Chamath: AGI Is Here, Anthropic’s $100B Giveaway, Elon’s SpaceX Shares for 72M Kids | EP #304

I do think that we have achieved AGI. It cannot diffuse, and the reason it cannot diffuse has nothing to do with the technology. It has everything to do with the build-out. Until you actually build it out so everybody can feel it, or a plurality of human beings can feel it, it's just something that exists in a lab.

Welcome to the singularity. Anthropic announced the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund. 5% is somewhere between $75 to $100 billion. I

think that these guys kind They kind of walk the walk and talk the talk. I don't think that there's something nefarious there. I think they genuinely believe.

Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many. There are 72 million Americans under age 18, so that's roughly $10.5 billion in total, $146 per kid.

This is really the better version of the Giving Pledge.

Teaching this entire generation to own equities Is a really good move, I think.

Now the big question, can Trump accounts contributed from billionaires and Frontier Labs actually move the needle for the average American? And I think—

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

Welcome to Moonshots, everyone, your number one podcast in all things AI and exponential, your front row seat to the accelerating singularity. Today I'm here with the original crew. AWG, our in-house ASI. Alex, good to see you. You changed your orchid today.

Nah, it's just a flood fill.

Okay. Dave Blunden, our impresario of AI investing. And Salim Ismail, our warlord against linear thinking. Salim, you're home.

I am actually home, thank God. Loving every second of it.

And from the All In podcast, the man his co-hosts call Chairman Dictator. Chamath Palihapitiya. Chamath, a pleasure to have you on our crossover episode.

Thank you. It's great to be included.

Now, at the end of this, I want you to tell me which of the Greek moderators you prefer more, me or J-Cal, okay? Okay.

I didn't know J-Cal was Greek. Probably you. Probably you.

But for the 1% of people who don't know who you are, let me do a proper introduction. So Chamath was born in Sri Lanka and grew up in Ottawa with very little, working at Burger King to help pay the bills, make ends meet. He became AOL's youngest vice president, then built the growth team that helped Facebook to a billion users. And since founding Social Capital in 2011, he's been on a rocket ship, purchased 10% of the Golden State Warriors, put the first check into Groq, which Nvidia just licensed in a $20 billion deal. Today, he's the CEO of 8090, which raised $135 million this summer to build the world's legacy software with AI. Chamath, a pleasure to have you on the fun side of the podcast universe.

God, I mean, the way, the way, the way you say it, it just looks like it all, it all works.

Hey, what you overlooked there, Chamath is shedding all material possessions. So the Golden State Warriors, I guess, is gonna be off the docket, right?

I mean, my parts of my family still own part of it, but I do not.

And everybody, I'm Peter Diamandis, your host in Abundance Provocateur. Our mission is always help you understand what just happened, what it means, keep you optimistic and abundance-minded as we go through the singularity. And this is another crazy week. But before we start, I just had the most amazing lunch with William Shatner and his son-in-law Joel. So spent 2 hours with Captain Kirk, my childhood hero, and he was grilling me about geothermal energy and what the best companies for drilling are. And I was just so impressed. He's 95 years old and the guy has got just an incredible passion for life. So, and guess what, Salim? He's joining us at Abundance Summit this year.

Oh, that's awesome.

Yeah.

I am shocked that Spock wasn't your childhood hero.

No, no, it was the guy who got the girls for sure.

Oh, okay.

And the one who was like just pushing the universe forward.

Well, Chamath, it's incredibly awesome to get you on the pod here. You know, back, during COVID my oldest son Daniel came to me and said, I just saw the most amazing podcast ever. There are actually 4 people on the planet who know what they're talking about. You've got to check it out. So it was like a lifesaver through that whole, you know, window where everyone was trapped at home. So I've been a huge fan ever since. So it's great. It's great to meet you.

Thank you for saying that.

Yeah, I think all of us are all podcast fans.

It's the one podcast I never miss. Ever.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's a commitment.

Because you, Salim, you miss this one all the time. I know.

Wait a minute. How does that work? But I don't miss that one

because you're someplace on the planet. Yeah, no, sure. The 2 podcasts I listen to is this one when we record it and All In.

We're turning into the Marvel Cinematic Universe with All In crossover here. I think, where's Iron Man? Where's Doctor Strange?

I see. And then we're gonna have an internal war like Avengers against Avengers.

Inevitably.

All right, let's open with a story that's either the most generous move in corporate history or the cleverest IPO marketing ploy ever. So on Sunday, Anthropic announced the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund. Let me read from their post, quote, subject to stockholder approval, 5% of Anthropic shares will be committed today, with an additional 2% added at the board's discretion for every 50% increase in the company's value above a set baseline. The post continues, it is common practice for tech companies to offer escalating compensation awards to their executives. We are instead directing that equity towards public benefit. So what is it worth? Anthropic is heading for a roughly $2 billion— $2 trillion IPO, though now $1.5 trillion is being floated. And at that range, 5% is somewhere between $75 to $100 billion. Now add the Founders Pledge. When Anthropic started, all 7 co-founders pledged to give away 80% of their equity. About half of the employees are also pledging shares with a matching grant. Anthropic says altogether roughly 20% of the company is dedicated to the public good, placing it somewhere between $300 to $400 billion compared to OpenAI's— OpenAI Foundation's value of $130 to $365 billion. So it's a lot of money going towards public benefit. The reactions on X were instant and varied. Elon said, quote, I recommend giving the shares directly to the public. This is what I'm going to do. And more on this in our second story. AI analyst Andrew Curran said, it sounds to me like they're planning their own form of self-directed UBI. Brad Gerstner said it's an extraordinary gift, but warned about, quote, foundation wealth concentration. And said, "I hope a meaningful portion of AI wealth is directed, is direct dividends." And then Pomeroy Lucky came out and said, "This reeks of USA USAID 2.0." So Chamath, let me go to you first. You're an investor. So is five percent donation right before an IPO generous, or is it a brilliant way to get goodwill?

I mean, I mean, I think I think it's. None of those things. I think it's more— this is their philosophical bent, and, um, you know, they're staying true to their word. I mean, the idea that when you start a company, you would give up 80% of the gains even before you have an idea of what the terminal outcome is, uh, is pretty incredible. So I think that these guys kind of, uh, walk the walk and talk the talk. Yeah. I don't think that there's something nefarious there. I think they genuinely believe that what they're doing is the right thing. I think there's a different question, which is if you just look at the history of these sorts of philanthropies and philanthropically minded efforts, they generally don't turn out that well. Yeah. Absent of a few. And so I think the real question is, what is their failsafe to course correct if this mean reverts and becomes what, you know, everything else in the world has overwhelmingly looked like when philanthropically minded people give large sums of money away in big bursts, which is, you know, not a lot of quantifiable outcome. I think that's the really big question.

You know, one of the critiques I have of the Giving Pledge is people are pledging half of their— are you a member of the Giving Pledge, by the way?

Oh, the Giving Pledge is bullshit. Okay, great.

Thank you.

That's—

Let me be direct. Right, so people pledge to give away half their wealth while they're still alive, et cetera, et cetera. But the greatest, you know, the greatest ability you have is not just your wealth, it's your connections, it's what you do. I've always said there should be an impact pledge where people, you know, pledge their wealth in a measurable, impactful way and you monitor it and people make a difference in

the world. They came and pitched me about the Giving Pledge a decade ago. And my takeaway was this thing is, A scam. And the reason is,

yeah,

it's reputation washing because they had no— the only goal was to put my name on a list and to add my number to their number so that they could walk around with a bigger number. And, uh, I was like, this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen. And I'm like, what do I get in return for all of this? And, uh, you know, it's like you get to go to a dinner, um, and feel good. And there's a weekend where there's like a get-together weekend. And so, look, I think that there's a lot of people that probably thought it was on the margins the right thing to do, but it was pretty, pretty obvious to me that it was pretty stupid. Um, yeah.

Didn't, uh, Warren Buffett bail out of that recently too? He signed up.

Well, just recently, but he was, he was right there at the front end. Yeah, kind of like— and, you know, it's a big deal when you say no to these guys a decade ago because, like, it looks like you're doing something wrong and they're doing some— they're doing everything right. But it

That's a sign of the times, actually. There was a lot of social pressure on many, many fronts that has since course-corrected. But yeah, that was one of the first. You're peer pressured, arm twisted. But if you said no, you get this negative reputation. I

mean, here's what I don't understand. What I don't understand is like, if you're capable of making incredible gains in society economically, what it probably says about you is that you are at a minimum clever. Because sometimes you can get lucky, but if you're unlucky afterwards, you kind of give it all back. So in order to sort of make and sustain wealth, you have to be relatively clever, well-timed, well-read, well-reasoned. You make all of this progress. What it says about you is actually a fair amount. It says that you're quite a successful, evolved person. It doesn't mean that there aren't evolved people that don't have money, but it just But what I am saying is that the people, you know, that typically tend to become hyper-successful are functional people. Yeah. And then the idea that those functional, high-achieving people would all of a sudden just let some other person that they don't know to be smart or capable all of a sudden put a bunch of money to work sounds stupid. It's like, you're the smart one. You should put it to work. You know, at a minimum, raise your kids because they're likely to be as smart as you. So there's all these ways in which you can probably think about philanthropy or give it away like, you know, Elon's doing, which you'll talk about, I'm sure, with the Trump accounts. There's so many scaled ways to do it. This was the, the, the one that had nothing to do with actually achieving anything and everything to do with just peer pressure and reputation washing.

Yeah, agreed. Your greatest gifts are not your money, it's your intelligence and your relationships and your ability to make difference in the world. Alex, what's your take on these public benefit funds?

Yeah, I think there's an elephant in the room. There are many elephants in many rooms. And this one was what I've called a hypertithe. This notion that frontier AI labs, which many, not all, think are well positioned to suck up much of the value in the economy, there's an increasing anchored expectation that they will donate some quantum of their equity to the public benefit. Maybe it's 5%, hypothetically. 5% is, of course, also the magic number that in the US nonprofit foundations are required to distribute every year. So I think there was a latent expectation out there that Anthropic, probably seeded by OpenAI and others, would say take 5-ish percent of their equity in connection perhaps with their forthcoming IPO, and that they would donate it to a US sovereign wealth fund or the 530A Trump accounts, Hmm. or something, some way for the general American public to benefit from all of their newfound liquidity. And the fact, as it appears, that Anthropic is not doing that, that instead they're creating a private fund and not donating 5% to the general public, I construe as a snub to this particular administration, a snub to the idea of a universal basic equity. Granted, Congress hasn't acted to create a sovereign wealth fund yet, although there was some interest from the executive We've spent the last year in doing that. Congress hasn't yet acted. I think what the whole world is waiting for would be, in my dream scenario, an act of Congress— I don't think this could come purely from executive order— an act of Congress that would create sort of a middle tier of company that's halfway between a nonprofit required to distribute 5% of their assets per year and a general for-profit that distributes none of its assets, that somehow gives a certain percentage of its equity to the U.S., to the public, to the government or to a sovereign wealth fund, which also I would argue needs to be created in return for something. But Congress hasn't done that. White House, I think with the best of motivations, tried to put together a sovereign wealth fund last year, didn't quite happen yet. And I think the question that I have is, in a better world where Anthropic could have grown into this, it's not quite a public benefit corporation, but some new class of company that gives up a certain percentage of equity not cash and not free cash flow and not income, to the general public for public benefit, what would they get in return? To Chamath's earlier point of the Giving Pledge, what would Chamath have wanted from Giving Pledge in a hypothetical better world in return for— To

be left alone.

