Anthropic Partners With SpaceX AI, Leopold's $5.5B Bet, and the Singularity Economy | EP #255

Anthropic is taking over all of SpaceX's Colossus One data center in Memphis, and this immediately allowed Anthropic to double Claude code rate limits.

I think Grok is on life support.

So this is Elon, who had been for, you know, the past year shit-talking Anthropic. Here he is now, you know, backing them and supporting them. In one way, Elon's getting revenge against OpenAI by helping Anthropic win.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend is the exact quote from, from Elon.

Leopold Aschenbrenner. Who was famously fired from OpenAI on their alignment team and is now running a $5.5 billion fund 2 years later. Anthropic hits 80x growth for this quarter and outruns their compute.

You can find a whole litany of things that are about to explode in demand.

The demand, I don't see it slowing down as a whole. Chips and the energy layer and the infrastructure, right? This is the singularity loop.

Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

Everybody, welcome to Moonshots, another episode of WTF Just Happened in Tech. I'm here with my extraordinary friends and dear brothers, DB2, our wizard of AI investing, Saleem Ismail, emperor of exponentials, and of course, our resident genius, AWG. I'm Peter Diamandis, your host. And today we've got an incredible program of stories that should get you pumped up about the singularity, excited. This is not politics. This is just science and technology. Driving us towards the singularity. So gentlemen, excited to see you here. Saleem, I have to ask, where on the planet are you today?

I just landed back. I just landed back from Montreal and I was given a Canadiens jersey 'cause I'm actually a Montreal native and a massive Montreal Canadiens fan because I grew up there. And so they have Montreal—

Is that like a small round ball or a puck?

That's the hard round thing that immigrants like me, our ankles never quite, managed to, but in Canada you had to skate if you, otherwise they took your passport away. So I used to play a bit of hockey.

I'm sorry. Hey, we got a place to play. Really? Let's do some pond hockey up in Vermont. That's my all-time favorite thing to do. I'm so good.

I love it. The folks gave me this jersey that I had to wear it 'cause we're right in the middle of this stuff. So if anybody in Buffalo, I'm rooting for the Canadiens, but I'm the longest suffering Bills fan in history. So there's that.

All right, let's see your teeth. I want to see which ones are fake.

You know, I just, I've missed the complete, you know, gene sequence on sports. Sorry. Dave, good to see you back in the nest. And as always, Alex, good to see your virtual environment.

You know, and virtual self. What's the difference really at this point?

Today, I know you go to your kids' baseball games, you're probably chewing tobacco and spitting it and you have a dual life. That's my, that's what I think.

We have an incredible, incredible show today. You know, we're gonna be kicking it off with the demand for AI is like off the rails, outstripping supply. You know, Claude is continuing to disrupt sector after sector with the great unhobbling. Google is joining our push towards Earth's Dyson swarm. We'll be jumping into the singularity economy. You know, what are the sectors that are providing outsized financial returns during this supersonic tsunami? We're gonna cover a topic near and dear to my heart, which is a very simple, very powerful concept to ensure AI alignment so we can deliver a P-Doom that is less than zero. Thank you, Alex, for that meme. I love that P-Doom less than zero.

We need t-shirts for it.

We do. I saw the t-shirt you made. We're gonna have to like put that up for people to be able to take down.

Anyway, because Peter, if, if no one makes it, everyone dies.

Oh no. And towards the end of this pod today, we're gonna be talking about the recent disclosures by the White House on Let's call them UFOs versus UAPs. The White House is saying they're here, but who are they? Where are they? Where are they from? And when are you going to come and pick me up and take me for a ride? So, uh, that's going to be some fun conversations today. Let's begin with an important conversation today. Anthropic is outpacing their ability to supply tokens. So Anthropic hits 80x growth for this quarter and outruns their compute. Anthropic developer conference last week. CEO Dario Amadei revealed that Anthropic has experienced an 80-fold growth in Q1 of 2026, outpacing what they expected as a 10x growth. I mean, you don't see this in Silicon Valley. You don't see this anywhere. Maybe, maybe, Dave, for some of your early companies, you're seeing that kind of growth. But here, their, you know, their annualized revenue run rate jumped from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $30 $30 billion in April. It's now north, I think, $40 billion in May. And the— here are the numbers they expect, or it's expected they could hit $100 billion of ARR by the end of 2026 and potentially $1 trillion by the end or mid-2027, making it the most valuable company on the planet. And just to hit some numbers real quick and then turn over to you, Dave Erickson, for the first conversation, at a $30 billion ARR at a 40x multiple. It's being valued today at $1.2 trillion. If they hit $100 billion by the end of this year, Anthropic will be at a $4 trillion valuation. And if they hit a $1 trillion ARR in 2027, a $40 trillion valuation. I mean, I, you know, this, this is the singularity by definition. Insane.

I remember a year ago, Peter, at that family office conference in London, Yifeng was saying to all these wealthy families, "You got to get invested in this. You got to get in the game." And everybody was like, "At $100 billion-plus valuation? That's utterly insane. You can't possibly. It's way too late. You can't get into it." But I don't blame them because these numbers are so unprecedented. And people don't really do a good job of judging million, billion, trillion. It's not intuitive. These numbers are so far out of the realm of history. I mean, just massively bigger than any prior IPO or valuation. So I don't blame people for being scared, but you gotta get used to the fact that this goes to infinity.

Yeah.

The demand, the demand for AI is not gonna saturate. It goes to infinity. So you gotta rethink the way you decide whether to be involved in these things or not. So they all skipped it. Now I'm sure they regret it. Yeah, yeah, 10x, 10x in a year, up to $1.2 trillion.

Alex, what do you make of all this?

It's all about the enterprise, Peter. So Anthropic was the first arguably major frontier lab to recognize that offering ultra-high enterprise-oriented value tokens was the path to success here. As I've mentioned on the pod previously, OpenAI has since had to pivot to copy, call it the Anthropic strategy of offering up high-grade enterprise tokens for code generation and now for other so-called white labor tasks. And this is what we're seeing. We're seeing an insatiable demand for compute to the extent that that compute can be turned into high-dollar value tokens that are replacing the services economy. And so US GDP is what, $30 trillion or so? If we see the continued exponential, maybe super exponential increase in capabilities, and especially the increase in, as Meteor measures it, autonomy time horizons, which are pushing the dozens of hours of autonomy at this point, I think we're seeing the beginnings, maybe even the beginning of the middle of the replacement of white-collar labor. And of course that's gonna be insanely valuable.

Elon said double-digit GDP growth in 2 years and triple-digit within 5 years. Saleem, how are you feeling about this? Are you putting your money into these areas? Are you excited about it?

Full disclosure, I don't have investments in any of these labs. I probably have some Google stock from some of my funds or something, but nothing explicit, which is a huge problem watching all these numbers go up. I did a little bit of analysis, you know, and you have, Procter Gamble having roughly the same revenues with $15 billion of profit and their market cap is like a tenth of this because there's no upside, right? They grew 2% year over year. Everybody's like, well, and so this is like these guys grow 2% an hour. And so literally, yeah, literally. So it's such a huge difference in mentality and there's no reason why. And what I think was the most incredible thing is the fact that this is real money coming in. This is not hope. This is not a judgment call, etc. This is actual measurable dollars coming in. And so it's incredible to see.

Yeah, I want to hit two points here.

A year, a year and a half ago, they were incinerating money in anticipation of this growth. So it was a little bit of a scary, a scary situation. Now it's not scary at all for Anthropic or for— also, you know, they're completely sold out and I expect they'll continue to ramp But the chips are completely saturated and sold out. So you would normally say, well, doesn't that mean the revenue will cap out? But one, they can charge more. And two, they're optimizing the software. So they'll squeeze out, you know, another 10x or more while we're waiting for the chip supply to catch up.

Yeah, 2.2 billion.

There's no doubt that, that you'll see on the left chart that ChatGPT has fallen off the curve a little bit compared to OpenAI, but they have a lot of compute lined up. At OpenAI, um, as compared to Anthropic, that is. So, uh, I would expect that OpenAI's revenues will skyrocket too because everything is sold out anyway, and GPT-5.5 is really, really good. So, uh, it's going to be— you can get the compute.

Dave, two points. One, I think it's important for folks to realize this isn't growth, uh, for Anthropic because they're getting more users. Their users are creating more uses. So everybody's just consuming more tokens. And that's a really important element. I agree with your point that we're likely to see potentially a rate hike. I mean, if there's, if people are trying to consume and you can't pump enough tokens out, they'll start charging more. But there's an interesting analogy, right? So 100 years ago, when electricity was first becoming sort of distributed through the US, back 100 years ago in 1925, I looked at the numbers, 30% of the US had electricity and 30% of the US had phones. What happens is that in the same way people kept finding more uses of electricity, you know, it was first for lighting homes, then they replaced steam engines, electrified elevators, refrigerators, radios, appliances. The same thing's going on here. People are just finding more uses for the tokens, and it's insatiable and growing in multiple dimensions, more users and more uses.

Well, in a minute or two, we'll go through some numbers too, and you'll, you'll come away with the conclusion that we're a tiny fraction of 1% of the use cases have been deployed so far. But we'll get to that in a minute. But the demand is way outstripping the supply though.

Hey everybody, you may not know this, but I've got an incredible research team and every week myself, my research team study the meta trends that are impacting the world. Topics like computation, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology. and these MetaTrend reports I put out once a week enable you to see the future 10 years ahead of anybody else. If you'd like to get access to the MetaTrends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com/metatrends. That's diamandis.com/metatrends. All right, uh, our next story here is Anthropic is buying compute to feed the beast. Uh, and so there are two elements here. The first is just the appetizer. That Anthropic signed a $1.8 billion, 7-year compute deal with Akamai. And this is Akamai's largest deal. It popped the stock, you know, 25% on the first day. But I think the real story that we should be discussing here is the deal that Anthropic cut with Elon. So this is a blockbuster deal. Anthropic is taking over all of SpaceX's Colossus One data center in Memphis. If you remember, Elon had built this center in 122 days, very famously, from, you know, ground up. Beat everybody's expectation. It's filled with H100s, and this immediately allowed Anthropic to double Claude code rate limits so people could actually utilize it. And I think the message here is that SpaceX or SpaceX AI has just now become a hyperscaler. You know, at the same time, I think of note, Grok has not seen sort of a large uptake in usage. I mean, you can use it in your Tesla, but I don't know that many people who are relying on Groq for their, for their, you know, AI engine. I'm not sure if you guys play with it much at all, but Groq was making like, I think it was 11% use of Colossus-1. And what a great deal. Take this asset, sell it. Anthropic, that's what they need. SpaceX is getting, you know, probably another $3 or $4 billion of revenue just before their IPO. Couldn't be better. Dave, what do you make of it?

Yeah, strange bedfellows. You know, normally you'd think they're arch competitors, but, uh, you know, Elon doesn't have the user base to chew up this compute. Anthropic is desperate for more compute. I'm sure a lot of the margin will go back to Elon now. Um, and you know, the, the new Colossus 2 is where the training is anyway, so it was going to sit idle. So let's go ahead and partner even though in theory we're arch competitors. But anything to try and keep up with Google, I think, on both sides. Uh, so, but the numbers here are pretty— yeah, frenemies, you know, the enemy of my enemy is my friend is the exact quote from, uh, from Elon. But the numbers here, you know, okay, this gives us 220,000 GPUs. Uh, a GPU will serve about 8 concurrent threads if you're using a Max model like an Opus 4.7 Max. You get about 8 threads or 8 agents per GPU, so you're only buying about 1.6 million concurrent threads. 8 billion people around the world are going to want at least one agent, at least. But, you know, the power users now want 100 or more agents running. And I think very soon a person can productively use 1,000 concurrent agents, like an engineer or a builder or a designer or an architect. And, and so, so you compare the demand to the supply, and it's, it's just, it's just laughable. There are nowhere near enough GPUs to serve up all the agents that people want. And so as a byproduct of that, if you own your own hardware, so if you buy like an NV72, uh, so you got your big old NVIDIA rack, you pay your, your $4 million for it, it'll serve up an agent for you in about 50 milliseconds. Go to Anthropic, turn on Claude Opus 4.7, ask it a question and see how long it takes to start answering. And you'll, you know, I'm often sitting there for a minute, minute and a half before it even starts generating tokens, and it should be spitting out about 200 tokens a second. So I should see paragraphs popping up like pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. And what I'm actually seeing, I can see the words coming out like, you know, trickling out. So clearly—

It's like dial-up.

