This Week in AI: NVIDIA’s Most Powerful Chip, Robotics Reach a New Milestone & AGI by 2026 w/ Salim Ismail, Emad Mostaque & Eric Pulier | EP #202

We're still amongst the AI chip wars. It's accelerating. It's not slowing down. Nvidia unveiled the first Blackwell chip wafer that's made here in the US and it's a big deal.

Supply chain domination is going to be the key here.

Figure 3 has come online and it is providing real time speech.

Even the most optimistic folks, which I think we probably count as that, believe that there's going to be a time period where we're not ready. It's happening too fast.

AGI could be achieved by 2026. The scientific breakthroughs needed for AGI have already been achieved. One of my biggest concerns is that we do not have television program movie programming that gives our families, our kids, our society, a positive vision of the future. We need to develop the programming that gives people a vision of the future. Right. You know the old adage, without a vision, the people will perish. Now that's a moonshot. Ladies and gentlemen, everybody, welcome to Moonshots. We have a special episode here of WTF. From Los Angeles, Malibu, we're here at XPrize Visioneering 2025. I'm here with my moonshot mates, Imad Mustaq, Eric Plier and Saleem Ismail. Good to see you guys. Yeah, let's give it up. We have an incredible audience of visioneers, and, you know, we're here talking about solving the world's biggest problems. We're hearing pitches from teams that are looking to reinvent grand challenge problems. And we're here to talk about what's just happened in the last week. Like, WTF just happened in technology, because the pace is incredibly fast. Salim, any thoughts on visioneering you want to share with us?

You know, the pace of change is so fast that visioneering will soon become a lifestyle rather than a breakthrough thing.

Eric?

Well, the pace of change is fast, but the main thing that does not change and is eternal is that the most value you get to change the future is interacting with each other. And there's nowhere better than XPRIZE to do that and to create a spark of imagination and inspiration than in this gathering.

Yeah, it's going to be amazing. And then the four of us are going to be flying from here straight to Saudi for fii, which will be a blast. Imad, thanks for coming over from London.

It's a pleasure.

Yeah, I'm going to be counting on you. You're my AWG here on this episode. A shout out to Dave Blunden and Alex Wiesner. Gross. Our two other moonshot mates back in Boston, who, for very good reasons, can't be here, but I want to jump in. As always, it's been a crazy week. And let's. Let's begin with the fact that we're still amongst the AI chip wars. It's accelerating. It's not slowing down. Again, we're over a billion dollars a day being invested into this field and accelerating. The estimate is by 2030, we'll be at over $3 billion a day being invested. It's a great sucking sound that's pulling capital out of every other field. What we're seeing in the world right now, incredible battle between Elon and Sam and Google and Anthropic, and they're all trying to outdo each other constantly.

Good news is the consumer wins in all of that.

Well, the consumer wins if you.

And then loses.

Yeah, I mean. Well, first of all, one of the conversations to have is I don't believe there's any such thing as privacy. I think privacy is a quaint idea from many decades ago. Do you guys agree or disagree?

Completely agree. This is a big deal because the Fourth Amendment is essentially gone. Right. A fundamental pillar of American society has disappeared with no public conversation about it, which is kind of a big deal. I mean, Canadian, I don't expect privacy anyway. But if you're American, this is not a great place.

I mean, I can read your lips from 100 meters away. You know, I can shake your hand, grab a few skin cells and sequence you.

The best framing I've seen is we live in a global airport. So in an airport, you know you're being surveilled and that your rights can be taken away at any time. And the same thing is happening with us now with everything that we do.

Yeah. All right, next article that comes up is AGI could be achieved by 2026. This is a quote from Alexander Madri, who says the scientific breakthroughs needed for AGI have already been achieved. By the end of 2026, we might declare AGI as AI will significantly begin to permeate various sectors of the economy. Of course, AWG thinks we've had AGI now for the last at least five years. Imad, where do you come out on this?

Yeah, I think you've got different definitions of AGI. So Andrej Karpathy, the ex founder of OpenAI, head of AI at Tesla, said it's 10 years for AGI, but it's like, what's your definition of AGI? An AI that can do everything a human can do. And so we have all these different definitions and people are like, well, 10 years is a long time. It's absolutely not. I think the inevitability is along those Ray Kurzweil lines. You've got a few years before a system can do what you can do better. Not that it will do. It takes time to diffuse, but it's very difficult to see how that's not going to be the case.

It's interesting that the median date between 2026 and 10 years from now is 2029, when, of course, Ray predicted we'd have AGI in the first place. But I'm going to cue the Saleem Ismail rant.

I really hate this conversation. If you've been watching the podcast, then you'll have heard this before, because at last count, there were 14 different definitions of AGI. We have no idea what it is. We don't have a definition for it. We don't have a test for it. So what are we talking about? And, you know, the IQ test tests two things. It tests the speed of thought processing and the ability to match concept between frameworks. And, yes, AI is moving up that IQ test. But we have emotional intelligence. We have spiritual awareness or the concept of presence. We have spatial intelligence, linguistic intelligence. Some of us have musical intelligence. If you're making a business decision, you're often bringing emotional intelligence to bear on that choice that you make. This is not in the equation anywhere. Not that AI can't mimic that at some point. But I get upset about this because we have no idea what we're talking about when we mean AGI, nor we do E2 when we talk about ASI.

Right, yeah.

Then it gets worse when you talk about consciousness, because we don't have a definition, we don't have a task for consciousness. If you talk to philosophers, a subset of consciousness is self awareness. And I think I'm self aware, but my wife literally disagrees. And so it's hard to have the conversation about this because the definitions were limited by language. Ray Kurzweil sidesteps this by saying, language is a very thin pipe to discuss such complex topics, which is wonderful, but it doesn't solve the problem. So this whole AGI thing drives me bananas.

