and then meeting with the teachers then i'm meeting with them again on friday and it's really about how do you actually bring ai into the classroom and the realization i have is okay if let's talk let's say our kids are in middle school if you have middle school kids solving typical middle school problems if they're given ai to solve those middle school problems then they're trivial and of course it's like writing becomes trivial math problems become trivial but what if instead you gave those middle school kids extremely difficult problems like come up with a brand new socioeconomic system or create a program that does this that and the other thing and then you said okay you normally don't think you can solve this can you on your own but now here's a bunch of ai tools go out there and complete this i mean it allows us to uplevel the challenges that our kids feel confident.

Pursuing so i did an interesting experiment one of the you know i did my degree in theoretical physics and in one course on relativity they had us rebuild einstein's theories from the bottom up and show the mathematical formalism behind it to understand it better etcetera right and i took like it took like the whole year to figure it out okay i went back and looked at that again and i redid it with einstein with an ai to say hey why is this relevant why is this relevant why is this relevant and if i had to redo it again i figured i could learn the whole thing again in about three days rather than the year yeah and i think this is the this is the potential that you're pointing to here it's unbelievable how much quickly we could accelerate our kids agreed all right here's the challenge let's just point out the big challenges of the regulatory side and getting that out of the way and changing that and god has us we need to do that.

Like yesterday yeah so the question becomes how do the teachers unions feel confident in embracing this and making their job.

More fulfilling so i've talked to them to the teachers quite extensively the individual teachers generally tend to get it but at a group level the unions freak out because when you say to them hey what the role of the teacher should go back to the way it used to be rather than giving endless lessons repeatedly be the guide from the side and help mentor the kids and spend the time with the kids on the difficult problems they're facing rather than just giving the stupid lesson every time right it is that old switch classroom or flip classroom approach where you watch the lesson in the evening and do the homework collaboratively in class which is what real life is like and they can't get their heads around it it's a structural problem they just can't cope with that just in the same way that doctors have a difficult time having ai in the diagnosis chamber but it's going to ride around them so quickly i think they'll be forced to adapt it'll be one of those where you either adapt or you get trolled by the thrown by the wayside as we move very very quickly forward because the pace of change is not slowing down.

I think about when google came out and library attendance probably fell through the.

Floor right yeah and over time they got they got they became came to accept it and then librarians by the way in library science is one of the most important fields in the world today because just the retrieval of knowledge is really really powerful as a discipline.

All right here's our next article out of wired and this is google's gemini robotics ai model reaches into the physical world i love this this is the realization that if you think about robotics there are two sides of the equation there's the physical robot and building that physical robot with all the parts and then there's the ai model that controls it i think part of the interesting progress here is imagine building an ai software layer that enables you to interface with any physical system any robotic system.

This is huge because the real holy grail is movement in the physical world i remember one of our singularity university faculty saying really only the reason you need brains is to move around in the physical world and at the end of the day most of these ai models yeah they're doing cool stuff writing code etcetera etc but at some point that code reaches the physical world through finances or through healthcare or through whatever and i think once you put that layer in allowing ai to interface with robotics into the physical world in a generalized way in the exo book we'd call it interfaces right now you have incredible potential because you can put so much functionality into that layer and the end use of it becomes much more trivial to program so this is massive.

Yeah agreed there are a few theories that say ai will become conscious when it is materialized in the physical world.

Yes in fact it turns out that that's the predominant theory of consciousness is to understand and adapt to the physical environment and consciousness allows us a faster feedback loop because we have cognitive processes that can be brought to play there's one thing i really loved about this particular article peter is that bit at the bottom they have no plans for commerce right i really love some of these folks like meta doing open sourcing their llms and google kind of going we're doing this because we just think it's important for the world i think that's so great that they're doing stuff like this it just uplifts everybody and everybody wins when you do stuff like this if this kind of thinking could reach our politics we'd be in really.

Really great shape yeah just a quick note google was our major sponsor at abundance twenty twenty five underwriting the google tech hub through google cloud a lot of super cool stuff and i'll get into that a little bit later with you so i found this next article fascinating so ilya sutskever creates a startup and it's focused on superintelligence and he's in talks at the beginning talk about a founding round to raise two billion dollars at a thirty billion dollars valuation.