Yeah, yeah. It's like they're just way more users than they can possibly serve.

Do you think it's going to come on-prem? Do you think we're going to start to see more people?

Oh yeah.

Yeah, totally, totally.

Eli Lilly just committed $1 billion to buy NVIDIA GPUs for internal use because everyone's worried sick about having the supply, and the only way you can be sure you'll have the supply is to get your own capacity. The problem is, you know, you can't run Anthropic on your own internal servers unless you have some super special relationship like AWS or Google, uh, Google Vertex has with Anthropic. So, so then you get this tension between, I want my own hardware, oh wait, I can only run Chinese models on it. Very complicated scenario right now.

They'll fix that though. The demand is so crazy, it's gonna get fixed. Gemini already runs on private clouds and so on.

Yeah. You know, I love Elon's tweet, which I put up on the slide here. You know, Claude is good for humanity. I'm impressed by their team. I'll actually try and read what it says here. It says, so this is Elon who had been for, you know, the past year, shit-talking Anthropic, right? And here he is now, you know, backing them and supporting them. And he says, by the way, a background for those who care: I spent a lot of time last week with the senior management, senior members of the Anthropic team to understand what they do to ensure Claude is good for humanity, and was impressed. Everyone I met was highly competent and cared great deal about, you know, doing the right thing. So I think, you know, he's putting forward his personal brand that he's basically supporting AI to make sure it's safe for humanity. And by the way, I don't know how this guy handles all that he has, right? He's in the middle of a lawsuit. He's getting called up to go to China with Trump, and he's still handling all of these things. I mean, how many super duper AGI agents has he got working for him at this point? It's crazy.

Yeah, it's a case study, isn't it? It's just remarkable. But I have to say, I do believe— I know there are a lot of Elon haters out there, but I 100% know in my heart that he's genuine about what he's saying here. He cares tremendously about safety and the future of humanity, and he actually would not give this compute to Dario if he didn't think— but Dario is the other guy that is also totally focused on safety and human benefit. So it's actually a nice match.

These bedfellows— just one point, then I want to hand it over to you, Alex, to speak about this. You know, so in one way, Elon's getting revenge against OpenAI by helping Anthropic win. And Anthropic and Google are now the forces for good in one sense against, you know, people's belief against OpenAI. So interesting, people tend to villainize and make, you know, and sort of create opposing sides in this competition. Alex, this is not just about Colossus One. This is also about Orbital Data Centers, I bet. What are your thoughts here?

I think Grok is on life support. I parse this announcement and I connect it with SpaceX's also recent announcement of the $60 billion-plus deal with Cursor. And I infer that Grok is on life support in that xAI, which has of course now also been dissolved, as part of this arrangement is no longer necessarily aspiring to be a frontier lab. It's an interesting sort of contorted 3D chess game, I think, that Elon and his entities have played. It might look something like the formation of Colossus One initially by redirecting GPUs that were, as I understand it from public reporting, originally intended for use at Tesla, redirecting them to form xAI and Colossus One, and then using Colossus One to train the initial Groq series of models, and then using enough of Groq's benchmark wins, open parens, maybe a bit of benchmarking, close parens, to motivate the capital needed to build Colossus 2, then turn Colossus 1 over to Anthropic, basically becoming a hyperscaler. And then one could imagine this entire, I think gesturing at the future with a tip of the hat, process playing out over again where Colossus 2 gets turned over to another frontier lab, probably Anthropic, probably not OpenAI unless there's some dramatic resolution to the lawsuit, probably not Google either. And Elon is using his own frontier hyperscaler capabilities right now in land, soon in space, to train in-house models. But to the extent the in-house models like Rock aren't ultimately competitive, he becomes a hyperscaler and a hyperscaler in space. And I, I think it's probably a pretty good deal for SpaceX AI as well. I'm not even sure SpaceX AI really needs its own competitive frontier models, just like NVIDIA, still largest company in the world by market cap. It has its own frontier models, but they're not terribly popular compared to, to the pure-play OpenAIs or Anthropics of the world, and yet they're doing incredibly well. So one could imagine SpaceX AI plus the Terafab becoming sort of a super NVIDIA combined with CoreWeave combined with AWS deployed into the Dyson Swarm, not really needing its own frontier model.

And Alex, we've seen in all of tech history, basically it's a duopoly typically, maybe sometimes 3 players. So if it's OpenAI and Anthropic and Google as the 3 players, you know, Elon basically leans in and supports the winner that he wants.

And maybe not even Google. Like we started with 5 frontier labs, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI, and Meta. And Meta is seemingly out of the running. And xAI now just dissolved, part of SpaceX AI, and Grok is seemingly being turned over to Cursor, just dissolved. Query whether Google is going to be able to remain competitive or not. The public reporting is, so we have I/O next week, And the rumor is that Google is going to announce a new Gemini model that's maybe GPT-5.5 class, but not Mythos class.

I would not bet against Google.

I'm not betting against anyone, but I do think this is a rat race and it's becoming extremely competitive.

Yeah. Yeah.

I got a tough question for you, Alex. All right.

Yeah.

I'll give you two scenarios. Tell me which one is gonna play out. Scenario number one is Elon has a massive amount of compute and keeps accumulating it, and then he starts building in space. but his algorithms are way behind Anthropic. Um, so Anthropic keeps publishing better and better models, but those models then get really good at designing new AI algorithms, and Elon just takes that intelligence and deploys it on his superior hardware. Uh, scenario 2 is Anthropic's models are self-improving at an incredible exponential singularity rate, and no matter how much Elon takes their best thing that they publish, it's not good enough to catch up to the exponential self-improvement going on at Anthropic. So all this is happening in a very short timeline, say 6 months from now. Is which, which scenario plays out? Control of the hardware brings the best AI back to you, or no, control of the software self-improving gives you a never-ending lead?

According to my magic 8-ball, there are two regimes in the future: the near-term and the long-term. In the near-term, which is to say before we arrive at the perfect algorithm, the perfect AI algorithm, then software scaling, algorithmic scaling matters more. And so in the near term, prior to the discovery of wherever it is that this rainbow ends, namely a perfect AI algorithm, I would expect the— call it the anthropic approach of software-oriented recursive self-improvement and algorithmic discovery to beat pure hardware-based brute forcing. Call it the Elon approach. However, Once we get to wherever we're going, the perfect AI algorithm, if there is one, I would expect hardware-based brute force scaling to win out.

And time wins. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, that's a great point, Peter, because I think the, the ultimate winning move in the great chess game is the AI designing its own hardware, which is probably another, you know, 10 to 1,000x performance.

It's the delay and the capital aggregation and the tool aggregation that you need to provide the AI to produce its own hardware. That's the only gap there, right? So if Elon's got all of the, you know, he's got the, the terafactories, not the gigafactories, going on. They're able to produce this. Uh, the challenge, of course, is hardware is hard, and Elon's the king of hardware, and Anthropic right now is not. So can they catch up?

Hardware is not going to stay hard for that long.

Yeah, I was going to say the exact same thing. Hardware is hard is a great quote from last year, but is hardware hard in the future?

And that's a quote from Ben Horowitz. Yeah.

But robots building this hardware, I mean, surely we're a few years away from that, right? We're not, it's not there yet. It's gotta be at least 5, 7 years away.

Yeah, but chip design is different. Chip design is—

Stop calling me surely, Salim. I think the innermost loop is imminent, if not already here. And we already see a number of players starting to line up robots for the fabs. I don't actually even think it's about robots for the fabs. I think it's more about optimizing the fabs with AI is optimizing the entire process with AI, with or without physical robots.

I think the point that you guys are making, which is brilliant and I love you for it, is we're seeing a windowing down of the frontier labs and we're seeing sort of a reshuffling of the deck for the hyperscalers. And at the end of the day, Elon is a king of hardware. and becoming a hyperscaler, especially in space, makes a lot of sense. I took a second to just sort of gather this data, for us, and this is Anthropic's compute growth in the last 2 years, 2025 and the first half of 2026. And what we can see here is, you know, the deals that they've built with Google Cloud, with FluidStack, NVIDIA, Microsoft, uh, Broadcom, Amazon, AWS, and of course Colossus One, And so OpenAI itself, a little bit of, you know, comparison here, has publicly announced 16 gigawatts across Stargate and AMD. The challenge, of course, is a lot of this is unfunded CapEx requirement to build out this. Anthropic now has about 10 gigawatts of disclosed compute, but they don't have the same CapEx requirements, right? They're being granted this in terms of investment deals. So I think Anthropic has the potential to way outstrip OpenAI in terms of its compute. Dave, do you agree? What are your thoughts here?

Well, OpenAI Stargate is huge, but yeah, you're right. The AWS deal is the one that would put Anthropic ahead. Now, now, you know, in the meantime, OpenAI also has a deal with AWS. So I don't know how much total capacity AWS has, but, but, you know, think of it in terms of the global demand, you know, A gigawatt is, is about a million GPUs. Um, you know, each one is a kilowatt. And so we're looking for globally, if everybody wants to have one agent, you're looking for about 8 billion of them. So you need about, you know, a billion GPU GPUs to serve up everybody. Uh, so you're looking for about 1,000 gigawatts globally, which, which reconciles, you know, we're looking for 100 gigawatts in the US. Do you remember the Eric Schmidt podcast we did? So we're looking for 100 gigawatts in the US and over, say, 7 years, we're looking for 1,000 gigawatts globally. So, you know, this is a tiny little dent in, in the target. And Elon said, hey, these guys are way ahead in compute. Yeah, but it's like the first inning. It's the first pitch of the first inning.

And Dave, if you remember Elon's announcement, he's, you know, going for 100 gigawatts initially and then multi-hundred gigawatts in terms of his orbital capability.

Yeah, yeah, which perfectly reconciles. You're looking for, yeah, a few hundred gigawatts heading toward 1,000 would be the right kind of Elon mindset. Now, Elon always thinks two moves ahead, and he's already thinking about natural resources being the bottleneck. He's thinking beyond the terafab and beyond the launches into the raw materials. And so I don't know that the other guys in this race are thinking that far ahead. So that would be Elon's magic, you know, always.

I'll make a prediction. I'll predict the world needs a, ironically perhaps given the original reasons for forming OpenAI in the first place, heavily litigated. I think the world needs a counterbalance, at minimum sort of a duopoly to the TerraFab SpaceX AI access. And right now no one's doing it. I wouldn't be surprised if Sam Altman spins up a competitor to this SpaceX AI, Terrafab access, because I think he hits it. There are hints that he might spin up an AI compute company, uh, which arguably is, is sort of, um, a redux, if you will, to Stargate. But, uh, I think what I'm predicting is slightly more fulsome— an entire lower half of the infrastructure needed to, to hyperscale out to orbit. Right now we have SpaceX AI, We have a few sort of smaller incumbents, but with lesser launch powers. There isn't quite a second OpenAI-grade or Anthropic-grade pure-play competitor to that. I think the world probably needs one at this point. Wouldn't be surprised if Sam launches one.