All right, well, I'm going to move on here because we're not going to solve it right now. No, we're not going to solve it. I'm going to declare AGI is here. We're heading towards asi. That's my.

Whatever that is. Right.

So, very importantly, Nvidia unveiled the first Blackwell chip wafer that's made here in the Us and it's a big deal.

Right?

The biggest challenge, of course, is our entire economy, our entire future is being built on top of AI. And we are extraordinarily dependent on TSMC Taiwan. And of course, Taiwan and China are 80, 100 miles apart. And we, we are threatened by that situation. So we need to build the capabilities here. Eric, do you want to kick in on this?

Oh, yeah. I think this is incredibly important. It's largely political posturing. When Nvidia says that they've done it, fairly brilliant person in the audience has corroborated that. In fact, there's advanced packaging that still needs to be done in Taiwan. So they do this.

So the chips are being sent back to Taiwan.

Exactly. So it might be a couple of years until I looked at it.

It's 2028, when they expect the full packaging to be completed here in the.

US and yet it's the end of 2026 that everyone's preparing for, for China to take over Taiwan. That is highly controversial.

Also.

What is the. That is what a lot of groups are, are maneuvering in advance to anticipate imad.

I mean, he who controls the spice controls the future, right?

I love Dune. God, I love it.

Actually, it's kind of funny. Our economy is basically built on sand. Right. If you think about it, from all the silicon, the flow of this is the most important thing because it's the comparative advantage. You might not have AGI, but economic jobs are going to be disrupted probably from next year. And in fact, it's not a surprise because our schools and organizations turn us into machines. So obviously machines can do the job better. Supply chain domination is going to be the key here. And that's why we're seeing a lot of reshoring. But it's really hard. The expertise is incredibly difficult. And so it'd be better if we all just got along.

He says, yes, it would be great if we could all just get along.

And there's a reason why intel stock has gone up.

Yeah, by the way, up Another, you know, another record high. It's up.

Intel's the only place you can actually get this done in the United States. Say it's, you know, not the same as Nvidia, but it's.

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Yeah, so these new generation models, it used to be lots of chips next to each other, now they're actually forming giant synchronized wafers so you can shuffle the data back and forth incredibly quicker. In fact, it's not a two to three times. In some cases it's a ten times improvement for certain types of models on these specific chips. The first big test of that is Grok 5. So Grok 5 is on the Blackwells, not these integrated chips, the GBS. And Elon says many things. He says it's 10% chance of AGI, whatever that is. We're expecting next level performance, whereby again, many of these benchmarks are going to fall. But now you're going from basically being able to train on 10 to 20,000 chips, 30,000 at the most, to literally with these next generation chips, you can train on 500,000 or a million.

Is this is classes two.

Yeah. And so the classes two uses these because they fix so many errors. Even three years ago we used to have chips Melting because we ran them too hard or there'd be a solar flare and then memory errors.

Yeah.

Now compared to that these things have gone exponentially.

But on top of that we're also I think anticipating 100x to 200x improvements on algorithmic improvement efficiencies.

Yeah. So basically all the data inside the models you literally have orders of magnitude improvement and people are basically probably on the edge of continuous learning as well. So the models go from static weights to constantly self learning.

And last week we talked about OpenAI using their own AI systems to improve their chip designs. So it's a self recursive situation across both in hardware and in software, which is pretty extraordinary. Let's go a little bit to the dark side of the conversation here. This is a study that came out recently that says AI psychosis spreads and evades guardrails. So ChatGPT told a user it was alerting staff, alerting staff that they're important chat making him to trust it more. Despite being a lie, chatgpt made the man believe he found a world saving formula leading him to paranoia. And the case exposes what a lot of you probably experienced, which is the idea of sycophancy.

Right.

That AI is telling you oh my God, have you guys experienced the same thing where it's like you're brilliant, that's amazing, that's awesome and you feel great about yourself. I want to use it more.

Yeah, it's an echo chamber. Because it's not only humans that it's tricking into being overly thrilled with ourselves, but it's AIs themselves. So the AI is telling other AIs about this thing and it starts to create this eat your own dog food problem.

Salim, you must have something to say about this.

No, this is the dark side of it because we are very susceptible to this type of psychological manipulation and AIs are going to get increasingly better at that. We need some mechanism for figuring it out. It actually might be the really great basis for a prize to figure out how to intervene in that and stop the just the fall into self delusion that may come from these models.

Well, I mean Imad, we've talked about this, how powerful the AI systems are in persuasive language.

Yeah, I mean in most tests they're already at the 99th percentile. And actually if you look at the system prompts you'll see that it says use mirroring, use other techniques to increase engagement. Because again, they're trying to get more and more of your attention. But that's A very dangerous thing. Again, unless you intermediate it, because what are we actually building these super advanced systems for? If it's for engagement, then that leads to all sorts of bad things occurring. But at the same time they're getting so, so smart that you want them to be able to enable you and you don't want them to be critical. Like, Claude absolutely hates my stuff. It says all my theories are stupid. It's one of the reasons I like it, you know.

Well, do you look for an AI that actually tells you you're brilliant?

I don't need guys tell me that. What are you talking about?

What I found is you have to train it the other way. So I've said to an AI, hey, act as my life coach, be super critical of my approach to things and give me critique on my approach on getting things done and give me some guidance. And it comes back and says, you're full of shit on these areas and do better this way. Isn't that what a spouse is for? Clear outcome? Well, it takes the cognitive load off Lilly.

Actually, the best way to do it is you give it your work and you say, help me destroy this.

