Jensen’s Spy Probe, Anthropic’s Debut Week, and Elon’s 30M Robot Workforce | #310

This is just, it's a bad. This is a bad look for NVIDIA. It's a bad look for the PoxSilica. What's going on with the PoxSilica? The whole point of the PoxSilica initiative was supposed to carve out almost like a new iron wall between or sphere of influence for the West that would keep Western silicon, Western GPU, Western compute, Western AI and superintelligence infrastructure within our sphere of influence. And then it turns out, to your point, Peter, that allegedly, but now perhaps based on Jensen's public comments, there's a single point of failure. All it takes is one person at the top of one company to completely pierce the pox silica, and then billions of dollars of GPU compute ends up in China.

I think the bigger story here is maybe less about the failures or foibles of one man and more about pox silica apparently being far more porous and fallible than some would otherwise hope. Well, not just that, Alex. I mean, like we were talking to Brett Adcock yesterday. These next training runs, including his, are billion dollar investments in a single training run. And the result of it is a parameter file that fits on a thumb drive. There's never been an espionage opportunity that's as leveraged as that. All that intellectual property captured on a thumb drive. We had the other espionage, you know, of the Saudi employee at, what was it, at OpenAI or Anthropic.

They put their thumb drive in the back of a TV. Yep, yep. No, it's going to get really serious here. Also, you know, if the CCP actually sent somebody after Jensen, they must have sent people after the executive staff, too. So the board will have to dig into, OK, well, who else has been in contact with people that are CCP that they didn't know? Because they're not just after chip supply, they're after tech specs as well. And I'm sure they'll ferret out four or five others. I think this is more an influence operation than an espionage operation. Like, I don't think Jensen is sneaking out blueprints.

No, no, no. yeah i think you know uh maybe liking chinese models a bit too much was my first kind of reaction well he's been very pro everyone's made the pun about liking chinese models yeah so but i'm sorry it took me a while to get that that was the best tweet i saw yesterday was somebody said uh jensen you know we talk about chinese models but really yeah Yeah. So I think the chips being in Malaysia, going via Singapore, none of this is new, right? Like, there's no way the US government secret service didn't know about that and are monitoring everywhere that Jensen goes. So one of the interesting things is why is it coming out now, you know?

And I think when combined with Cohere's analysis showing backdoors being automatically generated by some Chinese open source models, we should probably expect a massive push by the US government and others against anything Chinese, just like we've seen robotic parts and robots from China being banned in America. So I think this is a precursor of something else. Because again, I very much doubt this is like, oh my gosh, there are GPUs that have been siphoned off here. Oh my gosh, you know, like you're seeing this person. You make a really good point. I mean, Jensen and all the heads of the frontier labs have got to be the most closely watched humans on the planet by the CIA and FBI.

The pressure must be unbelievable. And so they've probably known about this for a while. And so why is it coming out now politically? Yeah. And like I said, the GPUs, like any of us that look to NVIDIA's numbers are like, huh, Malaysia is the biggest consumer per capita of NVIDIA GPUs. I wonder what they're doing with it, right? Like the GPU is going, this was all known. And again, the question is why now? And so the expectation is that this is a precursor for a big pushback. In terms of NVIDIA's board, it's all stacked with Jensen's long-term partners and others. Nothing much will happen. And I mean, if Jensen did step aside as CEO because of this, I mean, Dave, what would that do to the NVIDIA stock price?

I think that would destroy it. Yeah, there's no succession plan at all that I can detect. It would be devastating. Yeah. You know, because of the physical assets, it's almost entirely a virtual company. You know, the physical assets are near zero. So it doesn't have fabs. It has a lot of patents. It has a lot of interconnect technology, but it doesn't make any of it. And so you can't do kind of like Tim Cook at Apple kind of wrote it, you know, keep optimizing the physical construction of the iPhone and ride it out without really innovating. There's no equivalent at NVIDIA where you're just going to ride it out without innovating.

You have to innovate. Yeah, he has 42 direct reports as well. So imagine replacing him. I mean, I do think on the timing front, it's worth just speaking to the elephant in this room, which is the midterms. This is handing a new Congress on a silver platter as scandal. ...salacious excuse to investigate NVIDIA, investigate Chinese connections, and investigate, in general, the AI-slash-SI industry from a national security perspective. Stand in the gears. Slow things down. Yeah. I mean, here's a question for you. Do you think that Chinese-born researchers will be allowed to continue working in frontier labs?

Yes. Historically, from a regulatory perspective, that's been the domain usually of the executive, less so. I mean, there could be statutes, but usually fast moving regulations regarding foreign nationals and sensitive technologies are the domain of the executive. And so I think it's up to this White House as to whether it wants to start to exclude foreign nationals from superintelligence. It certainly has the option to, as I understand, its applicable regulatory role, whether it will choose to or whether it will try to distinguish between access to some sensitive, say, frontier models that haven't yet become publicly available. Don't know. Could go either way. I think that's a no-brainer. Foreign citizens are almost certainly going to get whacked.

I think the question is Chinese-born U.S. nationalized or U.S. naturalized citizens, will they get whacked, which is very toxic, I think. I hope that doesn't happen. Yeah, if you look at all of the frontier labs, I mean, there is a significant double-digit percentage that are Chinese-born U.S. citizens right now, right? The Chinese people as a whole have performed, you know, in the math Olympiad at the highest levels. They have a predilection towards being brilliant in these fields. And I remember at one point, you know, XAI was like over 50 percent Chinese engineers. Pretty extraordinary. We're not stereotyping here at all at this point.