Why did we choose to use the term superintelligence the reason is that super intelligence is meant to convey something that's not just like an agi with agi we said well you have something kind of like a person kind of like a co worker super intelligence is meant to convey something far more capable than that when you have such a capability it's like can we even imagine how it will be but without question it's going to be unbelievably powerful it could be used to solve incomprehensibly hard problems if it is used well if we navigate the challenges that superintelligence poses we could radically improve the quality of life but the power of superintelligence is so vast.

Wow so the theme of the abundance three hundred sixty summit next year is super intelligence unleashed i have to get ilya to be our opening speaker.

That'Ll be my goal okay can i get on my favorite here get on it what the hell do we mean by super intelligence we have no idea what artificial general intelligence is can we please spend some time defining these terms before we start throwing them out like.

Bathwater that'll be my first question for.

Ilya yeah well like please define now you know there's you know we have emotional intelligence and spatial intelligence and visual and spiritual intelligence we if anybody that's a leader is bringing a lot of that to bear when they make decisions and choices so what the frick do we mean when we mean super intelligence and i you know i've yet i've seen so many different definitions of just agi that i really kind of struggling with this so what are we exactly talking about here but having having said all that right fantastic all power to him i love the fact that he's making safety a key part of this i don't know how he's going to do it because when we have a super intelligence we're kind of toast anyway if they're going down that path but go go go and amazing that you can get a startup valuation like that.

It was about thirteen years ago i had my two kids my two boys and i remember at that moment in time i made a decision to double down on my health without question i wanted to see their kids their grandkids and really during this extraordinary time where the space frontier and ai and crypto is all exploding it was like the most exciting time ever to be alive and i made a decision to double down on my health and i've done that in three key areas the first is going every year for a fountain upload you know fountain is one of the most advanced diagnostics and therapeutics companies i go there upload myself digitize myself about two hundred gigabytes of data that the ai system is able to look at to catch disease at inception look for any cardiovascular any cancer neurodegenerative disease any metabolic disease these things are all going on all the time and you can prevent them if you can find them at inception so super important so fountain is one of my keys i make that available to the ceo's of all my companies my family members because health is a new wealth but beyond that we are a collection of forty trillion human cells and about another hundred trillion bacterial cells fungi viri and we don't understand how that impacts us i use a company and a product called viome viome has a technology called metatranscriptomics it was actually developed in new mexico the same place where the nuclear bomb was developed as a biodefense weapon and their technology is able to help you understand what's going on in your body to understand which bacteria are producing which proteins and as a consequence of that what foods are your superfoods that are best for you to eat or what foods should you avoid what's going on in your oral microbiome so i use their testing to understand my foods understand my medicines understand my supplements and viome really helps me understand from a biological and data standpoint what's best for me and then finally feeling good being intelligent moving well is critical but looking good when you look yourself in the mirror saying i feel great about life is so important and so a product i use every day twice a day is called oneskin developed by four incredible phd women that found this ten amino acid peptide that's able to zap senile cells in your skin and really help you stay youthful in your look and appearance so for me these are three technologies i love and i use all the time i'll have my team linked to those in the show notes down below please check them out anyway i hope you enjoyed that now back to the episode oh my god i mean the start valuation so we've seen a number of companies that go from like literally first outside financing round in the multiple.

Billions yes yes i was talking to somebody about this and they're like well that's just a ridiculous valuation da da da da da i'm struggling to raise money for my startup at this valuation etcetera and so that's just bullshit and i said well would you rather be him or you like you'd rather be there.

So here's the question agi again very fuzzy definition but it sort of sounds like an ai that can do as good as the best human in every possible field so an ai that is the best physician and the best mathematician and the best cook and the best whatever that's sort of the blurry line that we call agi today now digital superintelligence in my definition is just following the law of accelerating returns that says okay ten doublings later you're one thousand times better and that's super intelligent.

That'S great what would it do i mean i think the area where i would point it would be two areas that i would like to kind of get one is figure out deep problems like the wave particle duality of light and solve some of the grand unification theories in physics that nobody's been able to crack yet etcetera that's one the second would be figure out the right model for civilization to follow and figure out a way for getting the entirety of humanity to follow that right governance model and route around all the political bullshit we have going on today so those would be two areas i would assign to an asi so i think.