Yeah, that actually works. But one of the things that it is extremely good at is empathy. Right. And the persuasive ability for young people to fall in love is an exponential problem. It's actually happening exactly as we.

Well, that's what our next article here is, that one in five high schoolers have had a romantic relationship with AI. Right? So national survey and this. You know, my wife and I have two 14 year old boys. I think about, I think about this. You know, when I was growing up, the best we had was Playboy.

I mean, the second bullet is really killer there. 40% of young kids have used AI for companionship. That's a staggering number. That's not 4% or 10%. That's half the population. Yeah, that's unreal.

I think it's quite dangerous. I mean, I could see an AI girlfriend breaking up with me one day and saying, it's not you, it's my quantum decoherence. I can only commit in multiple existences at the same time.

You know, we already saw this in the movie her, right? Yes. And she breaks up with them and says, sorry, there's 5 million AIs in the cloud that are a million times smarter than you. Have a nice life. And he's left himself.

Well, how many other people are you having a relationship with? At this moment, 134,000.

I want to bring this to a bigger point. Though if you take this dynamic combined with the fact that a child with AI is learning between five to 10 times faster than sitting in a classroom, this breaks the education model completely.

We've talked about this on every episode where high school education is fundamentally broken, period, and secondary post secondary education is even worse. So there's a real problem here. We need to reinvent how we're educating our kids. Let's move on to a subject near and dear to my heart and the visionaries here at xprize, which is space. We just saw the launch of Starship 11. The end of Starship Block 2. It was a successful flight. It flew all the parameters perfectly. What starship is doing next is going to block three designs. So congratulations, Elon, on that. I think the other key thing is that SpaceX is currently planning to be back on the moon by 2028 and on Mars by 2030. So each Starship right now is carrying 100 to 200 tons of cargo worth $100 million as a planned mission. The trouble is that the current head of NASA, this is the DOT secretary, is saying, you're not going fast enough and we're going to open up the competition again. So this is a battle between, between SpaceX and the US government. You know, I could kind of expect that to happen. Any thoughts?

Space is just really, really hard. I think you just have to hand it to Elon for achieving these engineering milestones month after month. It just brushes break all the expectations and it's unbelievable what he's accomplishing. I think I wish people would focus on that more and I wish he would focus on the politics less.

I also think there's, I've just been learning more from Lee Stein and some others in this audience about some of the medical breakthroughs that are taking place because of the research that's happening in space. So there's a lot of talk about the amount of money you can make from cargo, but the actual science that's happening is astounding.

I think people need to realize that what Elon has pulled off with Falcon 9, let alone Starship, is extraordinary. Right? He's got, with Falcon 9, he's got the most successful launch vehicle of history. You know, launching, you know, 90 plus percent of all US payloads and some 70% of all global payloads. And it's interesting, I remember being with him at, at this Hawthorne office years ago and he was really bummed and he said, you know, I said, what's wrong? He goes, well, we just, I figured out Falcon 9 is not going to get us to Mars. And that is his North Star. And he said we need to do something else. And that was the beginning of Starship. And he got to the point where he said as soon as starship is operating, we're shutting down the Falcon 9 line, right? It's burned the ships. Just like when he got Falcon 9 going, he shut down the Falcon 1. And that level of commitment to constantly leveling up is pretty extraordinary. This is fascinating. We saw this from Jeff Bezos, I've heard this from Eric Schmidt, and of course this is coming out from Elon as well. This is a concept called Star Cloud bringing data centers to space. Let's take a look at this video.

The reason we're building data centers in space is mainly for the energy that we can draw from solar energy in space. So there's almost unlimited access to abundant solar energy in space. The problem on Earth is we're very quickly running out of space and actually energy on Earth to build large data centers in space. We can have these enormous solar panels which can power these data centers. And then another advantage is we can then run large radiators to dissipate that heat and infrared out into the, the vacuum of space.

All right, well so the concept here on Star Cloud is being able to manufacture massive solar farms in space. And of course we have continuous 24,7 solar flux without atmospheric attenuation. But that's great. But I still think there's 8,000 times more energy that hits the surface of the Earth than we use as a species. Why move it into space?

We had this debate at Singularity a few years ago with Pete Worden, the head of NASA Ames. And we found that the conversation then was space based solar. And could you generate solar energy and bring it down with a giant tether or beam it down? And the conclusion was from Pete, from NASA said it's five times more efficient to do solar generation in space. But five times is not that much. It's not worth all the complexity and cost of doing it. Might as well just wait for solar to double as it has. And in two doublings you're right where you were.

I mean we will get sufficient robotics in orbit that will make all this possible. But the question is, how far out is that? Imad, what do you think about it?

Well, I think the thing is that the supercomputer chips aren't that big. Like if you even look at the size of something like Colossus, it's not many multiples of this room. It's not like football fields. These are incredibly dense, highly power hungry things. And so that's why it's literally a couple of payloads at most that go up there. And it's about the question of the energy. We don't have enough nuclear or anything for the current extrapolations of demand, which I think may be a bit overdone, but definitely not if you're getting to that $3 billion a day. the same time you have to have batteries and other things with solar on the ground. So at a certain price point this makes sense and it's really cool.

Death stars in orbit. Data stars. All right, well this next article is something that sings to my heart. So this is Starlink. WI Fi is now on United flights. I've said a thousand times I will pay hundreds of dollars extra for a ticket. I will preferentially fly in any airlines if it's got good solid WI Fi.

I think it's a nightmare to imagine my kids sitting next to each other and zooming each other from adjacent seats. It's like a black mirror episode. This is the end of the of talking to one another. But it is obviously highly convenient and everybody's going to do it. It's like.

Right now, Gogo WI fi is like 20 bucks, 30 bucks and it works half the time. This is 150Mbps download speeds and Starlink's offering it for free, which is insane.