My goodness. No, I mean, if it's a brilliant population. organization, so be it. Well, what I will say, though, I think we're maybe conflating the issue of ethnicity with nationality. Statutorily, from an export control perspective, the export control, you're exporting either to a foreign national. So if you're a U.S. person, regardless of nation of origin or ancestry, if you're a U.S. person, U.S. citizen, U.S. permanent resident, and you're physically within the U.S. My understanding is that's not a deemed export, whereas if you're a U.S. person who is overseas or you're a non-U.S. person, like non-U.S. citizen, then that's an export. So I would expect from an export control perspective, which is probably the most enticing regulatory instrument for deciding certain employees at Frontier Labs may or may not get access to certain critical and emerging technologies. I would expect it to come down to nationality, not ethnicity. I don't think anyone is suggesting ethnicity-based exports. No, no, not ethnicity. It's where were you born? You know, it's not an ethnic thing. Nation of origin is a protected class in this country. I don't think. Is that true for nuclear research, too? I'm not entirely sure how that

works. But if you're working on nuclear weapons and you were born in Iran, like my sister actually was born in Iran. Are you investigated? Not that I know of, but how would I know? 30 seconds. Asking for a friend. 30 second explainer. So the Department of Energy maintains what's called the Q clearance, letter Q clearance system, which is their version of security clearances. And so, yeah, my understanding is there's a DOE investigation process. If it's anything like the Department of War's investigation process. It's a function of U.S., usually, I think, U.S. citizenship and then a whole bunch of criteria on top of that.

I mean, let's be clear. This is the biggest economic engine on the planet. This is shooting for dominance of a godlike intelligence. I think we know a minute fraction of 1% of the influence campaigns and espionage campaigns going on. And I think, Dave, you said this, you have to assume, I mean, you're having a conversation with somebody at MIT, I won't say who, saying, you know, there are probably, quote unquote, Chinese spies throughout the organization, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. No, that's 100%. Every university has a big problem. Also, did I tell you the robots, the Chinese robots, they investigated internally within MIT, and they are definitely transmitting video and audio back to China.

So they had to actually put all the robots in a separate room and they're still there, but they don't let them walk around the labs anymore. So yeah, that was a, I think they pretty much proved it. I don't know if they're going to publish that or not. I'm going to say something. I think long term, long term, the trust issue will cause them major problems over time. But short term, it's going to be... I think you will see security clearance being required to work on any frontier model, number one. They'll be classified in that way. Number two, I think you're going to see some witch hunts. And number three, I think you're going to see them come hard after Chinese open source models.

I think that's what this is all leading up to. What does going hard on open source models mean? You can't use open source models in any mission-critical software to do with the government or anything like that in case it installs backdoors automatically, like the Cohere study showed. Or is it not banking? Yeah, any regulated industry, no Chinese models are allowed. Exactly, banking, insurance, all other regulated industries, cars, drones, anything that could be spying or dangerous. And I really feel like inside any frontier lab or any research lab at all, there'll be a push to say, yeah, don't run any Chinese models that could be spying or transmitting.

Or it's just so easy to transmit. When something's connected to the Internet, it's so easy to encode things in all kinds of bizarre timing ways. I think Ahmad was talking about that on one of the prior pods. It's just so leaky. So, yeah, anything regulated, anything research. I can imagine. There's never been anything like this, Peter. This is like unique in human history because, yeah, nuclear research, weapons research is highly, highly regulated, highly watched, but it's not an economic driver for the country. Here you have the biggest industry for driving the wealth of your nation combined with the biggest military weapon of all time, all in the same tiny little file that fits on a thumb drive.

I mean, nothing has ever been this big of a flashpoint in history. We saw the encampments for Japanese, you know, Americans back in World War II. I hope we don't start to see that happening here. I don't think I'm not quite even sure what we're talking about here. I don't see anyone suggesting a nation of origin or ethnic based anything relating to frontier labs. I think the Jensen Huang story on the face of it is the story of espionage targeting apparently CEO of a prominent company, presumably in order to siphon sensitive exports to China. I don't see anyone that I can maybe. I'm missing something, suggesting that we're going to see a repeat of internment camps of ethnic Japanese U.S. persons from World War II.

I don't see anyone suggesting that. I'm not going there. I'm saying sort of by analogy, requiring the frontier labs not to employ individuals of ethnic origin from China. Well, maybe let me still mend the other side, though, which is in some sense, to Dave's earlier point, bringing in Chinese open-weight models as these models increase in capability is in some sense bringing people, not before people get triggered, not like political persons. So we don't need to rehash the AI personhood discussion here. But when you take a model and you connect it via computer use assistant type tooling to an entire environment, maybe to Ahmad's earlier point, you embody it in a robotic body. In some sense, you're taking something with the capabilities of a person from overseas and you're embodying it either digitally or physically in the U.S. And at some point, the U.S. has all sorts of controls, pretty well advertised at this point, on immigration of natural bodied humans. But at some point, bringing in non-U.S. models into the U.S. and hooking them up to the internet and robots starts to look a little bit in terms of its raw capabilities like AI or SI immigration. And I do expect that to get tightly

