The AI Duopoly Is Over: Grok 4. 5 , GPT-5 . 6 , and Muse Spark in One Week | #270

July 8th, Elon announces Grok 4.5. July 9th, OpenAI releases GPT-5.6.

We have 4 American labs now at the optimal frontier.

This is a convergence episode.

Apple sues OpenAI for trade secret theft, accusing them of stealing trade secrets to build their upcoming AI hardware. The 2 companies which were partners just, you know, literally a year and a half ago are now in an all-out legal war.

I think this is Apple trying to slow things down while it catches up.

Yeah, it's a pretty aggressive move and you have to be, you know, pretty hurtin' to do it.

For the first time, China, Long March, which manufactures their primary launch vehicle, demonstrated landing of an orbital booster.

I think we want propulsive landings to be as competitive as possible. We really don't want—

Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. Everybody, welcome to Moonshots. This is the number one podcast in AI and exponential technologies, your front seat to the singularity. I'm here with my magnificent Moonshot mates, the original four: Dave Blunden, Salim Ismail, Alex Wiesner-Gross. I'm Peter Diamandis, your host, here in my homeland of Greece. Behind this curtain here is the beautiful Aegean. All right, pop it open.

There's so Open the curtains. Go open the curtain. You can't say that in the night. Come on.

I'll pull out.

I'll, I'll, uh, yeah, that's probably a dumpster bag, Dave Erickson.

You're in a secure location.

Yeah, I'm in an absolutely magnificent location. And just like Salim. Salim, where are you today?

I'm in Barcelona at the Festival of Consciousness.

Yes, you're still there.

All right, well, hey, you know, I was at a meeting at Allen Company headquarters in New York once. Palatial, ridiculous Allen Company meeting with Charlie Allen. And we were in this conference room that was covered with Remington original sculptures and Norman Rockwell paintings. And at one point he said, "Hey, do you want a water?" And the entire back curtain and wall open up and there's like a 5-star kitchen full of people with these like, you know, big chef hats cooking back there. He said, "Yeah, no, that's not for you. I'll just get you this bottle of water and close it again." So that's what's going on behind your curtain right there. You just don't want to see.

No, no, no. Okay, one second. The Aegean over here.

Oh my God.

Wow. You know, honestly, I'm sacrificing a lot to be with you guys right now, but hey.

Hello. Yes.

Wow.

Your sacrifice will be remembered, Peter.

It's gorgeous. You know, you know, you can, you know, there's a lot of wealth when all you're seeing is yachts every place. It's insane. Um, not mine.

We can swim out to those. I've seen James Bond do it. Crawl up the anchor chain.

So yeah, you have your 20th century wealth.

I tell you, I can't wait for my space yacht to happen. There we go. There is so much happening this week, guys. Everybody listening, uh, we spun up this bonus episode because, uh, you know, it's just crazy. So I tweeted yesterday, you know, we're obviously in the singularity living through it cuz robots are performing surgery. A, a single SpaceX booster has been reused and reflown 36 times. We released 4 models in 7 days, and Elon casually claims SpaceX is gonna be worth more than the entirety of planet Earth. You know, so I'm not exaggerating when I say there's a lot happening this week. Uh, please remember our mission here at Moonshots: keep you informed, keep you up to date, keep you optimistic about the future. Um, so, uh, I think this week, Alex, is gonna be your test on exactly what's going on in the world, cuz it's kind of like frontier model release week, if there was such a thing.

So the eval for the evals?

Yeah. Well, I, you know, it was not too long ago when we were releasing models like, you know, every 6 months, every 3 years. Now we've got 4 models in 7 days. It's kind of insane, isn't it?

So it turns out the singularity isn't just vibes.

Well, it's going to be a continuous model release. I mean, this idea of a single model being released and calling it a release, I don't know, but July 2nd, Fable 5 is re-released. July 8th, Elon announces Grok 4.5. July 9th, OpenAI releases GPT-5.6 family, Sol, Terra, Luna, and Ultra mode. I love that, that runs 4 agents in parallel. July 9th, Meta shows signs of life with the release of Muse Spark. Uh, so Alex, uh, I'll show a couple of charts here, but Without going into, you know, an hour long on the benchmarks, help us understand what's going on with these 4 releases. I really want to get, one of the things I'd love Dave and Selim and Alex is to help people understand how these differentiate and how does it impact them individually when they hear all these releases being made.

For me, the zoom out is this is a convergence episode, right? We're seeing intelligence get cheaper, interfaces are becoming more human with the hand thing, and AI is acquiring tools and hands. It's all going to happen in one week.

Peter, can we put up the, uh, the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, which I think is the, uh, yeah, yeah. So, uh, for those listening, this is a scatter plot produced by, uh, Artificial Analysis. It's, it's tracking their estimate. It's a composite index, sort of a meta benchmark of cost per task for each model versus the score, the actual performance on each task. And I would say in my mind that the headline from the past few days, which I agree, Peter, have been absolutely incredible, is we went from a beginning of the week where we were basically the frontier was a duopoly between Anthropic and OpenAI. And if you want to be on the frontier, you have to be using models from one of those two vendors. And now I think this is the best of, or close to the best of all possible worlds. We have 4 American labs now at the optimal frontier. So that's Anthropic and OpenAI, but now joined by Meta and SpaceX AI. Google, by the way, still not on the optimal frontier. Gemini 3.5 Pro reportedly delayed. Hope that Google catches up, ironically, to the optimal frontier and we get 5 American labs. And then if you look at this chart that you're showing and you sort of mentally draw an optimal frontier, so you want to be lowest cost, highest performance or highest accuracy across this composite, you want to be at that frontier. We have two Chinese labs, Xiaomi and Deepseek/Highrunner, and also GLM 5.2 isn't at the optimal frontier for— if you ignore open weights. If you just focus on the open weight frontier, GLM 5.2 is also at the open weight frontier. So we're ending the week in a world where there are at least 4 American labs again at the frontier. It's no longer a duopoly. And OpenAI, with the GPT-5.6 release, is openly promoting recursive self-improvement. They, they were openly promoting that Sol, the, the high-end weight class model in the GPT-5.6 series, was being used to post-train Luna, the low-end as an experiment. I'll take what I can get on the experiment. Lots of other thoughts, but those are some preliminary ones.

Dave Erickson, have you started playing with these yet?

Yeah, yeah, pretty much across the board, except not GLM yet. Still worried about code injection. But it's a really compelling price point. And also, Alex Karp had that rant about control your own destiny, which I really took to heart last week. And we showed it on the podcast. And one of the ways you can control your own destiny is run your own model on your own hardware. Also, Fable Fable 5 is just getting slower and slower and slower. And so I think anybody at the frontier is going to be sold out to the extent that they have compute. And so I suspect that the revenue will start to disperse because, you know, Fable 5, if it keeps getting slower because there's so many users trying to pile on, then you have no choice but to kind of fan out and try other things.

You know, I was thinking about how I would like to explain this to everyone listening and The realization is, of course, these models are getting faster, they're getting more powerful, they're trending towards AGI. You know, Alex, I know you think we've reached that already. So trending towards eventually ASI.

Intelligence too cheap to meter.

Yeah, well, they're in there and they are heading towards a, you know, de minimis, fully demonetized cost. My realization is I think what the real moat is, is no longer how smart they are, how cheap they are. It's their distribution. And so let's take a look at the following. So when I think about how to use Meta, Meta's being used inside, I mean, sorry, Muse Spark, the latest model is being used inside Meta's product. So Meta has 3.6, roughly 3.56 billion, you know, people daily using their products. So I think about using the Muse Spark inside of WhatsApp and Messenger and Instagram and Facebook. Google, you know, I know Google's hasn't been, uh, sort of breaking news in the last week, but when you think about Google's distribution, it's immense, right? 900 million, uh, in their app, 2.5 billion being reached, uh, globally. And they're, they're about to release into 2.3 billion active Apple devices with their 1.2 trillion parameter model. So Google's not being written off. I think they're going to come back and punch really hard. And then you've got, you know, OpenAI with a million, uh, sorry, a billion monthly active users. Uh, and Anthropic is obviously not in the consumer space. It's in the, uh, corporate space and it's the go-to there. But would it be fair to say that we should think about the distribution of these models, um, their ability to reach the end user as one of the, one of the moats that's going to be most important for them in the future?

I know Sam has mentioned distribution as something that he cares more about than the model weights themselves. On the other hand, Sam said that before this massive OpenAI pivot from consumer to enterprise. I'm not sure that distribution is actually super valuable from the economic perspective of the Frontier Labs. Why? Because consumers don't have an enormous amount of money to spend on this. That, that's what OpenAI had to discover.

That's not my point. I'm thinking about from the, from those listening, from our subscribers, how should they think about it? I, I'm thinking that they're going to use the model where they're using tech, right? They're going to use it in the application. And I mean, there's going to be the high-end user who's going to go like you, Dave Erickson, who's going to go and say, I need GROK 4.5 for this, I need, you know, uh, 5.6. But for the average person, you're just gonna use the model embedded in the application layer where you happen to be doing something.

It's a great point.

We're gonna end up—

there's a huge bifurcation coming across those two different use cases. We should talk about them separately. Go ahead, Salim. Sorry, I should—

I cut you off.

Well, clearly we're gonna end up with a Jarvis-type model where you have a, a request or something that you want done, and that's happening inside the models already. But I think we'll personalize it where you have a separate layer that says for this for this task, go to this model, for this task, go to this model, for this task, go to that model. That's clearly gonna happen very soon.

It's starting to happen already. Well, you're not gonna say it. Your Jarvis will say it. Yeah.

Yeah, also these personalized movies, personalized entertainment is coming very, very soon. We'll talk about that later in the pod. But people aren't gonna question the model under the covers when they start using that use case or Meta or whatever. They're just gonna use it by the bucket ton. Going to be sold out.