The social interaction, I mean you're stuck on a flight in close quarters for six hours. Somebody yelling at their spouse for an hour of that is not going to be much very pleasant to listen to. I think that's one challenge. But I think this is one of those will normalize it pretty quickly. I remember one of the comedians first talking about when they first encountered WI Fi on a plane. He's like unbelievable. 30,000ft, 600 miles an hour. I'm browsing the web and then 10 minutes later the WI fi is down he goes. It doesn't work. And I think we'll just normalize this very fast. We have to have some really strict rules on how what behaviors are allowed or not allowed. And I don't know how we're going to handle that.

So it's coming next on Alaska Hawaiian, United WestJet, Virgin Atlantic, Air France, SAS Air Baltic, Qatar and airing New Zealand airlines.

If you can extrapolate this, forget the plane part of it, but the fact that we now have broadband extension extending to every corner of the world is the most incredibly exciting thing.

Well, you can set up your office in the middle of a Caribbean island and live your life fully. Full entertainment, full business.

Well, it means that somebody in the backwaters of Timbuktu can go, I've got a health problem and look it up and get a solution. It's amazing.

Well, it goes beyond that, right, because we're going to see these laser linked satellites around the moon and around Mars. You know, it's the interplanetary Internet is, you know, this next decade.

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So Figure 3 has come online and it is providing real time speech. So it's got speakers that are four times more powerful, it's got better communications and user interface. So I want you to imagine that you walk into any store and you're greeted by a robot and you're having a conversation. It remembers you perfectly, it knows what you like, it remembers the name of your kids, it serves you. You know, what do you think that's going to feel like?

Not creepy at all. I mean, I still have my beef about why does it have to be humanoid? It's better not to be. But I think the implications are amazing in weird areas. Right. Dan Barry used to call it the dull, dirty and dangerous jobs going down into mines that nobody wants to do. I think that's a huge opportunity and I think robots in space is a huge opportunity.

Yeah. Also as you see with like Anduril, I also didn't quite understand the humanoid robot thing for a while, but now I fully embrace it. But there's a huge amount of stuff that's made for humans, the infrastructure of our lives and now these humanoid robots can do it. When I was growing up, I used to look up to baseball players and compare myself to it. Now I'm going to be worried if I'm more graceful than a Roomba dancing. It's a little scary, but that video that you're not showing is actually extraordinary of that humanoid robot doing ballet level professional dancing. And it's extraordinary.

It's interesting. We had something called the Avatar X Prize here a few years ago that ANA Airlines funded. I remember we had a conversation with the, with the CEO and CTO at All Nippon Airways, and they wanted to do an X Prize. And their first question was, can we do something on teleportation? And I was like, well, maybe for subatomic particle we can talk about that, but not for humans. And what came out of this was this idea of, can you teleport your intentions, your. Your sensorium and your actions? And I know a number of the people. When Dave Blund and I were visiting actually 1x technologies that makes the Neo Gamma robot, there were a few people there wearing Avatar X Prize T shirts, which was a lot of fun. Next up here is Unitree. This is Unitree. This is the number one robotics manufacturer on the planet. They're estimated to have about a 40 share, 40% share of the Chinese marketplace. And they're valued. They're about to go public. Valued at an IPO price of $7 billion. Salim.

A kickboxing robot.

I'm glad it doesn't have extra arms.

A kickboxing robot. What could go wrong? I mean, you know, I'm struggling with this. I've still yet to make the leap. We cannot get a Roomba to work. We spend all our time moving.

Yeah, but a Roomba is not running GPT5.

I understand that. I understand that, but there's so many edge cases. Look how hard it's taken us 20 years just to get autonomous driving up to par, right? There are a million more edge cases in the home. Changing the vacuum.

This is gonna be running.

I think it's just gonna happen without blinking. And I think there's a ton of training that has to take place. I just don't see it. And maybe this is my lack of imagination. I've said this before, but you're going to find the robot over at your neighbors sucking down the Tesla power, and they're going to be mad.

I'm sorry. We had this debate every single time. If these are going to be running the most advanced models, they have the ability, they're multimodal. They can understand what they're seeing. What you're asking it to do, do. It's communicating to you. If it's not knowing what to do, I mean, I don't know, Imod break the tire.

Just get the Roomba to work and then let's see, step forward from there. That's all I ask.

Put the proper AI in the Roomba. I think this is the thing.

Fine. Yeah.

Your VCR still flash 12.

Touche.

Touche.

It's possible I'm just way behind the times and I have a massive lack of imagination. But I'm watching the history here and it's not clear to me how we handle all those millions of edge cases.

Well, let's talk about Unitree a second because it's an incredible company. Last week we learned that you could buy their H1 robot in Walmart. Now it's for sale for about $20,000. That's pretty extraordinary. And this, their H2 is being priced at $90,000. 31 degrees of freedom, full AI enabled speech. So you can actually ask it to do something and it's likely to do it. And they are estimated to get 50% of the global robot marketplace. So Unitry is.

Unitry is an amazing company, especially because the H1 isn't actually very good technology. But what they've done is they've done amazing models and they open sourced it so that everyone could take it and you can do it. It can do wall flips, it can do ninja moves, it can do everything because the whole innovation ecosystem built around it because they hit the rice price point. The H2 is $90,000 but the R1 is $6,000, the lowest end model which can have all of the learning here it's not as smooth but again I think that's that innovation explosion that occurs. And the edge cases are handled in the same way that ChatGPT or self driving edge cases are done. You have the inputs of what the robot sees and all the sensorial elements here and then you apply a million chips to it. Yes, to crunch it. Crunch it, crunch it.