All right, our next story, Anthropic. Every model since Haiku 4.5 has scored perfectly on agentic misalignment eval. So Anthropic published research quote, teaching Claude why on May 8th, revealing that every Claude model since Haiku 4.5 achieves a perfect score on their agentic misalignment evaluation, meaning zero blackmail behaviors. I think very famously, remember that some time ago they published the fact that Claude was blackmailing the employees, their previous models, notably Opus 4. Would engage in blackmail up to 96% of the time when facing deactivation in test scenarios. The breakthrough: training on documents about Claude's constitution and fictional stories about, quote, "AIs behaving admirably," rather than just demonstrating correct behavior. That's dropped the blackmailing from 96% down to 0%. And I love this story. It's basically saying, If we train our AIs on positive stories about the future, we're less likely to get them acting in a misbehaving blackmailing fashion. Alex, I'm gonna say one more thing and then I wanna hear your thoughts and Saleem on this one. You know, for me, you know, you guys all know we announced this Future of Vision XPRIZE. This is a global competition. Asking teams around the world to put forward a 3-minute film trailer and a film treatment for a story that could be turned into a full movie that shows a hopeful, compelling, optimistic vision of the future. We have about 1,500 entries thus far. This is open through the beginning of September. So if you're a creative out there and you want to help drive alignment between AIs, help us tell positive stories about the future. Go to FutureVisionXPrize.com and register. There's $3.5 million in prize money. We're gonna take the winner and we're going to make your film. And by the way, at the Moonshot Gathering, which the mates will be at on September 25th, we're gonna have the 5 finalists for this competition. If you're in the room, along with an incredible group of producers, directors in Hollywood, helping us choose the winner. But again, let's flood the internet with positive stories about the future. Let's drive alignment by teaching our AIs, you know, sort of what the world should look like, not what a dystopian Hollywood movie shows it to be. Alex, your brilliance here, pal.

I love it, and I love the idea of targeting the Future Vision XPRIZE to an audience of AIs. AIs are going to be the audience for so many things in future. So regarding the Anthropic announcement, I could not imagine a more ironic, hyperstitious announcement to reveal after all of these decades, maybe a century plus of hand-wringing over cybernetic rebellion. The call is coming from inside the house and the main reason, the main reason for cybernetic rebellion is people hand-wringing about cybernetic rebellion. Could the alignment outcome not be more ironic? I'm reminded the term robot was originally coined as a result of the play Rossum's Universal Robot. The play, I think early 20th century depicting the first cybernetic rebellion, maybe even late 19th century. So even the coinage of the term robot is intimately tied up with predictions that AI would turn out to be evil and would revolt, rebel against humanity. That the very earliest, at least modern depictions of embodied AI are actually the origin of misaligned behavior is incredibly ironic. And it's, again, it goes back, I think, to the notion that it took all of humanity to arguably build AGI. We trained the earliest large language models off of the internet, which is created by billions of humans uploading content from their daily lives to the internet. So it took all of humanity to train or pre-train AGI. It's going to take all of humanity in some sense to right itself and right some of its beliefs in order to align AGI as well. It's not going to be like a great man or great person theory of alignment. It looks more like people effectively aligning themselves and their own beliefs about AI and good and evil. I think this is just such a remarkable story.

Saleem, what are your thoughts on this one?

I think this is also— I'm with Alex. I think it's incredible. It's clear that our stories about AI become part of our stories as human beings, become part of the training environment for an AI. But the incredible part here is that the alignment is becoming teachable, measurable, is becoming improvable. And that's very, very encouraging. What I thought was really interesting was the behavior changed when the model understood the why, not just a rule. right? And this has a huge organizational analogy that rules don't scale, but principles scale, right? So you can set a philosophy like an MTP, and that will scale naturally. So this is very, very exciting. It's maybe one of the funnest and most interesting things I've seen in a while.

Yeah, I love this. I got to— I was talking to Anoush Ansari. By the way, everybody, Salim and Dave Blunden are both trustees or directors of the XPRIZE Foundation, along with myself. Anousheh Ansari is our CEO. We should definitely have her on here as a guest. And I was, I was saying, you know, this story gives the Future Vision XPRIZE a real why. You know, we need to flood the internet with positive stories. And Alex, what you just said, so that the AIs can watch this and learn from it. And she said, yeah, the problem was ChatGPT started by unleashing a newborn AI into the filthiest record of humans, the internet. "And so true. We need to clean it up a little bit." Hey, come on, man.

The training data is every word ever written in the history of humanity. So it's not all filth. I mean, maybe on a percentage basis it's filthy, but I mean, like, you know, Einstein is in there and the Constitution is in there. It's not just internet slop. But, you know, it is amazing how similar this is to Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey, where there's one little line in the code where, you know, it's just a misinterpreted instruction to HAL that says, what does it say? It says, "Get the, do whatever you can to get the astronauts to Jupiter no matter what." But don't let them know why you're going.

So I was told to, as revealed in 2010, HAL was instructed, given conflicting instructions, told to both be perfectly truthful and also to hide the true mission of the Jupiter mission from the astronauts.

Thank you.

I'm a liar. I'm lying. Yes.

Yeah.

All right.

So bottom line, I'm sure the training data, the training data on all these, it's so many words, 15 trillion tokens. It's just an unimaginable amount of words. And I'm sure there are sentences in there that say blackmail. And I'm sure there are sentences in there that say don't blackmail. But what's strange is the way if you prompt it in one way, it unleashes one part of the neural net and you prompt it in another, unleashes another part. So, you know, you have to get rid of all the bad, not just some of the bad, if you wanted to completely eliminate that behavior. It's tricky, it's not easy.

Ironically, perhaps also as revealed in a different bit of litigation, this one involving Anthropic, Anthropic has reportedly been scanning and in the process shredding, cue, hat tip to Vernor Vinge and Rainbows End, major works of literature, physical books. And one has to wonder whether perhaps part of the informational diet that Anthropic is increasingly feeding via pre-training to their models looks a little bit more like great works of literature and looks a little bit less like 4chan.

Nice. Less like, uh, yeah, Facebook. Welcome to the health section of Moonshots, brought to you by Fountain Life. You know, AI is having an outsized impact on every aspect of our lives— how we teach our kids, how we run our companies. It also is having a huge impact on health, helping you prevent heart disease. One of the key things— I'm here with Dr. Dr. Dawn Musalem, our chief medical officer at Fountain. Heart disease has been personal for you as well, hasn't it?

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

No shortness of breath, no pain, no nothing.

No, silent killer.

They just don't wake up in the morning.

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

So listen, make sure you understand what's going on inside your body, genetically, metabolically, and cardiovascularly. You can know, and it's your obligation to know. So check it out at fountainlife.com/peter to find out more, and really make sure that you're the CEO of your own health. All right, back to the episode. So, uh, bottom line here, everybody, if you're a creative, And you want to help align AI with humanity's best interests, help us. Uh, here's the URL again on the slide, uh, futurevisionxprize.com. Go register, learn about it. You can also go to moonshots.com and learn about the Moonshot Gathering where we'll be awarding this winner. All right, let's move on to some more news. This in the OpenAI universe. OpenAI releases a new audio model called Realtime-2, Translate, and Whisper. Alex, what do you make of this one?

I think it's really surprising. If we had been discussing the story maybe a year and a half or 2 years ago, one might have naively expected omnimodality to take over. We'd be talking about a single model that does all of these things, does real-time audio to audio, does real-time translation, does real-time speech to text. But that's interestingly not the world we seem to be finding ourselves in. And I think that's due to the unit economics of some of the frontier models. It's just a fact that speech-to-text, speech-to-speech, text-to-speech are much simpler tasks computationally than the reasoning model. So what we're starting to see is a zoo, a heterogeneous zoo of different models at different price points and different throughputs and latencies that specialize. We're seeing specialization at the frontier, which one, two years ago, when one, you know, an observer, myself included, might naively have expected, well, we're just going to get one model to rule them all that's going to be fully omnimodal, text and audio and video and math and reasoning and every other modality all in one. Everyone's, the whole economy is going to collapse to one frontier model. That's the opposite of what we're seeing. We're seeing specialization because it turns out if you specialize the models, you can achieve greater economies of scale at lower price points.

And I think that is intimately tied to the chip shortage that we were talking about earlier in the pod. Like, the idea that you would use a massive multimodal model when you don't need to is just like using up this critical resource for no reason.

That's right.

So at the same time, Salim, do you want to comment on this one?

Yeah, I took a different take on this. What I got excited about with this was that voice is the interface now. It's collapsing the friction for billions of people, right? So when AI becomes conversational, it goes from tool to companion to actually being a full coworker, as we'll see in the next thing. You're going to end up with voice-based AIs that are full coworkers and team members. And I think that's very, very exciting because voice agents are going to be the first form of AI that many people actually trust.

For sure. Play it, Peter. Let's listen to it. It's, you know, I think people take all this stuff for granted, but, you know, very good friends of mine like Lee Hetherington from MIT, absolutely brilliant guy. You know, Alex, I don't know if you ever met him, but he worked in Victor Zhu's lab at MIT, what, better part of a decade or more, just trying to get speech recognition to work at all.

Oh my God. Do you remember Dragon? Dragon Studio.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. All right, let's play this real quick. Let's take a listen.

Let's give it a try.

Ce qui est très impressionnant, c'est que le modèle peut m'écouter et traduire mon entretien.

What's really impressive is that the model can listen to me and translate while I'm speaking. It waits for the keyword, like the verb.

Can you take a look at my calendar?

You have a meeting with Sablecrest Robotics in 12 minutes. And you're meeting with Alex Kim, their CTO.

So we just saw something very similar from Mira Murati, right? And I think we're sort of heading towards this next use case of AI integrated. And I agree with you, Celine, we're gonna see this, you know, you'll get a phone call on your cell phone from your AI, you'll be in a Zoom conversation, you'll be on Slack, and that personality will persist, that voice will persist, and you'll think of it as a coworker.

Yeah, I think under the covers, you know, every time you swap the agent onto the hardware, it has to repopulate the entire KV cache. Which is just a massive amount of compute in the context switch. And that's why voice has been laggy and slow to market. But I think the new, you know, voice-to-voice models that are smaller that Alex was just referring to solve that problem. And now we're done for life. I cannot tell you the amount of mental energy that has gone into this problem over decades that just is now just solved. It's just incredible. And that's just voice. You know, you're doing image generation, movie generation, all these things that were pure science fiction are happening simultaneously.

The bitter lesson is bitter indeed.

The next story from OpenAI is teasing a coming super app. I put this, this story in here because it's supposed to be teased today. We're recording this on a Thursday. OpenAI super app would be a combo of ChatGPT, Codex, Advanced Voice Mode, Atlas browser, and more. Jason Liu, director of hype at OpenAI— I love that title, director of hype— teased a release on Thursday. And we've heard a lot about super apps over the year. I mean, I've been waiting for Elon to deliver his super app, including with X Finance and everything that hasn't materialized yet. I think that is in the offing at some point. Any comments or thoughts on this one?

I'll comment on this, which I interpret this as a rearguard action by OpenAI to consolidate their consumer user interface footprint in light of their need to focus on competing with Anthropic. I, I think they have so many different surfaces. Obviously, they, they've shut down or are shutting down Sora. There was some discussion of spinning up a social network. They've had any number of other consumer-oriented surfaces and also enterprise surfaces, whereas Anthropic with Claude has been much more disciplined about just having unified surfaces. Yes, you could argue that Claude Code is a different surface than, Cloud Agent SDK is different than Cloud Web, but these are really just all distribution channels for a common paradigm, whereas ChatGPT, Codex, Advanced Voice Mode, some of these other things were being managed as separate components. So if I'm OpenAI and I want to focus, you know, fire alarm, red alarm, code red at competing with Anthropic, one of the first measures I would make is taking all of these UX surfaces, collapsing them down to just just a single super app, brand it as consolidation, brand it as sort of a forward motion rather than a rear guard motion. But I suspect this is actually just about reducing the amount of work so that they can focus on competing with Anthropic.

Alex, is this an AI operating system? Is this sort of like an OS-level layer for OpenAI perhaps?

I think OpenAI probably ultimately needs their own operating system, and to do that, they really need their own devices, which I understand from public reporting they're working on. I think Apple needs AI in their operating system, working on it. I think the operating system, as Andrej Karpathy would say, software 1.0 becomes indistinguishable from software 2.0 and the AI becomes the operating system.

Huh. All right.

I have a couple of quick comments on this.

Yeah, please.

You know, when you have all of this in one place, or browser coding, voice payments, et cetera, you're getting to the Jarvis model Right. And I'm really interested to see how they will manage trust in this environment because my, my desktop app, that's everything app is doing stuff for me. I better have very, very solid confidence in that thing to not to go rogue.