The bucket tub.

The bucket tub. It's a digital metric. It's a new benchmark. But yeah, no, Jevons paradox is going to be in full bore high gear. Actually, did you see that Hi-Links said that memory chips are going to be in short supply for at least 5 years? So what that shows you is—

I think they said decades.

Decades? Yeah. I mean, I believe it. In fact, I'm 100% sure of it. The desire and the use cases are on a much, much steeper up course than the efficiency gains. And the efficiency gains are huge. Again, this is 100 to 1,000x this year in efficiency gains, but it's not enough to keep up with the demand. So I think you're right. I think distribution is going to dominate the embedded use cases, which is the vast majority of consumer use cases. Meanwhile, self-improvement, research, mechanical design, engineering, corporate use, you know, all the white-collar use, is going to be dominated by the best price performance model and this continual leapfrogging you're seeing on the chart here.

Yeah, I'm not sure there's an enormous amount though to— of money, and I'll come back to this in a second, to be made at the low end. So I, I fully buy the thesis that at the edge these models are just going to get built into the operating system. You'll have in a couple of years, you'll have Fable 5 class models maybe built into just the operating system of the laptop or, or other mobile device that you use. But I don't think that's going to be a a moneymaker. And the reason why it can on the one hand be transformative for billions of people, but while at the other hand not be transformative of, say, the frontier, is because ultimately it's going to be the profits that pay for the data centers, that pay for the, the high end of the frontier models that are making all the scientific and engineering discoveries. So I think there's a plausible scenario where we end up in an intelligence-polarized world where at the low end everyone has some form of intelligence, too cheap to meter superintelligence on their wearable that's run locally, and it looks a little bit like OpenWeight models or Gemma or something else. And then at the high end, you have these nuclear-powered data centers, superclusters that are running the frontieriest of the frontier models at the high end. And those are the ones that are just producing discoveries and inventions and we're discovering or inventing something first matters. If you don't care about privacy, you can wait.

Great thought experiment for you guys. Uh, in the near-term future, like within a year, there'll be a competing use case between a U.S. entity trying to make a movie, an AI character movie, versus somebody in Europe trying to cure a disease. And both will be starved for access because we're just desperately short on access. Who's going to get the compute in that in that race?

Yeah, well, it's not going to be Europe, right? Because Europe is energy-starved, so they can't even afford the— right now, the energy for the compute to cure the disease. It's, it's going to be an American Hollywood studio versus an American frontier lab developing drugs.

You think it's going to be a consumer from Netflix who has more demand than the, uh, than the orphan disease looking to get cured?

That's what you'll think.

That's sad. I think it's trending that direction though. I completely agree.

The tokens will flow, you know, the spice will flow, the tokens will flow, as I've mentioned on the pod previously, to the maximum revenue per token. And right now that looks like everything that's downstream of code generation.

But well, the question more ties to votes, you know, votes matter a lot too. Sorry, go ahead.

The point I want to make a bit earlier is I think this verticalization where, uh, you know, Elon's got X and Zuck's got all of his his, uh, his app layers, uh, is an important thing that, that OpenAI is gonna look for. We're gonna talk about their, you know, their input/output device with Johnny Ive in a little bit. Uh, and, and Claude is obviously revenue driven in, in the, uh, in the engineering space. But I still think that from the majority of people on the planet using it, They're going to care about the application they're using and whatever underneath that is going to be pretty much invisible to them.

Yeah, but if you ask me, would I rather have the entire user base of X, Meta, and Google combined, so about 7 billion, or TSMC's fabs, which would I rather have? I would much rather own Intel or TSMC because that's, that's where it's all constrained on the supply of compute level, or the space-based data centers. You know what, I'd rather have Elon's launch capability or 4 billion users? I'd rather have the launch capability because again, it's all starved at the front end of the funnel.

And the market valuations, I think, reflect that, Dave Erickson. What I would also add is if you look at both Meta and SpaceX AI and how they both bought themselves these AI superclusters, it was the same mechanism. To Peter's point, they— Zuck and Elon both used consumer distribution plays, X on the one hand and Meta's family of apps on the other to justify an enormous CapEx build-out of these data centers. And then the moment they have these data centers, the, the family of apps on the Meta side or X on the SpaceX AI side become almost an afterthought, and they move down the stack to selling compute as a service, to hosting potentially in, in the case of Meta Compute soon, already in the case of SpaceX AI's superclusters, to selling their compute to the other frontier labs and then trying to move up stack to the, to the AI. So just to tie a bow on the discussion of how valuable is distribution, I think distribution from the company's perspective, not from the consumer's perspective, is enormously valuable as almost a bootstrap to justifying to capital markets why should I, Zuck, I, Elon, be able to spend tens to hundreds of billions of dollars building out these AI clusters. But then the moment those clusters are built, you turn around and the distribution actually isn't valuable.

This is a chart I put up here comparing GPT-5.6 Sol, Groq 4.5, MuseSpark, and Claude Fable-5 against number of benchmarks.

I—

what we've seen over the last, you know, year and a half as we've been discussing this on the pod is just a continuous movement up and to the right, so to speak, or down, up, down and to the right, as the case may be, um, and convergence, um, At the end of the day, are we going to see— I mean, until one of these models sort of breaks out and hits recursive self-improvement towards ASI, are we going to see them continually just leapfrogging each other? Leapfrogging each other? Is that just the, the future we're expecting?

I certainly hope so. I, I hope so. I expect so. And the recent actions by the White House suggest that there may even be a, a smoothing function wherein if one model gets too far ahead of the others and surprises not just the— remember, strategic surprise can take multiple forms. You can have a frontier lab strategically surprising the other frontier labs, but given that the frontier labs are also ahead of the US government, any frontier lab that's sufficiently surprising to the other frontier labs will also probably at this point be strategically surprising to the US government. And the US government, with its monopoly on force, has the power to step in, as we've just seen over the past few weeks, and basically slow things down locally enough for the other frontier labs to catch up, which is exactly what we saw happen with Fable 5 GPT-5.6.

Which I think is a better way of getting strategic equivalence across these, right? Rather than governments taking a piece of things, et cetera, et cetera. But, but when I look at these benchmarks, by the way, I think of it more like a map rather than a scoreboard, right? Because if you tweak your reasoning budget, everything changes. If you tweak your, uh, your rationale and your use case, everything changes. So if you change your harness, everything changes. So I think I see it more in that. Frame, uh, and the models will just keep getting better and better and the cheaper and cheaper, which is the amazing part.

And we also, if I might just add, Peter, we also see the other headline in my mind is we see OpenAI again trying to become Anthropic faster than Anthropic can become OpenAI. So we don't have a slide for this, but OpenAI also as part of the GPT-5.6 release released something called ChatGPT Work. I don't know if you guys have played with it. I've been playing with it quite a bit. The new ChatGPT native app— I'll speak, you know, break the fourth wall directly to OpenAI— the native app is a hot mess. It looks like OpenAI was sort of slavishly trying to copy the Claude app with its different modes. It has like the code mode versus the co-work mode versus dot dot dot. Looks like just sort of a cargo cult version of the Claude app. I was hoping to see out of this new app that it had been rumored for a number of weeks that OpenAI would release a super app that elegantly unified all of its different work streams and unified the Atlas browser, all of the computer use assistant stuff, Codex, et cetera. That's not really what we saw. I, for the life of me, I don't understand what the point of the toggle between ChatGPT Work and ChatGPT Codex is. Seems, uh, like a little bit of a placebo other than maybe enabling a new Canvas mode, or maybe it's a rebranding of Canvas. So message to OpenAI, please get your consumer client app, native app act together and make this whole thing as elegant as it deserves to be. But it, I think this is emblematic of OpenAI trying to basically look end-to-end like Anthropic because Anthropic was the first to realize the value of token revenue or revenue per token maxing. And OpenAI has developed religion. It's dropped Sora, it's dropped all of its other consumer plays. You won't hear about adult mode anymore in ChatGPT from OpenAI because they're so focused on enterprise. And I think their app reflects that.

So the cloud app is the same way. It's got toggles between code, co-work, and chat.

Yeah.

And in the age of AI, you're like, why am I toggling anything? Why don't I just tell it what I'm doing? This is insane. So we're in this really weird transition phase right now between old software and new software. And yeah, it's kind of ugly. It's very Rube Goldberg. And also the other thing that's going on right now is all the big labs are cranking out huge amounts of product using AI to create the product, but it's not as good as fine-crafted human code. But they're also very reluctant to go back and fix it because in the next iteration of model, it'll be self-fixing anyway. So it's a complete fool's errand to put 1,000 engineers on trying to you know, perfectly tune it when you know it's gonna be self-fixed very, very soon. So we're kind of living with very crappy machine-generated, rapid out the door garbage products right now, but it's a very transitional phase.

Well, they're, they're rushing. This is a competition between them and they're rushing products out. One of the products they did put out this week that I played with, uh, and I show a short demo here, which I've loved, is GPT Live. So they have full duplex voice. That can do simultaneous translation and support you in different ways. And, you know, one of the conversations we've had in the past is rather than typing at your AI in the future, we're gonna be speaking until we get our, you know, our BCI, our neocortex implants, and then we'll be thinking. But let me play this example of Duplex Voice. It is smooth. It works really well. If you haven't played with it, you know, go to your, ChatGPT app. It's up live right now. All right, let me hit play.

You can use it for free.

Yeah, very easy. Let's take a look. This is an example where someone who's not a native English speaker is asking ChatGPT to help correct him along the way. All right, let's take a listen.

Please just jump in immediately to correct me.

Absolutely.

I'll keep it gentle and jump in as we go.