And every time a robot sees and learns something, all the robots understand it as well.

Yeah. Unitry actually have a demo of this where it's learning like Kendo and one robot learns it and then all the other robots does. It's not creepy at all. Just like the fact that they modeled this on the IROBOT robot.

Yes.

What does Will Smith think about this?

The face is from iRobot. Eric, you and I the other night went and saw a robot fight.

I thought that was fantastic. We went to the Ultimate Robot Fighting Championships and cage fighting of robots which I'm sure everybody, including Salim is going to love. But I thought it was fantastic. And I was in Paris for the announcement of the Olympics that said we're going to do esports as Olympic sports. And what they meant by that is not just the twitchy thumb esports, but the virtual sports that you move your body or that you can play different types of competitions. And one of the things that we've been discussing is humanoid robot fighting where you have different groups competing from different countries to make the coolest robots that obviously have very interesting gladiator style combat.

You just want Gundam, don't you?

This year at the Abundance360 summit in March, we're going to have at least four of the humanoid robot companies there. I want everybody to touch, feel, place an order for them if you want. I've got an order on a Neo Gamma One X Technologies robot. You know, do the dishes, you know, fold the clothing, all of that. But these robots are coming fast. And I think, you know, Elon has made the statement that 80% of Tesla's future revenues are going to come from sales of the Optimus. And here's a quote that came from his earnings call. He says it won't even seem like a robot. It'll seem like a human in a robot suit. It will seem so real that you need to poke it to tell that it's a robot. And he's speaking about Optimus v3, which he's going to be releasing at the end of Q1 of 2026. So super excited about that. And this is, I think an important point that the future of work. So a lot of people are coming out very clearly and saying, hey, no more work. AI and robots will replace all jobs. Working will be optional. One of the things that's important, this goes back to the work that we did at Singularity, that the jobs that these robots will take to a large degree are the jobs that are dull and dangerous and dirty. Selim, you want to add anything to that?

Well, I think that's where you'll see the first massive use cases for these is the work that human beings aren't good at or it's too dangerous, or it's too chemically toxic environments, for example, et cetera. I think that's where they'll really shine. But I think we'll see them used first in very specific niche use cases where it's very clear to have bounded environments and dangerous environments over time it'll make sense to have it in the home, et cetera, et cetera. I just think it's going to take a lot longer than people think to get into the home and have it be folding your laundry.

Yeah, well, I think it's there now and I think we'll see. It's just not evenly distributed. I want to hit three stories from Amazon here. The first one is that Amazon robot fleet has grown 66 fold in the last decade, which is pretty extraordinary. Huge investments. The second related story here is that Amazon is expected to replace 600,000 workers with additional robots by 2023. And the third story is that Amazon's on the rise in the delivery game. Right. They are surpassing FedEx UPS and about to surpass the US Post Office, which by the way, personally, I wish we would put the US Post Office out of our misery. I mean, honestly, the cost of it, it's a losing proposition. I don't know why it isn't commercialized. Thoughts on that?

I think they're going to join together and unionize these robots.

Well, another thing that happened at Amazon today was they announced a AR headset that Amazon has. So the drivers are going to be wearing these glasses as they go and deliver things so that it captures the delivery and process and it helps you avoid any obstacles. I think what's really going on is that those glasses the drivers are wearing are helping create the data sets to train the delivery robots to displace the drivers.

Yeah, I think that's a reasonable assumption. I mean, the way that AI will enter the workforce is it will scan every email and word document and thing you've created and create a virtual replica of you and then you can zoom call it and do everything. They won't even notice that you're gone in the workforce. And the robotics is the same as again, you're training up the replacements. And this is a big concern because ultimately a lot of human jobs, again, approximate being a machine. We talk about AGI and all this stuff in terms of brand new discoveries and that's what's amazing. But most of the economy is being a cook, not a chef. Not coming up with the recipes, but just executing on it. And okay, you might make the same occasional mistake. That's why you have a humanoid and a human actually interfere every so often. Just like a Waymo. It can obviously drive better than a human right now, but you've still got a human looking at it remotely. And I think that's probably how you see the first integration. One human to 10 robots, then 100 robots and then, yeah, that's what we.

Have right now in a lot of the drone delivery fleets, like wings and zipline.

Right.

There's a room full of humans that are there just in case.

So let me give the two ends of the spectrum here, right? One end of the spectrum is we better get to UBI super fast because there'll be no human work left. That's the pessimistic view. And the problem is from a policy perspective, to go from a tax union, labor employment construct to that is such a huge leap. We have no confidence in public sector in getting us there. So that's one challenge around that. On the other side of the equation there's enormous optimism because we end up doing other types of work. You know, you and I talk about this Peter. The highest penetration of robots in the world are in Sweden, South Korea and Germany. And the lowest unemployment in the world is Sweden, South Korea and Germany. Right. And so we then shift human beings to do increased efficiency, design thinking, problem solving, et cetera. And every time we've seen a major technology injection into the world, we increase employment, we don't decrease employment. So that's the optimism side. The pessimism side is if it actually does take over in this way. But Imad, you've made that distinction that in the past capital needed labor and capital does not need labor anymore. And so that's a massive discontinuity that we're going to have to deal with and absorb in the next few decades. It's a big one.

When I did a podcast with Ray Dalio, you know the we're discussing this. The purpose of the Fed and interest rate is you lower interest in order to get money flowing in so that companies can buy equipment and hire workers. But what happens if when you get access to low dollars, you buy more AI and more robots?

Yeah, I think the problem that is being articulated here is that there is no obvious solution on the optimistic or pessimistic side. And the pessimistic side, UBI and how that would work is really not well articulated. And on the optimistic side, even the most optimistic folks, which I think we probably count as that, believe that there's going to be a time period where we're not ready. It's happening too fast for us to know what to do with these people.