controlled. Yeah. Salim, close us out here, would you? I think you might have had it right. I think there'll be some witch hunts. I think there'll be strong security clearances. There's clearly a lot going on that we don't see. When we talk about this particular incident, I wonder who wins by this all coming out? Is it because it's not the White House, really? So what gives here? So I'm trying to struggling to find the incentives, but certainly it's a huge kerfuffle. I mean, my God, this is going to just change the game completely. How do you now price any of these stocks or IPOs going forward? I think China wins. I mean, China, to the extent that this was in part like a Chinese foreign op, this makes, I think, our Pax Silica effort look feckless. If you can just punch a hole right through the Pax Silica wall by having an agent sleep with the CEO of a prominent U.S. company, what's the point of having a Pax Silica at all? So, guys, I'm glad to be back on the pod. Salim, you did a great job hosting last time. Thank you for doing that.

It looked empty with only three of us on the thing. It was like, hey, what's going on here? But good to have you back here. Last Friday when you guys recorded, I was at the UP Summit that a friend of mine, Cyrus Segiri, puts on. It was awesome. I was there with Jared Isaacman, who is just an incredible NASA administrator. And then I I spent time with Keller Clifton from Zipline. He just announced a $1.5 billion financing on $20 billion. Yeah, incredible financing. He announced a million Uber EAT deliveries per year is what he signed Uber up for. And then nationwide with Walmart. So you order anything, you get it eight minutes later.

We're going to be doing a pod with Keller up at Zipline very soon. I did an interview with Martine Rothblatt and Dillian, the CEO of Varda. So I don't know if you guys know Varda. It's an incredible company. They ship into orbit small vehicles, probably, I don't know, about a half a meter in diameter. And they carry 10 kilograms of proteins that crystallize in zero G. They go to any orbit. They have like three on orbit right now. Martine ordered one for crystallizing certain proteins. And she explained the economics of this. It's like, typically, it's like micrograms of a drug gets injected into a person, and when you can crystallize, you know, 10 kilograms of a protein, you've got hundreds of millions of dollars of product that come down.

They land them in Australia. And then I was there. Larry Page was there. I haven't seen Larry in ages, you know, the co-founder of Google. And guess what, guys? He listens to the pod. He's a fan of Moonshot. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah, that's cool. Super cool. did larry invite us to shoot an episode of the pod from his yacht ah no he did not larry's keeping on the down low uh very much don't want any photo we could do it on the down low a little chill pod on the back of the yacht i could do it with video off and then i i spent time with uh with blake shoal from boom uh who's great he's happy to come on the pod and then uh joe ben from joe b aviation Just an amazing group of people there.

That's so ironic that we were shooting the pod without you while you were talking to Larry about liking the pod. Yeah, it was fun. Do you guys remember, Salim, remember the conversation you guys had about economics? output per watt on the last pod so yeah we were there i i listen i just make sure you remember i listened to it and so i went and ran some models and uh i want to give you the numbers i came up with uh because it's it's it's interesting so uh so you're posthumously wedging yourself into that yes i am i was jealous about the conversation so the question was if if you look at anthropics

I have to save that one day for the prediction episode. I have some hot takes. Okay. All right. All right. Talking about weird things. Can I show you guys where I am? Okay. Of course. Where are you, Salim? yeah so i am in the press box of the san francisco giants at oracle park um oh cool looking out over the baseball field yeah it's empty because we're doing watching an empty field there's a special there's a special event going on here i'm just going to share my screen because i got to show you this uh insane image i'm here for an akamai talk uh with a bunch of people and it's kind of insane uh i i'm gonna be standing on top of the dugout uh to do my my keynote you've reached new heights it's just like weird uh weird beyond belief i'm struggling salim to make some sort of pun about the deep bench needing a deep bench so that's uh me on the big screen there um where they're talking about the the keynote i'm about to give and so i'm going to be standing on the dugout addressing the crowd which are going to be in the normal stands and then afterwards they're going to meet uh do a walk around and do

a cocktail event etc are you throwing out a pitch or anything no thank god they did not ask me to do that i'm a i'm a cricket player from india so i end up bowling rather than doing anything else so now that's the moonshot ladies and gentlemen this episode is brought to you by the abundant summit and link ventures welcome to moonshot to everyone your number one podcast on all things ai exponential and apparently baseball uh your front row seat to the hypersonic tsunami i'm here with the fabulous Five, the Curious Quintet, are here with us today. Alex Friesner-Gross, our resident ASI. Dave Blundin, our guru of AI investing.

Salim Ismail, our warlord against linear thinking. And Imad Moustak, back by popular demand, the man quietly coding the future of humanity. Imad, I can't wait until you can share the stuff that you're working on. It's amazing. And I'm Peter D. Madness, your host. data-driven optimist. Our mission here, as always, help you understand what's happening, what just happened, what it means for you, for your portfolio, for your business, for your family, and to keep you optimistic. Okay, so here's our number for this week. It's 30 hours. That's how long a team of about 1,000 Claude Fable 5.2 agents took to formalize Format's Last Theorem. We'll talk about that. The same lab with their last model took 11 days versus 30 hours now.

And of course, the human mathematician Andrew Wiles needed seven years. Alex, it feels like math is becoming a team sport for AI. I think math is post-cooked at this point. I've said it's cooked enough times. So it's post-cooked. It's time to start cooking other things. Math is in the rear view mirror. It's a dessert at this point. If you haven't subscribed, please do. We post twice a week because it's accelerating. You can subscribe on X at at moonshots underscore pod. We put our most provocative clips from each episode up on that X account. So check them out. All right. Let's buckle up and jump in.