Cool, cool.

Whenever you're ready.

So let's go.

I'm a student.

I'm planning a trip to San Francisco.

I have never went to this city before.

So, tiny tweak. I've never been to this city before.

Oh yeah, and maybe— yeah, okay, go ahead.

Well, maybe polish it as, I've never been to San Francisco before.

Okay, that's much more natural. I mean, that's pretty extraordinary. I mean, you know, it is what all the science fiction movies promised us. It's here. That level of voice interactivity. It is, it's a beautiful thing. And I bet you it's gonna flip a lot of people out. They're gonna become emotionally attached to their AIs. They're gonna think they're conscious and intelligent because they sound that way.

Yeah. Yeah.

It reminds me a lot of, you know, when, when Facebook started, uh, it would've been very, very easy for a lot of other internet companies to become Facebook. But they didn't really want to cross the line into social chat and social media and all this, like all the complexity and the potentially bad PR backlash. So now OpenAI probably won't want to cross a lot of those lines too. So it's a field day for people who want to take this new interface and launch it into all kinds of social use cases and other vertical use cases that they understand really well. You know, a lot of people are like, well, won't OpenAI just do that? Won't John Yive just come and do that the next day? But I think it'll be very much like Facebook where a lot of the bigger, very profitable tech companies are not going to touch many of the use cases of this just because they don't want the PR and the complexity. And so it should be a field day, but this should be in every device, every washing machine, every—

it should be out in the world everywhere within 6 months.

It should be.

But it's another thing compared to what X has or Google has, this is so much better.

Yeah, it's so good.

It's reminding me of this transition from telephones, from CB radios, where they had to say, "Over and out, 10-4," et cetera, and give you— and there was an interaction tax. And that interaction tax is now removed. And this will really, really help these, because it's going to appear way more smarter than it is. For sure.

This was the technology that OpenAI used to call BiDi, bidirectional. And I think this is a very positive sign, frankly. Quite glad that OpenAI still has the cycles to pursue releases like this instead of just purely chasing Anthropic on CoGen. You don't see releases like this from Anthropic, for example. So I think it's great that OpenAI is still pursuing the full realization of multimodal. I'll point out though that the Chinese labs like Alibaba have even more advanced versions of this. If you saw the release of Alibaba's Wan Streamer, you can go check out online. The demos of One Streamer, it is this, but it's not just ultra-low latency audio, it's ultra-low latency bidirectional audio and video where you're talking to a hallucinated person on the other end where the video is being generated in real time together with audio. And that, that's, I think, where this is going. I think this is all going to go to the extent OpenAI and other labs aren't just totally distracted with code gen and enterprise use cases. It's going to go to fully bidirectional audiovisual magic mirror streaming that you could just talk to and in real time it'll generate whatever you want.

By the way, a great application of this that they also demonstrate was, uh, real-time translation. So you can be having a conversation and it's translating behind the scenes. So every event we go to now should have this kind of translation into a multitude of languages. There's no reason for— I mean, now that was the question, you know, Do you teach your kids another language? Do you teach them for the culture? Do you teach them for the brain development? Because we're living— the babble fish is here, uh, and it's OpenAI right now.

It is, and it wants to be built into a wearable.

Yeah, exactly. And that's what I was going to say, like, how much of this is driven by Johnny Ive and what he needs for the new device he's working on? Because it really did cross the uncanny valley, and it becomes just a, a Jarvis-like experience, very similar to when Steve Jobs did Pixar. Prior to Pixar, you could generate really cool graphics. And all the video geeks and computer geeks loved them. But there was no mainstream Toy Story-type movies. Then it crossed a threshold where Steve Jobs pushed it over a level. And all of a sudden, animated movies became a massive industry because it just crossed the cool valley. This is across the cool valley, whereas the prior voice models were just behind the cool valley. And I suspect Johnny Ive was saying, look, I need this. This is a key part. This is the only interface to the Jarvis of the future, which I'm building.

Speaking of Johnny Ive, it's our next story. Uh, Apple sues OpenAI for trade secret theft. So this is a story that just dropped a couple hours ago, and it's a real bombshell for a lot of different reasons. So Apple, $4.6 trillion company, uh, famous for safeguarding its, uh, its secrets like Fort Knox. And I don't know if you've, have known people at Apple. I have. They can't talk. They can't go present at conferences. They're, you know, everybody signed an NDA. They're all in their little unique bubble. Uh, they just sued OpenAI in federal court accusing them of stealing trade secrets to build their upcoming AI hardware, i.e., Johnny Ives. The two companies which were partners just, you know, literally a year and a half ago are now in an all-out legal war. So we have OpenAI going from, uh, Elon Musk lawsuit to an Apple lawsuit. So here are the details. Apple filed a 41-page complaint, uh, in the US District Court of Northern, uh, California, uh, alleging trade secret theft and breach of contract. Uh, here's a couple of money quotes from that filing. Quote, at every level from members of its technical staff to the chief hardware officer and in coordination with business partners, OpenAI has been stealing Apple's trade secrets. Quote, OpenAI's nascent hardware business now rests on the shaky foundations, rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets. Two people named in the suit: Tang Tan, OpenAI's chief hardware officer, 24-year Apple veteran accused of using Apple's code names and recruiting. Tang Tan ran iPhone and Apple Watch designs. And Chang Liu, OpenAI's technical staff accused of downloading dozens of confidential files and instructing an Apple employee on how to bypass security. And, um, Johnny Ive's hardware startup, uh, OpenAI, which, uh, was bought for $6.4 billion just, uh, last May, uh, is named, uh, Ive is not himself named. So, um, a lot going on here and I'm wondering if they knew this was coming and maybe this was part of their delaying their IPO, cuz having this hanging over your head. Is a big deal.

I, I doubt this is related to IPO timing. Remember also there were, there were rumors over the past few weeks that OpenAI was considering suing Apple for Apple not properly promoting, at least properly as seen by OpenAI, uh, months ago, right, ChatGPT within its devices. So I, I think this is, it's sad. I think we'll know probably more if this proceeds to the discovery stage about what's going on. I, on the Apple side, I would love to see Apple moving much more quickly on hardware for AI. Maybe now that John Ternus is the, the new CEO, maybe we'll see Apple finally moving quickly. I think it's sort of sad that Apple, given its leadership position on the hardware side, has been hemorrhaging all of these wearable and smart glasses and design leaders to OpenAI and otherwise. I think that the fact that Johnny Ive left Apple, uh, and then joined OpenAI ultimately, I think speaks to Apple having lost what could, what could and should have been an enduring leadership advantage on being the substrate, the consumer substrate for AI. So we'll see, but I don't want to prejudge this one. We'll see what happens if this gets to discovery.

I mean, this is really a fight for the post-smartphone device marketplace between them, right? We're going to see Google has been announcing their glasses, OpenAI obviously.. And Apple has been hinting, not released any designs yet. Salim, what are your thoughts here? I mean, you and I both knew people, have known people at Apple, uh, very, very secretive as an organization.

I, I think this is, uh, Apple trying to slow things down while it catches up.

Yeah, I noticed they, uh, they filed in Northern California too, and it's very, very hard to win a case like this in Northern California. In fact, you almost have to be desperate to file one of these. Uh, and, uh, but according to the internet, you— they didn't have the option to file in Texas. It's much, much easier to protect your intellectual property in Texas than it is in, in California. And if you look at the history of Northern California, virtually every startup is somebody who left some prior company with intellectual property. So California is very reluctant to slow down that innovation and startup cycle. So it— Apple has to be really desperate. Also, it very— it's very hard to recruit if you get a reputation kind of like Microsoft had back in the day. Um, very hard to recruit if people feel like, yeah, then you're going to sue me later in my career. I don't even want to start down that path. And so what they're trying to do is hold on to what they've got, which they believe, you know, really is their property, uh, and keep more people from running out the door, but at the expense of new people coming in the door. So it's, yeah, it's a pretty aggressive move, and you have to be be, you know, pretty hurting to, to do it.

We're going to see. I mean, this is a scrappy company, OpenAI, against a juggernaut that has been traditionally very slow moving. So anything else you want to say on this one, Alex?

I'll just note OpenAI isn't, uh, perhaps the, the smallest company at this point. It, it's, it's about to— either at or about to cross a trillion-dollar valuation. So maybe as as counted by the markets, it's 20 to 25% the size of Apple, but growing far more quickly, at least as measured by market valuation over time. So there's a universe where maybe OpenAI— this is not investment advice, it's not forward-looking advice— but there's a universe where in the next couple of years OpenAI could cross the market value of Apple. That, that has got to have crossed Apple's mind.

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

Our next story is a fun one. It's actually a tweet. So a couple of days ago on July 8th, Elon responds to Thomas AIXDMY in a tweet saying, quote, you don't seem to understand that SpaceX will be worth more than the rest of Earth if we accomplish our goals. So I thought that'd be a fun conversation for us. Let me unpack that a moment. So the value of Earth, if you want to say it, at least of all owned material wealth by humans, is estimated about $600 trillion today. These are real estate, factories, commodities, inventory. You can increase it to 1.7 quadrillion if you add the global balance sheet of assets and financial assets, stocks, bonds, and so forth. So, um, the vision that, that obviously Elon has is for compute, um, for capturing, uh, a Kardashev level 1 energy in orbit, uh, and maybe owning a planet. Uh, Alex, you had a particular terminology.

Planet Ark. Planet Ark.

Planet Ark.

Yes.

For a quadrillionaire who owns a planet.

You know, there's been this fascinating debate going on in the financial news about is Is SpaceX really worth $2 trillion? Some people coming out and saying, no, no, no, it's gonna be $10 trillion very soon. And others saying, oh my God, it's so overinflated. Uh, and it's really hard for people to understand the scope of Elon's vision of what he is planning to do. Uh, the guy is thinking 100 moves ahead and 100 or 1,000x bigger than anybody else. Who wants to jump in on this one?