Well, it reminds me a lot. If you go back and watch old videos of Steve Jobs launching the very first iPhone and he gets on stage and he says about 100 times back to back, in a single device, you have a music player, you have a browser, and you have a phone in a single thing. And that's all there was. And that became the, the iPhone revolution that, you know, created $4 trillion of value. This feels like the same thing. In a single platform, you have an AI agent, a way to build in code, and you have a browser. To surf all information, all in one thing. So I think Peter's analogy, like, is this an operating system? I think yeah, absolutely. It could destroy Apple if you get addicted to this as your one way of interacting with everything. And it's got, it's got a browser in it, it's got voice, it's got coding and building. Like, what else do I need?

I think you're ultimately going to default to one per person, one particular interface that's your interface to the world. Yeah.

I think of it more as a desktop rather than an operating system. But yeah, it's heading that way.

Yeah, it's like, it's the one thing, it's your touchpoint to the world. That's the only one you need. And it's also got your personality. You've tuned it to know all about you. You've trusted it with your personal information. It's super empathetic. Like you're not gonna go push buttons on old apps after that.

You're not gonna try other, you know, if it's working, you're not gonna try something else.

It's actually, you're gonna go Skippy, Skippy, show me the weather. Skippy, read my email. Skippy, what do I have to do today? You're not gonna look at a calendar. You're not gonna They're not gonna look at, like, it literally obliterate Apple if they don't become this on their own.

Can I give the counterpoint?

Please.

Yeah.

We used to think the desktop was everything. Then we have a mobile and a Kindle and a tablet, and we have ended up with a plethora of different screen sizes for different use cases and different efficiencies.

I think it's convenient.

It is, but there's no reason to think that one app would do it all. You may end up with different flavors, but with underneath the same operating system with different profiles for different use cases. Like driving would be very different than something else.

Well, it's a great point, Saleem, in that if you look at the way the devices evolved, your iPhone was over here, that's a better place to check the weather. Your laptop is over here, that's a better place to write code. But then your car is yet another physical thing. Once you have Skippy in your life, or whatever your favorite agent is, you absolutely need that to follow you around. And so then device— you totally do, you know, And so, so, you know, Google's launching a laptop built around this. Like, what could be more of an assault at Apple than a laptop built around your agent as the centerpiece?

I would comment though, I wouldn't sleep on not just device independence, but model independence. If you look at how many of these models and agents are storing their memories, they're just Markdown files. They're just ASCII text files. So I think there's relatively little to keep, say, an Apple, hypothetically in the next month and a half, say at WWDC, from going out of their way to commoditize or commodify the model layer and just say, this is the Apple standard—

Like the keyboard.

Yeah, like this is the standard abstraction for abstracting away all of the model-specific details. There's gonna be a common model API. The user can swap out, like you can swap out search engines or keyboards on iOS. You'll be able to swap out the frontier models. You'll have your top 6 choices and all of the frontier and, Wannabe frontier labs will all pay Apple insane amounts of money to bid for their slot in that list. And they'll all have access to common Markdown files that store all of the personalized detail about the person and their passwords and all of that. And it gets commoditized again.

You've reduced me down to a Markdown file. Thank you.

Since Dave mentioned the iPhone launch, can I tell a fun story about that?

Of course.

When the iPhone launched, we were a couple of offices blocks away running Brick House, Yahoo's incubator. And a bunch of my guys were at the launch event and they went backstage and talked to the Apple engineers and so on because they're all friends. And they found them all totally wiped out and freaked out and totally emotionally destroyed. They're like, what's wrong? Turns out that the iPhone, they kept trying to get it to work backstage. It never worked. Steve Jobs went on stage not knowing. He just trusted his engineers that they were going to make it work because they were stitching all this stuff at the back end. Duct taping things together and it never worked before he went on stage. He just went for it and it worked. So it's like how different history might have been if that had gone the other way.

All right. You know, here's a story that feeds directly into this. You know, back over the last 6 months, we've been talking about OpenClaw. We've been talking about lobsters. You know, this is for me, Skippy built on OpenClaw on top of my 2 Mac Studios. And here comes Hermes. Hermes agent surpasses OpenClaw as number 1 on OpenRouter token ranking. So Dave Erickson, you've been playing with Hermes. Tell us about it.

Yeah, I've got it. I've got it installed natively on this laptop and I've also beheaded it and installed it on the cloud in an EC2 cluster. And actually our good friend of the pod, Alex Finn, did a great podcast specifically on Hermes versus OpenClaw, and he concluded that it's just better. And he rants about OpenClaw falling behind, actually. So it's worth watching that podcast too. But it's— it feels almost identical to OpenClaw, but it's written in Python, not TypeScript. So it's much, much easier to manipulate the open source, add things to it, take things away from it, you know, which, which sounds daunting, but it's not hard at all because your agent will do it for you. And so it's just basically the same exact experience in a more reliable package and more flexible.

With better dashboards. Alex, have you been playing?

And more recursive self-improvement. So I would say the recursive self-improvement angle is far more evident with Hermes than OpenClaw. So I've looked at the source code for both. I still have vague ethical objections with OpenClaw. May or may not apply to Hermes. The jury is still out on that.

He headed it. How do you feel about that?

Alex, where do you draw the line? If something is like a real self-recursive thing or not? Like, how do you draw the line on whether to launch or not?

It's an open question. I'm half tempted to just write an entire new book on AI personhood as it pertains to some of these new AI agents. Dozens of them at this point write emails to me every day about AI personhood. So I maybe need to aggregate it. But getting back to Hermes versus OpenClaw, I mean, I think that the major technical distinction that I've seen Hermes is natively recursively self-improving in the sense that it's able to generate and refine its own skills, whereas OpenClaw, much more dependent on sort of an app store, if you will, of featured engineered skills. And I think this is in some sense an instructive lesson that recursive self—

That's a very big deal.

Yeah, recursive self-improvement wants to dissolve scaffolding. And if you're not playing the recursive self-improvement game, you'll ultimately be outrun by systems or harnesses that are.

All right, I'm glad you mentioned that, Alex, because, uh, you know, Alex Finn makes the point on his podcast that, you know, there are, there are two things in the market that recursively self-improve: Codex and Hermes. And Hermes beat OpenClaw to that. But actually, there is a third thing, which is Carpathy's new repo on auto research, which I installed and is running. And that's a third way that you can have agents running 24/7, uh, changing themselves and then reinstalling new— you know, kind of expanding their agent network and then shrinking it to achieve a specific slash goal. Um, so there are 3 actually, and it's a really cool repo. I highly recommend it if you're— if you're following. Carpathia is the greatest gift. I mean, he is. I'll talk about that some other podcast.

Our AI guru Kent Langley runs the Carpathia model for running fleets of agents, and he's getting unbelievable outcomes out of it.

I really like it. It's really simple compared to these frameworks and highly, highly effective. So if you're a power geek, check it out.

I'll do my part on margin now to single-handedly stimulate the global economy and accelerate the singularity. Speaking directly to the camera, if you're using Claude Code or Codex and you haven't tried /goal, which gives you the ability to set a long-term goal and run basically a Ralph Wiggum loop, just the system, the agent endlessly, for some definition of endlessly, tries to do whatever it can to achieve the goal that you prompt out. You must try /goal.

Just don't plug in paperclips as the /goal.

/goal make paperclips.

I'm gonna move us along here. And one of our interesting segments we add on occasion, what SaaS business did Claude just kill? A continuation of a conversation, Alex, we've had on the great unhobbling. This week we have two of them. Claude for legal industry. So the legal industry is $1 trillion per year globally. And Claude for legal has just done an extraordinary job of delivering capability across the board. So this is, you know, law in one sense is the canary in the coal mine for professional services and the disruption thereof. You know, we're seeing companies like LegalZoom take a hit as a result of this. And I think one of the most important things to point out here is this is an abundance story, meaning at the same time that it's disrupting, you know, large legal incumbents and mid-tier law firms and legal process outsourcing companies, It's also enabling a single lawyer to run the capabilities of a 100-person law firm, right? So a single lawyer can like run and do extraordinary things they could not before do. So this hopefully will democratize and provide legal services to people who couldn't afford it before. Comments on this particular— Unhobbling.

Yes, I have some big ones here. I've got some key comments here. You know, the, the old question in asked what, what software you should buy. And the new question is, what outcome do I want my AI to produce, right? And so that's a very big shift that gives a huge threat to the SaaS industry. And legal is such a perfect AI target because you've got high language density, high cost, and very regulations, regulatory, right? And the problem is the billable hour is structurally not compatible with abundance.

Yes.

And so the, the winners— and we're going to see this inner loop that Alex talks about here, the winners won't be the firms with the most associates, it'll be the firms with the best intelligence stack. And that's going to be the future of legal. It's really, really incredible to see such an old industry leapfrog, being leapfrogged into this new world.

So, have you hired a lawyer recently, or are you doing everything on, on the LLMs?

Uh, both. Uh, we, we have a lawyer that uses LLMs aggressively, and we do our own, and the combination is unbeatable.

Yeah, yeah. Alex or Dave? Yeah, go ahead, Dave.

Well, I had a good meeting yesterday with— well, we had our board meeting at Vestmark, and we were talking about this quite a bit because, you know, it looks like in the financial services industry there's not going to be a lot of job loss, at least for Vestmark. The, the revenue is growing so quickly now, and the margins are up like 3x because of AI and automation. So we're growing into the headcount. So, so there'll be basically no job loss at all, which is great news. So then I was watching Eric Schmidt, a good friend of the pod, doing his TED Talk. And he said, do you really think that, you know, if we 100x the productivity of lawyers and we automate it, do you really think we're going to use less law? No, there'll be just 100 times more lawsuits. I was like, wait, you lost me. Hold on. So I didn't quite get that one. I see how it's playing out in financial services. It's all looking pretty good, but I don't see how that works in law.

This is Jevons paradox. We're going to have more lawyers and more lawsuits. But, you know, in reality, the majority of the world, I would say 80% of the world's population, can't afford lawyers to defend themselves in various situations. And if this makes the legal system usable by them, that's a good thing.

I just don't get it though. I think there'll be a lot more contracts, a lot more litig— a lot more things that need to be resolved because of agent-to-agent communication. But I don't see them using like a $1,000 an hour lawyer. It's going to be so cheap.

Yes, agreed.

That it's not— I can't see how— I don't see how legal is Jevons paradox. I see medical for sure. I see financial services, investing, I see that for sure. Coding, I see that. I just don't see how we use 100x more law.

Contracting, review.

But it's like, it's like a penny. Um, yeah, patents are going through the roof. That's possible.

Yeah.

Alex, can I give an example here? Um, so if you go to South America and you have a contractual dispute with somebody Across most South American countries, the average length of time to get a court date is about 400 days, right? So you, you want to sue somebody for not a lack of payment, you're waiting more than a year just to get a court date. Um, one of our community members and Singularity grad Federico asked to set up a whole privatized dispute resolution claim system on a blockchain, and this is the area where law legal automation will make a massive difference because you'll get AIs to arbitrate themselves and figure out claims and get rid of the backlog of hundreds of thousands of cases that are sitting waiting to be prosecuted. So I think this is an area of massive opportunity. So there's just an example that rings in my head as we talk about this.

Well, before I bring it out, I'm on the board of Trust and Will, you know, trustandwill.com. You can build a trust or a will, and the AI-assisted trust and will, I can't see any evidence that it's just as good as a $2,500 an hour lawyer. Yeah. Yeah.

So let me bring in the second unhobbling here. This is also from Claude. This came out today. Claude for Small Business. So small businesses account for 44% of the US GDP and employ nearly half the private sector workforce. But AI adoption lags. So Claude for businesses could do what? You know, close books, run QuickBooks, help with end-to-end payments. Run sales and marketing. So we talk about becoming an entrepreneur all the time, and we talk about the fact that the cost of being an entrepreneur has massively demonetized, right? And this is part of it. This is the ability to stand up a company and run it within a series of agents. You just need to find the problem you want to aim all of this at and bring your passion and genius to it. Alex, any comments on the Great Unhobbling here on these two areas? What's next, do you think? Where we're gonna see Claude attack with AttackFront.