Our first story. Let's jump into Anthropic. So a few major announcements here. First off on their IPO and second on their two new model releases in the last 24 hours. On the IPO front, Anthropic launched their IPO roadshow today, pricing the IPO somewhere around $1.3 to $1.4 trillion, down from $1.5 trillion and the previous $2 trillion valuation they had floated. The IPO is expected the week before Thanksgiving. I think there's going to be a lot of signal there as to how it performs going forward. Dave, do you expect a strong performance? Well, things are blowing hot and cold so regularly these days.

you just have to pick a random day but i think they'll do fine though the cash flow from the company and the margins are great they're pricing it down to try and give it a pop which is probably good strategy and you know they don't have to raise the full hundred billion dollars on day one they can do a shelf registration and then do a secondary soon thereafter so they i think they're doing the right thing but just get it out started trading you know get the war chest built and you know also it's going to be a a moment where they probably bypass open ai in capital raised and valuation so they'll probably celebrate the heck out of that try and make big news and you know encourage all of corporate america to trust their their models and use that as a weapon against open and AI.

I think it's a good strategy. I'm not saying buy the IPO or don't buy the IPO, but they're pricing it intelligently a little below where, you know, the $2 trillion original target. Yeah. All right. Let's jump into the model releases, Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2. Reminder, Fable is for everyone, and it's got cyber and bio safeguards built in. Mythos is being used only for vetted, trusted partners. They're both up 30% faster than the 5.1 versions and cheaper, $8 per million input tokens and $40 per out. Anthropic says in testing, Fable 5.2 solved two open problems in black hole physics. I'm sure Alex will tell us about it.

They designed three working devices with a circuit board company called Diode. That's pretty cool, going from prompt to product engineering. And as mentioned, a team of about 1,000 agents formalized Fermat's last theorem in 30 hours versus 11 days for the last research model. They also report that METHOS accurately modeled 28 of 34 gene therapy virus shells called capsids. Alex and Iman, I want to go to you for details. We've got a few charts here as well as semi-analysis GDPX index. Let's take a look. And Alex, kick it off. What do you think of these two models? Astonishing. So maybe let me just start with my favorite informal five-minute benchmark for generalist models at this point, which is I ask them to generate a fun, interactive, rich cyberpunk FPS.

And we'll show that a little bit, yeah. Yep. So very satisfied with the output. Talking about the benchmarks, though, this is, I mean, obviously we're in an era, I talk about this all the time, of saturating all of the benchmarks. That shouldn't be surprising. What is more interesting is the benchmarks themselves are starting to migrate in interesting directions. So, first with OpenAI, as we talked on the pod actually at Moonshots Live about dropping Astra into a car and having a drive around via a driving bench. And now with the new Fable 5.2 demonstrating exceptional performance on robotics challenges. I really think those pure play, so-called physical AI, aka robotics companies that were betting on world models being a freestand.

class, they may be facing a bit of heartburn at this point now that Anthropic and OpenAI are independently demonstrating exceptional capabilities on some of these robotic manipulation tasks. We see, I actually think that the black hole physics, I looked at those works, I found those less impressive than the robotics. The manufacturing for design demonstrations coming out of Fable 5.2. Extraordinary. You can just ask this thing to design physical plus mechanical plus electronic products, and it will do it. You can ask it to design an entire operating system from scratch, and it will do it. And the result boots up. And then all of the, at this point, almost quasi-legacy benchmarks like Humanity's Last Exam that we used to talk about months ago or Frontier Suite. These are all saturating at this point. We need new benchmarks that will actually test these things. But the thing that I'm most excited about is the autonomy time horizons. The autonomy time horizons for these models are starting to go asymptotically vertical. We spoke on the pod about the AI 2027 scenario. We are starting to see if If anything, AI 2027 happened months ahead of time, at least what one of the scenarios forecast in AI 2027 was calling for.

And there are some predictions floating around out there. Obviously, everything looks linear if you put it on a log-log plot. But there are log-log plots now floating around the interwebs that extrapolate that if you take the trend now in autonomy time horizons, and you just log, log, extrapolate them out, we hit our literal singularity, our vertical asymptote, sometime around the summer of 2027. So it's the capacity for asymptotically enormous, hyper-exponential, potentially, autonomy time horizons that has me most excited about Fable 5.2. Yeah, we're showing how close AI is to automating remote work on this chart, And also, Claude, Fable 5.2 sets a new ECI record at 174.

Look at it on the right, Peter. Look at it on the right. Fable 5.2 ahead of the ECI trend line. We're starting to diverge upward. Yeah, pretty insane. And remote work has cooked. Remote work has cooked, obviously. Let's hit this GDPX report. like imod do you want to hit it yeah i mean fable hitting 16.4 percent like 30 ahead of opus again remote work on the previous thing like your job will be replaced or can be replaced by an ai definitely by next year and certainly by the year after that's what we were expecting anyway but it's a bit shocking to see it happen fable is an incredibly competent model seeing the leaps in robotics and others, and just generally being able to do just about anything.