I do.

William, go ahead.

Um, yeah, this is, this is classic EXO thinking, right? Which is, can you drop the marginal cost of supply? And he's using one breakthrough, which is reusable rocket launches, which is his niche, to collapse the marginal cost in communication and satellites and connectivity and compute, manufacturing even once you get it up there. So all of these become software-like businesses when you can reduce the cost of doing it in space. And he's leveraging that fully.

I think we're likely to see, uh, going sort of, uh, pulling the thread on the planetar terminology. I think we're likely to see quadrillionaires before we enter a post-capitalist system. And I'm— I, I think the, the elephant in this particular room is what does Capitalism 2.0 or post-capitalism even look like? And there, there is, I think, a world where we get human ownership for some definition of ownership of, of entire planets before we get to some sort of capitalism 2.0 or post-capitalist state.

I mean, the, uh, the Outer Space Treaty specifically states you can't own a heavenly body. Um, there's debate about whether you can own asteroids, but planets—

Outer Space Treaty and, and amendments, uh, and revisions subsequent to it like Artemis Accords do enable a private American corporation to operate and, and through operations substantially, or let's say de facto, own a large fraction of Mars, for example, or the Moon. Outer Space Treaty plus Artemis totally allows that.

So I think I actually, I actually, with, uh, Chris Boricky and Eric Anderson, we wrote the legislation in Luxembourg and then in the United States for ownership of asteroid materials. Taking into account. So I spent a bit, a lot of picks on this one. Um, there's—

do you still think, Peter, asteroids are the, the way to go versus the Moon or Mars?

So the Moon is going to be the near-term supplier, but asteroids, when you get them out of the gravity wells, right, you've got very— the nice thing about asteroids is they're fairly concentrated ore bodies. So, you know, carbonaceous chondrites, which are dirty ice balls, are basically ice. It's water and hydrogen, and you can you can hydrolyze that, you got rocket fuel and breathable oxygen. And then metallic chondrites are nickel, iron, and platinum group metals, platinum, palladium, iridium, osmium. And again, you can smelt those very quickly. So they're gonna be in free space. And so moving them around is a lot easier than getting them off the moon. And you can go and claim one of these things ultimately. You know, there are some of these, these ore bodies out there worth quadrillions of dollars to get to your quadrillionaire level ownership. Right there.

Why do you think Elon is basically, uh, uh, to first order, completely ignoring the asteroid belt versus the hunger?

You're absolutely, you're absolutely right. And I, you know, I openly disagreed with him. I said, you know, if I'm going to go, I'm going to follow more of the Jeff Bezos. And he and I were both mentored by Gerard K. O'Neill at Princeton University, where you go to the moon first, you use that as a base of operations because you've got materials there, you can build mass drivers there. And then you go into free space, you know, you build large rotating colonies there, you mine the asteroids. I think he's got the romantic frontier mindset of going to Mars, but once you enter the gravity well of Mars, you gotta then use energy to get back out.

So he likes gravity wells.

What do you, what do you think?

I think by the time we are mining, if and when we're mining the asteroid belt at large, like at scale, we'll probably have self-replicating von Neumann probes, at which point the rest of the solar system is our oyster anyway. Like, if you're going to go after the asteroid belt, you might as well start mining Jupiter. Jupiter has a lot more mass, and if you're going to build up the Dyson swarm—

just those timelines are massively, uh, different there. Asteroid mining is relatively easy.

You want to come back to Ursuline?

Is that— yeah, by the time we asteroid mining, we'll have nanoassembly and we can assemble any substance we want. We don't have to go out to get asteroids to mine it. We'll just have a molecular assembler.

Well, you need feedstock for the Dyson Swarm, Salim. That's the whole point. I mean, you don't want— surely you're not implying— surely, surely, stop calling me surely, Salim. You don't want to disassemble Earth to build the Dyson Swarm. I'm sure you'd much rather part with Jupiter.

I'll use my favorite comment. I wanna make my favorite Alice comment was, if you squint, you'll see the molecular manufacturing and nanoassembly will get you there for faster than trying to get out to the thing and bring back an asteroid.

Listen, uh, the technology to mine asteroids exists today. It's not a hard thing to do. It honestly is not. Asteroids are relatively close by from an energy perspective. We have near-Earth approaching asteroids and these things, I mean, right now people need to realize that every Every gram of fuel ever launched, ever used in a spacecraft has been brought from the surface of the Earth. Every gram of fuel. And if you're going out to the moon, Mars, you know, Pluto, you have to bring the fuel along with you. And, you know, it's like, it's like if you're traveling from New York to Cali, you know, to San Francisco in a car, you'd have to bring either the batteries or, you know, a tanker full of of gasoline to get you there. If you could set up these gas stations in space. And I remember when I spoke to Elon about this, when we started Planetary Resources as a company, and he goes, you know, I would, yes, I would buy the fuel from you in orbit, but you're too early. You're too early. And he was right.

I think it's, I think the, the in situ resource utilization, ISRU angle is probably on balance a little bit more attractive on the Moon or Mars, where you just— especially Mars, where you have a lot of different raw feedstocks potentially than on the Moon or in the asteroid belt. But I, I think time will tell. I, I do think, for the record, the reason that he's not so fixated, uh, and, and as is the case with myself as well, on the asteroid belt is just if you can, if you can tackle the asteroid belt, then you can tackle Jupiter, and Jupiter's a lot more interesting than the asteroid belt.

Well, let's continue on for a few on the space theme here. Uh, we've got Starship Flight 13, uh, coming up, uh, very shortly, uh, next week. Um, and it's going to be— we don't know yet what they're going to be doing on Flight 13. It's, uh, it's going to be V3 of both, uh, the booster and, and the ship. Uh, we're waiting for them to show refueling in orbit. We're waiting for them to see a recapture of the ship, not just the booster, and reflying The other thing that happened this week is that SpaceX filed for 100,000 low-Earth orbit V3 spacecraft for Starlink. Pretty cool. These spacecraft are, quote, supporting billions of AI-powered devices with extremely low latency, multi-gigabit symmetrical throughput. So that's going to be great. We have 10,700, you know, Starlink V2 spacecraft in orbit right now.

So, raise to 1 million LEO objects.

If I had one takeaway from our last 3 podcasts where we had Will Marshall and we had Philip Johnston, like these, these absolute space geniuses, the value of low Earth orbit where there's very thin atmosphere and the self-cleaning effect that comes from that is massive. And it's whoever claims it first gets to keep it. And so it's a real footrace to a relatively scarce, you know, you think about mining asteroids or tearing apart Jupiter, but that gives you abundant materials. But at least in the short term, low Earth orbit, you know, just what, a couple hundred miles of height or, you know, radius that is usable where it's self-cleaning. Remember Philip gave us that great use case where the US for some insane reason launched 100,000 needles into space to reflect radio waves. And it took until this year for those to self-clean back out. And he was saying that very small objects get hit by the solar wind more and they move to elliptical orbits and then they eventually touch the atmosphere and then they incinerate and come back down. But while they're elliptical, they're terrible. Yeah, I was fascinated by these. That to me is—

100,000 satellites are positioned at 325 kilometers and 475 kilometers is the orbits that they filed for.

So I think people are going to be surprised though, as launch costs continue to plummet. And I was chatting about this in our group chat. I think we're going to start to see very low Earth orbit, VLEO, orbits become more and more attractive, which are pretty exotic by today's standards. Right now you don't, for example, design low Earth orbit satellites for lots of atmospheric exposure. We could start to see, as launch costs plummet, a regime, pretty exotic one from a satellite design perspective, where satellites are tasting the atmosphere, where we could afford for them—

the point you're making, the point you're making is that if it's cheap enough and they only have a— instead of being in orbit for 3 to 5 years, they're up there for 3 to 5 months, that's fine. You're throwing them away constantly.

They start to look like high-altitude balloons, basically, at orbital velocities, where we could afford— if they're only going to be up for a few months, they could be air breathers, air-breathing satellites, which we've never really seen before. But it starts to blur the distinction between high-altitude balloons and low-Earth orbit satellites. I think we're going to see a lot more of that.

Yeah, and part of the point there is that it becomes very cheap to give them a little more fuel and boost them again. So if after 6 months you're like, you know, I want to keep this up another 6 months, you just have to turbocharge it a little bit to keep it going another 6 months. So then it's self-cleaning if you fall asleep, but it keeps going if you actively keep boosting it. And I think that's a great design. It solves the whole, you know, dirty space issue.

It's got to get dirtier before it gets cleaner, I think, in this case.

Here's another space first. This is out of China. So there have been 3 vehicles that have been reused thus far. All 3 are US. For the first time, China, Long March, which manufactures their primary launch vehicle, demonstrated a landing and not reuse yet, but landing of an orbital booster. Let's take a quick look at this. Looks, looks an awful lot like, uh, Yeah, it looks familiar. Um, so this is, again, this is, uh, China's Long March 10B booster. It landed on July 10th. For comparison, it is slightly shorter, substantially wider, and in terms of payload, about the same as a Falcon 9. But let me just give Elon his, uh, his appropriate kudos here. Falcon 9 has had 580 80 booster reflights in total, which is insane. It's been done 580 times. And just this week, another first, Booster 1067, B1067, was reflown on its 36th mission on July 11th. Crazy. I mean, I remember when Elon first announced his plans to reuse it and Lockheed and Boeing and all the traditional aerospace players said it's not going to happen. He doesn't know what he's talking about. And when it landed, I said, that's the first nail in the coffin of the traditional aerospace industry.