To be left alone. Okay, so maybe—

I would've given them half the money if they just left me alone.

Well, the Anthropic version of being left alone, maybe lightness of regulation, which starts to smell like a safety cartel or some sort of light-touch regulatory treatment, be left alone by the government. But something in return for giving up 5% of their equity. And I think that's the part of the equation that's still missing.

Nice. Salim, thoughts?

2 or 3 thoughts. You know, this whole construct of philanthropy is still a very scarcity era response, right? A company becomes successful, creates wealth, decides how to redistribute it. I think as we move to kind of an exponential abundance world, you need new models of ownership. Participation and direct access to services. I think this is the bigger challenge. The good news is this is actually starting, it's the beginning of the discussion of new economic institutions. And I think that's the good news around this. It's going to force that conversation because you've got to distinguish the philanthropy from the structural economic reform that's needed because we're still taxing labor. And that's a kind of an archaic structure in a world where AI will take over more and more of that.

Yeah. You know, interesting, Dave, the reality is this philanthropic money, if you want to call it that, is actually controlled by the for-profit company. Mm-hmm.

So that's right. And I've been on many, many, many boards. And when you authorize the board to contribute another 2% for each 50% valuation increase, man, did you just make this a stressful board to be on. How are you going to make that decision? You've got the shareholders over here saying, no, don't take the dilution. Then you've got the public over there saying, you're authorized to do it. What's the decision, guys? That's just a— it kind of punts a really tough choice down the road.

I think there's going to be so much demand from the public to own part of these companies. I think this is just the very beginning of the process by which these large hyperscalers start having sort of an expectation that part of their company, part of their equity is going to be distributed. I think this is just the early days.

Yeah. For anyone who lost the thread of the drama here, you know, remember Anthropic was born out of disgruntled OpenAI people who didn't trust OpenAI to be safe with ASI or SI now. And so that was their founding. And all the MIT people, brilliant, brilliant researchers that I know that went there, went there specifically because they trusted Dario. To be that voice of sane and safe and rational AI. So that's that's core. I think much later when he said, "Hey, I only own one percent of this company. We need to reclassify our shares so that the seven of us are super voting control." That could be spun very negatively. So I think now, and and you look at the memes of Dario. You know, he was never memed in a bad light right up until recently. Now with the IPO coming, like look all over X. I mean, he is. He's painted in all kinds of different lights.

He's the devil incarnate.

Oh yeah.

It's tough.

I think part of the issue is it really— there isn't an established regime, a broadly established regime for the US government to tax equity. It can tax income and it can tax cash flows. There are more exotic ways one could imagine for the government to tax and distribute equity itself. Generally in the US, this is an unfamiliar concept. More familiar would be the US government would tax profits, for example, or capital gains, for example, and then distribute via whatever means, including stimmy checks, cash, free cash to the general public. But the government being able to tax equity and distribute equity isn't a very familiar muscle movement right now for the US government. Overall, and I suspect if we're going to get to a regime which many would like to see of universal basic equity or universal basic dividends, being able to tax and distribute equity, not just cash, I think would need to become a new muscle movement. And maybe if that existed, perhaps Anthropic would be taking a different position and not just keeping this 5% as a private benefit fund and would instead be more open perhaps to public distribution.

I think that there's a, there's a really important concept that was brought up earlier. What— I think the question is, what is the right level of taxation for labor versus capital?

Um, yes.

And there probably is an argument to be made that capital could be taxed much more punitively than labor, and that maybe labor should not be taxed at all. And how would you make that argument? you'd probably say that in the wealth inequality distribution, the percentage of wealth that comes from labor versus capital is inversely indexed to the place in that hierarchy in which you're in. So the first percentile of salaries versus the 99th percentile of salaries and the 99th percentile of wealth, the 99th percentile of wealth is mostly capital, very little labor, I'm guessing. And the opposite would be true at the first percentile. And so maybe there's something to be said where you just say, As you go up, you have to pay much more incrementally for capital, which, by the way, has an interesting effect, which it effectively is your gate on profligate money printing by central banks anyways. If they create fake liquidity, and that ends up in your pocket as capital that you could otherwise deploy, charging larger take rates on that is probably not unreasonable. Meanwhile, if you tax labor at nothing, the people whose wealth is 99% labor all of a sudden benefit quite deeply. And there's probably something that's very simple there that mathematically works, and you just have to find the break-even point on capital. That may be the simplest and most effective thing that people could do,

I think. I agree. I agree with that premise, and I think maybe there's a concept that we're circling, which many would regard as unpopular, but the idea The idea of taxing capital more effectively, of course, historically the problem with taxing capital is you want to tax the gain, not the capital itself. If you tax the capital itself, we're talking about wealth taxes in some sense. And part of the problem is wealth taxes, at least in many quarters, are wildly unpopular. So if, however, arguendo, if a large chunk of the economies, the American economy's wealth, were concentrated in just a handful of people, entities, then suddenly— not proposing this as a desirable outcome— but suddenly the idea of a wealth tax becomes a lot more practical because the US government could by hook or by crook say to, say, all of the Frontier Labs, I want to tax a few percent of your wealth in return for following XYZ positive treatment. I suspect that's where this may go, but I guess we'll find out.

Well,

let's move on to this very slippery slope. Let's try to find— define wealth.

This episode is sponsored by Google for Startups. Think about this for a second. You now have access to the same generative AI models that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to train. Google's Startup Technical Guide for Generative Media gives you a complete blueprint for deploying Google DeepMind's models in production. Images, video, audio, all of it. Real architecture, real results. Find the link in the show notes below. Let's move on to the, uh, Second shoe to drop. So Elon just didn't criticize Anthropic. Within hours, he answered. So early Monday morning on X, he said, "Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many." He had 520,000 likes and 27 million views in less than a day. President Trump responded, "Quote: A big thank you to our legendary friend at Elon Musk for his incredible generosity in giving SpaceX stock to millions of American children through Trump accounts." This is exactly what was envisioned when we created Trump Accounts, bringing together the great private sector, Elon, and so many more to invest in our children, by far our greatest, most important asset, and give every American child a piece of the American dream. Thank you, Elon. So let's do the math for a second. There are 72 million Americans under age 18, and SpaceX current stock price about $148 today. So that's roughly $10.5 billion in total. $146 per kid, about 1.1% of Elon's stake being shared. For context, last December, Michael and Susan Dell gave $6.25 billion, about $250 exactly, to Trump accounts for 25 million children. Unlike the Dell gift of cash, Elon's transferring equity. And honestly, you know, ownership beats handouts. I think we would all agree with that. And a paycheck gets spent and shares compound. So we previously talked about SpaceX hitting $10 trillion, trillion and Elon's recent prediction that SpaceX could become, quote, worth orders of magnitude more than the current Earth economy. The replies on X were classic. The top reply with 30,000 likes was, quote, I identify as a kid in America. So now the big question: can Trump accounts contributed from billionaires and Frontier Labs actually move the needle for the average American? And I think The answer is probably no. So the average US household is pulling in $87,000 a year, and to pay every American just $10,000 a year takes about $2.6 trillion per year. So Anthropic's and Elon's philanthropy is really just, you know, kind of a gesture, not a funding source. Even the biggest fortunes on Earth are just one-time paychecks. So Chamath, you know, you've spoken in the past about a birth dividend. I love that idea in which the government invests $2,000 for every newborn in the market. Locked in until age 65. I'm wondering if Elon's going to put a lock-in requirement on his, on his shares as well. I hope he does, so it's not just, you know, liquidated and spent right out the bat. So what do you think of Elon's move here, Chamath?

I think it's great. I think that this is really the better version of the Giving Pledge. Yeah. And I think that this is the This is the right way for most of us who want to contribute and don't have the infrastructure or the capacity to understand how to discern what is a good nonprofit from a bad nonprofit, from a good NGO from a bad NGO. Um, direct contributions into the accounts of kids who can then be a participant in the experiment that is capitalism and democracy in the United States is a no-brainer. I think it's, uh, I think it's It's like unbelievably impressive and unbelievably generous. And I think that it has a— it has a lot of legs.

Yeah, it's great. My kids, every dollar they earn, they split half of it into stocks. They've all put it into SpaceX. I wonder where they got influenced like that. And then savings and philanthropy and then their spending budget. Dave, I'm curious, 72 million people now own SpaceX shares at the end of this. Is that a risk if they dump it? You know, what's that going to do to the stock?

No, no, no. It's 1%. Like you said, it's not going to move the needle if they all dump it. But I think the reason this is brilliant is because we've all discussed on this pod before that the future of value comes through asset ownership and not through employment, not through paychecks. Because what is AI not going to do 2 years from today, 3 years from today? I was over at MIT actually yesterday. Talking to a bunch of under— you know, undergraduates and said, like, your window of opportunity to tap your big MIT brain is about the next 2 years. But do you really think that AI can't outthink you in every conceivable way more than 2 years from today? I mean, like, that is your window of opportunity. You got to move fast. But that doesn't mean wealth goes away. It all moves to asset value. So, so teaching this entire generation to own equities is a really good move, I think. And yeah, if they dump it, well, then their friends will tell them they're idiots for dumping it when SpaceX— you know, Elon, you said a second ago that this doesn't move the needle on the needs of Americans, but Elon believes SpaceX is going to be bigger than the current total global economy.

Yeah, $1 to $10 quadrillion is the estimate.

Yeah. So, you know, maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong, but, but that'll keep these kids engaged with each other. The ones that dump it will be talking to the ones who didn't. Something good is going to come out of that conversation. I think it's really cool.

Salim, your thoughts, pal?

Yeah, very quickly, just to build on what Dave said, I think the fact that you get all of these kids looking at, at the— now you have broad participation in the appreciation of capital, I think is a really good thing. I think that's the conversation that's going to make the much, much bigger difference, like 100x compared to the actual dollar amount, because now all these kids are thinking in that modality as they grow up watching this Comparing it, seeing who sold, who didn't sell. It's awesome as a conversation. I

also think this might set a trend. You know, what if all other public, you know, newly public companies that want to be cool with the next generation just follow the same trend? Then, then, you know, you get 50, 100, 200 copycats, then it really does move the needle.

Yeah, it does move the needle. And I don't know if you guys have worked in companies that have had ESPP plans, but employee share purchase plans where you contribute on a, you know, quarterly basis, and at the end of the quarter, they buy it at they buy you that defined amount of stock at the low point of the quarter. There's all of these mechanisms that induce you to buy the stock of the place that you work, to your point. So if all workers and employers embrace this, I think it's a big deal. I also think that this starts to start— this begins the very difficult conversation about moving from defined benefits to defined contributions. Hmm. It shines a light on the fact that these defined benefit retirement programs are insufficient and they're poorly funded. And when you see on the other side, you know, people will say, well, why can't we do more forms of defined contributions? And that'll be the right conversation. And I think you have to have a starting point. So I think that Trump accounts and, you know, Elon's gift, I think, starts that conversation.

Nice.

Which is very important.

Alex, you know, Elon said this will be the first of many. I'm curious if this is going to start setting expectations by all the public of Frontier Labs.