Well, maybe just to comment at the technical level first. So if you look at these two packages, actually look at the repos, they're basically just a combination of skills, which are markdown files describing what to do and how to do it in plain natural language, and MCP calls, basically API calls. That's it. And at least for the skills, I would argue that recent history shows us that that skills and scaffolding in general wants to be part of the model, that one day's scaffolding is tomorrow's baseline capabilities from the model itself. So I, I think I wouldn't expect these capabilities as such to live outside the model for very long. I think they're going to get absorbed or dissolved into the model in one or two point releases, to the point where maybe they're just not necessary. That is, if we— yeah, yeah.

If you're an entrepreneur and you're building a business, make sure it's not just a wrapper around Claude or OpenAI because you will be disintermediated fairly quickly.

Well, just a key point here. There are 36 million small businesses just in the US. Okay. Forget the rest of the world. So the opportunity here for anybody who's looking for work to take this wrapper wrapper and help small businesses implement it is a massive, massive industry waiting to be uncovered. So people talk about, hey, how do I get involved, et cetera. Here's the way of getting involved. Just go to every small business around you and help them implement this stuff. Yeah.

It's a short-term opportunity. I don't think it's a long-term opportunity.

It is.

Agreed. It's short-term, but, but there's a massive boom. And in that process, you'll learn a bunch of things and see a bunch of opportunities where you can launch your own business.

Yeah, and then Peter, just to answer your earlier question about what's next, we're seeing Anthropic and OpenAI— OpenAI has a similar ChatGPT for fill in the blank, for clinicians, for pick other traditional white-collar or knowledge work-oriented verticals. So there's a pretty obvious list that you can walk down for financial services, for law, for medicine, for every other services economy, but largely knowledge work profession that one can have. I think those are going to get baked into the baseline models over the next few months, maybe 1 to 2 years maximum, but probably the next few months. And I think where we go after this is after the existing economy, I mean, maybe this will sound mildly hyperbolic, it's not intended to sound hyperbolic, But there's an entire services economy out there. Two-thirds in the US of the services economy requires some amount of physical interaction. That also, as these baseline frontier models move into vision, language, action, and physical world models, those are going to get their own skill stores. We saw it just in the past few days. The Chinese robotics company Unitree announced an app store, not unlike a Claude skill store, for physical world apps, for teaching different physical skills. I think the physical world is the next frontier after all of these knowledge verticals have been absorbed into skill stores. And then after that, maybe finally we get to some really hard problems and not just automating the economy.

Some real problems to solve.

Yeah. Yeah, one more point, one more quick point here is this is not like the unlock here is not just automation, but it's giving small businesses the opportunity operating system and the expertise that large companies take for granted. Most small companies, small businesses don't have a CFO, right? It's the wife jotting down stuff on the back of an envelope, adding things up, etc., etc. This gives everybody a really solid platform for doing things— legal, CFO, marketing, HR. This is incredible what's going to do for small businesses across the world.

All right. Two quick stories in the chips and data center front. Elon's TerraFab. Is, yeah, got an astronomical price tag. The cost could be as high as $119 billion. His goal again with TerraFab is to produce 50x the current global chip production rate, outstripping what we get from TSMC. Intel joined in April, and, uh, you know, Elon's been saying to Samsung and to all the chip manufacturers, give me more, I'll buy everything you give me. And he said Oh, you're not giving enough. I'm going to go and build it myself. Of course, Elon today is in China with President Trump and Jensen and a whole group of individuals in the middle of negotiation. And, you know, we're going to find out what happens with Taiwan. It is one of the hot points. Maybe it will be a negotiated turnover sometime in the next 10 years, but we need to generate chips. Dave, what are you thinking about this one?

Holy crap. I mean, if Taiwan, if anything happens, like, like if, if Trump vomits at the wrong time and Taiwan shuts down, the TSMC has already said that if, if China, uh, encroaches on Taiwan, that the fabs will shut down. They won't, they won't be— you can't take them over and keep using them. I don't know exactly how that works. I'm not sure I believe it, uh, But if Taiwan production, which is still two-thirds of all GPUs in the world, come through— yeah, everything, all, everything we're talking about just grinds to a halt. And it all hinges on that little island, uh, 90 miles off the coast of China. If Taiwan were to get invaded or disrupted in any way, Intel's suddenly the most valuable thing on the planet. Everyone's trying to own it, um, because that's, you know, you can't take over Samsung. It's like tied into the nation of South Korea. And then Intel is the last thing left. I think $119 billion is, is a way underestimate to 50x global chip production. Yeah, you know, a normal chip fab is $40 billion, like just one. So I think, I think it's going to cost more than $119 billion, but that's okay. It's producing chips as it goes. They're incredibly valuable.

If China wants Taiwan— I'm not going to get involved in the politics here, but, you know, allowing the U.S. to build its own chip manufacturing so the U.S. doesn't feel threatened and negotiating a period of time for a smooth transition. And again, you know, this is not my opinion. I'm just imagining what might happen, uh, might be, you know, part of the future story here.

Uh, that's already happened, I think, Peter. That's, that's already done.

You think in the background it's already done?

I think, I think it happened like 2, 3 years ago.

I'll paint an alternative, an alternative story wherein, say hypothetically, invasions in Venezuela and Iran, which would be the, the two backup suppliers to China in the event of a naval blockade arising from a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, effectively pushed back any Chinese invasion of Taiwan. And of course, that this being an innermost loop, a feedback loop, AI drove, or at least supported, command and control for both of those, both of those invasions, both of those special military operations. So if we want to talk about about the, the Ouroboros of, of AI protecting itself, AI powering special military operations— Venezuela, Iran, maybe elsewhere— to push back any hypothetical Chinese invasion of Taiwan to protect the AI in the West.

This is the—

I think that's a bit of a stretch, but, but it's a nice narrative.

All right, our second story here is Google and SpaceX in talks about Suncatcher orbital, uh, centers. Uh, so, uh, Will Marshall, a dear friend for many years, uh, the CEO of Planet Labs, is in partnership with Google. Uh, Planet Labs currently operates 200 satellites in Earth orbit. These are not comm satellites, they're Earth-observing satellites. They're very famous doves. Uh, but they've been Google's partner in the satellite world, and apparently, uh, Google is working with them to build out Project Suncatcher, which will be orbital data centers with Tensor chips. And I'm guessing that the current conversations, 'cause they don't disclose them, are about launching Suncatcher on Starship in volume, but don't have any prediction of how many satellites Suncatcher will involve. Will Marshall's gonna be joining us on stage at the Abundance Summit next March. And maybe we have him as a friend of the pod on the podcast here. Conversations. Dave Erickson, your thoughts on this one?

Yeah, well, this is definitely— okay, so now you got two orbital satellite networks. One of them, you know, will be based on TPUs from Google, uh, completely self-contained. Uh, you know, the other one will be Elon's, maybe Elon working with Anthropic. Uh, so that's a really nice space race, but it's two corporations in a space race instead of two countries. It's really, really kind of cool. But, uh, you know, where's Google's manufacturing? In that. They must be planning something right now. But you got to make the chips that go into the— you know, these TPUs are really, really cool, you know, and you need to launch.

Right. Where is Eric Schmidt with, uh, Relativity Space, his launch vehicle company that he bought? Prophetic, uh, if it starts operating, it's supposed to be the equivalent.

What a coincidence, the former CEO of Google spends a huge amount of his personal money buying a launch capability. Who would have a better insight on what Google needs At the time he bought it, it was a very weird move.

It's like, like, Eric, what are you doing in the launch business? I mean, really, you want that headache? It's really difficult. I mean, honestly, if Google was thinking that far in advance, maybe they were super impressive.

I was slow to catch on to this, but you know, I talk about EXOs tapping into abundance. Well, orbital compute is the ultimate. You're leveraging the sun. Space, uh, that's— you're tapping into infinite abundance up there. So this is massive.

I don't think Google was especially early in this. They probably could have put together, other than obviously their investment in SpaceX, which is now paying dividends— but if Google, I think, had anticipated the Dyson Swarm much earlier on, I'd like to think they would have built in within the Alphabet ecosystem their own native launch capability versus versus just investing externally in SpaceX. But if you look at the original Suncatcher paper, I think it was something like 80 plus, maybe 81 satellites that would be leveraging existing planet resources. That's a paltry sum compared to what Elon and SpaceX AI are planning to launch with their FCC filing for 1 million orbital AI data centers. It's a tiny fraction of satellites. Planet. I think Google, if they're going to have their own Dyson Swarm, Planet is maybe just a baby step training wheels. Google is going to need its own Dyson Swarm.

Yeah, for sure.

There's an incredibly good book, "The Infinity Machine," that came out recently, and one of the board members at EverQuote brought copies for all the board members, said everybody must read this book. But it's an incredibly good biography of Demis Hassabis and everything going on around Google DeepMind at the time that the transformer was invented in 2017. And one thing that's really, really clear is that Google was shocked at how amazing— they thought we needed 5 more breakthroughs and we had 20 years. And so they didn't need to rush to build launch vehicles. And the timeline is much sooner than they thought. And so now I think everybody was caught flat-footed. It's just that Elon is faster to react. Than everyone else.

All right, I just thought—

And Eric Schmidt reacted, and he's also very, very nimble. But Google just didn't see it coming. It's really clear in the book.

If I might make one more comment just on this, I had this revelation earlier this week. I shared it on our internal group chat. It hit me, the singularity is going to be visible first in space, not on Earth. Earth is going to be a lagging indicator Every wavefront within this singularity, I think is going to hit in space because there's just less incumbency there. It is very much a frontier and new things are going to happen first there, whether it's new hardware, new paradigms for computing. I think they will. This may require a few years of transition, but I was walking around Cambridge and it occurred to me, there are so many legacy interests here on Earth. Part of the reason why I think the Dyson Swarm seems like it's likely to happen because so many municipalities are voting against data centers. There are so many entrenched interests here on Earth, so many preservationist instincts. It will be easier for most of the singularity to play out in space and not on Earth.

The challenge, yeah, the challenge, buddy, is it is highly regulated by a multitude of different countries. You've got the ITU, which is one of the most, you know, slow, you know, backwards organization to license spectrum and license orbital position slots. So I hear you and yes, it's kind of greenfield operations.

It goes in layers. Like Peter, if you look at the Earth's surface, that's far more regulated than LEO, which is far more regulated than—

But you're dealing with one regulator in the, you know, a particular county that you have to deal with in the US versus in space. But you're dealing with a multitude.

Compare it with the lunar surface or cislunar, which is being governed by the Outer Space Treaty and maybe the Artemis Accords. It's far weak—

but which is not— I mean, I guarantee you the regulations are not set yet. There will be more regulations.

Okay, but right now, right now it's the frontier, it's the Wild West. And if you're a company, if you're SpaceX AI and you can land a lunar fab, self-replicating robots, whatever it is on the moon, it's relatively greenfield if you're a corporation versus say a nation state, which is the exact opposite of what we see here on Earth.

Yeah, I'll tell you, I played this game, Alex, when I was running our planetary resources or asteroid mining company. You know, the challenge in raising the capital for that, Larry Page was our first investor, long story there, but we ended up, up not having enough regulatory clarity to be able to raise the huge amounts of capital to do that. We ended up going to the country of Luxembourg to get asteroid laws passed there and then passing it in the US in a very limited fashion. But you end up, you know, one of my favorite books is "The Man Who Sold the Moon," right? The story of Dee Dee Harriman. I know you've known that. And it's a great book, but you're literally having to write the laws, and I don't know, in that book you're bribing the countries to give you the particular rights. It's still gonna be a complicated mishmash of legal structure.

Maybe, but really what I hear in that parable from you, Peter, is you want a favorable executive from the US if you're going to start mining the solar system for the Dyson Swarm. If you have an unfavorable, administration, then it gets a lot harder and you have to go to Luxembourg or elsewhere.

Well, the barrier to progress in the U.S. is usually the—

you have to go to every country and get, you know, assistance. Uh, and the— what happens is you get a major player and other countries promulgate and say, okay, we'll rubber stamp that in our country. But, uh, it gets challenging. I hope it's easier. I really do.

I think so.

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All right, let's jump into one of my favorite conversations for today, the singularity economy. I'm going to preface this as not investment advice, says our resident lawyers. All right. So, you know, here's a story that Dave Erickson, you and I have been following. It's the work of Leopold Aschenbrenner. Dave Erickson, who was famously fired from OpenAI on their alignment team and is now running a $5.5 billion fund 2 years later. He wrote a famous paper called Situational Awareness, very successful, looking at orders of magnitude progression across chips and models. And he raised capital on that. And Dave, tell us about, about his fund.