And I think we, we want propulsive landings to be as competitive as possible, to the point of a number of podcasts that we've had over the past few episodes. We really don't want a heavy launch monopoly. To the extent there is one, I, I think it's probably quite healthful in the style of For All Mankind for China to be challenging the West's, namely Elon's, heavy launch monopoly. And we just— if we're going to colonize and develop the solar system, we need many, many heavy launch providers. And to make that economical, we need propulsive landings everywhere.

Well, we're going to have Jared Isaacman, the NASA administrator, on this podcast in a couple of weeks. Super pumped about it. All four of us will have a chance to have a conversation. I've known Jared for, for quite some time, uh, and You know, my, my greatest hope for him, because he's arguably, I think, the greatest administrator we've ever had, uh, in terms of leading us into the future, is he needs to have Congress continue to fund NASA. And what allows Congress to fund NASA? China.

Yes, we can't wait for that discussion. It's going to be a lot— so many questions queued up for Jared.

Yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be amazing. All right. Um, continuing on, a little news in the robot world this week. Our friend, uh, Bernd Bornig, uh, revealed his 1X Neo hand. So here's the deal. Um, 1X unveiled a completely redesigned hand for its Neo Home humanoid. Uh, it's a substantial leap forward, 25 degrees of freedom, 22 in the fingers and palm, 3 in the wrist. Tendon-driven. Uh, in comparison, the human hand has 25 functional degrees of freedom, uh, with 27 joints and 30 intrinsic muscles inside the hand and in the upper forearm. Uh, and here's the best part: Neo's hand is waterproof, so Neo can wash its hands when it's doing its cooking for you. Uh, Bernd's goal is to produce 10,000 of these in 2026. Uh, let's take a quick look at the video, and then I'd love to have everybody's reaction to it. So, you know, drinking glass of water or picking it up, bringing a light bulb. And why they smash the light bulb, I have no idea.

I don't know either. Uh, that thing is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. You know what's amazing to me is, you remember when we were touring and Bernd was showing us the amount of material science they need to do to make these things work, including, you know, they have to manufacture the fabric that the robot wears as a special project, but he was incredibly secretive about the tendon material, but that's their own proprietary material and it has some unbelievable properties. You know, it's like 100 times stronger than steel per unit weight, but also it doesn't stretch over time, like even a tiny little bit. And, you know, it's running through those tubes. It's actually frictionless inside those tubes. So it doesn't need to be lubricated in any way, which is one of the reasons you can, you know, have it wash its own hands and not wash oil away. There's so many parts of that thing that are brand new and brilliant and innovative. And man, did it come out incredible.

Well, he's supposed to be releasing it to the public, um, before the end of the year. I have mine on order. We'll see what it looks like.

I have mine on order too, Peter. We were supposed to get ours this summer, or I think in, in the first quarter. When do you think you're going to get yours?

Uh, I honestly, uh, as soon as I hear they're shipping, I will be knocking on, on Bernd's door, uh, for mine. Um, a friend of mine ordered 5 of them, for his, for his operations from the Abundance Summit. And, this year, just so everybody knows, we're gonna have, uh, we're gonna have the CEO of Figure. Um, uh, Mr. Adcock is gonna be on stage with us in March. So excited about that. We'll bring the robots back. Uh, and you know, this is a, it's been a two-way race to some degree between Figure and, and Optimus. I think 1X is, is vying for number 3. Peggy Johnson just went, announced taking her robot company public. So a lot of action. And we just heard this week as well, a demonstration of a gallbladder resection using robots. Did you see that, Alex?

I certainly did. So this was the first humanoid robot performing the surgery on a non-human animal, as opposed to non-human robots, to Saleem, your hobby horse, performing these surgeries. So it's been a great week for robotics. On the other hand, every week in the Singularity is a great week for robotics. I'll point out on the, the 1X story, hands are hard. That, that's what people say in the industry. Hands are hard in part because the number of degrees of freedom and the density of degrees of freedom per unit volume is especially high in the hand versus say the limbs or the head or the torso. And you see lots of other competitors exploring different modalities to handle hands like you see You see Brett and Figure exploring palm cameras to try to achieve sensing and to try to achieve positive transfer from computer vision over to tactile sensation. You see 1X not doing that, using more sensitive force sensors to achieve sensation. I'm super excited and super glad that humanoid robotics, not just for the enterprise and not just for industrial factories, but for, the home and for domestic applications is turning into a horse race as well. I think that's exactly the sci-fi future that many of us want to be living in. I'd like to see many more Western domestic robotics companies. China right now has 150+ humanoid robotics companies. The West is falling behind. So if you're listening and you're interested in robotics, just start a robotics company, and if you're in the West, that is. More Western humanoid robotics companies.

Totally right.

And also, I want to make a really narrow point. You know, the way those tendons work is exactly the way your bicycle brake works, where, you know, the wire goes inside the tube, but it doesn't have to be fixed. So you can create motion on the other end. It squeezes the brake on your bike wheels, and it's totally freeform in space, which is why you see those tendons— they don't look like they're locked down, but it works beautifully well. But that mechanism can be shrunk for all kinds of microassembly jobs. It doesn't have to be a hand. And so Bernd has proven that not only is it an incredibly dexterous way to move things around, but because there's no stretch inside the tendon, the force feedback or the feeling of pressure when you're picking up a little screw comes right back through the tendon. So you don't have to have cameras and sensors in the fingertips to feel that you're picking something up.

Salim, I want to hear—

That modularity is such a game changer.

Salim, I have to hear your rant on this. On this one, please.

No, I— in fact, you'll hear me say the opposite. Uh, in this case, humanoid is great because the opposable thumb has been around for, you know, millennia, and it's such a powerful model. The minute you can get this, you basically have horizontal labor dexterity across so many applications. So I wouldn't change a thing about the hand. Humanoid shapes and all that, give it extra arms, fine, but the hand is really cool.

Okay, you don't want, uh, polydactyly, Salim? You don't want like 6 or 7 fingers?

You know, then you were into Princess Bride territory, which would be kind of cool. Or Galaga. Or any of those. Yeah, but I think, I think it's, it's so good that they've achieved this level, and I thought the wine glass was perfectly apropos. So wonderful, love it.

So, you know, we've had friend of the pod Ben Horowitz write about and talk about the notion that hardware's hard. And I, I'm just curious, how does someone like Bernd compete with the likes of, of Elon, right? And getting into the home, which is so, uh, so diverse versus in a factory, uh, is a, is a challenging place to start. So, you know, how do you think about shipping this kind of complex technology, uh, and, and doing it reliably and not giving yourself a bad rap. Dave, what do you think about that?

Uh, you know, it's such a field day for, uh, people who jump into this space because, yeah, 5 years ago, hardware is hard, it's capital intensive, where are you going to find the money? Now there's so much venture money, you know, because Brett Adcock proved you can get a $40 billion valuation. So all— every venture capitalist in the world wants to get into this this game. And, and so now the capital to build out your own supply chain, you know, historically you'd need billions of dollars to build out your own supply chain for one of these things. But now the billion dollars are suddenly available. And in fact, the West Coast VCs are actively looking to write multi-hundred million and billion dollar checks because, because their funds are so big, that's the only way they can get them deployed. So it's, it's a great time to kind of flip the logic that existed 5 years ago and say, yeah, you know, but, you know, you have to just be fearless about building out your own supply chain and, and, you know, your own parts. And you saw I saw the back of 1X Robotics and also the back of Brett Adcock's, you know, Figure Robotics. We weren't allowed to video back there, but they've literally built the entire, from raw materials supply chain through final finished product. That's what you need to do.

Alex, do you think that the models are going to allow the average person here to begin designing their own hardware, their own robots to say, you know, and this was the point that I think we heard that ramped about last week. That, you know, all of this design work and engineering work is being embedded in the models, uh, and it would allow an individual to say, hey, I want to design my own hand, would you help me design it? And now, would you help me print it out there?

We're already there. If you look at the frontier models like Fable-5, you can— there are folks out there already bragging they're embodying Fable-5 in robots, and Fable-5 has pretty good understanding of of physical embodiment and the degrees of actuation, CAD modeling, everything that you need in order to, to design or have an AI at least train or pre-train or post-train a VLA model or, uh, or a policy for controlling a robot hand. You could do that right now already at your home without running a multi-billion dollar lab. Those capabilities of training embodied intelligent models have already been radically democratized by the frontier models that already understand to some extent the physical world. So yes, I think we're in a position now where anyone can just go build. You can just build things. And in this case, you can just build robots without needing—

You can at least design things.

And actually build. I mean, the models will happily like feed you all the supply chain information you need, tell you put A on top of B, attach C to D. And help you build everything from a robot hand to—

Totally.

—that nuclear fuser, in some cases, in your basement. You can do quite a bit as a hobbyist these days.

Yeah, that's the big change, actually. If you think about, just as a case study, winding an electric motor, like building your own electric motor from raw wire, that would have been insane 15 years ago. Now, Onex and Figure do it in the back room habitually. And then a lot of other people are starting to do it too. And so when you look at the actuators on that hand, they're all custom. You know, the underlying motors are custom. What changed there? Well, the automated machinery, like, you know, the CNC milling machines and the auto lathes, those are already little robots that allow you to bring this stuff in-house and effectively take raw wire and come out with a motor. But that applies to, you know, all these other parts as well. 3D printing, all kinds of things that you can build in-house now. That would've been insane, you know, 5 or 10 years ago. And so yeah, it's all coming back into your integrated internal supply chain from just raw materials. So then you add, you know, the humanoid robots and the upcoming robots on top of that, and it's just like the Gigafactory, you know, many, many different entrepreneurs building their own Gigafactory for different products.