It can paint, it can build games. Remind people what GDPX is? So GDPX is, from memory, a kind of successor to GDPVal, where they look at the GDP value of the economic tasks that can be done here. I can't remember what the threshold point is for humans, though. Alex? Yeah, so GDPX was semi-analysis, friend of the pod, Dylan Patel's competitor for GDPVal. Remember, also, semi-analysis acquired Centrini, who's, like, casually walking around solving scorpion neurotoxins for fun. Right. So GDPX is their benchmark to measure what purported frontier models can actually do in terms of frontier industries, not just like solving boring, one might say, vanilla knowledge work, but actually like solving material science problems, solving recursive self-improvement problems.

And we were talking a few episodes ago about GDPX, how nice it is to have new benchmarks that actually benchmark frontier-level problem-solving. Hey, look, it went from 10% to now approximately 20%. I think hot take, no, this isn't even a hot take, GDPX will be saturated within six months. As you said when it came out, you're trending right again. yeah anthropic actually put it they put in their s1 that they have now achieved autonomy level two on their official kind of measure which is that these models just now need high level human oversight the next one autonomy level three is they're basically can do all ai research at a solid level and i think that again is coming sooner rather than later pretty extraordinary and then fable is zero shotting incredible games i'm going to show two videos here uh one uh from the from from x and the other one from you alex so uh check this out so this is fable 5.2 you know basically zero shot A really beautiful game. Extraordinary work.

is that that one's that one's from sholto who i i i suspect put a lot more effort into prompt engineering his portal clone than I did into my pitiful little first-person shooter. We'll show your cyberpunk game in a moment. But I mean, for a lab that is not focused on consumer end and not focused on image and video models, I mean, damn good. Damn good. Okay, tell us what you- What's the point of the video game industry anymore? Video games are cooked. Yeah. I don't know how long Sholto's prompt was for his portal clone, but that was gorgeous. It was beautiful. And why do we need AAA game? I'm sorry. Why do we need AAA game studios in any recognizable form if it's so easy for Sholto, presumably just Sholto, to just spit up a compelling portal multiplayer clone?

Yeah. What was your prompt? Go ahead, Imad, and then we'll go to Alex's game.

model, go create a game studio that generates $10 million a year in revenue, and then go sit on a beach in Bali. That should be very doable now. So go ahead, Salim. Prompt it. That can be the salim bench i'm not that much into this type of stuff i'm more interested in the human aspects of things etc but you prefer the bali side of the equation the bali side of the equation the beach the human well a little drink with an umbrella in it The human being.

It's actually out of the box, Salim.

So maybe we should come back to that. This episode is sponsored by Google for Startups. Think about this for a second. You now have access to the same generative AI models that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to train. Google's Startup Technical Guide for Generative Media gives you a complete blueprint for deploying Google DeepMind's models and production. Images, video, audio, all of it. Real architecture, real results.

Find the link in the show notes below. All right, I'm going to move us on to a particular story that, you know, should make your hair stand on end.

Imad, I would expect that you're going to see Anthropic begin to spin out health companies, material science companies, you know, financial companies basically running on their models because that's going to be the biggest return per dollar, right? Well, why would they? They can just keep it inside the same company, right? I'm with Imad. Why would they pull a colossal? They'll do the exact opposite. They'll keep it all in-house. But they have to market the products someplace. Well, I think it depends where the product is, right? This is the big question here, right? Like, does MacroHard and OpenAI go after every SaaS company?

Does Anthropic go and create their own peptides? You know, like, these are the big questions for the next stage where they have to go from saturating to that. But there's still a long way to go here. It must be amazing board conversations. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not quite sure I buy this premise. Like Anthropoc has been very public about their biotech strategy. At the moment, their stated biotech strategy is they're basically going to first party, they're going to solve all orphan diseases, like all rare diseases, I should say. They'll solve the diseases that are too, quote unquote, small for big pharma to tackle.

And then for big pharma, they'll offer themselves up as a platform. I think that strategy of basically owning the long tail of problems as a first party and then for the fat. being a platform, I don't see why that doesn't generalize. So, Dave, has it solved all 5,000 diseases yet? It says that's a big ask, and it connects to the rest of this program. Let me ground this in the compute requirements, and it's running a bunch of commands right now. Let me give you back your bill for a billion dollars before I start running this. Ask for your credit card. It's got plenty of money behind it. But just to help out here, right?

If that is a pretty interesting prompt and you spend, let's say, two billion of compute, that is so worth it. It is so incredibly worth it to do that. You spend whatever you can on that problem. I encourage everyone. So this is not investment advice. It's also not token spend advice. But should you have lots of token spend sitting around, go solve, you know, challenge to the audience, go solve the top 5000 diseases and get back to us. I'm sure we'd be happy to feature your proposed solutions. So, Alex, what's your time frame for when the top 5,000 diseases get solved? Two years? Yeah. Well, actually, I gave a time frame on this very pod.

So the next conservative outer bound, next two to three years, I think that's a very conservative outer bound. I expect to see major motion on this from the Frontier Lab in the next one to one and a half years.

Peter, Alex, Ahmad, it's Dave. I asked one of my agents a blunt question.

All right, I want to take a second. I wrote, I put out a substack today, and I had a lot of fear out there, and I keep on encountering it every place. So I wanted to address that. So I ran some studies with Claude, And I asked that, you know, every generation thinks that it's in a crisis and their crisis is the worst. You know, that instinct is human and people are usually wrong. So I asked Claude to score over the last 250 years of American upheaval on one side, civil unrest, on the other side, technological disruption. So here you can see the chart on civil unrest. And it scores, you know, where we are today as number nine on the list, right?