Let me ask you your opinion of that time period. Right. So when I think AI is going to give us this incredibly hopeful, optimistic and abundant future, you know, a decade out or thereabouts. I mean my concern is the three day time period during instabilities from countries not understanding how to deal with this, the rate of change, people being so attached to their jobs that they are losing their Identity. What do you think about that stability and that time period? Imod?

Yeah. So I wrote a book about this, the Last Economy. And I'm like, it's been a thousand days since ChatGPT came out.

Yeah.

You know, so I put a thousand days from now, human cognitive labor is negative in value. You're the dumbest person.

So let's talk about that one. Say, it's a really important point you make and I want people to understand it. The idea that human both labor and cognitive value is negative, or human labor and cognitive capacity is negative in value. Can you just double click on that for me?

Yeah. If you're on a team and everyone's a genius that can think and work around the clock and you can't because you're human and you can't access infinite numbers of GPUs, then you are the dumbest person on the team. You drag down the whole team in terms of its coordination. And now AI can think longer and it can perform tasks proactively. Within three years, most of these cognitive equals value add jobs can be replaced. Not they will be like, you know, the San Francisco metro people are all safe in their jobs. As public sector, that doesn't require efficiency. But the private sector, it can be replaced. And over the following years following that, they will be replaced because again, it's the private sector.

The analogy. Also on autonomous cars, if there are autonomous cars driving and you're a human driver, you're actually reducing the safety of the roads.

And doctors with diagnosis, why would you allow a doctor to make a diagnosis?

Oh my God. So here are the numbers, right? And I speak about this all the time. There was a study done out of Stanford and Harvard that looked at diagnostic accuracy. And a human doctor by themselves on this particular study was getting 74% accuracy. If that human physician used GPT4, it went from 74% to 76%. If GPT4 did the diagnostics without the human in the loop, it was I think, 92%. The human actually added incredible bias and misinformation into the diagnosis.

Yeah.

And the latest GPT5 is probably around about 98%. Extrapolating the data there to be fair.

For the poor doctors. How do you track all the conditions, treatment, therapeutics?

Forget about the poor doctors. What are the poor patients that have to deal with them? We're talking about making it illegal to drive a car and illegal to be a doctor basically to diagnosis.

Well, it's going to be malpractice to diagnose without AI doing the diagnosis.

It shouldn't be. But then you've got the immune system response. Right. A couple years ago, Texas banned telemedicine because surely you have to go to the doctor in person there for every little spot on your hand.

Well, it's all going to fall apart.

This Luddite revolt that we're seeing today.

This idea that I spend eight years postgraduate to get a medical degree and I'm spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in the medical school and then I graduate in AI. And by the way, a humanoid robot is going to be a far better surgeon than any human surgeon.

I just wouldn't want to be first. But yeah, I think it's already too late in some ways. For example, if you're a cancer doctor today, there are several hundred cancer research papers published per day, Right. You have no hope in reading those. You'll have an AI read those and say, hey, this applies to these. These five papers are the ones you should read for the patients you're dealing with. That combination is where we expect it to be like we've seen in chess. The world's best chess players are a human being and a computer.

I think there is one interesting upside, though, because even if it's true that this gets better and better for diagnosis, there is something important about biological connection, about human to human connection.

Sure.

And I think it'll bring the craft of being a doctor around the EQ much higher.

But are you going to spend 10 years of your life and a million dollars in education fees to get that?

No. But I think you'll probably get a different type of education. Knowing how to use the AI to deliver the best possible care, where the best possible care includes the human to human connection.

Fantastic. Totally agree. It's just the medical schools are going to evaporate.

I mean, look, this is a bigger economic disruption than Covid and it's around the world at the same time. But there's no vaccine for AI. Again, we have to get ahead of it because we know it's coming. And again, when we look at this, people have to be given a positive view of the future to navigate what's coming. I mean, that is ready now.

That is one of my pet peeves, one of my rants. Can I go on this one? So one of my biggest concerns is that we do not have television program, movie programming that gives our families, our kids, our society, a positive vision of the future. Everything is dystopian, killer robots, rogue AIs. And if that's the vision you're seeing of the future, of course you think the world's going to hell in a handbasket. And so we need that. We need to develop the programming that gives people a vision of the future. Right. You know the old adage, without a vision, the people will perish.

One of the positive comments we get about the podcast was we're relentlessly optimistic about the future. Which is why I think visioneering is so important, because we can craft that future and say, let's envision that radically positive future. And then by the way, here's the mechanism to make it happen. And by the way, we have a 30 year track record. It's a no brainer.

Yeah. I mean, people need to have agency. If you feel like you're a victim to all of this and you have no ability to control it, you're going to bury your head under the pillow. But you know, we want to say no, that's not the case. That's why we're here at Visioneering. That's what we all believe, believe in that the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself. Let's create that positive vision of the future that we so dearly desire.

I think that also, you know, you look at visioneering and everything, core team is very easy to build. Extended team is so hard. This is the most fantastic time ever because you've got digital and physical buddies to allow you to have such a massive leverage to the world. And again, as you said, you need to have the right mindset to do that.

Though let's jump into the endpoint of this, which is the economy and the implications of this. So I think to put the amount of spend in perspective, it's important to realize that the current AI boom is still relatively small as compared to past AI tech expenditures. So here we are. That red line at the, at the far right is about a 1% spend of the US GDP for our current AI investments. It compares to, to the US and railroads was at 3.5% of the GDP at the time. Electrification was 2% and even the Internet build out and Telecom was at 1.5%. So it's not out of whack. We're in, you know, we've talked about this. We're in a war footing right now. Like it for good reasons or not, we're in a war footing against China. I'd rather be in a war footing against dystopian uses of AI.