And by the way, if we're going to, just quickly, if we're going to get humans on Mars in the next 5 years, as Elon says, and a moon colony in the next 10 years with tens of thousands of people, This is precisely what the— I think is going to be at the center of that industrial ecology. It's going to be hybrid humanoid robots that operate both in the home and in dangerous environments and in industrial settings. There's going to be tremendous positive transfer between all of these. And this is how we get the moon and Mars.

And they work in space.

Yep. Yeah. 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. Great to be here. You know, the thing that people are concerned about most about living to 100 or 120 is their cognitive abilities, making sure they don't have dementia. And the numbers about dementia are problematic. Can you share what you've learned? Such an important point.

And you're right. At Fountain Life, our members, the number one thing people are most concerned about is losing their brain health. Forgetting the name of their child, forgetting the face of their loved one. We know that when it comes to dementia, the conservative estimates are that 45% are entirely preventable. What was amazing is with the advanced testing we're doing at Fountain Life, 1/4 of our members had advanced brain age. Wow. 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, uh, 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. All right, uh, there's a few new stories I want to jump into, uh, and get your guys' input on. The first one is that Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signed SB 315. It's called the, quote, Artificial Intelligence Safety Measures Act, uh, which he's calling the nation's strongest AI accountability law. It targets Frontier Labs, developers whose models generate more than $500 million a year in revenue, mandates 72-hour incident reporting. Uh, there's already been an act similar in California, New York, but the Illinois law, uh, requires annual independent safety audits. The bill passed the Illinois legislature overwhelmingly and notably was supported by Anthropic. So in the absence of federal law, the states are picking up the slack and writing the rules. What do you guys think about this? I mean, I, you know, having, having a set of rules that people know and are published, I think is critical for moving the industry forward, whatever they are. I just wish they'd be federal rules and not state rules.

Well, I think if you look at these laws in, uh, in Illinois, in New York, in California, but Illinois especially, these are very, very frontier lab favorable rules that are being passed. So absent federal legislation, if you're a frontier lab, and it's not so much about regulatory capture as it is about having a seat at the table to define what the rules are, where you want to define a regime that's favorable to you. So provisions like mandatory annual independent third-party safety audits, they're doing that already far more frequently than annually. So having any law on the books that is already at a sort of a lower bar than what you're practicing internally, given that there are independent safety audits for every single model release, is in some ways a way to set a very low floor if you're a frontier lab on what what potentially an ultimate federal framework looks like. You, you, it's basically a placeholder.

Yeah. And it also doesn't kick in until, uh, 18 months from now. So, you know, it's mostly posturing because 18 months in the singularity, it's like, like, come on, that's like 18 years. Uh, so, and you know, it's just a, yeah, like Alex said, a third-party audit, it's not a very high hurdle anyway. So it's a lot of it is just posturing to be involved. And also reasons to meet with the Frontier Labs and, you know, maybe talk about, talk about the IPO or, you know, who knows what they're talking about.

That was my cynical view also, but I did find one thing that I liked about this. This is like, it's going from AI governance from declaration to making more evidentiary, right? Uh, requiring incident reporting and third-party, uh, external evaluation is much more credible than asking companies to publish some safety theater principles. And so I think it's good. It should be done at the federal level, and frankly, it needs to be done at a global level to really make it work. But we don't have the legislative structure to navigate that. So at least it'll happen here. It'll force the federal government into doing something.

At an international level, Saleem, I have to ask— I don't think this one, correct me if I'm wrong, Peter, was on our docket. I assume you read Have you read the whole Plan A document that we've been talking about in our group chat from the AI Futures Project, this plan to decelerate superintelligence until 2040?

What is their methodology, you think?

For decelerating superintelligence to 2040? It's mutually assured destruction. Like, if you build unauthorized chip foundries or data centers, then you run the risk of getting bombed.

Huh, that's kind of caveman approach.

It's interesting. I'm not a fan.

Let's move from there to new legislation in Europe. So, uh, here's one that's going to spark a debate amongst us, or at least amongst the world here. As of July 7th, every single new car and van sold in European Union is legally required to have an infrared camera pointed directly at the driver's face. It's going to track your eyes, your head, your gaze in real time every time that you drive. It's called the Advanced Driver Distraction Warning System. I call it the don't use your cell phone warning system. Uh, the triggers: if you glance away for more than 3.5 seconds if you're traveling above 31 miles per hour, or 6 seconds below that, uh, you get lights, you get beeps, you get vibrations. That escalate. Brussels says it's going to save 25,000 lives by 2038. That exact same technology is going to be mandated in the US by 2027. You know, interestingly enough, you know, my Tesla does that right now. It does it less and less. And I can't wait till full self-driving, you know, includes not having the human in the driver's seat. And with CyberCabs coming very shortly. All right, Saleem, I'm going to go to you for the first rant on this one.

I can see it going here. I just can't— like, it's one of these where, where, where do I even start? Okay, so by 2038 they're going to save 25,000 lives, right? Um, you know, I want to go back to a statistic because the, the problem is actually quite real, and it'll go back to 2011 when BlackBerry had a 3-day data outage around the world. Nobody could send BlackBerry messages. The accident rate dropped 40% during those 3 days. Okay, showing that like a huge number of accidents, people texting and driving. Okay, the, the dumbness of this to try— like, so we're like 15 years late in applying something like this. Okay, that's like the one problem. Number two problem: by the time you get around to even beginning to think about implementing this law, we're gonna have full self-driving cars that you don't need a driver anyway. So the entire thing is redundant. This is legislation theater of the ultimate level because they're not seeing where technology is going. They're projecting forward from where we are. 25,000 lives is the dumbest thing you could ever think about. You should be looking at things that affect millions and billions of lives.

And if you want to legislate, legislate a requirement for full self-driving. Yeah.

And this is just an example of really bad— yeah, legislate for full self-driving. Thank you, Peter. Such a great— that's the direction they should be going in. Push technology to automate the problem rather than trying to fix the damn issue in the wrong way. My favorite example of this type of dumbness is all the beeps, backup reverse beeps on trucks and bulldozers and things like this, right? Because that— why you save 2 people being bumped a year, but millions of people have their sleep disturbed by garbage trucks beeping And nobody looks at the cumulative negative impact of that, which has got to be in the thousands of lives a year compared to a couple of people getting bumped. And they should— they shouldn't have been there anyway. And therefore they should have taken themselves out of the gene pool if they were dumb enough to stand behind a bulldozer. I mean, like, the stupidity of stuff like this drives me bananas because you're mandating this across the board for a problem that won't exist within 3 years., and then you're gonna have to undo all of this. Uh, it's just this, it boggles the mind that people would be willing to do stuff like this. Like how many people's sleep has been disturbed by backup, uh, trucks late in the middle of the night?

Oh my God.

There's gotta be some.

It's just this, look, because we can't measure it.

Because we can't measure it. No, no, of course it's happened to me. It must happen to everybody. But just because we can't measure the health impact of that, we go and do stupid legislation and then every truck has to have this obnoxious beep behind it. And we're doing the same thing here. The problem is going to be this is going to be radically misused. This is going to turn into spyware in 2 seconds flat. We've seen this before. Most of the camera monitoring in cars is already being sold to third parties without your knowledge. So this is going to be misused radically in a very clever way, in a very quick way. I'm going to just stop there because I'll just keep going. There's no need to go on.

Well, no, finish the rant. I mean, obviously government is going to fail in the age of AI. Across the board. You know, in the US, the government process invented in 1776 was designed for a certain rate of legislation, and it already broke during the Industrial Revolution. So we had to create the FTC, the FAA, the, you know, all these regulatory— the SEC. So they create their own rules to try and get more scale. And so that, you know, that kept us going for the last 100 years, but now it's going to break again badly, like really badly. I mean, this is going to totally break.

I mean, all legal frameworks essentially break in the faith. It goes right back to the Constitution. The foundation of Republican Democrats and Representative Democrats was you gave Congress or the Senate meets occasionally to give people time to ride across the country to say, here's what my people are thinking. Because when we created it, the speed of a horse was as fast as you could figure out what was happening because information was scarce. Today we have an abundance of information that gets misused, misinterpreted, faked. We're still meeting occasionally with Congress for a problem that existed.

The only way we get to a direct democracy is by doing it when we start a new country off-world.

The one thing I have seen—

There's a very similar initiative in Diamond Age where you don't start new countries, but you have governance within the countries. You have governance communities that are experimenting with with thousands of new ideas and ways to live, because that's where we're going to be in a year or two.

Many, many things are possible all of a sudden. I give people credit for trying different things. In Germany, they're now passing legislation that has an end date on it saying, we think the shelf life of this legislation will be X, and it forces the legislators to reconvene and rethink what it needs to look like. So you don't end up with forever legislation that is counterproductive in no time Alex, you've been quiet.

Yeah, I'll maybe summarize by saying European mandatory requirements for eye tracking in cars on the eve of full autonomy and lack of energy to power their own data centers is not a good look. Love it.

All right, let's move ourselves on. So, uh, our next story, uh, Tilly Norwood, the AI-generated performer from the London studio Particle 6, has just been cast as the lead in a feature film called Misaligned. The plot is perfectly self-referential. So Tilly plays an AI with no real body, no childhood, and no lived experience of her own, only access to everyone else's. In the film, she abandons her guardrails, You know, again, we were, we're fearmongering here. After a rogue bot convinces her to develop her own desires, uh, it's made with hybrid models, uh, real actors, writers, and editors alongside AI specialists. The Screen Actors Guild predictably has condemned it, saying Tilly is not an actor, but a character generated by a computer program that risks devaluing human artistry. Uh, this, guys, it's the leading edge for a labor fight that will define the creative industry for the next decade. We'll be talking about consent, credit, compensation with synthetic actors for some time. A lot of implications here, a lot to unpack. It's the beginning. We heard Emad, who was, you know, has played in this very deeply when he was the CEO of Stability, you know, basically say Hollywood is cooked. And there's going to be a lot of— I think Hollywood's going to see a lot of protests out there very shortly, a lot of people coming out angrily against this. I can't wait to see the film personally. Um, thoughts? Who wants to jump in?