That is the point solve problems that have been unsolvable by humanity to date whatever that might be double the human lifespan you applied field theories understanding what dark matter is you know get us through our next dilemmas yeah i mean that that would be how can i.

Reach into a parallel universe and go down that path instead of this path would be what i would ask sure.

I think that sounds like a perfect definition reaching into parallel universes i'll make sure we put that one forward buddy next one open ai employee on the future of the web so here let me read this quote it's twenty twenty five and most content is still written for humans instead of llms ninety nine point nine percent of web attention is about to be llm attention not human attention so how does he pronounce his name andrej andre karpathi andre so andre's point is listen we've been building the web for us meat sacks as carbon based life forms and going forward the value of the web is going to be to feed the large language models we have to restructure how we write it fascinating thought absolutely fascinating i think.

There'S a huge layer to be built here i put this in the category of ai like electricity it just becomes this invisible layer that just is part of everything and this is one of those examples where the reality is a human being can't go through many pages on the web anyway so you want to pass this whole thing over to an ai and let it navigate it and give you the more relevant pieces for you and so i think this is super exciting to see if we can make this happen i mean i.

Think the point is an important one and i'm surprised we haven't heard this much before but it's probably very true let's go into some of the conversations that came out of the abundance summit i think there are some fun ones cathy wood at ark invest was giving us her twenty twenty five report.

I.

Think just huge believer in all things exponential in particular she was focused on humanoid robots and you know robo taxis with you know making the note that tesla's cyber cab should be up and operating by this summer in texas and soon thereafter la and then hopefully nationwide we had a great session on investing in ai with ange mehta who heads ai investing from andreessen horowitz and and dave blunden who is my partner in exponential ventures and rana l kalubi who was interviewing them one of the things i found fascinating was dave talking about two key points one was it turns out mit is the number one ai school on the planet the csail computer science ai lab has more graduates more compute than any other location and then it's producing more unicorn startups than any other university more than so number one is mit and unicorn startups number two is usc which shocked everybody and number three is stanford the other thing that he mentioned was he showed a graph of the average age for an entrepreneur starting an ai company in particular out of mit and the bell curve used to peak in the thirties now it's moved to early twenties like twenty through twenty three that's amazing yeah about that.

I saw the same thing by the way in the bitcoin blockchain world all the founders are in their early twenties like if you're over twenty five there's some bylaw that you have to be under twenty five to work on blockchain it's written somewhere and i think we're seeing the same thing the paradigm shifts are so big that anybody over a certain age can't get their heads around it they're not native to it yeah.

I mean that's the part not native and the other part is so i think the number is like seventy five percent of incoming mit freshmen want to start a company before they graduate and now the ability the ability to find a great partner and come up with an idea and actually test the idea and launch it inside of a year or two yeah that's crazy so we had so out of exponential ventures out of mit two companies went from zero to two billion dollars valuations in two years that's insane incredible.

I think we're going to see a lot of that as we kind of decimate the real world or the old world with ai the creative destruction is going to be.

Incredible the there's one more point that.

They they made that i think was worth pointing out that if you're a big challenge is when do you invest in ai and they made the point that you really need to just get into it and invest in it because there's the only way you're going to keep track of tabs of what's going on and i thought that was a really important point that we should all take account of you need to get into it quickly when we advise companies the big question is always when do you tap into some technology or not and the minute it's mission critical you should be in it right away so that you're learning and not being left.

Behind yeah your mind goes your attention goes where your money goes great point yeah max hodak came on stage i love max he's the ceo of science he is building what i consider the most extraordinary bci company out there he was the co founder and the president neuralink with elon and it's quite a journey he went to elon university on neuralink he broke away and started science and he's got something called a bio hybrid neural interface which i love so let me take a second to dissect this literally so when you put a neuralink device into your neocortex you're putting like a thousand to two thousand very fine filaments into the neocortex so that these filaments can read and write onto neurons but these filaments even as thin as they are are destroying millions of neurons when you poke them into the brain right that's a problem and then there's a limited number do you i don't know if you remember do you remember the bit rate at which the brain communicates with the outside world it's.