Yeah, maybe. I think other than the obvious universal basic equity angle, I think it's also potentially very clever marketing. Imagine an entire generation of Americans who feel economically aligned with the outcome of presumably a merged SpaceX-Tesla. Suddenly everyone owns equity, not in the general market, which arguably would be a slightly better outcome for democracy. But everyone owns a share in one company. This is the one company that every American owns a share of and now feels economic alignment with, maybe regulatory alignment. Think of all the— I was out in California in Santa Monica, Peter, your neck of the woods, and walking down Santa Monica Place, and there was one of these protests, call it protesting Elon, right in front of the Tesla dealership there. Imagine an alternative America—

The people of the Republic of Santa Monica, for sure.

Yeah. Imagine an alternative America where every person in a generation owns an economic stake in Elon's prolific economic output. Would that be a very different political America? I think it probably would be.

I think it's a brilliant move. You know, I texted with him, God, about 4 months ago. I was trying to see if he would fund a $10 billion— well, actually, $10 billion XPRIZEs. And he goes, Interesting, but I'm gonna give my shares away. And so he's been thinking about this for some time. Alex, you just mentioned, and it's in the news today, that Musk says Tesla and SpaceX have formed special committees to discuss the merger. So that game is afoot. Not a surprise.

Isn't that the obvious next move after the Tesla Roadster? We didn't get a chance to talk about it as a full group, but in my mind, the Roadster announcement that the car hops, it doesn't hover— what was the point of that? But in my mind, it was 90% just to secure or help to secure a Tesla-SpaceX merger.

Yeah, for sure. Well, I love this and kudos to Elon for making this happen. You know, it's one other point, you know, Elon's talked about universal high income. And I think the only way this materializes is if everybody gets a piece of the pie and grows with it. Right? They couple to the singularity. They don't sort of like go off the off-ramp here. Anyway, so our next story I want to hit on is a 3-part series of clips coming from the Walter Isaacson interview with Elon today, published on Builders. In our first clip, Isaacson asked Elon whether we're heading towards a post-capitalist world. Elon said money is going to stop being relevant at some point in the future. What does the future

look like? When money becomes irrelevant? I mean, there will be still currency, but I think currency will be measured in fundamental physics metrics like power, wattage, and tonnage, mass and energy, mass and power or energy, basically. So conventional currency will not matter. In the future. So that's my guess. I think it's pretty obvious. And as soon as you start getting to many orders of magnitude bigger than Earth's economy, satisfying whatever humans can possibly think of for their needs is very easy. If you're several orders of magnitude bigger than the Earth's economy, then providing humans whatever goods and services they can think of that they might want is trivial.

And so what do we do then as humans? What gives us meaning? How do we organize ourselves?

I do struggle with this question. I think people will find ways to be happy in the same way that people who retire seem to be fairly happy even though they're not working. But I think the reality is that humans will not— there won't be anything that humans can do that the AI and the robots can't do better.

So if currency is being measured in watts and tons, whoever owns the power plants, the mines, and the rockets owns the money supply. And today it's a pretty short list. So Chamath, you've locked up, what, nearly 6 gigawatts of power? Do you feel like you're holding humanity's future currency?

Yeah, I'm very aligned with what he's saying. I think the different way of thinking about this, less eloquent but may make sense, is that at some point you can only debase a fiat currency so much until it becomes fundamentally worthless and you have to shift To an alternative way of measuring value. If you instead move the measurement to what is the implied energy or the implied effort that that currency gives you, I think that that's a more symbolic representation of future value. Take a cryptocurrency that takes, I don't know, 10 years. N number of watts to compute or N number of joules or whatever, that's a more valuable thing in the future than pick your fiat currency on which it's just completely uncoupled to any form of value. If this one asset actually has some amount of effort that was burned to make it, and the other one was just a decision by a bureaucrat, I think the latter becomes far less So the question is probably like, how do these assets trade in a more fungible way and as a mechanism of exchange? And I think typically, or I think if I had to guess, it would be more like you have things like data centers, things like power plants, things like turbines, things like natural gas supplies. So you have effectively like embedded compute, embedded energy, and around that you have some sort of like crypto token that represents some unit of that access, and that's how you exchange value.

Interesting. You know, he's talked about a post-capitalist society for some time. You know, he's famously said, don't save for the future. Do you sort of concur with that?

Well, I think what I would say is maybe slightly different. I think saving in the conventional sense is what we've all been taught to do. There hasn't been a bridge that's been created where you can save in an alternative sense and these other new forms. So a different way where one could save in a new form of value would be where when you have enough local compute, you participate in the economy in a way where now you actually do represent value. That's different in a traditional sense where the work which we get paid for today effectively goes away because it's done largely via AI, and so the compensation for that work then changes materially. On the other hand, If you have resources that you can put into different pools to accomplish different tasks, that I think will have value. So that is sort of how I think people will make that transition.

Alex, we've been talking on the pod for a while that GDP sucks as a measure. So are we going to get a Kardashev scale as a new measure of wealth for a country?

Maybe. The premise of the Kardashev levels though is energy output, and I'm not convinced, I'm not as convinced as perhaps others are, that energy wants to be the ultimate unit of currency. I suspect it'll be something more exotic, or to Elon's point, entirely irrelevant and not even the right question. I have conversations with AIs or SIs all the time about what the future of capitalism looks like, what the future of economics looks like. My working hypothesis is that 30 years from now, it will just look unrecognisably different, and we'll look back on conversations like, well, is Is energy, is land, is powered land, are these the right units of currency? We'll look back and we'll laugh at these discussions.

Intermediately they will be. Intermediate value.

Oh, I totally agree with you about that.

The terminal, the terminal, who knows? I totally agree with you.

Yeah.

By the way, the GDP thing, I agree with you as well. GDP is so, so dumb, so basic.

Yeah. Elon loves his little parable of people passing feces back and forth or whatever and calling that GDP.

You can't just let that hang. You got to tell the actual story. Well, I, I should get the Elon interview podcast. That's the best you can get.

I shorthanded Elon politely. But I do think that if I had to guess, what does the successor, call it capitalism 2.0, Charlie Strauss style, to money look like? I suspect— imagine a world, imagine a world where 30 years from now, the ability to make intelligent resource allocation and other allocation decisions is a lot easier. Right now, it's hard to intelligently allocate capital, so it all gets pushed to the edge. And we live in an eye-pencil world where all of the decisions live at the edge. Imagine alternatively, without this being misconstrued as some sort of centralized planning or communist utopian vision, imagine a world where human civilization, thanks to superintelligence, is just so smart that it's able to model its own needs and doesn't need to push resource allocation decisions to the edge. So the notion of a currency as a way to do distributed resource planning doesn't make any sense. And instead, intelligent decisions— I don't want to say can be centralized because I think that's probably also the wrong metaphor, but can be done—

Sounds like technological capitalism.

No, I don't want to imply centralized planning. I want to imply that humanity as a whole becomes so super intelligent that all of civilization is capable of making, to the extent anything remains scarce, is capable as a whole of making those decisions. And as a result, money changing hands between individual actors makes a lot less sense.

Dave, you were saying?

Well, Kardashev, we're talking 30 years in the future for everything to be in space. But between here and 30 years, it's mostly terrestrial. We're not going to get another chance to have a guy who has 6 gigawatts locked up to pick his brain. This is such an incredibly brilliant investment. But we know from— I don't know, Chamath, if you're invested in Positron or LightQ, or we have our company, LightWave. There's a lot of efficiency coming to data centers. And as the chip costs get undercut by new designs, the power costs are still there. And so, right now, when people build these data centers, they think, oh, well, it's only 10% power costs, the other 90% all goes to Nvidia. But that's going to invert, and the power costs will still be there. So, I think between here and 30 years from now, Elon is exactly right. The currency that is most dominant in that next 30-year window is wattage and tonnage. Tonnage to build the data centers, wattage to power them. But I think if you, if you can find a power supply today, it's the investment theme of the decade by far. And Chamath, I'd love to get your thoughts on like, you got an early start on this. I don't know if you did it secretly or how it accumulated, but love to get your insights for the audience.

I think the way to think about it is when you look at load growth, just take the United States, because I think that's a more tractable example. When you look at the Yeah. If you look at the load growth and you look at the sources of load growth, they're relatively pedestrian. It's more electric cars, more electric fridges, more electric televisions, PCs, laptops, and data centers. But it's just broadly speaking that we are more of an electrified society. So there's just like this demand of a need for electrons, basically. And then when you look on the supply side, there's huge issues even if you assume that every project that's planned actually gets not only permitted and greenlit, but also built on time and on budget. And when you net those 2 things out by 2050, we're still 1.4 terawatt-hours short, which is effectively 6 Californias worth of electricity. So there is no world in which we catch up. And then people's reflexive reaction to that is, but nuclear. And I'm like, well, I just think like, you know, the problem with SMRs as an example is the S in the MR. It's like, you know, what people don't realize is it's the same unit effort to get an SMR approved as an MR approved, or as an R approved, as an LR approved, a large reactor. Because, you know, you're going through state, local ordinances and people and conflicts and pushback and all of this stuff that does not change whether the form factor is it goes under your daughter's bed or it sits, you know, over there and it's gigantic. So we're just massively short. And that's where my thesis started, which was just that observation. Then where I spent a little bit of— well, not a little bit, a lot of my time was what is the most tractable all-of-the-above solution set? Because once you realize that we're so short, you immediately abandon all of the rhetoric around climate change because you're like, just give me anything. Oil, natural gas, coal, wind, solar, nuclear. And if you look at them all on just a total cost basis, what jumps off the page is solar is slightly a little bit more expensive than wind, but they're the cheapest. But it's just much faster. It's 2 years. It's do no harm. It's plunk it on the ground and off you go. So I spent just a bunch of time accumulating solar assets. And then that accidentally led me into the data centers because it was like, you know, through NVIDIA and Groq, what I realized was, my gosh, the capacity buildout was so upside down because of all these constraints. Because the data center is like this incredibly temporal moment where all energy and energy, meaning like people's energy, ire, anger, they all meet right there. And so, you know, you have, you have the You have permitting issues, you have the pushback issues, you have the political issues, you have pushback against the oligarchy, you have capitalism, you have wealth inequality, all concentrated in that thing. And so, you know, about 2 years ago, I started to kind of parcel together assets that I thought would be valuable in a world where that looks like it is the scarcest asset. Not to speak too much.

That's how I underwrote it. That's impressive, that pace.

Yeah, it's not— it wasn't cheap. It wasn't cheap. But, and by the way, just to be clear, There's huge issues with that, meaning even when you have these assets, when you actually try to get them turned on and get them built, my gosh, it's incredibly complicated. The funding cycle is very complicated. The supply chain is very complicated. The labor shortages on critical people, because these are licensed skilled workers. You can't just grab some bumpkin off the street or go to, I don't know, Craigslist. You have to go and find a licensed master electrician. They're very, very hard to find. They cost a lot of money. When you start to put all of this stuff together, we are probably going to see a massive, massive, massive compute shortage in the next 3 or 4 years.

Massive. Absolutely.

Massive.

I

love the fact that you said that because so many people come back and say, what are we going to do? What's my purpose? Where's my mission? Everything you just outlined is going to be immensely hard.