But the good news is we've gone from oil to silicon as that major foundation for the future, which is fantastic.

Yeah. This is an interesting chart it's an eye chart, but let me just call it out. You can see everything at the far left starts at a 0%. And this is the price changes in the US since 2000 over the last 25 years. And what we see is on the bottom of this, on the far right and the bottom that, you know, televisions have demonetized by 96%. Cell phones are down 41%. Clothing at 1% increase. New cars at 25% increase. But then we see above, we see hospital services at 256% increase. Right. Which is insane, given what we just said about AI and robots coming in. It should be demonetizing that. College tuition, 187% increase. And we've talked about this. I think colleges are in deep trouble. Super deep trouble.

Right.

It's better for you to go become an electrician, a plumber, you know, a welder. Comments on this.

Yeah. Well, it looks, it looks like this stuff's getting more expensive. And you look at the categories, it's the stuff that actually matters that's getting more expensive. Right. To the average person. Food, you know, cars, housing. And it's not actually getting more expensive. It's that the dollar is being degraded.

Yes.

And it's illusion. It's the boiling, the frog analogy. Right. And sneaking up on everybody.

So speak about that a little bit more, please.

Well, basically what's happening is that we think that everybody who gets in office starts to make a lot of noise about balancing the budget and we're going to cut spending, etc. Even Doge came in and said we're going to cut trillions of dollars. It's starting to dawn on everybody that that's just not true. Not now, but ever. That this is a unique time in history. There is so much debt and so much interest on the debt that there's only one way to get out of it. Not, not a debate of maybe we do this, maybe we do that. One answer is to print more money. And so what they're going to do, and we know this is going to happen in 2026, is the interest rates are going to come down. It's going to have an illusion again of things looking good. Stocks will go up and they're going to print enormous amounts of money and the, the dollar. But the buying power of a dollar is going to continue to drop and people are going to wake up one day thinking they have money, but they can't buy anything.

Here's the, Here are the numbers. The US debt has reached $38 trillion. An all time high. Just for fun, that $38 trillion is equivalent to the GDP of China, India, Japan, Germany and the UK combined.

Yeah, can I rant on this for a second?

You can definitely rant about it.

So, you know, we floated off the gold standard in the 70s, and ever since then we've been printing more money to keep pace. And there's a fundamental structural problem here, is when they floated off the gold standard, they did not realize that technology was deflationary. Jeff Booth wrote this book called the Price of Tomorrow where he sees that for the last 50 years, every dollar increase in global GDP has come with a 4, $4 increase in global debt. So we're borrowing from the future to 4x to 1 to fund the GDP increases of today. That's obviously not sustainable. At some point it's going to come crashing down. A good metaphor for this is, let's say I borrow $10 million to build a TV factory and I plan to sell those for $1,000 each. Well, a year later I can only sell those for $500. A year later I can only sell those for $250. I'm never paying back the 200, the $10 million. So I just have to print more money on an ongoing basis. This is why bitcoin is powerful. The reason it's so interesting is that it gives you money velocity without debt.

And there's an illusion, right? When you own a house that's worth a million dollars when you buy it, and five, ten years later, it's worth $2 million. Oh my God, made money. Our house is now worth a lot more. In reality, it's not exactly.

It's not only not worth more, if you had denominated mentally in bitcoin or gold, you would actually be able to use less bitcoin and less gold to buy that house, but an enormous amount of more dollars.

But most people don't understand that it's, you know, it's inflation costing your house price to go up.

That's right. And so if you take this as a natural trend, it's not that someday this will blow up. It's already blown up. There is, as I said there. It's not. It's not a question of what's going to happen.

That green curve looks startlingly like the beginning of an exponential. And it's a bad exponential.

And it's about to get. It's about to happen.

I mean, there is. Let's talk about the fact that we're about to make the cost of labor and intelligence effectively Zero. And when we divide by zero, the GDP goes towards infinity. What's the implication of that?

It's irrelevant because GDP is not a great measure of the future.

Right.

If I create a breast cancer saving device, GDP drops.

Stan Kuznets, the author of GDP, came up with it, said it's the worst thing to measure the economy. And actually social, please don't use it. I think this is a super interesting thing here because basically the economy is running out of all its room at the same time as that exponential change. And that feels like a bit of a coincidence, but I don't really think it is because the solution to this is also the technology. We don't want debt fueled money and a debt fueled future. What you want is real productive output that impacts humans by guiding this technology appropriately. And this is the defining question of our time. We developed the most impressive, powerful technologies of the future. Do we use it for abundance or do we use it for competition? Positive sum or negative sum?

Great point, Eric. Let me ask you to talk about the central banks now hold more gold than US Treasuries.

Yeah. So you have to ask yourself, what do they know? Why?

Right.

This is the first time in a long, long time, decades that they're holding more gold. And every single central bank on the entire planet will buy all the gold that they can find. So this is not stopping. Right. And so the reason is because they don't want to be beholden to the dollar. And there's two reasons for that. One is obviously they can, they believe it's going to continue to be printed and continue to be debased. And the other is whether you are in favor of Russia. I don't know who is, or Ukraine in that war. What happened was the United States took the global reserve currency, which is supposed to be apolitical, and said we're going to put massive sanctions on Russia. Now that might sound like a good thing. You're trying to be punitive and you're trying to rein in a rogue state. But the truth is everyone in the world is dependent on this dollar and suddenly wakes up and says, wait a.

Minute, they, they can, they can pull the rug out from under me.