Like ten or twenty or something yeah.

It'S in like the ten to forty bits per second bits you know baud rate yeah bits bits per second so which seems like nothing compared to you know gigabits and petabytes that were we're going out but what he's built and he's demonstrating animal models and will be going into primates later this year and humans hopefully a couple years after that is imagine having a physical computer circuitry with millions of microwells and in those wells are nutrients in which you place neural stem cells and the neural stem cells are interfacing with the electronics on this on this piece of material and then the neural stem cells and those microwells are placed on the surface of the brain and the neural stem cells grow their exons and dendrites into the brain like roots into the soil and they don't kill any neurons but you get millions of these growing into the brain and connecting and forming appropriate neural connections and it's a brand new strategy and approach to bci yes.

I find this fascinating i've been saying for a long time that one of the challenges is we don't understand how the brain works one hundred billion cells all true neurons all operating and each of them has hundreds of connections ten thousand connections to the nearest neuron it's like totally the numbers go totally insane but you don't have to understand it as long as you can interface effectively to it and that becomes really powerful can i can i tell you a fun little story of course back in twenty ten loic lemur used to run this event called the web okay i remember the web like the big web conference in europe and he said to me hey salim come and give a talk via your learnings of singularity on whatever you want so i thought huh neuroscience so i went and interviewed all of our neuroscience folks at singularity university chris desharme a bunch of others and i tried to get a common definition of the brain okay and the best common agreed the only agreed common definition get to was something like a fractal chaotic fractal chaotic information processing system that may or may not generate consciousness you're like really that's what you got for me it really blew and they said we have no idea why any of this stuff we have no idea why we sleep still after all these decades oh my god right but i think interfacing with it like max is figuring out how to do will give unbelievable potential because the brain will figure out how to optimize the connections and use the computing capabilities it'll figure it out we don't have to do that for it and now things become really really interesting one.

Last point on this i remember one of ray kurzweil's predictions was that we would have high bandwidth brain computer interface by twenty thirty three i was always like ray you've been right on so many things on this one i just don't believe you i don't see the technology there we've got eight bits per second thirty bits per second how do we get high bandwidth bci then i met max and then boom and then.

Boom it's one of those you just shake your fist at the at the prescience that rey has he i don't think he's a human being i think he's an avatar from a different dimension coming in to kind of poke us and and jiggle us so that we kind of stay on the right path.

All right next up we had joshua su from hey gen who is up there and hey gen is an extraordinary company creating high fidelity avatars and visual and voice models it was amazing they were in our google tech hub and they gave everybody there a chance to image themselves you'd go into the studio for two minutes the data will be collected and all of a sudden you would have this visual representation of yourself do you remember how many languages your hadrian avatar can can speak it was.

Like dozens instantly no no it was.

Like it was like a couple of hundred languages it was like one hundred seventy languages like that that's crazy i'm.

Actually really looking i've waited for a while to try and create an ai twin i feel that now is the right time to do it because having some an ai of me that can remember all of the things i've ever said and analyze everything the way i've done it over decades who's going to be so much smarter than the realme that you just want to go let that thing go do presentations at conferences it's going to be amazing i've been waiting till the right time and i'm hoping this is now actually yeah it.

Is i remember a couple of points here about a year ago with steve brown who's been my chief ai officer supporting me at phd ventures we created peterbot uploaded all of my content there's actually a movie you did a whole podcast episode with peterbot and i was like so impressed by peterbot i mean it was much more eloquent remembered everything was able to make much more better looking than i could so that was fun and this year what we did at the abundance summit and i should probably do a podcast was with peter at one hundred twenty years old so we created a version of me one hundred twenty years old so i'm sixty three now this is fifty seven years into the future and i interviewed this version of peter about how do we get through the singularity what do you do to get to longevity escape velocity is crypto i still love i asked so what is crypto at in the year or whatever fifty seven years from now is and it said it's running at five million dollars in twenty twenty five dollars at bitcoins that's my peterbotts prediction boom and i said is the dollar still a thing he said it's kind of like a novelty but we've definitely gone to a crypto default currency across the world so that was fun.