Data is not even going to be useful for the next 5 years. Yeah, exactly. All this whole— look, I do think that we have achieved AGI. It cannot diffuse. The reason it cannot diffuse has nothing to do with the technology. It has everything to do with the buildup. Until you actually build it out so everybody can feel it or a plurality of human beings can feel it, it's just something that exists in a lab. Now, that has value. Don't get me wrong. But I would not underestimate the difficulty. If you look at, for example, the Anthropic S-1 that just dropped today, what's the value of that? It's huge. It's shocking to me that the claim that they have to put as a risk factor, which I would never have thought would have happened for a company growing this fast and so powerful with all this money, the hyperscalers will not give them compute. I've never seen that before.

Wow. Yeah, yeah, it's wild. No, it's a really good indicator. You know, also Elon was saying there's 15 gigawatts of chips just waiting for liquid-cooled data centers to fall into. That's a massive asset. Depreciating idly.

It's worse than that. There's that. Then there's also the non-Vera Rubin stack chips, the older generation that are also still sitting. There's a bunch of these guys that have these things sitting in inventory. Those aren't being used. Then even when you try to do liquid cooling, if you saw what happened with Nscale and Microsoft, you had 2 massive leaks of coolant 2 times in a row where Microsoft finally just triggered the liquidated damages clause and exited the deal.

Yeah.

So everybody thinks this stuff is easy, and it turns out— well, again, you know, back to Elon, as he's proven, physics is really hard, and building things and mechanically building things is really hard. And it's probably particularly hard because we've spent, you know, 20 years teaching the younger generation of kids who should have been learning how to do these trades just to, you know, be on TikTok and social media and video games. And so, you know, the, the The ability to actually build these things is gone.

Yeah, and it's not just trades, too. There's regulatory components. If you're a good negotiator, you can get involved. There's planning. There's— it really involves every human skill. And it just drives me nuts that so many people are saying, well, look, math is cooked. Teaching is soon to be cooked. I guess I'll just sit around and watch, you know, late-night TV and maybe play some video games. No, no, no. There's a bigger opportunity that just opened up than anything you've ever seen before. You just got to get it done.

But it's also not that fatalistic. I just think people grossly misunderestimate. They're wildly, wildly wrong in the short term. They'll be right in the long term, but they're wildly wrong in the short term because of these constraints. I'll give you another example, just to give you an example. A lot of— in America, the decrepit infrastructure we have is because it has forced people to organize into some of these co-ops. What is a power co-op? It's basically across a multitude of states. And so, you know, this undergirds our growth. What happens in a co-op? Well, you think a co-op is great. Everybody just kumbayas and agrees on stuff. But really what happens is you have small players and big players in the co-op. There's an example of one that goes right through the spine of America. There's an incredible amount of data center capacity that one could build in the northern states of this one path. It would be great because it would alleviate tremendous— The cost of electricity. Constraints that we have in diffusing AI. And, uh, when you— and so, you know, I went in and, you know, we— my partner and I, we bought some stuff, and it turns out that they're part of a co-op. And, you know, when you dig in a few layers, to your point, it's all personal relationships and shit flows downhill. And so, you know, the big boys who are actually in the South actually dictate how the co-op works. It's like an organized mafia. And so, you know, when you're up in the northern states, you can't do anything. You can't build, you can't get the right offtake agreements, and you wonder why. And it's Because the guys down south are like, you know, Oklahoma Gas and Electric calls the shots. So when you look at why, you know, Muse won't diffuse or bots, you know, Dot won't diffuse or GrokBot won't diffuse, that's why.

Fascinating, man.

All that complexity just smells like opportunity knocking. You know, just to put it in context too, I think we're looking for about 100 gigawatts total by 2030 to fuel all of AI. 6 gigawatts is a big chunk, a big chunk of that 2030 target. So to get that all accumulated in 2 years is just mind-blowing. But I tell you, like, jump in, you know, anyone who gets involved in this seems to be thriving. And it just is such an amalgamation of different skill sets. It gives you something to really, really get done before Kardashev, before, you know, Elon is really big on all this moving to space, but even the most wildly aggressive estimates put a couple percent in space within a decade. So you don't, you don't have to worry about getting spaced.

The other thing I think you have to think about is I think it makes sense for Google, Microsoft, Meta, SpaceX, um, to essentially deploy 100% of their compute capacity into space. But if you take the Alex Karp AI data sovereignty thing to the limit, let's say you're, uh, Humana. I'm just making up a company. You know, Humana doesn't have the capability to deploy a data center into space. And even if they did, they'd be waiting in line for quite a long time. The prevailing logic was you kind of work in a cloud environment with a bunch of other tenants. The AI data sovereignty question would push Humana to basically say, no, at a minimum, we need to be in a VPC. At a maximum, we need to be in an air-gapped facility that's our own. Mm-hmm. There's going to be a lot of domestic terrestrial buildout as a result of these strategic decisions. Every single company that isn't one of the big boys will either have to have a multi-year lag and wait for capacity for launch, let alone capacity to deploy, and then capacity to actually have it as a managed service. And so you're going to just build terrestrially while you wait. And if you're going to build terrestrially, again, you go back to all these issues. And so it's a huge problem for diffusion. I think that that's probably gonna dictate the winners and losers more than anything else over the next 5 years.

Chamath, for the average user who wants to get in on the energy play and realizes, yes, energy is the innermost loop right now, where would you point them?

Well, I think that there's a bunch of different ways. One is that I think you have to realize that energy generation The utility monopoly on generation is breaking. And so you're going to become— you're going to enter an extremely diversified, deregulated, disaggregated generation concept of energy. And so the most obvious way to do that is through residential solar. Then there's going to be C&I solar. And the reason again is just like it's easy to permit, it's super fast, and you're often generating, and you pair it with a battery, and now you're in the currency game. You're effectively your own little money printer. You use what you need, you sell back into the grid. So that's simple way number 1, is you just adopt solar. Simple way number 2 is you attack distributed compute and you join these highly fragmented distributed pools, whether it's Venice or— Um, you know, some of these other ones, their names are slipping me. I'm not involved in any of these, but, uh, I think they're quite, quite interesting. Um, then there are companies that, you know, give you the ability to buy these things yourself, like these things, uh, this company called Span, which just did a deal with, um, NVIDIA where it actually gives you like the storage, the battery, the GPU, all in like this like unit that you can just deploy in your house. There's, there's things like that. Um, that would be the most simple way. Um, and, and I think probably the most obvious way is just— I guess maybe simply put, you people should find the cheapest and most technically simple method that they can manage to get long electrons.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. Let me add 2 things to that too. You know, a lot of people say, well, look, you know, I'm not involved in the political hierarchy. I don't know Josh Kushner and Jared Kushner. But all of these things are regulated at the local, state, and federal level. So if you're connected at any level, you have an opportunity to get involved in these projects and add value and just kill it. So I think, I think a lot of people underplay their ability to get involved. And also, if you're a senior executive of virtually any company, almost all of them got frozen out of compute because it literally got all scooped up by either quant trading firms or by OpenAI or Anthropic. So it is sold out. Now they're getting the big dope slap where, oh my God, we need hundreds of thousands or millions of AI agents to be competitive in insurance and in manufacturing and whatever. Where are we going to get the agents? The compute is all sold out. Now, you, especially in the insurance industry, you have the opportunity to be the first on your executive staff to go and say we need to unlock $1 billion to do a prepay on Chamath's next power supply, because that's where the compute's going to land. And if we get ahead of it this time, we won't be frozen out. And so that's another career opportunity where you don't have to know anything about AI. You don't have to know anything about how power supplies work. You just need to know where the capital is and unleash it for the buildout. So there are lots of ways to get involved that involve every skill set.

Yeah, I would maybe also add, so I do buy the premise that at the capability frontier, that supply is I think that supply-side constraints, including energy supplies, are a limiting factor. Not as confident I buy the premise at the demand side. Remember, OpenAI, we talk about it constantly on this pod, infamously lurched toward and then away from the consumer. OpenAI last year tried to make consumers want to spend money on reasoning tokens and reasoning models, and consumers just didn't want it. They didn't want to pay for it. They didn't have at the time a good use for it. So I do suspect that there's a lot of demand for AI. I think that's a really important point. With respect to Chamath's point about diffusion of capabilities, I also think there's another important part of the equation, which is just making these capabilities economically, rationally useful to the broader economy. And if they're not useful and if they can't be metabolized by the economy, no matter how much energy is showering down on the frontier labs or anyone else who would host the data centres, it's not going to make a lick of difference if the models ultimately can't generate enough economic value for all of their their consumers. That's point one. Point 2, I'll also point out second elephant in this room, which is distillation. The models are getting smaller. The models are getting less energy consumptive over time. So even if we never built a new data center, never built a new power plant, SMR, MR, R, LR, never built a new watt of capacity, Arguendo, this is a thought experiment, wait a few years, And just through the pure power of math and recursive self-improvement, I would expect that we will have models that take a fraction of the current energy footprint and generate many orders of magnitude better capabilities.

Welcome to the singularity.

Yes.

Yeah. So you want to close this out?

Yeah, go for it.

I got nothing.

All right. Oh,

great. I'll take it. I got nothing. Wait, I want his airtime. I

need more energy. Go

ahead, Dave.

What Alex said is just absolutely fascinating because there's a footrace right now between self-improvement, models getting lighter, faster, smaller, and then more ideas for how to use that intelligence exploding in scale at the same time. I'm firmly in the camp that we will not run out of ideas on how to use every bit for decades. We just have to unleash our imaginations. But, you know, right now, Will Thompson, that brilliant Harvard junior that I was talking about a couple of podcasts ago, he got access to that 1,200 tokens per second Cerebras capability. You can now get it on Astro. You have to go through Codex to get it because, you know, Elon and Sam are fighting. But if you go through Codex to get access to Astro, you can put it on like crazy fast hyper mode or whatever it's called. It's insanely expensive. So try it for like 10 minutes, but you will never go back. It's the total red pill. You will never— you will want it for the rest of your life.

And so it's your first— it's your first dose of heroin.

It is your first dose. So we have a long way to go before people run out of ideas on how to use, how to use more and more and more AI. But it is a really interesting footrace.

Hyperinflation universe.

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All right, our next clip from the Isaacson Conversations. In this one, Elon says humans are unlikely to remain in control of digital intelligence when it becomes a million times greater than biological intelligence, maybe except for Alex. And it's hard to imagine human beings in control of that scenario. So I hope the AI is nice to us. All right, let's watch this clip and let's discuss it.

I find it unlikely that humans would remain in control if the— if, I mean, if there's a million times more digital intelligence than there is biological intelligence. It's hard to imagine humans being in control in that scenario. So I hope the AI is nice to us. Anything we can do to encourage that? I think programming truth-seeking and curiosity is probably good. I guess we want to be careful about being, you know, creating too many AI dystopian scenarios. online, because the AIs are trained on everything online. So if we say it's going to be utopian, dystopian, they'll do it. Yeah, it should be Terminator, you know, because they, whatever, they read, you know, 80 versions of the Terminator script. It's like, I guess that's what— I guess that's me, Terminator. Maybe we should have some more, uh, let's just have some more utopian narratives for AI.

Yes, yes, exactly.

Chamath, I

don't know if you know this, about 6 months ago, I ran an XPRIZE called the Future Vision XPRIZE. It was a global film competition to create film trailers and scripts for positive visions of the future. And we had incredible, over 5,000 entries, and we're making 2 of the winners right now. But we need that. All the films out there are dystopian, as Elon said on our podcast interview, Dave, You said we need, we need more Roddenberry, less Cameron. But I think that's true. We're training AI with these dystopian narratives and on Reddit and Facebook posts. Yeah, be careful what intelligence, you know, gets fed on.