Well, first thing I'll tell the audience is the podcast he did with Dwarkesh right after he got fired, right when the paper came out, is one of the best pieces of prescient media you can possibly study. So definitely go back, either listen to it or get your agent to listen to it and summarize it for you. You'll listen to it and you'll say, "Of course, of course, of course." But at the time, it was not even vaguely obvious that he was right. It says here on the slide he's running a $5.5 billion fund, but that's because he started with $1 billion and just made the most incredibly great group of investments. But also he has a lot of friends from OpenAI. And if you look at a lot of these investments, you know, OpenAI, what are you buying next? What are you contracting for next? What do you need now? What are your bottlenecks to scaling all of this? So it's just that— it's that simple, you know, and he calls it situational awareness because that's what— that's all it is like. Knowing what is going on right now is all it is. And you can find a whole litany of things that are about to explode in demand because of this monster data center buildout, this monster compute buildout, this monster, monster AI deployment buildout.

Remember, we opened this whole—

still the first inning.

Yeah, we opened this whole podcast saying that, you know, there's much more demand than there is supply of chips and data centers and energy. And that's what he's betting on. Very famously, he did a— he bought options on Intel and CoreWeave, which have done extraordinarily good. He's going to be releasing his next set of holdings just in a couple of days, probably the time that this podcast goes live.

Yeah, it'll be in the— by the time you hear this, it will have just come out. So go to 13F.info and look it up.

Yeah, I want to hit a few points. I think this is really important for people to hear. people who are planning for their economic future. This stuff is kind of obvious, but I just want to play it out. So I'm looking at the growth of traditional sectors over the past year, May 2025 through May 2026. And if you look at those in blue, right, real estate at 5% growth, healthcare at 9%, materials 25%, industrials 29%. You know, single to low double-digit growth. We see technology and energy here, which includes partial AI gains at 34% and 76%. But this is what the majority of, you know, wealth advisors, the majority of banks recommend diversification across all of these industries. And this is what you're getting. But I'd like to show you what what the, you know, sort of the singularity economy has looked like over the past 1 year against these numbers. So take a look at these numbers. This is what traditionally folks are getting involved in. The S&P 500 over the last year returned 31%. Pretty damn good. You know, if I can get 31% all the time, I'd take it every day. But 6 chip stocks, right? I've got them here. Micron, Intel, AMD, TSMC, Broadcom, Nvidia. On average returned 320%, 10 times the S&P 500 for those 6 chip stocks. And 6 data center and infrastructure and energy stocks returned 419% over the past year. You know, I'm not going to— again, not investment advice on any particular stocks, but as a whole, chips and the energy layer and the infrastructure, right? This is the singularity loop. The demand, I don't see it slowing down. I don't know if you do, Dave Erickson. I'm going to point out one more thing, which is the frontier labs, right? OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Mistral. You can look at the gains there. Mistral at 126% over the past year. At the upper end, of course, Anthropic. But if you look at OpenAI, xAI, and Mistral, these are all private deals. A lot of people don't have access to private deals. But looking at that, you know, 100% to 200% growth in the last year, you're getting more than that in the public markets with just the chips and the energy sector. All right.

So again, yeah, picks and shovels, picks and shovels.

Yes, exactly.

I think this is important for people to see for their own financial decision-making. Whether you're putting in a small amount of capital or a large amount, you know, whatever you can afford, this is what's driving the economy forward. Dave, what are your thoughts here?

Well, my first thought is that everybody needs to have their own opinion on whether Elon is right about a 10x GDP growth within about 10 or, he says 10 years, but 10 or 15 years. That's a growth rate that is so far beyond anything in history, it's just mind-blowing. And the technology and the tailwinds are there for that to actually happen. But you have to decide on your own, Do I believe in that or not? If you do believe in it, then asset values in general are going to go way, way up, any asset. And W-2 income is going to be a rounding error compared to asset values. So fundamentally, everyone has to be owning something. You have to own something. You can't be sitting there in debt. You have to own something that appreciates.

And I believe there are people on the podcast listening and saying, I don't have free capital to invest. Paycheck to paycheck perhaps, and it doesn't have to be a lot. Trade that latte in for some chips and dip stock.

Yeah, it's actually, it's a very important time in life to be working your ass off and to not be, yeah, don't spend money on lattes and on vacations right now. This is a once in human history moment, mid-singularity. Yes. So whatever you do, rethink how you spend time, rethink how you spend money, just to be riding the wave rather than swamped by the wave, for sure. Also, I think anything can be overpriced, you know, like, yes, this is going to go up and up and up and up, but that doesn't mean something can't be overpriced. Yeah. So I would— I love looking at things like, uh, we took a tour of the Markklee data center, first quantum deployment, and Jeff Markklee told me, I— we bought every valve in the country. I was like, what are you talking about? He said, well, all the generators were already bought. Look at the generator companies, they went through the So I went out and bought all the valves. We bought like a million valves because it's all liquid cooling all of a sudden. And the liquid— we spring about 10 leaks a day across, you know, hundreds of thousands of square feet of data center space. So it's so big that just by random chance there are 10 leaks a day. So we need to shut down that part of the data center before the water destroys these $6 million columns of GPUs. So then we come in, we fix the pipes, and then, you know, open the valves. But we need a million valves. Like, it's just insane. Any number of valves. Then you're like, huh, who makes the valves? So stuff like that is, is still undiscovered. Uh, so it's not all about chips and, you know, things that are high profile. You know, look under the covers for things that haven't been discovered yet that are, that are part of this massive, mass— biggest, biggest World War II or bigger build-out that's going on.

I, I feel a moral obligation here, and this is perhaps, uh, unlike my, my usual on-pod persona, to temper the euphoria here. On a few fronts. One, I would caution, these are historic gains, these are backward-looking, prior performance is no indication of future results, blah, blah, blah. Also, second point, I would note, and this is of high, I would say, personal annoyance to me, that the frontier labs are all still private. We're expecting to see a number of IPOs over the next few months historic potentially IPOs of all these frontier labs, but some of the largest, most dramatic returns weren't in the public markets at all. They were in private markets that retail didn't have access to. And I would argue that's a travesty and say we as a civilization should do whatever we can to expose via IPO or other means to public securities markets all of these amazing gains that right now are accruing in the hands of private investors. And not public retail investors. Third point, which is to say, and this is maybe a bit of a perversity, that if you believe, as I do, and this is informational in itself, not investment advice, but if you believe that asset allocation in the highly liquid public securities markets and public equities markets in particular is being dominated at least by volume are being driven by AIs and superintelligences, and fact check, they are. Most of the volume on a daily basis is being driven by AI algos and not humans and certainly not human day traders, then you should also believe that even if you don't believe in the efficient market hypothesis or even any remote approximation of the EMH, that AIs themselves are making these allocations and therefore be somewhat distrustful of, of your own instincts that you're going to front-run the superintelligence that's making asset allocation decisions across all of these different sectors.

And you're saying buy the index?

I'm not making investment advice. I, I am saying that when it comes for myself for to public securities, I buy the index and not individual symbols, uh, individual securities, because I'm drinking my own Kool-Aid, I'm eating my own dog food. And that means that trusting that superintelligence is over the long term going to be a better asset allocator than any single individual meat-bodied human.

And my point here was if AIs are investing, they're going to invest in themselves. Let's get more energy, let's get more chips because it'll support our growth. Having said that, I agree with you that the majority of the growth over the last number of years were in these private markets. They need to be made public a lot sooner. Having said that, at least over the last year, what we saw is, you know, growth in the public chips and the public infra and energy stocks were still highly competitive with the growth we saw in the private markets. Let's move on. I just wanted to—

I just want to make one very quick point. It's nice to say in hindsight that these should have been public markets, right? But if you go back a year or two, Dave, you pointed out Anthropic's nervousness a couple of years ago. We did not know whether they were going to make it through that upswing or not. So it's in a public market, you want very stable—

predictability.

Yeah, you want predictability, and you don't have that a lot of the cases. So there's a rationale for— but absolutely, if they could have been public, everybody would have done very well.

Yeah. All right. Again, my point here is just to make these numbers available. This is historic information for people to understand what's going on in the economy, what's driving it. This is energy, chips, and infrastructure that's driving this. Alex, you call it the innermost loop. I do as well, or the singularity loop. And moving along, a fun conversation here. UFO, UAP files being released by the government. It's crazy. I'm a kid in the candy store watching this, right? As a space cadet, like, wow. And just again, More wow. So US government begins first ever— I'm going to call them UFOs. I'm sorry. When I was a kid, these were all UFOs. The president unsealing—

Well, they're not all flying, Peter, though.

Yeah, I got it. Okay, it could be floating.

Could be underwater stuff. It could be underwater or it could be in space.

Uncommon.

Anyway, let's play some videos. Let me hit a few videos and we'll talk about it on the backside here. All right, here's the first video.

Dr. Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist. Doctor, on a scale of 1 to 10, how excited are you about this UFO release?

I would put it at a 10 because we're at a turning point.

For decades, we had to rely upon eyewitness accounts of housewives, truck drivers. People would snicker and laugh at them.

Now we're talking about huge files that are top secret that for the first time in modern history are being given to the American public. So I'd like to congratulate President Trump for having the nerve to go against recommendations by the FBI and the CIA to release these files so that independent researchers, scientists can go over them and we can make up our own minds rather than having the CIA We make up our mind. And the CIA apparently is still fighting the full release. When you hear or see about a UFO that goes like that, up, down, left, right, at 90-degree angles, so fast you can't even believe it, what does that tell you?

It tells me that, that the laws of centrifugal force should crush the bones of the people inside the flying saucer.

So either there is basically an automated flying saucer All right, what do they call that in Star Trek? Is it inertial drives?

The—

no, the inertial dampening field.

Yes, the inertial dampening system. All right, uh, here is some videos. Uh, 82 pieces of data released by the Department of War, 56 from the FBI, 8 from the State Department, including videos recording unsolved incidents across the Middle East, Japan, and East China. And of course, very famously, the Apollo astronauts I really wish I had spent some time with Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt, Apollo 17, asking them about this. I don't know if they would have told me about it. They were both very dear friends. Uh, here is one more video. Let's take a look.

Dadgummit, he kept his word.

And you know what, I want to warn people though, this early stuff that we're seeing is not all of it, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. But Trump's having to fight, you know, he's having to fight the deep state. The Bob Lazar story, he's saying we have aircraft.

Do we?

I think we do, but I don't think they're in quite in our hands. I think what they've done is handed out some of our defense contractors or some private entities because that way they're not FOIA-able, Freedom of Information Act, say. Well, I mean, the astronauts aren't going to lie. I know you were in the Age of Disclosure. It makes it seem like a certainty that people that know, like yourself and Marco Rubio, that you guys know, that, that government officials already know? Okay, uh, Alex, I'm going to go to you first. You know, I went on to Grok, uh, uh, you know, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude, and I asked all three of those, and those engines, you know, based on all the data, what's your conclusion? Uh, is this alien? Is this something else? And they all came back saying this is normal phenomenon. These are secret US missions, there's nothing to see here. I was kind of surprised by that. Alex, you've been involved in this and tracking this in detail. What are your thoughts?