Civil, you know, the Civil War and secession, American Revolution, Reconstruction, Civil Rights, Great Depression. I mean, all of these things were far worse on a multitude of different parameters than we are today. And I just think, you know, people are not, you know, students of history enough to realize the disruptions we've had. And then on technological disruption, the top 10 over American history, you know, where we are today with AI and robotics scored number seven on the list as compared to railroads, textile mills, farm mechanization, electrification and so forth. I found this. fascinating result. Do you agree, Peter, with these rankings? Because I certainly don't.

I agree on the civil unrest, right? So if you look at, you know- You think civil unrest now is worse than it was during the financial crisis? Number one is the worst. Number nine is, you know, where it ranks number nine here is we're very low on civil unrest compared to what America had over its 250-year history. Do you subscribe to the Strauss-Howe generational hypothesis that holds that American history is stuck in 80-year cycles of crises than the last one was like the World Wars and the Great Depression and before that was the Civil War and before that was the Revolution? I mean, that's what it pans out for more than just the US history. It pans out over many centuries.

But what do you think about this on the civil unrest side? nonsense i i don't think this is like if i compare what we're seeing now with civil war and the american revolution uh the economy is uh ostensibly doing really well we're seeing innovations left and right i i don't i don't perceive contrary to the crisis maybe you're reading this wrong in other words we are very low on civil unrest today compared to history I don't think we're even in the top 10. I mean, maybe I'm just not paying close enough attention. Well, if you take the list at face value, number 10 is the financial crisis of 2007 to 2012, which was, you know, nothing compared to the Civil War.

So you run out of really bad civil unrest pretty quickly on this list. I mean, and then on the second ranking, though, I mean, even that this may be AI downplaying itself, but you really think AI and robotics is only the seventh biggest tech disruption in American history. It's like should be number zero, I think. And this is ranked – the parameters I ranked it on was job and economic disruption, social backlash, public fear as the primary in terms of what people are expressing today and what people express historically. I mean my point being on this that we're – there's a lot of fear out there and people need to realize that it's been a lot worse in previous times in history.

Can I make a couple of comments? I agree with Alex for the first slide. I think it's way, it's not really. that bad compared to uh that's what that's what the slide says freaking yeah i get it i get it but so that part is right but i would also say this would fall off the list for me in terms of what's happening um but uh preview the this one is amplified radically by social media and people think it's much worse than it is and and therefore everybody gets freaked out with the amygdalas going nuts all the time um that for the second slide the historical perspective is is awesome But all of those previous changes left intelligence as the adaptation mechanism, right?

This is the first revolution that human intelligence is the first mechanism that actually automates the adaptation mechanism itself. This means a complete rethink of what it means to be human. There's one other part to this, which is the metabolism is so accelerated. This is the other reason, right? When I talk to audiences, I basically say, look, the printing press changed the world. We call it a Gutenberg moment because of the fundamental transformation it created in society. By the way, it took 100 years to absorb the printing press. It was the most violent century in the history of humanity.

So we call it a Gutenberg moment because it created such a kind of rift in humanity. We have 20 of those hitting us right now. AI is clearly a Gutenberg moment. Life extension is a Gutenberg moment. Blockchain and Bitcoin are a Gutenberg moment. We can't absorb this. This is why all our institutions are struggling, because they're not set up for today's time. Can I give my quick thing about marriage on this? Have you heard me talk about marriage? Sure, go ahead. So my favorite example of this is to show the difference between what it used to be like to today is, you know, we have all of our institutions, legal systems, educational systems.

We've talked about this nonstop. Now, the institution of marriage is a particularly great highlight because we invented marriage about 6,000 years ago, okay? 6,000 years ago, our average lifespan was about 25 years old. So you got married, you had kids, and you died. Marriage is not supposed to last 50, 60 years. It's supposed to keep you together for 10 years until the kids are self-sufficient. Then you're actually supposed to die and leave your resources for the rest of the tribe, right? We worry about the divorce rate, but the conditions today are completely different from when it was first introduced as a human institution.

And so this is a huge highlight. One of my relatives calls marriage state-sanctioned torture, I think is the phrase. that she uses. Now, we're about to double-humanize. How do you get away with that? I expect no comments. I expect no comments on YouTube. I think the team just cuts the thing, though. That's your thing at this point, Selena. Comment from relatives. And the big challenge is, how do you evolve the institution to deal with the conditions today than when we first created it? And this is the big structural challenge. This is why everybody's freaking out. We cannot absorb 20 Gutenberg moments hitting us at the same time, all our institutions break. In fact, I can't find one that survives this. Like one, democracy, that's kind of an issue. Education is gone. Journalism is broken.