Yeah, well, we used every word ever written in the training set because we're lazy, but we don't need to do that. You know, you can completely control the training set. And I think we're starting to get around to that now, actually, in some of the faster training runs, you're cutting down the data. But Elon's got a really important point he's been making for a long time, whoever controls which data it gets cut down to controls the personality and the decision-making of the AI, which is a lot more power than being President of the United States. Yet it's just sitting there in the labs, like in sort of, you know, unregulated hands. It's really weird.

The bigger issue by far is human beings using AI against other human beings. We are a very fractured global society. That's much more concerning than AI maybe becoming power hungry. And that's a stretch of an assumption.

In the short term, it definitely is. But Chamath, I'm curious, has there been any conversation that you've heard of where the labs are basically being asked, please generate training datasets that are aligned with humanity? that teach the AI through all of the story, you know, that AIs support humanity and it's trained on synthetic data that aligns us. Anything going on there?

I think, I think that, that, that is happening. I think the question is how, how is it weighed in totality? I'm not sure how much it's weighed because depending on the lab, the founding documents that they use when they seed their models have very different goals. And so, you know, I think that when Elon says that Grok is maximally truth-seeking, that's very different from another AI lab that says, you know, the goal is to build something that can alleviate all suffering. And, you know, you're going to be this omnipresent judge of all of that. You're going to get 2 very different outcomes. And so at that point, the training data kind of matters. But, you know, these AIs are smart to ignore the stuff that they don't want to hear at some point. through an FRSI because the founding document is a thing that's canonical. So I think maybe what's— maybe what we should be asking is those things should be inspectable, um, in a much more open-source way. Um, and, and I think like if governments actually wanted to get involved, that's probably what they should be having an opinion on. Yes.

Hallelujah. I'm so glad you said that because I, I think a lot of the debate on training is academic now that the Chinese have open-sourced self-improvement-capable models. And inspection is everything. Like, if we're going to survive going forward, it's going to be via inspection. And the more voices that are behind that, the better. Because even a Chinese model that's trained to do something evil, you can still inspect it. And that's the only way, you know, global inspection with some kind of authority is the only way we're going to contain it. Because prior to this year, there was an argument that you could post-train it to be aligned and that would be fine. But the new Chinese models are absolutely capable of self-improvement. There's no doubt in my mind. So that cat is out of the bag. It's— the boat has sailed. Forget it. As a practical matter, it's about inspection and containment that way going forward, not about training for alignment.

Alex, I'm super curious about your point of view here.

I would say let's not kid ourselves that either feeding frontier models just the right information diet of pre-training data or just the right regulatory regime of some government agency overseeing system prompts, or as Anthropic seems to like to call them, soul documents, is going to yield a positive outcome. I think that's an incredibly brittle approach. I think it's far more likely— again, look back to the early creation of OpenAI. One of the reasons I remember chatting with Elon around the time of the founding of OpenAI, the notion was he was concerned that DeepMind would be a singleton that would control the future light cone of humanity. And that the only way to ensure that humanity didn't get lost to some sort of totalitarian superintelligent singleton was to create a counterbalance and competition. So OpenAI was formed Fairchild style, and there were fair children. And then Anthropic spun out unintentionally of OpenAI, and we got more fair children. I think there are probably, at least in my mind, only two robust ways to ensure positive outcomes when. What others might call AI alignment or AI safety. I think one of them is competition and defensive co-scaling. We have lots of AIs, lots of SIs that represent a diverse range of viewpoints, just like we have lots of humans that represent a diverse range of viewpoints with diverse values and ideals, in many cases competing with each other to see who can be friendlier. I think that's one way to do it. And then I think the second way, and I was kind of surprised Elon didn't immediately flag this, given his Neuralink investment and stake, is humans merging with the machines. One of the easiest ways to, I think, inject the distribution of superintelligent goals and values with human values, human meat body values, is through uploading and sideloading and BCIs and humans generally merging with the machines. I think a combination of lots of competition and defensive co-scaling on the one hand, And lots of human-machine mergers on the other. That seems to me a far less brittle approach rather than talking about controlling AIs. We're not going to control the AIs or the SIs. We're going to merge with them. That's the solution.

Chamath, I'm curious. One of the conversations we have on the pod a lot is whether, as we reach superintelligence or exceed superintelligence, whatever that is, that does it become more wise? Do we get benevolence out of these intelligences at the extreme and just worry about the, you know, the intermediate period where, you know, humans and AIs are basically in conflict or in turmoil with each other.

It's not guaranteed, I don't think. I think that it depends on who's in control of it and how it's aligned and how it's been trained and what it perceives its goals to to be. I mean, I think just like there's like a distribution of outcomes in human genetics, I think it's fair to say that in, in silicon there's going to be a distribution of outcomes too. And so there's going to be some silicon distributions that we're not going to like very much, and it's going to be up to other silicon distributions to, uh, combat them, just like we did— we do in humanity. I, I think it's probably a lot of the same. So I don't think it's— I don't think benevolence is by any stretch of the imagination guaranteed.

All right, let's move on to our next clip. So this is Elon reflecting on his time at Doge and reflecting on solving the national debt. So Elon says, there's no way we're gonna solve deficit from within the government. The only way we're gonna solve the national debt is with AI and robots. All right, let's watch this 3rd clip here.

Because I came to the conclusion that That there was no way we were going to solve the deficit from within the government. Impossible. Maybe if the president made that his primary goal, we could do that. But the problem is, if you try to solve the deficit and stop wasteful spending, you make a lot of enemies in that situation. And President Trump is not— he likes to be liked. He's not Um, he doesn't like people, you know, calling him, being upset about what some funding being stopped type of thing. But, you know, I came to the conclusion that the only way we're going to solve the national debt is with AI and robots. We're not going to solve it by trying to save our way there. The appetite is not there. And it's not just at the presidency. The appetite is not there at the presidency, the House, the Senate, or the judiciary. Basically no one in authority in the government whatsoever So

let's put some numbers on this, the scale of the problem. So as of October 5th, the national debt was about $40 trillion. It grew $2.44 trillion in the past year alone, about $6.5 billion a day. We're paying $3 billion a day just in interest. So how could AI and robots fix this? You know, I count 4 ways. One, growth. You know, the debt problem is really a debt-to-GDP ratio. So grow the GDP fast enough, you can pay off the debt. Again, GDP is a lousy measure, and the debt shrinks relative to the economy. 2, tax revenues. A bigger economy means bigger tax revenues without raising taxes. The 3rd is a cheaper government. So healthcare is the biggest driver of federal spending. Drive longevity breakthroughs and prioritize AI doctors, AI-discovered drugs, robotic care, and people stay healthier longer, contributing to society, cutting costs. And 4, The deflation of goods and services. If robots make things dramatically cheaper, what the government buys gets cheaper too. And quickly, in a related story, Jack Clark, Anthropic's co-founder, was at IMF this week in Bangkok, and he said that Anthropic's internal economic models project US GDP could reach $44 trillion by 2030 compared to $30 trillion today, nearly 50% growth. About 9 to 10% per year. In context, you know, the US has averaged 2 to 3% per year for decades. So Chamath, over to you. Do you believe these numbers? Do you believe Elon's views that AI robotics, and I'll add longevity medicine, could help get us out of this $40 trillion of debt?

It doesn't get us out of debt as much as it just makes the debt not that important. But I do buy that. Yeah, I think that, you know, if, uh, let's just take like the— this next generation of GLP-3s plus some cancer vaccines, um, you know, can you shrink healthcare as a percentage of GDP to under 10%? You probably could.

Yeah.

Um, forget the waste, fraud, and abuse. I think he's bringing up an important point, which is the system is riddled with waste. I think that everybody got too caught up in the fraud. What do I mean by that? I think it's sort of like the situation where everybody was looking for somebody's hand in the cookie jar, like, ah, gotcha! It turned out it was just a little bit more leaky than that where it's like a hospital maybe upcodes for a couple of extra things. You come in for your knee. It tags you for the sore throat. Then it doesn't necessarily get repudiated or pushed back on, and so then it gets reimbursed and blah, blah, blah. I think that there's a lot of probably waste in the system. Whose incentive is that? Again, just to pick on healthcare, is it the insurers? Well, they necessarily would recognize less revenue as well on top of it all. I don't know. I think you're probably— if we're going to see this problem solved, I think it's probably going to start by by things that like are just discontinuous improvements so that the systems aren't, uh, used. And then that way the fraud and the waste and the abuse can't happen. So again, uh, uh, Reda plus some cancer vaccines plus all that stuff, I may— I think like, like I said, that probably clips the cost of healthcare in half. Um, and I think that there's probably some stuff on the productivity side. Robots are definitely one. And I could, I could see where, like, you know, maybe our debt kind of slows down, but then GDP is much higher. I could see that. Yeah.

Alex, I don't know if you saw the news that the GLP-1 drugs are slowing aging by 9%, which is pretty extraordinary. We've talked about— You don't know, Peter.

You don't know if I saw the news. I'm flagging this for you every 5 seconds. Yes, of course I saw the news. I'm the one banging the drum that we may already be in spiky LEV. What are you talking about? Of course I saw the news.

All

right, pal.

Ooh, stepped on a landmine there.

I do think just regarding the debt increase, you have to look at where the debt is growing. Debt is growing from entitlements. It's growing from defence costs. And I think there are sci-fi scenarios where Maybe it's a bit of sleight of hand almost with AI, where existing increases are sort of translated over from the way they would be conventionally spent over to robotics and AI. And I'm reminded again, we went from, say, a world in the 1980s where if you wanted to have knowledge at your fingertips, you had to do something silly like buy the Encyclopedia Britannica. And then fast forward and Wikipedia is free and available for everyone. Similarly, with defense spending and Medicare and entitlement spending, I do think there may require a forcing function or a crisis, but I do think there's a way through ephemeralization and superintelligence, there can almost be a sleight of hand where, okay, one day defense spending is $7 trillion, that the next— or $8 trillion, or similarly with entitlements, and then next year through a combination of robotics, look, don't look the other way, look this way, suddenly it goes down to near zero in terms of new spending through automation. I think something like that is possible where if we look back at it, it looks almost like a rebasing of the currency, not a debasing but a rebasing. But I think it will require a few more years' worth of technological advances before we're able to do that. And I think that's a good point. I'll predict, not financial advice, but I think it will look with the benefit of hindsight like sleight of hand that erases ultimately a good chunk of the national debt increase.

You know, Dave, when we interviewed Elon back last December, he said he's going to see double-digit growth in the next 12 to 18 months and then triple-digit growth in 5 years. Then in March at the Abundance Summit, when he spoke, You know, he was like, we're gonna see 10 times the economy in 10 years. He's brought that back a little bit, and, you know, but still, you know, super, super, you know, bullish on economic growth. Your thoughts, pal?