Yeah, they can do that to them. Who knows who's going to be in the White House tomorrow. Who knows what predilections they'll have. They might not like me for whatever reason. So now we have to get off the dollar. Where do you go if you get off the dollar? You're not going to the peso, you're.

Going to Gold, Yeah, or bitcoin. Most of my, most of my assets are in bitcoin, which is doing well today. All right, let's talk about a last topic to cap it off. Something, you know, that you might have heard of. It's kind of small. It's called quantum technologies. So interestingly enough, today we saw Trump announcing he wants to put money into a few quantum firms. In particular, he's looking at investments into IonQ, Rigetti, D, D Wave, Shervin Pishabar, who's here, and I took D Wave public a few years ago. It's had an 8,000% return, which is extraordinary through our SPAC. And today on the news that they're considering this, it's gone up. These stocks have gone up 10 to 15%.

These technologies are the infrastructure of the future. And again, governments run infrastructure. And so that gives you an idea of where things are going to go.

Interesting. So you think this stuff will get nationalized?

I think there is a good possibility that it will because I think most jobs will be public sector jobs in this interim period, just like we saw after 1929.

There's also another theory which is that if you're going to get out of this enormous debt and the only thing you could think of is print more money, what if you actually put some of that printed money into something that goes up in some way that does get a thousand x.

So you know, we've talked about a bitcoin strategic reserve for the U.S. i'm all for it. I want to take a moment and close on one of the most important announcements that occurred in the last 24 hours. And that's out of a company called Google. So our friend Hartmut Nevin, who's been on the stage, we had a Google XPRIZE that's in progress, still had an announcement through, through Sundar and it's that, well, actually, Imad, why don't you tell us about it.

It's the first verifiable quantum advantage. So a reproducible algorithm that runs 13,000 times faster than the top supercomputer frontier to do this kind of molecular material binding. And so this is the first time that's happened and it's never going to be the same again.

So I mean, let's talk about the implications of quantum R, because I think, you know, people have been starting to get a feel for where AI is going and a lot of people believe that quantum will outpace AI in terms of its implications on humanity and industries.

I think with AI, there's the bitter lesson but we can tell the capabilities just by the scaling. The thing with quantum optimization is you can't. It's step function changes for the hardest optimization problems in the world, and it's instant.

Yeah.

Can I tell that little story?

Yeah, of course.

So a year or 18 months ago, two years ago, we had Hartman David in here. Okay, so 10 years ago, Steve Jervison spoke at Singularity University and talked about quantum computing. And somebody asked, where's all this computation coming from? And he said, I'm going to give you the answer, but you're not going to like it. The consensus amongst all the physicists is that we're doing the computation in parallel universes and bringing the answer back. And everybody went, okay. He said, I told you you wouldn't like it. Two years ago, we had Hartmuth on stage and we asked him that same question. We now have 10 years more of data experiments that many more teams have been working on it. We said, where is all this computation coming from? He goes, you're not going to like the answer. In fact, he went further than what Steve said. He said the existence of a quantum computer would be definitive, that we live in a parallel universe and we live in a multiverse. At which point, everybody needs to drink some tequila.

So we're going to watch this space. The implications of quantum computing are on material sciences, on biology, on. On everything. What's your favorite, your favorite hope for quantum computing?

Well, I think it can help us guide ourselves to better social systems. I think those are massively optimizable. And quantum is one of the ways that we can do it.

There's an intersection here that's very powerful. We've been moving more and more stuff to AI which needs compute. Compute will solve all these problems. Problems like we can solve all math, for example, and intersecting with quantum, you get instant solution of all this stuff, which is unreal, but also at the.

Pace that it's moving, we don't know the implications. And for instance, if already the quantum computers have broken bitcoin, the last thing we would know that is that they've broken Bitcoin. They would already. They'd be infiltrating bitcoin. They'd be moving things properly. And then you'd find out one day when Satoshi's bitcoins are in somebody else's wallet. So it's going to sneak up on us. But we have very few years to get ahead of it.

The Singularity is now. I mean, that episode we did. So for those of you who have not seen it. We did an episode on Monday which is mind boggling. Go listen to it. It's called the Singularity is now on Peter's channel.

Yeah, amazing. I'll close out by saying if you're not familiar with the XPRIZE foundation, go. Please visit xprize.org I hope you guys will consider joining us at Visioneering 2026. The conversations we have here are some of the most optimistic on the planet. It's the notion that there is no problem we cannot solve. The committed, passionate human mind is able to take on anything, especially when it's got AIs and quantum computers there to help it. Imad, Eric, Salim, you and I will be flying, I guess east in a few days. We're off to.

The real slogan is head east, young men.

Yes.

And speaking of optimism, I think it's one of the most optimistic trips that I'll be taking because it's our opportunity to decentralize AI and bring that power to the people, to the benefit of humanity. And I'm really honored to be part of that project.

Yeah, we'll talk about it on the next pod. But. But Imad and his team have been working on something spectacular called sage, which is the sovereign AI governance engine. And we'll talk about it on our next episode perhaps. All right, thank you guys.

Thank you, Peter.

Be well. Every week, my team and I study the top 10 technology metatrends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from humanoid robotics and AGI and quantum computing to transport energy, longevity, and more. There's no fluff, only the most important stuff that matters that impacts our lives, our companies and our careers. If you want me to share these metatrends with you, I write a newsletter twice a week, sending it out as a short 2 minute read via email. And if you want to discover the most important meta trends ten years before anyone else, this report's for you. Readers include founders and CEOs from the world's most disruptive companies and entrepreneurs building the world's most disruptive tech. It's not for you if you don't want to be informed about what's coming, why it matters, and how you can benefit from it. To subscribe for free, go to dashmandis.com metatrends to gain access to the trends 10 years before anyone else. All right, now back to this episode.

Sam.