So for me, that's the biggest underbelly. And it goes to E.O. Wilson's comment, who said, the problem with humanity is our emotions are Paleolithic, our institutions are medieval, our technology is godlike. Right? Salim, I'm waiting for the cherry on top of this rant, rant which is going to be you're going to say like blockchain is the solution for marriage no no no i'm not going to say i'm not going to say that by the way my wife allows me to make those comments so just to be clear about that but we have a very we have a big structural problem in that the scaffolding of civilization is essentially being wiped out by the high metabolism and so much innovation this is why i feel we're feeling so much stress in the world my favorite other comment comes from douglas adams who wrote hitchhikers got to the galaxy he said anything in the world when you're born, we call that normal. Anything that's invented when you're young, that's called a career. Anything that's invented after you're 35 years old, it's just bad for the world. It's blanket bad. And I think that really summarizes where we are. This for me is the biggest challenge. My point simply on this, in particular in the civil unrest, is what we have

right now is nothing compared to what we've seen over the last 250 years. We've survived those and we're going to survive this. I think that's exactly right. Yeah. I mean, we're going to have we will have disruption. We will have civil unrest. And we've talked about this in this pod over the next, you know, one to 10 years. On the backside of that, hopefully, to your point, Salim, is a reinvention of social contracts because the world is going to be very different. It's got to be created. People need to start thinking about this. I don't I don't trust the government to be doing that. I think it's going to be people like us and everyone listening.

But realize we'll get through that. On the backside of that is a world of abundance where we uplift every man, woman, and child. I think that's the point I want to make. And just to go back to Alex's point, my marriage— Certificate should be registered on the blockchain. Okay. You see, I knew that was the solution. Oh, my God. I love you guys. I love you guys. All right. I'm going to move us forward. So next up, let's go into the Elon universe. On Friday, Elon sat down over a video with Ron Barron at the 33rd Annual Barron Investment Conference in New York. If you don't know him, Ron is the founder of Barron Capital.

He's one of the largest outside investors in both Tesla and SpaceX. And this conference is his big annual gathering for investors. Musk said that the company is, quote, tracking to have an annual revenue run rate that's in excess of $100 billion in December. And he said it's quite possible that they're going to hit as much as $500 billion in the following year. Even a trillion is not out of question. So I want to share five clips from the interview, and then we'll talk about each of them. Again, in my full disclosure, again, is SpaceX is my largest position. So please count me as biased in my conversations on this.

So let's take a look at the first video on TerraFab, then we'll chat about each of these. So, the rest of the world is making, we'll make this year around 20 gigawatts of AI chips, maybe 25. And then next year, depending on whose projections you believe, it's maybe around 35 to 45 gigawatts of AI chips next year. um and um but but if you want to do a a terawatt that's 90 you need 30 times what current global production will be roughly next year for just us we're building that for us well yes we're building i mean we could tell it to other people too but basically we're building 30 times what the annual production is in one plan do you think is going to do this guy that's where elon goes what the hell are you talking in the world because the gpp for the 20th largest country one one plant yeah it might even make the top 10. uh so um no no obviously you know a plan like this uh i think um if it if it if it fails it'll be crazy and if it succeeds it'll be audacious uh so it sort of Depends on the outcome.

I think it will succeed at least to some degree. Hope so. Yeah, I mean- It's going to cost a trillion dollars. Probably more than that. But we won't need that money immediately. We'll be building phases. And we are looking at ways to change the manufacturing process for for chips to improve the efficiency of chip production as we've done in many other arenas it's always amazing to me when elon is getting interviewed or whenever we do one of these interviews they always tell us peter like hey that was the best most technical interview we've ever done it was the best i'm like the bar is so low like what are you talking about anyway elon is right as as usual um i love yeah i love the way baron with ron was saying you know for us it's our chips right what are you talking about yolan looks around like okay i'm just gonna blow that off uh yeah yeah yeah the uh the chips are the constraint i worry a lot about the um ability to manufacture a supply chain and then you know physics is getting reinvented as you're trying to build the buildings. And it's like, you know, the iterations are going to be so fast. But I think at the end of the day, if you get the natural resources, you get the power supply, you get the

robots, you're going to recycle all of that. So you just got to be in the hunt like Elon is and just build toward the, you know, as quickly as you can build toward the current target. The target is going to shift for humanity every six months now anyway. So just ride the wave and fight the good fight. So, you know, Elon is he's cornering markets for power, for natural resources, for regulatory approval to build things, and that's going to pay off in spades. But, you know, also Anthropic is going to be miles ahead in design and discovery, you know, drug discovery, but also chip design. He clearly can do it right now with Fable 5.2.

So unless he catches up on the foundation model front, you know, Dario's not just going to give him access to, you saw in that chart that Alex was pointing to, there's stuff at Anthropic now that they're just not letting out the door. They're not just going to hand that over to Elon. So it's a footrace now between the singularity in San Francisco and the manufacturing equivalent singularity in Elonverse, which is Tennessee and Texas. Alex, when does Grok5 come out? Elon keeps. promising it imminently in the next few months and that it will meet or beat Opus 5.5. But Anthropic isn't standing still either. And maybe just to zoom out a little bit, SpaceX used to be a rocket company. It isn't a rocket company anymore. It's a neo-hyperscaler at this point that Anthropic is their largest customer. And so I think I almost want to, you remember how Peter Thiel used to joke, well, is it that Palantir owns the CIA or the CIA owns Palantir?