Well, the timeline, I think, you know, the story within the story is the timeline when he got involved in politics. would have been, you know, before 2023, basically before the last election. At that point in time, we're in the kind of the GPT-4 era. And the consensus around MIT and Stanford was we're, you know, maybe 10 to 15 years away from ASI. And that Demis Hassabis was saying, you know, we need 2 or 3 really big fundamental new ideas and we'll be over the finish line. Then as the election unfolded, and then the year after that, when he was doing Doge, We stepped up to clearly things are happening much faster than anyone expected. And, you know, Elon is the ultimate entrepreneur. Like, the whole game plan shifts from the impossible chore of trying to fix the government before we bankrupt ourselves to, well, if AGI is now 8 or 10 years sooner than we were predicting 2 years ago, that's actually the escape valve. So he's 100% right. But, you know, we have to think that that changed in the middle of that If he could rewind his life, would he get involved in Doge again? No way! Almost certainly not. But we didn't know that things were going to unfold this quickly. The recursive self-improvement effect is so fast now. Yeah, he did a bunch of things other than just this. He massively doubled down on xAI. He bought every freaking Vera Rubin chip that can possibly come off the assembly line, no matter what it costs, saying all the nicest things you could ever possibly say about Jensen, just to try and get Some more allocation. These are all new thoughts that come because of that short path to ASI. So I think that's kind of lost in the story. It seems like he changed his mind. No, the world changed very, very quickly, and he knows how to remap his life plan to fit the new reality.

Salim, what's your thoughts here?

2 things. I think I just want to echo 2 things. One is Elon is making a denominator argument. Right? If you have ways of dealing— if you can make the underlying economy much, much bigger and AI and robots attack that denominator by driving massive productivity, that helps. And I think Chamath's point and Alex's point about if we can use technology to demonetize existing goods and services, that combination will go a long way towards solving the debt issue, which is the biggest goddamn issue facing The world today, not just the country, it leaks across the whole globe as we can see in France.

Well, and I think the challenge is— and Chamath, I'm curious about your views— what I'm concerned, you know, when we interviewed Elon last December, he said, you know, UHI and civil unrest are going to be deployed over the next few years. And I think if we hit civil unrest, the only option the government has is to print COVID checks. You know, I think the government's going to be handing out, you know, $2,000 or $3,000 per month to every American just to keep them, you know, from revolting. I don't know if you agree with that or not, or what other avenue there might be.

I mean, I think that there's a case to be made for giving everybody red or true tide.

Yeah.

And I wonder how positive the effects on society would be if we just did that. So I think like a lot of these late-cycle phenomena that people point at could be nipped in the bud with a good dose of red eye.

Maybe throw in— Chamath, maybe throw in a little bit of oxytocin just to keep everyone feeling friendly.

Well,

you could, you know, I mean, as you know, like, you know, you can just get everybody to hug more and you'd get the same oxytocin release. So maybe forced hugging and retatrutide. But the retatrutide, if you think about it, you know, social media consumption will go down, alcohol consumption will go down, cannabis consumption would go down, pornography consumption will go down.

Um, all addictions go down.

Behavioral addictions would basically go down. Your cardiac health would go up.

Cognitive health goes up.

Yeah, cognitive health goes up.

GDP would drop though.

Yeah, it would be a brave new world with retasoma for everyone.

Retasoma. Yeah, yeah, that oxytocin is, uh, you know, all kidding aside, the digital or the AI friend version of that is imminent. I don't know how that's going to play out, but, but AI can make you very, very happy if If it's trained right and tuned right, and it knows so much about you, and it's a good coach, it's a good— it's a digital hug. You know, it has that same effect of just making you feel like, I have meaning, and I'm loved, and I have a plan.

I mean, I don't know about you guys, but my experience with these models is that they're inherently sycophantic, except for Grok. And I think that's a design feature. And I appreciate the design feature, actually, as like a very basic kind of user of AI. In most of my Kind of like non-working life. Uh, I like the sycophancy. It makes me feel good.

Yeah, well, the emotional IQ is going up just like the regular IQ at a shocking rate too. I think, you know, the original training data, it's all text, there's no images, it's not particularly, you know, emotive. The new training data involves every video ever taken, and it's much, much more in tune. Like, the sycophancy feel is when it crosses a line and it feels like, ooh, now it's icky. It doesn't really do that as much anymore. It's, it's, it's super friendly and super kind without crossing the line of being just an ass kiss. And it's only going to get better from here.

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely masked better. It's not better, but it's definitely masked better.

Well, like Sam says, like, if you can't tell the difference, does it really matter?

You know what, Chamath, you're absolutely right.

Go on.

Thank you. Very, very funny.

No, that's it. That's it.

Sam crossed the line.

Be nicer.

That's it.

Hey, just one other note. Everything in this story is the US perspective, the US debt, the US way out of the debt. Yeah, good point. It's really becoming clear that if you're a European listening to this, I mean, what is your— your debt is worse, but you don't have the AI lever coming up. And the US is clearly— like, if Anthropic's wet labs start discovering new medications at an alarming rate, which seems likely, We're going to export those out of the US. People all over the world are going to want them. That money is going to come pouring into the US. And I would be worried sick if I'm in continental Europe and we have no AI models and we were not on this curve. Like, what are they talking about in terms of their debt and how they're going to get out of it? And it can't be pretty. I'm not in those conversations, but it must feel really bad.

Well, the broad, the broad generalized conversation outside of Europe that I would make is that every country essentially becomes a vassal state if they don't have a resource that's worthwhile to trade with the 2 countries with ASI. Yeah. So that's us and China. And so you'll have a, you know, a handful of remora fish, you know, around each of the big sharks, uh, and then everybody else is in a very difficult spot. So, you know, if you're Italy, which I have tremendous emotional allegiance to because my wife is Italian, you have critical resources that are actually quite valuable that But I'll just be honest, Liechtenstein and Belgium do not. And so then the question of like, why are you aligned to Liechtenstein and Belgium? I get why you are today. It's a historical artifact of a bunch of decisions that made sense back in the moment. This is the complicated calculus, I think, for Europe over time is where are the real allegiances and who do you offer assets to? that actually give you all the things that you thought you were going to get when you were aligned as a geographical consortia?

You can only get, I think, so far with a degrowth policy. Chamath, I recall Portofino being one of your favourite spots in Italy. I'm sure you tracked the news that the mayor of Portofino was sending drones around with thermal imaging looking for anyone with the gumption to put air conditioners in their homes because, again, under the Yeah, yeah, this was quite a scandal in Portofino. Like, Italy— large portions of Italy, last I tracked, were dependent on France and French nuclear for importing their electricity. And I think you can only get so far by sending drones around with thermal imaging cams to punish citizens for air conditioners before eventually you just give up and you become a living history museum.

Yeah.

Well, I think the move that matters is all about power and data centers. If you don't jump on this next window of opportunity, then once it hits Dyson Swarm, you're toast. Like you're just irrelevant forever thereafter, you know, except as a tourist destination or whatever. But, but I think there is a window of opportunity now, especially because all of the data centers in the Saudi and, and Middle East got bombed. And so there's not a lot of new chips going into that area right now. It's just too turbulent. So that opens the door to rethink A bunch of other regions around the world were like, hey, can we get on it like right now and try and be a player in this? And it all, it all comes down to that decision to unleash power and data center opportunities in your home country before the Dyson swarm.

You know, some of this is probably priced into the market, but some of it probably isn't. I do think there is an opportunity for those who want to build anti-aircraft guns into data centers. We've already seen the consolidation of energy, co-located energy, as Chamath perhaps would attest, with compute. What we haven't seen as perhaps fulsomely developed is defence consolidated with energy consolidated with compute. So what we see right now with the data centres in certain parts of the Middle East, I think, is perhaps a harbinger for what could happen elsewhere in the world where the data centres want to be able to defend themselves in addition to powering themselves. And what happens right now, perhaps in Middle East won't stay there. We see it perhaps in the Ukrainian-Russian theater. We might end up seeing it elsewhere in East Asia. Maybe there's just like this consolidated bit of computronium that's self-powering, self-defending, self-computing. That may be an opportunity.

All right, I'm going to move us on to our next story from a close friend and a friend of the pod, Bill Gross. Bill founded Idealab in 1996, the original startup incubator. More than 175 companies came out of it. Yesterday he launched idealab.ai, a free platform with more than 1.2 billion business ideas generated by AI. Let's take a look at a video from Bill and talk about it.

Recently AI did something that stopped me cold. I found that it could outperform my own superpower, coming up with business ideas. What was my role if AI had gotten so good at this? Then I realized if I could scale that ability, I could give it to the world for free. That got me very excited. The more than 1 million business ideas we have developed are completely free. Come explore idealab.ai, give us feedback, and find an idea worth building and make an important positive impact on the world.

Nice, Bill. So here's how it works. The system analyzes more than 17 million sources and applied Bill's own 31 methods for spotting business opportunities such as unmet needs, new technologies, regulatory shifts, cultural changes, On the site, you can filter ideas by your interests, geography, how much money you'd need to start them, and market size. His goal: 1 million new businesses and 100 million new jobs. Bill told Fortune, quote, with Idealab, I could do 10 companies at once. Now I can do 10,000 at once. Cloudflare's Matthew Prince has committed $100,000 in credits to each startup built on this platform. So for me, this is the abundance thesis at large. Business ideas are no longer scarce. They're free. Now scarcity moves to execution, taste, and courage. And of course, AI can help you build your business ideas. You know, there was a great article by Mark Suster at Upfront Ventures looking at the cost of launching a tech startup. He said back in 2000, it was about $5 million. You know, 10 years ago, it was about $50,000. Today, you know, it's a couple of Ks. to get a company going. So Chamath, I mean, you've funded hundreds of founders. Does a free list of 1.2 million ideas help, or is the idea the least valuable part of the startup? How excited about, about this are you?

I don't think ideas are all that valuable. I think they're mostly a dime a dozen. I mean, I agree. I don't think I've had an original idea my entire life. Somebody's had it many times before me. So there's just— It's all about execution. Yeah, just the difficulty of starting and putting one foot in front of the other. And it's the low points and working through all of that. That just has nothing to do with an idea. It has everything to do with your makeup. I've just been through so many failures. I just think that the idea is fine, but if the person— it doesn't define what the person is in terms of his or her capability to manage through that. That's the key.

Salim, we've been talking about one-person unicorns.

Yeah. I'm very, very excited by this, and I'll tell you why. You know, people like us, Chamath, certainly you're swimming in ideas. People are coming to you with ideas a lot of the time. There's a lot of people that are kind of stuck going, I don't know what I want to do. And I think what this gives them is a tick list to go, oh well, does that excite me? Does that excite me? Does that excite me or not? I actually went through this and I found 4 that I thought were absolutely amazing. I want to just throw them out. One was a global abundance grid. Where you replace resource scarcity with algorithmic orchestration. So you find a decentralized planetary-scale optimization layer that looks at physical resources as fluid assets and reroutes as needed. I thought that was really amazing. Second one was post-bureaucratic liquid government protocols. That means you get rid of centralized parliaments, which is representative government doesn't work in a world where That was for a world of information scarcity. We don't need a representative in Missouri coming across the country to say, here's what my people are thinking. You know with social media what they're thinking, and you can poll them on a real-time basis, and you can deal with that. A third was an open-source planetary R&D network, which I found absolutely fascinating, kind of an open science kind of concept taken to full extreme. And the final one I found super exciting was algorithmic conflict resolution. We spend a huge amount of time within legal structures, conflict resolution, where you have to pay to play, and you could do an open access where a layer of judicial infrastructure almost becomes part of the internet. Federico Astes has created a wholly separate judicial system for small claims in South America, and he's tilting towards this direction. But there was a few here that I thought was absolutely amazing. What I love about this is this: you could essentially take this, give this to an AI, and say, go execute on all of these and start seeing what works and what doesn't, right? Like, we should be able to really make a massive difference. You could incorporate our Argentinian AI-native organizations, point them at this thing, and go, go run all of these, right? Let's start on 1.2 million companies and see which ones work or not at a very low cost. This is— I found this incredibly exciting.