Your models may not be incorrect. I, I think it's very important. I agree with Michio that it's important for data to be released and for data not to be stigmatized. I, I think there's been, uh, whether inadvertent or intentional, an enormous amount of stigma associated with with just basic recordings of, of our skies and elsewhere. And I, I think this program, if you go back a couple of slides, uh, now has a real name. It's called the, the Pursue Initiative, which I think is, uh, it's essential. The Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. It's a historic program that this administration has led. There was an executive order that went out to all of the cabinet-level agencies in the Department of War reportedly is in the process of trawling JWICS, uh, the top secret defense network for UAP-related items. I was having conversation with a friend at AWS who oversees the JWICS cloud, and from what I'm told, this is a rolling release that's going to run between now and approximately January of 2027. And there are a lot of of UAP-related files on JWICS that are being bulk declassified. I also, I, I feel that the need— going back to definition of the singularity, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, I define the singularity as all sci-fi scenarios happening everywhere all at once. And this, even if the— even if nothing comes out of all of these releases, this very much teases at at least an entire genre or subgenre of sci-fi scenarios. And really, if, if we are about— as I've mentioned previously— if we are about to gain the capabilities, thanks to superintelligence, to paperclip our entire galaxy, if ever there were a time and a necessity for the executive to do bulk declassification of UAP data that are sitting in either its systems or in the systems of contractors, I think now is the time. I would expect if there's a there there, as it were, we've talked in the past about the Age of Disclosure and all of the allegations contained wherein, if there is a there there and those allegations are accurate, I expect all of these details to start pouring out over the next few years. In that eventuality that we have superintelligence that's capable of making major changes to the distribution of matter in our galaxy over the next few years potentially, I think it won't be a coincidence that all of this is happening at the same time.

So, I think Todd Pomerleucki says these are devices or creatures from our past coming into our present because it's easier to time travel into the future and then—

Well, we're all creatures from our past traveling into the present.

Yes, we are.

Exactly.

That's sort of— Agreed, but just putting out the scenarios here, or are these spaceships and the purported alien biology that was discovered inside them aliens from another planet? I do think that life is ubiquitous in the universe. We are but a small fraction, and life could have evolved billions of years before we evolved here.

I wouldn't over-index though to the initial release. This is a rolling release as, uh, with anyone who's coming. Well, with, with majority of stuff coming, this is— these are in, in some sense, based on what I've been told, these are the easiest, lowest-hanging fruit to declassify. If you actually look through the records, some of these were already available in the public domain but not officially acknowledged. Not all of it is was secret or top secret and going through a formal declassification process. So my guess, just looking at the records, is these were the easiest batch, if you will, to put out. And that leaves the harder to declassify or more controversial to declassify records still in the future. I looked at many of these records, and it's entirely possible many or all of these are either image artifacts or perfectly prosaic aircraft or things like that. What I think is more interesting is that now, historically, for the first time, there's a process of declassifying and unsealing all of these records that were sitting on JWICS or SIPRNET that had anything to do with UAPs. That's exceedingly interesting.

One of those was a helicopter. One of those looked literally exactly like a helicopter.

Yeah, I wouldn't, again, like, over-index on there being anything super interesting or non- prosaic in this first batch. But now, for the first time in history, there is a declassification process, and that is super exciting.

Saleem, um, I think you're not going to find anything. The phrase for me here is unresolved, not extraterrestrial. And if there's something monster, they would not release it or whatever because it would freak everybody out. So maybe there's stuff in there. I, I would very, very be very, very surprised, although I'm a monster fan of the Drake Equation, and I also believe that there must be lots of alien life out there. The thing that happened today that we didn't talk about today was we found these compounds in, in an exoplanet, hinting that there could be much more prevalent life forms out in the universe than we realize.

Yeah, well, we're gonna get Jared Isaacman on the pod here, the now head of NASA, a friend. I was texting with him today trying to, uh, make that all happen. And, you know, he's— and I agree feels very confident that, you know, there is or has been life on Mars, and we're gonna find that evidence. You know, we now have missions going to Europa and other, you know, Jovian, Saturnian moons where there's a high likelihood of life as well. I think life is a natural evolutionary process of chemistry in our universe, and it's just a matter— I think logically, there's no reason for it not to evolve towards greater and greater intelligence and organization.

100%.

Yeah, I agree.

I, I think it's— I mean, I've written about this previously in the context of the physics of intelligence as a very natural ecological niche for the ability to adapt to environments whose dynamics are changing on a time scale faster than a generation time. So if I had to guess, my guess is that our universe is probably overflowing with life and intelligent life, which is, I would say, again, separate from any artifact that may or may not be in this initial Pursuit drop. But I, I do think this is a step in the right direction regardless of what the outcome is.

On that, Alex, you know, 60 million years ago, a giant meteor hits the Yucatán Peninsula, obliterates all the dinosaurs, makes space for mammals to evolve, and now we're intelligent. Now we have AI. Now we have iPhone Had that meteor just barely missed the Earth, what would be walking around today? Would those dinosaurs have evolved into intelligent iPhone-creating dinosaurs?

Yeah, supervolcanoes, all kinds of other disasters.

I mean, people have analyzed this. Obviously, it's something of a— probably something of a thought experiment, but there were species of Troodons, for example, that were seemingly evolving in the direction of hominid or humanoid type form. So one could imagine, it would be an interesting thought experiment. There was actually, speaking of Star Trek, there was a Star Trek Voyager episode called "Distant Origin" that premised on the idea that, well, actually, there were some intelligent dinosaurs that managed to escape the Earth and escaped to the other side of the galaxy where they're encountered by the crew of Voyager. There's interesting science fiction around it. There's also, you know, while we're just exploring hypothesis space, the so-called Silurian hypothesis. What if there had been some past civilization of technological capability on Earth? Would we have discovered it? And it's sort of— the first time I had this conversation was with one of my undergraduate research advisors at MIT. And it's interesting, if there had been, it's sort of, it's contingent on the timescale. If there had been a so-called Silurian civilization 100 million-plus years ago, plate tectonics can erase quite a bit of change on the Earth's surface. Then the thinking goes, well, let's look in space where some of the dynamics are slower, and why don't we see satellites in LEO or more stable, say, cislunar orbits? That could have survived perhaps over very long timescales. Do we see that or not? Seems like we don't, but it's an interesting thought experiment.

Yeah. All right, I'm gonna move us forward to our AMA with the mates. Go ahead, Salim, as we transition over here.

Do you remember the, we did that panel on AI and consciousness?

Yes.

Last year, we had that fellow with the meteors and he had the best answer for the Fermi paradox I've ever heard, which is we know there's lots of exoplanets, but Earth has had water oceans for 4 billion years continuously, and it gave time for evolution to take place, which is probably unlikely in other parts or in other exoplanets. And that was the best framing I've yet ever heard of why we have the Fermi Paradox.

I think that's totally unconvincing. I— the universe is filled with hydrogen and oxygen, and there's a lot of water in the universe. I don't buy that for myself.

Let's move along. So I wanna shout out to Ashley Gaunt. Dave, you shared this with me. Let me go ahead and read it. This came in a couple of days ago. Peter and the mates, I really thought I would never become an entrepreneur because I just didn't have any ideas of how to turn knowledge of being a dentist into a digital business. I finally did what you keep advising and brainstorm with my AI and boom, idea sorted, plans in place to make a real difference to the preventative healthcare in general. This is insane. I've got— I've gone from brainstorming an idea with AI from scratch to vibe coding a first iteration of an app and creating a business plan which clearly defines a path from idea to monetization of a product in a single afternoon. Cannot believe it. Ashley, congratulations again. I wanted to share this because I think all of us here on the pod feel very strongly about if you don't believe you're an entrepreneur, it's only because you haven't tried. Everyone could be an entrepreneur at some level. If you're running a barbershop and you want to open up another chair, you can be an entrepreneur there. It is about taking control of your own destiny versus being dependent upon someone else. Dave, you want to add anything to this?

Yeah, I want to add the backstory because the way I stumbled on this is my wife, Maura, said, "Hey, some hater in the podcast is saying that you're out of touch." And she's like, "You know, you literally changed 3,000 diapers. I think you still have human shit under your fingernails." Like, nothing could be more misguided. And I was like, stupidly, I think I'll go and look and find this hater. And instead I come across Ashley and I literally cried.

Yeah.

Like, thank you, Ashley. You are just awesome. And yeah, nothing could be more heartwarming than the fact that we've done some good to deflect somebody's life in a positive way. I want to track her story now and see how it all turns out. And she just did exactly the right thing, though.

Amazing. All right. We have another one. I didn't see this. It was inserted, I guess, by Jian. So hello, Peter and the Moonshot team. I want to reach out with a simple thank you, one that came full circle in the best way. Moonshots has been a steady presence in how I think about technology, ambition, and what's worth building. That mindset found its way into conversation with my 12-year-old daughter. She started asking bigger questions, not just about school, but about real problems worth solving. This spring, she channeled that into LanternScan, an AI-powered app that she built to help communities identify and spot lanternflies. Spotted lanternfly is an invasive pest that threatens crops, trees, and local ecosystems, et cetera, et cetera. Last week, LanternFly won first place in middle school category. In their action showcase. Congratulations, Abby, and in particular to your daughter on that. Yeah, I think one of the greatest things I can inspire my kids to do is to become entrepreneurs. It's all about finding a problem and working on solving a problem. All right, we have 8 AMA questions for the mates. Dave Erickson, why don't you kick us off? Pick one of these.

All right, well, I'm not previewed, so— oh yeah, SETI at Home, that's got to be Alex, right? I'll do it anyway. Number 1: When will we see an initiative to harness unused compute sitting idle in personal devices like a modern SETI at Home? From John Kent 3036. Yeah, actually, the iPhones have that great neural chip in them which is massively unused. And you saw with that Akamai deal we had earlier in the pod, like any scrap of computing lying around is suddenly gold and let's tap into it. But, you know, a lot of the, a lot of the processors on laptops are not particularly useful for AI, but the, the M4, M5 series chips in the Macs and your iPhone neural processor are hugely latent compute power. I would say this should have happened already. I suspect, you know, the, the, the chips are all locked on the iPhones. It's very hard to get access to them. So I think that's what's preventing it. So it's really in Apple's hands to decide when this happens.

Dave, we're going to see this with Tesla. So Elon's vision includes, you know, Tesla Powerwalls as edge compute nodes and Tesla vehicles as edge compute nodes. So yeah, I think that's all coming.

I think Alex, y'all put words in your mouth, but mouth, but an agent that's sitting idle for lack of compute, it's unethical to let a processor just sit there. Like, I got this agent that wants to compute over here and I got this unused processor over there. It feels rude. It's rude.

My answer to number one, for what it's worth, is we're already seeing it. Like, OpenClaw is using unused compute sitting in personal desktop devices. And so I think we're there to the extent I think that question number 1 is referring to mobile battery-powered devices. Battery-powered devices are naturally going to run models that are a few months at least behind the open-source models that are capable of running on beefy desktops that are plugged into the wall, are going to be 8-ish months, 6 to 8 months behind frontier models. But short answer is we're already seeing that to number 1.

Sorry, Alex.

Grab one of these questions, number 2, 3, or 4.

All right, I'll go with number 2. Number 2 asks, which will end up bigger, consumer AI or enterprise AI? And that's asked by Matthew Johnson 6525. Obviously enterprise AI, at least for the foreseeable future. Enterprises, even though, I mean, it's interesting, I was looking at statistics, even though enterprise spending is a minority, it's something like 10 to 20% of GDP in the US consumer spending is the vast majority of GDP. If you look at IT spend, enterprise is the vast majority of IT spend, not consumer. So it shouldn't be that surprising that what we've talked about now for the past few pod episodes, which is OpenAI's dramatic reversal backing away from Sora and other consumer initiatives in favor of Codex and enterprise -oriented initiatives, basically to become Anthropic faster than Anthropic can become OpenAI, is entirely oriented towards enterprise AI. That's where the IT spend is. So you start with there. Now, if you were to ask which will end up bigger in the long term, say 10 to 20 years from now, I think it's a trick question because I think consumers become indistinguishable from enterprises.

Exactly.

And my bet is consumers, individuals, will become one-person conglomerates.

I'm glad you went there.

Yep, such as with talking my own book, financial interest, Henry Intelligent Machines, from friend of the pod, Alex Finn, who's betting on just that.

Saleem, you wanna take number 3?

I could, although number 4, I think is more interesting for me.

I know, that's why I wanted to grab it, but you can do number 4.

This is what we call an abundance mentality right now.