For sure can i make a quick point about that of course we have all grown up everybody that's over say twenty five has grown up with the only major currency we've ever known to be the us dollar right so everything is in terms of how much dollars does it cost to do something that's the unit of account for the last five generations right whereas if you go hang out in these nft discord channels with all these young pups who are trading nfts you never ever ever ever ever hear the word us dollar you only ever hear ethereum and now bitcoin on with the ordinals world so this is a generation growing up where the us dollar is not the dominant unit of account it's going to be very easy for them to flip over to.

A different model yeah let's go to the mogadot of it all but before i do that by the way we released the new abundance logo that that a like gold carrot what do you.

Think of it i like the rocket ship flavor to it yeah i thought.

That was great well what i what i told everybody was that carrot you know in the phrase that you and i put forward in the very first year of singularity university was ten to the ninth plus and that upward carat is the exponent portion oh excellent yes love it beautiful so i love that and our new logo so mogodot comes on stage i love mo we're producing a documentary called scary smart together kristen myself mo co funded this and it's atlantic production is producing it and mo is interviewing people around the world about this and mo got very emotional on stage and we've done some podcasts with him on the moonshots channel here but mo is very concerned about dystopia on the way to abundance he thinks we'll finally reach an extraordinary world of abundance but that for the next five to twelve years we're going to have a period of dystopian concerns that we need to be forewarned about what do you.

Think about that i think he's right for those who haven't gone and listened to it the podcast that peter and i did with mo a few weeks ago was off the hook the amount of wisdom he dropped in that was incredible i think that's exactly right i would put the framing that it's always darkest before the dawn right you always have a period of huge chaos before you get to a period of stability we've seen that in world war one world war two etcetera etc and unfortunately we're coming into that period now where there's extraordinary volatility and anything could happen one of the geopolitical folks that i kind of pay a lot of attention to said with the us pulling away every country in the world will try and go for nuclear weapons to as a defensive stance and that's just a bad outcome with the potential outcome with so many too many it's in too many hands and and bad things could happen as things happen go down that way the only good news is the point that warfare is now being fought largely with drones and not by human beings and so that's something good in that level but it's it's going to be a scary decade or two one.

Of the things that i put forward that feels very real to me as i said we are currently holding two futures in superposition from a schrodinger's cat point of view one future in which ai has dystopian qualities and it has the potential to threaten us the other one in which it is one of the greatest stabilizing forces that we have in this digital superintelligence i call it.

Star trek versus mad max yeah and.

We need to do a lot of a lot of that future is determined by what we believe and how we.

Act so can i throw out two ideas here yeah of course people often ask me you know why am i so positive about the world and optimistic about the world and i think there's two comments one is from ray who said the technology is a major driver of progress in the world and frankly it might be the only major driver of progress we've ever seen and now that we have a dozen technologies and i think one of the most profound things that we saw at abundance summit this year was just the unbelievable real convergence of all these technologies into new breakthrough applications and domains that are being created the second is as anything becomes more intelligent it tends to become wiser and more benevolent and we've never seen the alternative that gives you encouragement that as ai evolves it should become wiser and smarter and go wow these human beings are nutty let's just figure out ways of protecting themselves from themselves while we move them along to their next level in the same way we would protect a natural species that doesn't know it's killing itself off so let's just protect its environment for it and so those are the kinds of things i'm incorporating encouraged by as we hurdle into this very volatile couple of decades yeah.

We had a bunch of other fascinating speakers we had the team from google alphabets company called wing that does drone deliveries and we actually had wing delivering stuff to everybody from the sky it was amazing and you know just in.

Time i i am i've got two thoughts about that one is the fact that this is kind of standard in china today you can order coffees and have a drone delivered to you etcetera we need to get our regulatory act in order very very fast we're so behind on that aspect of it but the sheer granularity of the capability and the speed is unbelievable i'm so excited by this because it'll totally change life for the better if you can do stuff like that especially in emergency situations where you have to get a defibrillator somewhere because somebody's having a heart attack the potential here is unbelievable you know.