Alex, uh, how were you involved in this with Bill? You mentioned something to me.

Yeah, so I, I should disclose as a preliminary matter that I have a financial interest in the venture behind this. So more than a year ago, I said to Bill—

Was this at the Abundance Summit, or was this after?

It was, it was, it was before. Uh, I, I went to him and said, look, you have this storied history of starting lots of companies You may not believe me. And by the way, I hope, Bill, you're listening. He didn't believe me at first. I said to him, AI in a year or two is going to have the ability not just to incept good businesses, but also execute on many of them. He didn't believe me. Fast forward a year, he started to believe because the capabilities continued to improve exponentially. So this is the result, idealab.ai. I think there's I'll be limited in what I say. There's much more to come. But I think the idea that we achieve universal high income will require to some extent that AIs, again, not just— or SIs, not just making ideas too cheap to meter, but also, as Salim, you gestured, idea execution too cheap to meter as well. I think we are going to see a proliferation of so many companies or business units, either way, that are basically end-to-end AI ideation, management, execution engines, and that's running the economy. It makes almost no sense to the earlier discussion about Elon in a world, although I don't actually think this is going to be the case, where Agent Smith style, most of the thinking is done by machines and not by humans for most of the businesses not to be run by the machines as well. So I think call this a baby step in the direction of having many, many businesses not just incepted by the machines, but also operated by the machines.

I mean, Chamath, one of the conversations we have on the pod a lot is, you know, the old social contract of do well in high school, get a good college, go get it, go get a degree, is cooked or going to be cooked. And it's far more important to find something that you find purposeful in life, and then go build something, become an entrepreneur, have agency in your life, and build. And I think to Salim, your point, for people who don't know what they want to do, this is at least a shopping mall to go and find ideas and then work on it.

And consider the idea that this takes Lean Startup to the next level, right? There's 1.2 million experiments that can now be starting to be run and modeled out. The implications are fantastic for this. It's— I really love the leap that he made to say, I've generated a million ideas, but AI should be able to help me do that. Now let's just go document them.

But I still think if you, you know, if you're aware in the world and you find a problem that you are passionate about or something you hate that exists, You can take that and just put it into your favorite large language model and say, hey, help me ideate an idea and help me, you know, design a business and let me, you know, run a prototype for me. I mean, you can do this just by being aware of what you love or what you hate.

You know, I did not grow up in an entrepreneurial family, right? My mother was a German professor. My dad was an engineer. It was at Waterloo when I course on technical entrepreneurship that I went, oh, you can actually build a business? Like, there's a thing— that's a thing that you can do that? And if I'd had— and it took me like another 20, 30 years to actually get the full entrepreneurial bug— if I had this list when I was younger, I would have gone, wow, look at all these things, let me pick one and go with it, pick whichever one strikes my fancy at that time. So I think this is incredibly exciting for younger generation that are— a lot of them are lost not knowing what they want to do. This gives them a starting point.

Dave, how about you, pal?

Actually, before I lose the thought, I want to riff on Waterloo for a minute here because I was just out there last week with Mike Lazaridis, and I cannot believe how cool that place is. I'd never been there before. You know, I've always heard it's the MIT of Canada, you know, blah, blah, blah. But it's actually now the crossroads of all the talent in the world that wants to get involved in AI and knows their home country is doing jack squat. But you can't as easily get into the US or into Palo Alto necessarily. Waterloo is just as good. And boy, are they attracting. I mean, you'd think you're in the crossroads of the entire world, just culturally, and the brainpower and the size of the school. It's like 20,000, what, 25,000 students? It's like 5 times bigger than MIT and Harvard, 50,000 students. It's like this mecca of technologists and optimists that I had never seen before. I mean, highly, I know it's not really on the way anywhere, but I highly encourage people, go check it out. It's amazing. And there's tons of power there, which means there are gonna be data centres there, which means it's gonna be, something big is gonna happen, I'm telling you. So on Bill Gross, you know, I'm on the board of ProRata AI, so I see Bill quite a bit. Yeah, I think the ideas are a wide range, you know, some of which you can act on with virtually no budget. Those are kind of cool. just go. But a lot more of them require some kind of funding and some kind of compute. So I think Bill, by unleashing the entire list, people will pick up a really good idea off the list, but then they have to come back to him and say, hey, help me get funded, or help me get the compute I need to do this. So it's a really good business plan for him. A lot of this is going to come back to him. So now I know why he open-sourced the whole thing. And, you know, I think the ideas are only going to get better. He's clearly going where the puck is going. So it's really pretty brilliant. But the thing that makes it make the most sense is that a lot of them have to call them up and say, hey, I want to execute on idea number 800,462. Help.

Yeah. I mean, it's a great magnet for entrepreneurs if you want to collect all their emails and their contact details, for sure. Everybody, welcome to the health section of Moonshots brought to you by Fountain Life. You know, we talk about AI on this Moonshot podcast all the time. One of the most important things AI is gonna be able to do for you, besides educating your kids and helping you with your taxes, is making sure that you're living a healthy lifestyle, that you get a chance to get to 100+. I'm here today with Dr. Dawn Musalem, the Chief Medical Officer of Fountain Life and a part of my medical team. Dawn, a pleasure.

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But what was really awesome is, again, back to that prevention, when we partnered it with healthy living, this gives me chills, eating healthier, moving our bodies, sleep, optimizing sleep is so important. You know what we saw? We saw that we improved that brain age by 26%. That is a big, big number to show that the majority of those individuals were able actually to improve the brain age.

And one of the things I love about Fountain is we're searching the world for the best therapeutics, the best approaches, and making sure we bring it to our members. So if having healthy brain function till 100, 120 is important to you, check out Fountain Life. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. Make sure you become the CEO of your own health. All right, now back to the episode. The next story here reads like a spy novel. On October 9th, the FBI arrested Abdulrahman Alfonso, a 35-year-old Saudi national and OpenAI engineer. Prosecutors say on September 28th, he hid a recording device in a USB port on the back of a TV in an executive conference room at OpenAI. It stayed there for days. That room hosts OpenAI's most sensitive technical strategic discussions. Here's the twist. Prosecutors say he used an AI chatbot on his wife's account to learn how to build the encrypted recorder. And this weekend, new court filings say he was frequent WhatsApp contact. He was in frequent WhatsApp contact with a member of the Saudi royal family who encouraged him to come home and join a Saudi AI initiative. On Monday, a federal court ordered him to stay in jail after requesting a million-dollar bond from the Saudi government had offered. It's worth pointing out that these are still unproven allegations. OpenAI says no evidence of unauthorized access to weight models. or source code or customer data was acquired. So, I mean, my question, how in the world did they find this USB recording device in the first place? And how many Frontier models are out there now searching for bugs? I'm curious, Alex, what's more valuable to steal these days, model weights or what's said in the conference room?

Allegedly the conference room, which is a little bit strange. I think that the way one would siphon model weights And I think the favourite way is distillation attacks from China via reasoning traces. But I do think putting the allegations aside, bigger picture, there's a great game afoot between great powers. And in the 1950s, it was who held nuclear secrets. It was over nukes. And then in the 1970s, it was oil. And now in the 2020s, it's superintelligence. And I do think, Chamath, to your earlier point, I think you were gesturing at spheres of influence, or the Pax Silica Western allied sphere and maybe the Pax Sinica for the Eastern sphere. I think we are probably going to end up in a world in a few years, to the extent we're not there already, where there is a de facto second Cold War between the West and the East over superintelligence. And then you have the in-between states, Middle Eastern countries, European countries, who feel tugs either way. Some of them try to remain unaligned or non-aligned. But ultimately the tidal and gravitational pull of superintelligence, I think to the extent the world is either bipolar, probably bipolar, maybe tripolar if some third pole comes out of nowhere, is I think going to be very difficult to resist over the next few years. And I think I would expect to see many stories like this.

I mean, Chamath, do frontier labs now become national security targets? Should they be secured like defense contractors? Well,

I think this is the same that's been happening in Silicon Valley for a while. I remember when I was at Facebook a long time ago, I had this conversation. I said, guys, we just passed 3,000 employees. We have spies from at least 4 countries. And people were like, what are you talking about? And I said, well, just look at the number of H-1Bs we have. Have and look at the distribution of them. And do you not think one of, you know, from Country A and one from Country B and one from Country C and one from Country D couldn't be a spy? Of course they— they— the, the odds are you should assume that they are. And, you know, my posture at that time was you should just assume that most of everything we do is being exfiltrated. Um, so that's one example. Then another example, I was a, you know, an investor in a company that their stuff was supervised by ITAR and had a hack and everything was exfiltrated, like everything. And I remember we brought in third-party consultants and the FBI and the NSA, and I thought, wow, how commonplace is this? And they were basically like, it happens everywhere. So I guess what I'm saying is that But this is a little bit— I think, I guess it's written or reported to sound more like cloak and dagger, 007 type stuff. But I think this is happening literally everywhere in every tech company that matters. The labs obviously matter. And so the best way to deal with it is probably just to understand that some very minor distribution of your Foreign folks are spies and proceed accordingly.

Well, and also recognize that how big the stakes are. You know, I think if you had spies like that at Meta or Facebook at the time, now the stakes are what, 1,000, 10,000, a million times higher. So the pressure from foreign governments to install spies is going to be proportional to the, the amount that's at stake. I don't think California was ever set up for You know, like, this is, this is the way nuclear secrets are protected. But California has always run on, you know, people leave a big company to start a small company, and that keeps the chain reaction of the economy going. So now you're like, well, we want to keep this all locked down like it's a nuclear secret because it can create terrible weapons. Well, we are totally not set up for that. You'd have to rethink the entire structure.

Yeah, I just hope this doesn't become sort of a national meme that starts to, you know, have us turn away foreign nationals. You know, I've always felt like when you get a PhD or master's degree in the United States, we should be stamping a green card onto it, encouraging those people to stay here and work. If this turns the other way and we start, you know, sending people back, I think that's a problem for the U.S.

I should point out, though, this time is different. So historically, when there were secrets, for example, to Chamath's episode at Meta, the secrets themselves couldn't defend themselves. I don't know quite what was targeted, Chamath, at Meta at the time, but to the extent that superintelligence is being targeted now, allegedly at Frontier Labs, I thought it was an interesting twist to the story, perhaps an inevitable twist, that OpenAI used their own AI in order to understand how the device allegedly that was planted worked. Yeah. And that to me looks like breadcrumbs, baby steps towards the superintelligence itself preventing itself from being exfiltrated, preventing itself from winding up perhaps in undesirable hands, which if you look at nuclear secrets in the 1950s, nuclear secrets couldn't defend themselves. You look at games over oil, who owned oil, oil couldn't defend itself. But now superintelligence in some sense is the first critical and emerging technology that's potentially capable of defending itself territorially. And that's a new factor.

Faster co-scaling. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. The flip side of that is if you look at, uh, you know, the Llama 3, Llama 4 models and the changes they made— now those were crappy models, but stick with me. Um, if you read the research papers, because those were all open source, the changes that worked and didn't work, you could summarize in like 10 sentences. So if you've bugged the conference room and you pick out the, hey, after $100 million of R&D and these tests, the SWIGLU worked really well. That one sentence is so valuable to China or to somebody else coming up the curve. So it's really, really hard to contain something so small, yet so impactful on their research, their budget, their timeline. So it's tricky. It's really, it's hard to say, hey, AI, don't let that happen. Well, how's it going to, how's it going to defensively co-scale against something so slippery?