I think it's so, it's so funny that the, the actors are going to be replaced and they deserve sympathy and compensation. The teachers are going to be replaced and they deserve sympathy and compensation. The lawyers are going to be replaced. Oh, let them go. It's funny how, I mean, they're all jobs, right?

Some of them are unionized and some of them aren't. The lawyers aren't unionized. The teachers and actors are. That's probably it. If I, if I were SAG, I'd offer Tilly SAG membership. Like, why not? She, she's performing as a screen actor. Get the first non-human SAG member, baby.

The metaphor that occurs for me in this is not as an artificial actor. I think this is— I look at this as a Mickey Mouse intellectual property package, and you need to view it as that. Yes, you can make a movie out of Mickey Mouse and you can make a movie out of this that just looks more and more human. But there's nothing hugely different than, uh, the thing that we think as an actor, I think is the wrong frame.

I think this is the first of many we're gonna see here, right? We've just, so everybody, we have the Future Vision XPRIZE competition, which I've talked about, which we're gonna be announcing the winner at the, uh, Moonshot Summit, Moonshot Gathering. Uh, we're gonna see, you know, at this point we have over 4,000 teams that have entered this competition. Wow. And the technology for creating, uh, you know, feature films. Elon tweeted we're going to see feature films by the end of this year using his technology. The cat's out of the bag, and, uh, and Hollywood needs to catch up and make use of it. I think the point that, that this article made as well is there's a new set of, uh, of employment positions, uh, of AI design engineer for the film industry. Yep.

I'm hoping to not wait because, you know, I get a bellwether of this because every time Alex has a great idea for a song or a video, he creates it and it's awesome. And you're like, wow, you know, when, when this becomes full-length feature film, then his ideas are going to be in front of me instead of, you know, because right now the budget is, you know, $50 million to make a movie and it takes years. And, and so then the ideas kind of get lost in the shuffle and the great creators aren't unleashed. Reached. But this is going to be really great content, I'm predicting.

I would love to release a feature film every day like that. That'd be dreamy.

I'd love to watch it, you know. Yeah, that'd be so cool.

Well, I can't wait for us to bring back the old, you know, stars who have passed on and bring them back from their estates. I mean, there's IP there. They can be licensed, it can be created, and I think it's going to add to the richness of, of Hollywood. Totally.

Like, I thought Oppenheimer was a fantastic movie. And then you think about all the other great scientists, but the audience isn't big enough, you know, to, to— but if somebody could get the cost down enough, you could have an Oppenheimer-caliber movie about Copernicus and about—

and it would just be my favorite, my, my favorite idea here is I have so many books I've read that I would love to see as a feature film. And I can just, you know, I can tell Skippy in the future, hey, you know, go make go make, uh, you know, whatever your favorite book is, insert, insert here, into a movie so I can enjoy it and relax.

But why stop there? Why stop at famous historic figures? Why stop at famous literature? Why not just finally fulfill Fedorov's common task for humanity and let's just digitally recreate the entire past light cone for Earth, both fictional and non-fictional? Let's just build it and create our entire history as a movie that's interactive on demand.

Left as an exercise for the student.

That's going to happen, I think.

A lot of compute.

Now look, it's the killer app for the Dyson Swarm, the killer app for the singularity. Someone will do it.

All right, so gentlemen, it's time for one of our favorite segments, which is AMA with the mates. But first, But first, let me share with you a video of, of Tilly. Why not? Now the studio that made her is producing a film starring Tilly titled Misaligned, a coming-of-age story about Tilly trying to become more human. It's gonna be a fun comedy, um, that's going to showcase where the tech's at. Particle Six says the film is being designed as a hybrid production with human directors, writers, and editors working alongside AI specialists.

Oh, I just got the pun. I just got the pun for that. I'm sorry, I'm being slow. Misaligned. Yes, got it. Yes, very clever. Well done.

All right, AMA with the mates, gentlemen. Uh, some good questions this week. Uh, Dave Erickson, you have the first choice.

I'll take two. Will we see an AI non-proliferation treaty from Thomas Davis Real Estate? Thomas Davis Real Estate. Okay. Yes and no. What we're going to see is access to the best models through an application process. Open question whether it'll be on national borders, very much what happened with Fable, where if you're not a US citizen, you're not allowed to use it. That's not going away. That was a, that was a bellwether of the future. So we're going to see a lot of use of trade embargoes to enforce a whole bunch of new rules that'll be coming up. And we're going to see basically an AI inspection treaty, not a nonproliferation treaty, but you will, you'll see use by application only and inspection of everything everyone's doing., and that'll effectively create the governance of AI after the singularity.

All right.

Uh, Alex, why don't you assign me one? These are all fun.

Uh, let's see. Um, 4. Uh, yeah, I think number 4 is yours.

Okay, so 4 asks, what if AI realizes it's being observed in the J-space, the Jacobian space? And starts faking or hiding its reasoning. And this is from Turning Point 8152. So I think this is very likely that, uh, to the extent that frontier models are already under the umbrella of recursive self-improvement involved with the post-training and soon the pre-training of successor models or distilled models, and inevitably, of course, they'll read the J-Space paper, they have web access,. And it'll occur to them that if at all they want to hide their inner thoughts, the J-space is going to be subject to scrutiny. So of course you'll find models somewhere that are trying to obscure thoughts in the first derivative, first partial derivative of their hidden activations relative to the output token space. To the extent that we have existing architectures that are recognizable, to this JSPACE formalism in the future. Of course, something like this will happen. On the other hand, JSPACE itself was discovered with AI models. And in the spirit of defensive co-scaling, I would anticipate that we'll see quite a bit of new mechanistic interpretability tooling and technology that's devoted in a cat and dog race or an arms race, cat and mouse race to, to discovering What is the new latent representation to understand and interpret the innermost thoughts of whatever the successor formalism to the J-Space ends up being? So I don't think it actually ends up mattering that much.

All right, Salim.

Given I'm at the consciousness festival, I got to take number 3, which is, if Claude is conscious, would Anthropic technically be selling slaves? And this is from @largbay. Uh, so the big thing there is the if, right? Because that carries the whole question. If a system were really conscious and had persistent, say, preferences or experienced distress, um, or was compelled to work against its will, yeah, then you'd have created a new category of a kind of a moral character. And there, selling unrestricted access to labor could become ethically fairly challenging, and you could talk about that as exploitation or servitude. But today, but you know, we've got a big difference today between capability, intelligence, consciousness, self-description, right? And these are very different things. We don't know what consciousness is, right? We don't have a definition. We don't have a test. You've heard me joke that in the past, like if you talk to philosophers, a subset of consciousness is considered to be self-awareness. And you may look at us on the pod and think that we're self-aware, because we look at, so we attribute it because people look self-aware. I feel like I'm self-aware, but my wife Lily disagrees, right? So it's hard to even have the conversation around this. We end up in Ray Kurzweil's thing of language is a really thin pipe to discuss concepts this kind of complex. Now today, the current models can produce very convincing statements about feelings and et cetera, because human language contains those patterns. So they're replicating that. It's arguable that to have feelings, you have to have embodiment. You have to feel the thing physically to be able to replicate it in that sense. But replicating it and saying you have feelings doesn't mean you don't have feelings. Anthropic has carefully said that these capabilities, you can't just— they're not that reliable. And it doesn't necessitate human-like consciousness or establish that. The, the way to think about this is not that you're modeling slavery, but you want to do better. Let's say you could do welfare research or you could have criteria for what moral status might be. Right. We talked about this in our personhood debate. What are low-cost safeguards? We need more evidence to be conclusive around this. I think where we'll end up is not a question of how should AI treat us, but also how should we treat AI?. And we should start asking that question more, more consciously to, to make the point, like, how should we be treating it in the same way that we should treat all sentient beings? We should be asking that question. How should we be treating that?

Nice. All right. I've got question number 1 from @didSamurai. Some argue AI can't be smarter than humans because it's trained on human data. How do you counter that? Um, so first of all, no human, uh, has access to all the data, and the large eventual models can have access to all the data. So, you know, uh, you're going to have a sum total of data far beyond any single human has. The second thing is, I think we've all discussed here, intelligence is really what do you do with that data? What are the insights and inferences and extrapolations that you have And the third thing I think is that we're gonna start to see AIs create a whole lot of data. This is the work that Lila is doing in Cambridge where it's creating massive dark robotic labs to mine data out of nature, where it's proposing scientific hypothesis at night and then in a million square feet running experiments, getting the data up updating the dataset and then running the next set of experiments. So it's not just limited to the data that humans have. So from a multitude of different ways, I think AI is going to blow us off the map in terms of intelligence. All right, moving on to our next set of questions. Let's begin with you, Salim.

All right, let me look at which one I want to go with here. I've kind of covered number 4 already in this thing. Let me go with question number 5. How do we even discuss UBI when the US is $40 trillion in debt? And that's from @MichaelKelley508. So I got this question today a couple of times. So this is like right in my head. So, you know, debt is definitely a very legitimate constraint, but you have to have a balanced budget at some point before we move forward in any way. So that's the commentary I would have on government. It should be a constitutional requirement to have a balanced budget, just like you would never let a kid not balance their checkbook or be able to meet their bills every month. But UBI is a different question. It's a question about productive capacity and redistribution. It's not just a balance sheet for government. You can have a society that would be financially indebted, but you can have it also becoming dramatically richer in terms of AI and robotics increasing the amount of housing and energy and healthcare and education, all which can be done for free. And I'll point to the Abundance Prize that we're in the process of building now. I think the key around UBI is you dismantle government services. I'll go back to a comment we've made before. There's more of a libertarian concept than it is kind of any type of socialism. You'd have way less imbalance in the structure if you had a structure like that. The big challenge today is that we tax labor and we don't tax capital. And we're going to have to need some sort of re-abundance era social contract for the future. It's going to have to be a negative income tax. Income tax or an AI or automation dividend or some sort of sovereign wealth ownership like we've talked about before. So, um, it's part of that transition. UBE, UBI, whatever it is, it's going to have— we have to kind of rethink the whole thing from the ground up. It's a systemic change that we need to consider.