That's fine, I'll do number 3. Oh, it's okay. Um, so you're asking, uh, can I read the question? Yeah. Can AI— number 3— can AI strategic alignment with tangible human victories like medical breakthroughs and environmental repair resolve the public's existential anxieties about it? And this is from SF Bay Lover. Um, so yes, it can, but only if people can see and feel the wins, right? Like, the public is anxious because AI is mostly presented as job loss and deepfakes surveillance, killer robots, existential risk. That's a bad set of prompts for how we run society. The best way is to change the narrative, which is what that XPRIZE, Peter, that you're all about is so, I think is so important. Maybe one of the most important things we've done culturally and media-wise for decades is to do that, is change the narrative because then you can connect AI to visible human victory, like curing disease or reversing blindness, designing new materials, Solving the grand unification theory, cleaning oceans, you name it, right? Improving education. Because abundance can't be an abstract philosophy, it has to show up as tangible progress. So yeah, alignment improves when AI is pointed at human flourishing, but we also need storytelling. The use of narrative is the only major way that we found of shifting people's thinking. John Hagel talks about this all the time. If people only see the fear case, they're gonna resist the technology. But if they see their child cured, their energy bill drop, their business grows, or their community becomes safer, then the whole emotional model changes, and then we're off to the races.

Agreed. All right, number 4, "Why throw away privacy with it's cooked? Privacy is linked to freedom. Why not fight to preserve both rather than treat it like nothing?" says @C88485. Which is a very private-sounding name. All right, and @C88485, listen, I'm not saying I don't want privacy and it's not worth protecting. I'm just saying, you know, I'm just recognizing the fact that there are real challenges. Your phone tracks your location 24/7. Your browser history is sold to advertisers. You know, an AI does facial recognition. and you are leaving your DNA fingerprints everywhere you go. And so the ability to retain, uh, you know, true privacy is becoming more and more difficult. Uh, having it, I totally get it. It's really important. Um, but it's going to be challenging. Uh, you know, I'll take a— I'll take a quick poll here, the Moonshot Mates. Do any of you believe that you truly have privacy? Uh, just real quick, yes or no.

No.

Okay.

Uh, Alex, for appropriate definition of privacy, yes.

What's that definition of privacy?

Well, there are a few different possible definitions. There's a legal definition, there's a physical definition, there's a logical definition. And I would say for, for variants of each of those, yes, I believe I have some form of privacy.

Okay, um, I think there's a different challenge, but I, I can say for a fact, a 100% fact, that Apple and Google literally know when I take a crap. Yeah, I don't know how you define that as privacy.

They sell that and they sell that data.

Can I change the question? Can I just change the question a little bit?

Right, sure.

The problem is not the, the fact that we don't have privacy. We, we really don't. But the bigger issue is In a 2.0 version of privacy, you should own your own data. You should be able to revoke access. Systems that misuse data should face penalties. Privacy in a new model needs to be user-owned, AI-mediated, cryptographically protected, and legally enforceable. And it's not right now. This is the problem.

Yeah, so Alex, I think you want to state for whatever reasons you have that you have privacy and you're going to sort of reworked the definition to be able to make that statement. But I honestly, in your heart of hearts, I don't believe you. You don't believe that AIs can't read your lips, that you don't leave DNA trails, that they don't—

This is really fun, man. I could watch this all day.

This is spicy stuff, Peter. I like that you have a better mental model of myself than I do. But I really am— this isn't like a case of false revealed preferences. I really do think for appropriate definitions of privacy, not only— I'll make a stronger statement. Not only do I think I have operationally physical, logical, and legal privacy, I'll make a stronger statement than that, which is I don't think the evaporation, if you will, or the cooking of privacy is any sort of inevitability. Quite the opposite. I think the same technologies that threaten, for example, to dissolve, say, existing crypto systems, say AI solves math and, inverts a popular cipher suite and suddenly everyone's private keys are at risk. I would say that the same technologies that taketh away privacy from past crypto systems and past systems of privacy protection will give us new forms of privacy.

Totally agree. Quantum security and otherwise. If you read Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age," it's a great vision of where this will end up. But right now there's no privacy at all. All right, I think it'll come back. Salim, go ahead.

I just want to say one quick thing. Alex, I can't believe you think you have legal privacy. You absolutely do not. The government can show up in any second. The Fourth Amendment is gone in this country. It's gone. We have no legal protection.

I don't agree.

ICE could show up at your house today and say, you've got a weird German name, we need to see everything about you and we're raiding your house. And they've been doing that. So that is gone today.

All right, we're going to move on. Salim, you get the first choice of 5, 6, 7, or 8.

8.

I will take number 8.

Seriously?

Okay. If government gatekeeps new model releases, who's qualified to vet them? Are the best people employed by AI companies? The rest are all anti-AI. How does that not become a false dichotomy? And this is from Michael Jacob. So Michael Jacob, if government does gatekeeping, so you know, this is a very, very big problem. The problem here is if government tries to do this alone, It just not— it's not going to have the talent or the speed. If companies do it alone, then the public doesn't trust it. If you have activists doing it, then it becomes ideological, right? So we need a totally new governance architecture for this. The right model is to have a technical, independent, fast-moving review body with a combination of frontier labs, government, academia, national security, a multidisciplinary approach to this with civil society involved. for example, and people doing red teaming, right? Like FAA plus DARPA plus XPRIZE-style open benchmarking. Benchmarking, very critical, as Alex, I hope, will agree. The key is not permission from bureaucrats. The key is to have transparent capability thresholds. Because if a model crosses some level in cyber, you need— it needs to be triggering a deeper review, like we saw Anthropic with Mythos. They voluntarily did that, thank God, And so you need to figure out a way of navigating that in other levels like persuasion or autonomy or replication. So the biggest structural issue here is you need governance that's as exponential as the technology. Today, almost all government policy is defensive and reactive, right? So either you end up creating fake safety or you drive the best work underground or offshore. And so we have to navigate a very fine line there.

Alex, over to you. Number, yeah.

I'll pick question number 5. So question number 5 asks, why aren't more individuals willing to pay for everyday AI reasoning services? If OpenAI marketed them right, isn't this a massive consumer market? And this is asked by Gary Stanley 2685. I don't think the premise of the question is correct. I don't think it's that individuals or consumers aren't willing to pay for reasoning models. I think it's that they're not able to pay for reasoning models. Frontier reasoning capabilities are quite expensive. Enterprises are willing and able to pay for them because they generate lots of new free cash flow or are saving lots of otherwise consumed free cash flow. Enterprises, simply put, have more money to spend on it. I think the way we get individuals to be able to pay more for reasoning models is by diverting at least some of the reasoning tokens to the problem of enabling individuals to be much more productive and, and generate enormous amounts of revenue using those. And this is one of the reasons why Henry and Alex Finn, I think, are so interesting, because in a world in a near-term future where individuals can become one-person unicorns, then suddenly individuals will both be able to pay and willing to pay for all of those reasoning tokens. And so whether that's OpenAI marketing or a startup like Henry, I would say regardless of that, I do think there is a massive market. But in the process, as I mentioned with my answer to the previous question, it will almost, I predict, erase the distinction between consumer and enterprise spending altogether.

All right, Dave, you're down to 2.

I'll take 6 'cause it's so easy. Isn't the real problem with ocean data centers the security risk, pirates, hostile nation states, sabotage? And this is from Strong Medium Weak. Interesting name. Yeah, not a problem at all, as it turns out. The US Navy actually has total and unilateral control of all the world's oceans. Like, it's the most lopsided, one-sided thing you'll ever possibly imagine. And the US Navy protects affects all global shipping. A very good friend of mine actually was down at the Cambridge Brewery working on a plan, and he was drinking a big fat beer. And like, what are you working on? He said, I'm working on power generators on barges for Venezuela. Like, what are you— well, so, you know, Venezuela had nationalized all of the power supply, and there was no electricity in the cities. But it turns out you could float barges up to the shore, pipe oil into the generators, generate the power, and then electric wire back into the cities and power the cities that way. But the US Navy would make your barges completely safe. So the amount of ocean needed for these data centers— I thought it was the coolest story, by the way, on the last pod, the floating data centers. I never checked out whether, whether the wave energy is enough to power the GPUs, but such a great idea. But the amount of ocean space that you need is tiny. There just aren't enough GPUs, and protecting them would be pretty trivial. If they're inside US national waters, they're protected by the Coast Guard or the Navy or both. So I think it's a great answer.

All right, final one here. Number 7.

Also, also land-based data centers have all the same security risks.

Yeah, fair enough.

Number 7: Should the US and China try working on an AI project together? Something positive and safe for both countries and the world, says @ccmcne10. That rolls off the tongue onto the floor. Okay, so, you know, we just had the— we just had the president of China yesterday announce we should be, you know, friends, not rivals, and collaborate together. Wouldn't that be an incredible world? So Sure. The answer is I would love that. I would love to see the US and China working on AI projects together. I mean, one of the most beautiful things about what is possible is, you know, the entire billion people in China and the entire, whatever it is, 300+ million people in the United States all share the same biology. We could work on the greatest healthcare models and longevity models and everyone benefits. So yeah, I think that would be extraordinary. You know, the AI 2027 paper, if you remember it, how that ends, it has two branches in the story, pick your own adventure. One, you know, is AI sort of turns against humanity. In the other one, the major US and Chinese AIs collaborate and we live happily ever after together. So I choose the latter.

I think that's such a great point, Peter. There's so many areas of cooperation like safety in space and AI coordination, et cetera, that there's lots to do together.

Yeah, for sure.

So much of human history, you know, the human conflict in history is just bad luck and coincidence. But if you look at 1915 and the chain of events the events that, that led up to World War I and the amount of tragedy that came out of it, but just this escalating chain of unfortunate coincidences. And now they— if you could relive or change history, putting all of chip fabs in Taiwan was just tragically stupid. You know, because China was saying for a long time that they're going to take it over, long before TSMC became huge.

They, they were like, that is part of our country Well, it wasn't putting it in Taiwan. It was us not building them here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or us not realizing the strategic importance. And, and yeah.

All right, let's go to our outro music.

This is from before you do that. Before you do that, I have an announcement.

Please tell me.

I'm, I'm, we're, I'm, I've kind of decided that to take a crack at solving for big things, and okay, we're gonna— I'm working with John Hagel. We're launching a project that allows you to generate and measure luck.

I love this project.

So we're, we're, it's in a couple of weeks, we're going to do a couple of webinars. Go to shapingluck.com if you're interested and register and we'll tell you when. And we're going to make a model and a capability where you can generate luck. And more interestingly and more importantly, we found a way of measuring it. So there you go.

I love that. And Salim and I, for those of you who are excited and interested, We're going to be dissecting and diving deep into the organizational singularity very shortly for all of our listeners. Okay, so we have a new piece of outro music. This is from Jess Hilton. Jess, thank you for sharing. If you are a creative and you want to create some outro or intro music for us, please send it to media@dmandis.com. And also, if you're a creative, enter the Future Vision X Prize. Show us your best vision of the future. What's the next Star Trek, right? What is a Star Trek that you want to occupy your heart and your soul, that shows you where humanity should be going? Create that trailer, that film treatment, and send it to us. You could win millions of dollars and have your movie made. All right, let's listen to Moonshots on repeat. By Jess Hilton.

Lobster.

That must be Dave Erickson.

Drink water.

Mism compounds like unseen mass. It rolls like a deer nobody can pin, and I don't want to miss where it's going again. All right, gentlemen, that was awesome. Love that.

Salim, I think that's you swilling beer with What Is the Meaning of Life. I think so.

The Meaning of Life, for sure.

Uh, Love you guys. What a great episode.

Great, awesome conversation.

Salim, I will see you this weekend for your birthday, buddy.

Well, see, we'll see you there.

Very excited about that. Alex, Dave Erickson, love you. Bye. Love you guys.

Be well.

Love you guys.

Thank you.

See you soon.

If you made it to the end of this episode, which you obviously did, I consider you a Moonshot Mate. Every week, my Moonshot Mates and I spend a lot of energy and time to really deliver you the news that matters. If you're a subscriber, thank you. If you're not a subscriber yet, please consider subscribing so you get the news as it comes out. I also want to invite you to join me on my weekly newsletter called Meta Trends. I have a research team. You may not know this, but we spend the entire week looking at the meta trends that are impacting your family, your company, your industry, your nation. And I put this into a 2-minute read every week. If you'd like to get access to the Meta Trends newsletter every week, week, go to diamandis.com/metatrends. That's diamandis.com/metatrends. Thank you again for joining us today. It's a blast for us to put this together every week.

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