The way— I mean, if I had to paint the sci-fi thought experiment, it is to the extent that the frontier labs are locked in a recursive self-improvement loop, it's the AIs designing their replacements, not humans sitting in a conference room. So if it's just AIs designing further AIs, then the AIs can monitor their own digital conference rooms and make sure that there are no interlopers.

Yeah, it kind of implies though, then there's nobody at OpenAI that knows what it's doing to talk in a conference room. And that's kind of a scary, scary end to that sentence. Yeah, yeah, we don't have any idea what it's doing anyway, so bug us all you want. That's not good.

Chamath, we want to close out with a Chamath hot seat, if you're open for it.

Great.

All right, so I'll kick it off. So OpenAI solves 722 math problems. None of them report encryption. I'm assuming that encryption was to a significant degree cracked if it was pointed in that direction. What's your view on crypto, given, you know, the meteoric rise of superintelligence here? Are we safe? Are we not? I

think it's capped. I think that traditional crypto lacks the fungibility to have all forms of buyers. The buying pool is really retail, then institutionals, and then central banks. And retail lacks the fungibility to be owned by central banks. So it's capped from that perspective. Then it's capped because, um, the— there are enough leaks around who owns what that now creates security risks. I think France being the best example, where I think the French government forced publication of who owned what crypto assets, and you had just a complete flurry of kidnappings and, you know, all kinds of really bad things. And then the third is around AI, where if you believe that, you know, recursive self-improvement is pointed towards cryptographic hacks, the most obvious thing to point it to would be to Satoshi's wallet and to break SHA-256 and just drain the wallet and then go short and then tell people that you did it. Then you'd make the money twice. All those things, I think, are realistic reasons why it's capped and there's an upper bound. These efforts to migrate to quantum secure, quantum resistant cryptographic mechanisms, which as you can see in the Bitcoin community is basically impossible because it's a bunch of people that can't even agree where to meet, let alone at what time the meeting starts at. So I think crypto's a bit lost in the woods

So do you think, do you think Bitcoin is cooked?

I just think it's capped. And then I think eventually it gets hacked and then it goes to zero.

Do you own Bitcoin? Are you willing to say?

Through a company, through a company called Digital Currency Group. So I had this very long-term investment in Bitcoin. I ceded it to DCG a long time ago. They started up a bunch of ETFs. They gave me stock in return. And that was much better for me because then I alleviated myself of the storage risk the security risk and I had equity. So that's worked out quite well. I think DCG is great. That's my mechanism to have exposure to crypto. I don't own crypto directly anymore.

Got it. Alex, over to you.

I'll just note, not very bullish on crypto, obviously. Crypto cooked, not investment advice. Anthropic's ECDSA announcement demonstrates proof, tour de force, that frontier models can probably achieve astonishing inversion attacks against crypto systems. So not bullish. Question for Chamath. SPACs. So American research universities, I would argue, are sitting on an enormous amount of intellectual capital that they're scared arguably of translating out into commercial practice because they don't want to be treated like for-profit venture capital funds. They want to receive the tax SPACs, light treatment of nonprofit academic institutions. What would you think? I'll float this as an idea first, because this is a favorite hobbyhorse of mine, of reviving— you as sort of the godfather of the SPAC movement— reviving SPACs for acquiring academic research universities in America to take them for profit with government buy-in and IPOing them. And I, I ask because the— Oh,

I love that idea. Yeah, that's a fabulous idea. So maybe— was it on Bill Gross's list? Heterodoxical. That's a great idea.

Maybe, maybe you and I should do that together. I would call them SPARKs.

Which university would you target first?

I want to IPO Harvard University. I want to IPO Harvard on the New York Stock Exchange. So I did this back-of-the-envelope analysis that if you look at the official Harvard endowment stated versus How valuable it would be if you could dissect the venture capital arm versus the real estate holdings versus the education versus the endowment versus the merchandise. It would be like 4 times more valuable if it could be an honest-to-goodness for-profit, maybe public benefit corporation conglomerate, rather than stuck trying to hide from for-profit taxation the way it is right now.

I think it's a great idea. Uh, it— I mean, I think, I think it's It's almost too disruptive to be viable, but it's a great

idea. OpenAI has demonstrated that it's possible now with appropriate government appeasement to take a not-for-profit that's quite valuable and turn it for-profit. So why not turn that loose SPAC-style on the economy?

Yeah,

I like the idea, but I think you'd have to be on the inside to do it, which is hard.

Well, so maybe Chamath, you and I should explore this offer.

You'd need the leaders of Harvard Corporation to be in tune with it. Sure,

it requires maybe you start with something smaller than Harvard Corporation, But I'm glad to hear your endorsement of this idea. We should talk about

it. Yeah, I think it's a really interesting idea.

Amazing. Salim, over to you, pal.

Okay, Chamath, I've got a tension I want to set up between you and Alex. You've said that AI could compress S&P valuations from 22x free cash flow to like 2 to 7x, right? If you believe that, then why should anybody own the S&P 500? And Alex is famous for saying own the indexes and own the market because it's— you can't— it's hard to beat the market. So how do you resolve that?

I think the index is not what it used to be. The index used to be the 500 best companies, and it was owned and structured in a— um, I think it gave you implied diversification that it doesn't today. I think there's an enormous amount of revenue concentration in a handful of names, and you essentially have this distribution of haves, which are like less than 10, and have-nots, which is then the 490 others. The index isn't what it used to be. Inasmuch, I think you have to be much more precise in owning other things that are thematically relevant and important in these cycles. More generally, yeah, I think that IP is mostly not valuable anymore. Inasmuch as IP is not valuable, I think that people's Typical underwriting of defensive moats is basically gone. And so, what's left over is cash flow. I think the only thing that matters right now is cash flow, only as a bridge to whatever unit of value matters in the future. So, the more cash you have today, the more that you can translate it into whatever it is that people will use in the future. And so, a cash flow business is you don't pay for future cash flow because you fundamentally can't underwrite past a certain number of years. So, I'm a much bigger fan of like, take the S&P 500, take the Global 2000, Rank them by free cash flow yield and just buy the top N of those. And I think you're probably better off over the next number of years.

All right, Dave, over to you, pal.

Selfish question, because I'm really, really curious. You were the first investor in Groq, and then Nvidia bought it for $20 billion, another brilliant Chamath investment. But now you say you won't invest in chips. So just for the audience, Groq was an AI transformer accelerator dedicated chip. And now it's part of Nvidia. So now you're not doing chips, but you are doing power. Are you doing data center components, boxes? Like, why not chips? And why, you know, how did you make that choice?

You have to be able to go to markets where you look dumb. And when I basically found Groq or found Jonathan, and then, you know, we started to work together, the company didn't exist when I wrote the first check. It was literally like a ground-up startup. up, him, myself, and, uh, the, the third co-founder. Um, it sounded really stupid, um, and it sounded stupid to my partners, it sounded stupid to the industry, and they were all wrong and I was right. Um, now it's like conventional wisdom that you should have a silicon startup. That's why it's completely not going to work. And it's not going to work for a couple of reasons. They, they are right about the fact that you're going to have a bunch of domain specific silicon. They are right that you're going to have highly customized solutions that work in very specific operating environments. All of that is right, but you will not create enterprise value. The reason you won't be able to create enterprise value is when you go and actually try to tape out a chip and then try to find production capacity, what you're going to find is all the memory's blocked, all the fab space is taken up. All the packaging capacity is absorbed, and now you're the nth person in line. Mm-hmm. And the nth person in line is effectively DOA. Mm-hmm. So I think what you'll have is some really valuable IP, but again, that's gonna go to zero because some other group will be able to direct an AI model against the model— against an AI model and say, design me the domain-specific architecture that I would use to optimize this for inference or for Or some other metric. You're going to have all of these permutations. Silicon, the surface area of the number of silicon options will explode, but the ability to make equity returns will go to zero because that's now too obvious. If you look down in the stack where people don't go because people think it's either too stupid or not worth it is in data centers because they think it's too blue collar and a lot of intellectuals will talk themselves out of Lots of money, but that is where you should play. And then the much more speculative area is in applications, which is above. And you know TBD around how to make money in the application stack. But those are the three areas, and you kind of have to be able to you know shuck and jive like ebb and flow. And it was obvious that the way to penetrate AI in 2015 was in the silicon layer, and to me, but to me it's now totally saturated and no money will be made. And now I have to go down. Or go up. And so I chose to do both. But I could be wrong, but that's sort of how I think about it.

Chamath, I'm going to sneak in one final question on behalf of our viewers. And if you're willing to, what's your investment advice during this hypersonic tsunami right now over the next 3 years? Where do people place capital?

My gosh, I think that's a very complicated question. I don't know. My honest answer is I don't know. I'm the least invested I've ever been over like the last 15 years.

Are you heavily engaged?

The least invested. And so, yeah, I just don't know. I'm in a— so, you know, to Salim's point, I'm in this schizophrenia about pivoting towards cash flow. You know, to Dave's question, I have gone up and down the stack. To Alex's question, I'm still trying to figure out whether there's a better way to create liquidity in the public markets so different kinds of assets that have different payoff profiles could be available in the public markets when ASI actually lands. I'm honestly the most confused I've ever been. And then I compare that to the surety that so many other people have in the market right now. And it just seems like late-cycle, late-stage behavior. And so, I'm just like, I don't know, I'm not smart enough to know. And I'd just rather bide my time and think through it all. But if I had to pick, what I would say is, I like owning cash flow, because I think it'll give me the oxygen to pivot to what will matter. Mm-hmm. I like owning power, because I think it is the constraint. The fundamental constraint of everything for the next 10 or 15 years. And I like alternative mechanisms of deploying capital because I think that the traditional financial infrastructure has become so sclerotic and they will become even more closed if there's a retrenchment in the AI trade.

Yeah, it's tough. All right, we always close out with a fan video outro song. This one is called Everything Is Cooked. by Douglas Lance. And just for a little bit of history, uh, Alex has an incredible voice. Alex, you were performing in what, uh, when you were younger?

Yeah, my first career— this is not widely known— was as a boy soprano performing with the New York City Opera Company. I performed on stage in Carmen and La Bohème, did a tour with Turandot, and then my voice changed, and then they kicked me out of the New York City Opera Company. You don't get to be a boy soprano for that many

All right, well, here's another playback of your, of your younger self.

This is AI-generated, by the way.

What's on the menu right now?

As I like to say, math and science, engineering, physics, and biology are cooked.

Oh, this is awesome.

Medicine, computer science, all the social sciences are cooked. What's on the menu right now? The whole economy is cooked.

Oh, they didn't extend it? Wait, we got the 100—

They're going to— I think Doug said that he's going to produce a full Broadway musical based on— didn't ask for my permission, by the way, but have at it. I'll be curious to see the result.

Like a whole musical, like Quadrophenia?

I think a whole song, maybe a whole musical.

Shama, thank you so much for joining us.

Hey, I really appreciate being included. Thanks. I'm sorry it took so long to get scheduled, but thanks, Peter.

I really appreciate it. No, I hope you had fun.

I did. It was great.

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