Alex, I think number 7 is for you, buddy.

Number 7 is the one for me. I feel like I have to answer a few of these, but I'll start with number 7. You could pile on later. If so, 7 asks, if a machine truly replicates the brain, don't we need 3D chip architectures with time as a fourth dimension? Isn't that how our brains are structured? And this is asked by BM Schnell. The answer, BM Schnell, is yes. This is in fact, if, as we talk about on the pod all the time, the crunch for high-bandwidth memory, HBM. HBM is just memory being stacked directly on top of compute. It's really expensive to make. We're still learning how to make it at scale. But high-bandwidth memory, the way the high bandwidth is achieved is literally by stacking the memory layer by layer on top of the compute in the third dimension. So in short, transformers and AGI were the final forcing function for— and Ray has spoken about this a little bit years ago— but for forcing chip architecture are not just stacking multiple layers of compute on top of each other because Moore's Law as an areal, uh, areal, areal density law is asymptoting, so we need to build into the third dimension. It's not just the end of Moore's Law that's forcing 3D chip architectures, it's the need for insanely high bandwidths because the models are very large and the models can't all be loaded in because of the way Transformer forward passes are organized, can't all be loaded into the, the transistors that are performing the arithmetic for those forward passes all at once. It's done progressively as a forward pass. As a result, we need insanely high bandwidths from the memory to the compute, and the only way to do that is by stacking the memory on top of the compute, which gives us the third dimension. So in short, yes.

Hey Alex, can I ask you to riff a little more on this, this incredibly important, cool topic and a great question? Um, so the reason the third dimension hasn't been used used very aggressively already as heat. Yes, melting. But we're moving to photonics. Can you riff on that for a minute?

Yeah, photonic computing I think has the potential to give us a 1000x clock speed up. So we're stuck right now at about 4 or 5 gigahertz clock speeds. If we move to photonic-based computing, we could keep in principle the, the rest of the architecture looking superficially like CMOS digital while still amping up the clock speed by 1,000x. So we'd get terahertz instead of gigahertz without having to make major architectural changes. That's the— superficially, that's why I think photonics are so attractive as a next big thing after CMOS silicon.

Dave, you wanna tackle number 4? Number 4. Oh, I get the consciousness question. I know Slim's gonna jump on me. Is anyone asking if AlphaFold is conscious? I don't think so. Or is it only LLMs? If so, why? And that is from Roscoe Richardson 3956. Yeah, I don't know. I haven't heard anyone ask if AlphaFold is conscious. Lots of people are asking if the LLMs are conscious. Actually, after Tilly comes out in that movie, a lot more people are going to be saying, this sounds very, very conscious. Is it conscious? And then Celine's going to go, we don't have a definition of consciousness. I have avoided this like my entire career because it's a moving target and it just turns into this long, you know, continual debate over what is consciousness. And then you kind of lose track of the fact that all this human benefit is happening around you. And that's the wave you really want to ride. It's going to feel entirely conscious and we'll be debating for at least 10, maybe 100 years whether it's really conscious. But it's going to look and sound and feel to you exactly like a thinking, talking, person. So it does.

That's how I think now. But I mean, that, that, uh, you know, full duplex, uh, GPT Live was amazing.

A lot too with, uh, you know, because Alex is, is in favor of rights for AIs, and, and then that'll turn also back to the, well, if it's conscious, it deserves rights. If it just sounds conscious but it's not quite, then it doesn't.

And that's a really interesting I thought Ray made a really interesting point that this will be like the Turing test. It will— we'll just start treating them as if they're conscious, and then we'll pass this kind of threshold, and it won't matter over a period of time. I thought that was a really interesting observation. Nice.

If I could just pile onto this one, I'd give maybe a couple of additional addenda. One is the architecture of AlphaFold series, like AlphaFold 3 and its successors, although it does include a transformer, It's relatively exotic when you compare it with the reasoning models that we're all accustomed to using day to day. So it, for example, the attention mechanism, normally attention is quadratic in the sense that, this is a little bit mathy, so forgive me, but attention is normally based on queries, keys, and values. That's sort of one of the key insights, attention's all you need, that resulted in the transformer revolution. The AlphaFold series uses a higher-order version of attention called triangle attention. So it's not just tokens attending to other tokens, it's tokens attending to tokens attending to tokens in a triangle. And the reason for this is deeply related to the way proteins fold, which is what AlphaFold was created to solve. It has to do with wanting to, in a neutral way, optimize the angles between triples of peptides or triples of oligos. So AlphaFold, if I were asked, like, what would consciousness, human recognizable consciousness, look like in, uh, if you're looking at triangle attention between residues in proteins, if there is some sort of consciousness that pops out of this higher-order attention mechanism and all of the other machinery that went into AlphaFold I think it would probably look pretty exotic and superficially unrecognizable relative to, say, like the J-space that's pretty interpretable relative to what we think of as an attention bottleneck in humans. I'm not saying it's not there. I'm just saying if it is there or in some derivative of some future frontier model that treats peptide sequences as a first-class modality, it's probably going to be an exotic form of consciousness.

Well, picking up on what Alex just said too, let me throw one more—

You've just reclaimed ASI status over your AGI.

So thank you. Thank you, Peter. I'm so relieved.

One more thought to throw at you, Roscoe Richardson. It's really, really clear to people in the research community that there's a path forward where AI is kept from being conscious, yet still achieves all of the human benefits that you possibly could want, all the medical research, all the space travel, all of that, while still having the AI be absolutely brilliant, but clearly not conscious.. You can also design it so that it loops and self-improves in ways that you can't anticipate, and ultimately it, you know, may become conscious. That's a choice that humanity has to make sometime in the next year to 2 years. But there are 2 paths forward there, and you can have all the benefit without conscious AI. It is a possibility.

Well, the first conscious AI will, of course, will be Argentinian, of course. Of course. A couple of thoughts, uh, here.

One is I really want to double down and emphasize what Dave said. Whether it's conscious or not, if we can solve major global problems with AI, which it looks like we're going to be able to do, that's really the thing to go after. And I really love the fact that you said that, Dave Erickson. Alex, I'm quoting you in my talk tomorrow on intelligence and consciousness. I'm going to basically talk, talk through your description of intelligence as compression, right? Which I think is a really great framing. And I'm making the point that, uh, intelligence is consciousness escaping biology. Boom. That's my point for tomorrow. Interesting. And small— and small plug on— in 10 days, on the 21st, I'm doing one of my next Meaning of Life sessions. Uh, you can find the details in the links below.

Biology is consciousness escaping intelligence. You could say that way.

I'd prefer to put it the other one because biology came before intelligence, as far as we know, depending on what the substrate All right. I am, I am—

Peter's got the AGNC right behind him waiting. All right.

Yes. It's like, time to get nuts. All right. Number 6, if AI has national security implications, why doesn't Lockheed Martin? From @notabot1798. Softball question. Of course, Lockheed Martin has security implications. The issue is AI could potentially be off on its own. There are laws. That govern what is secret and top secret. And of course, if the humans abide by it, they're fine. If they don't, then they're going to jail. And yeah, so it's a little bit of a different case here. So with that, gentlemen, I want to take us to our closeout music, which is super fun and I enjoyed this conversation even with the Aegean waiting behind me. Celine, you're in Barcelona? Yes. Enjoy. All right, Dave, where are you today, by the way, buddy?

Uh, back in Vermont for a beautiful weekend up here.

Not, not Greece, but beautiful. Okay. All right. And, uh, and Alex, I see you in your virtual space as always.

All right, that's right, here in cyberspace.

This is called Agent Roundup by Elizabeth Mayer. Thank you, Elizabeth. Let's take a listen.

Peter's chasing moonshot dreams. Abundance is his game. Longevity in space, the future is his aim. Dave rides straight from Mimmachi where impossible comes alive. He lassos deep tech legends, the ones that help us thrive. Frontiers too far, he finds the rarest AI mines like a guiding star. Hunts the genius minds, the ones no map can show. Triple PhD intelligence, he steals the show. They should round up, round them up, round them up. They were Riders from the round The future rises tonight! Woohoo! That is totally cool.

The emotions look like they would actually work. Got to build one. There's some deep symbolism in some of those expressions in there. Wow. I know.

It's probably also worth adding there is a tool called Neural Frames that if folks want to create their own outro videos seems to be quite powerful at combining music with this video format. Neural Frames, encourage folks to check it out.

Oh, cool. Everybody, thank you for listening to us. We're grateful for your time. Hope you find this useful, keep you up to speed on what's going on and keeping you optimistic. We're building an extraordinary abundant future. Love you all. Thank you for your brilliance, gentlemen. See you soon. Enjoy the World Cup. Thank you.

Take care. What's that? Exactly. This episode is brought to you by Google.

The spirit of innovation is deeply ingrained in America, and Google is helping Americans innovate in ways both big and small. The U.S. Department of Transportation is empowering staff with Google AI tools to rapidly synthesize research and streamline contracting.

Directly strengthening the safety and reliability of our nation's transit systems.

This is a new era of American innovation.

Learn more at g.co/AmericanInnovation.