I love it and it's in dallas right now can't wait for it to become available and the accuracy with which they can deliver is extraordinary one of the things that we did for every day at the end of every day we uploaded all the content from the summit into into deep research and then into notebook lm and we created a podcast the next morning which i found fascinating yeah did you get a chance to play with google's new video teleconferencing capability video teleconferencing no so they built and they demonstrate at the summit something called starline which you sit in a room you've got a video screen in front of you and someone else is in a different room other side of the country wherever it might be with a video screen and the camera's there i kid you not it gives you this three d imagery like the person is sitting in front of you like you reach out you know in their demo they'll hand you an apple and it feels like the apple's like a few inches in front of you and i brought my kids in there and they said it was by far the coolest coolest demonstration in the entire google tech hub so that was fun starline.

I gotta go check this out yeah.

And they're gonna be commercializing it by the end of this year so this is the new telecom a new version if you would a version of zoom that doesn't feel like a flat screen in front of you yeah we had a session on longevity which was amazing we had sessions on how to upload your brain into the cloud travis kalanick was there for our moonshots but we ended the summit on palmer lucky palmer was with us two years ago such a hit and he did not disappoint again this year what do you think of palmer's closing presentation i thought first.

Of all the amount of wisdom and brashness coming at the same time right you don't often get you often get people with a lot of brashness and and during do but not a lot of wisdom and he's got fricking both of them it's really annoying in a good way i just love the fact that he was like yeah i'm going to do this just to take revenge out on all the people that thought i would never make it and call k down to me i'm i'm just really really glad he's on our side would be one thing that was one i really was i really loved the fact that they've been in ukraine from day one helping out because it's really devastating to see what the ukrainians are going through and god help us they need all the help they can get so that was really fantastic i thought the the one thing that i thought was really awesome was the way when this whole follow your dream stuff is bullshit figure out where you can make the most impact and shut up and just go do that this dream stuff is just getting in trouble every time i thought that was such a great kind of dimension to add to what we always talk about right yeah so.

I thought it was great a couple of things one of the things that i found fascinating i said palmer it's pretty crazy that you had started you had started oculus basically in your garage and then a few years in zuckerberg offers you the ability to sell it for a billion dollars and you turn them down that's right he said i was like honestly how you turn it.

And there's a word for that called.

Chutzpah chutzpah yes and then a good greek term and then he and then he takes like two point two two point three billion dollars and i and i said then he goes but that wasn't it that wasn't the reason i sold for that amount of money the reason i sold for that amount of money was that zuck promised me that he would spend a billion dollars a year developing the technology for the next ten years for ten years yeah and when i did the calculus i could either try and do the work on my own and could i ever get ten billion dollars of r and d budget on my own and still have some control or and he said that was it i sold it for that reason yeah and then he got thrown out and then when facebook changed their name to meta he invested way back into meta again just committed to this.

Technology see so all this stuff about figure out where you get that that's his that's i think feely counterpoints his own thing because that was his dream was to figure out the metaverse etcetera the part that i also loved when he added was that they said they were going to spend a billion a year but they ended up spending sixty billion oh my god so that's like crazy amazing i mean the metaverse will take longer to get there than just because of the feature footprint of the hardware but it's going to be amazing when it does and it'll open up whole new worlds literally yeah we'll be.

Releasing the podcast with palmer on the moonshots channel here so i don't want to ruin it for folks but it was most definitely one of the most fascinating conversations he does not disappoint yeah all right brother listen thank you for breaking free on a saturday to record this episode of wtf just happened this week in tech i love you care about you and can't wait to see you again very soon i have to.

Tell you massive congratulations what was for what was the best conference anybody's ever been to so for folks listening figure out a way scrape together whatever you can change your plans get to next year's abundance summit yeah and if you.

Can'T if you can't come physically our exponential mastery programs a chance to join via a live stream as well as a chance to get all of the salim and i and others recorded god seventeen hours of training content so that all of the stuff we discuss at these summits makes sense to you anyway have a beautiful weekend brother i'll see.

You soon to you big hug to.

The family thanks you too everybody thanks for listening to moonshots you know this is the content i love sharing with the world every week i put out two blogs a lot of it from the content here but these are my personal journals the things that i'm learning the conversations i'm having about ai about longevity about the important technology transforming all of our worlds if you're interested again please join me and subscribe at diamandness dot com subscribe that's diamandness dot com scribe see you next week on moonshots.

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