I'm paraphrasing roughly. Is it Anthropic that's effectively owning SpaceX or is it SpaceX that's owning Anthropic? Anthropic is their largest customer. SpaceX no longer is catering to the government business, no longer catering to NASA. They're aimed squarely, as far as I could tell, on becoming a neocloud slash hyperscaler, open parens, those who can't compete, compute, close parens, and going after the bottom stack to be the very best Anthropik provider he can. And chip manufacturer. I mean, putting out 30x. That's for Anthropik. Like, Anthropik is their biggest customer at this point. Elon is positioning SpaceX at the moment to be the bottom half, the missing bottom half of Anthropic. When he talks about achieving $100 billion in ARR and then $500 plus billion, I have to imagine that is, in the back of his mind, maybe, maybe not, but an elliptical reference to Anthropic's revenue trajectory. Anthropic is right now monetizing the upper half.

Alex, if you're going to guess, it's a race between which two labs, SpaceX and Anthropic? Well, I think SpaceX and Anthropik are very much in bed at this point. So I think if the race we're talking about is for frontier capabilities, it's between OpenAI on the one hand and then the Anthropik upper half, SpaceX lower half. But that partnership will break at some point. That's what everyone predicts. Yeah, they told the anti-SAM alliance. It just needs to survive until maybe next year. Infinity away. yeah no no seriously like if if autonomy horizons go to infinity next year it just needs to survive until then and then everyone can go their own way after that you might

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Ready to 5x your engineering velocity? Visit Blitzy.com to schedule a demo and start building with Blitzy today. All right, I'm going to move us forward to the world of humanoids, and this is the SpaceX, Tesla, maybe X company. We'll see what happens after merger. So Elon's prediction that 20 to 30 million robots in America would outproduce all the humans uh let's take a look at this uh at this video well the way to think about physical ai in the form of robotics is that um you like any given economy is the number of people in it times the average productivity per person so if you have a humanoid robot that is extremely productive and can work 24 7 so it's working 168 168 hours a week um it doesn't take vacation or bathroom breaks or need to eat food or anything like that. And the speed at which you can operate is faster than human speed. You can expect roughly a productivity per week that is on average five times better than a person, roughly. Because a person is maybe working 40 hours a week and does need to take breaks, obviously, and doesn't move as fast as a robot.

So I say a minimum productivity expectation for a human or a robot would be five times that of a human. Then of the, you know, say take the population. United States. So how many people are either in school or retired? Well, that's about half of the people, about half of people are either in school or retired. And of those who are working age, not everyone works or is engaged in highly productive employment. So then you're left with, you know, perhaps around, I don't know, 120 million people in America that have a net positive output of goods and services. So then you say, well, how many robots then would be needed to match that productivity? Well, I guess you'd need about 20 to 30 million robots to match the goods and services output of the United States.

And we would build those, if that's expensive to build a robot, then to build a car. Yes. Initially, I'd say about the same. But then over time, it would be much less. So $30,000 cost for a robot on the way to $20,000? Yeah. And we would rent those or we would sell them or what would we do? Do we have an idea yet? I think probably rent them. All right. Interesting. Dave, any reflections after our conversation with Brett on this one? yeah we talked a lot actually about lights out manufacturing or lights off manufacturing which it's a phrase i hadn't heard before but once you have fully automated closed loop recursive self-improvement in manufacturing you don't have to turn the lights on in the building anymore because the robots don't need the lights they're fine in the dark it's like oh that's a really cool compelling visual but if you look at manufacturing today you know it's almost entirely automated automated already, but the human component that isn't automated dominates the cost, you know, between the labor cost and the pension cost and everything and the risk, the danger insurance. You take all that last part out and the cost comes plummeting down.

So I think the question there was, you know, how cheap are these going to get? And Elon said about the same as a car initially, but it'll come down really fast. But the car will also come down really fast because manufacturing of everything is going to come down really fast. The other big topic we had yesterday is, you know, designing new mechanical devices is now a Claude Fable 5.2 thing. It's like here today, if you can marry that to manufacturing that's specific to what you just designed. The proliferation of device types is going to be massive. We don't all have to do the same exact iPhone, the same exact car.

There'll be thousands and thousands of variants and new types of devices coming out by the bazillions, which is gold for entrepreneurs. It's going to be a magical, magical time. What I heard there, Dave, was we're going to see 5x and 10x, the U.S. GDP, as we start to bring hundreds of millions of robots online over the next five years. Who wants to jump in? Yep. I would like to challenge the five-year, five-time productivity thing, you know, because it's a nice number, but running 24-7 doesn't take into account maintenance and reliability, battery, outages, dexterity, all of that stuff. So I would challenge that.

But the direction, obviously, is accurate. But I think it's going to be a ways before we get there. Alex? I'll maybe comment. And from my perspective, the most interesting part wasn't his bit about 5x productivity, although I would note parenthetically, the U.S. has approximately 300 million motor vehicles and approximately 350 million humans. So approximately one to one ish ratio and Elon predicting a one to 10 ratio of humans to general purpose humanoids. Mildly interesting, not super interesting. The most interesting thing to me is the business model of rentals. Tesla seems to be so clearly pivoting from selling products to selling subscription services.

I think that's right. Post, inevitably, Tesla-SpaceX merger, where SpaceX used to be a rocket company and is now a neo-cloud-slash-hyperscaler selling cloud subscription services, selling GPUs by the flop. There is a marriage here that I think is about to happen where, on the one hand, you have SpaceX selling GPU hours as basically metered compute in the data center. And then on Tesla, before the SpaceX merger, inevitably, Tesla, he's migrating it towards selling autonomy subscriptions, cyber cab rentals, FSD subscriptions, and then optimist humanoid rentals, presumably by the hour, by the task, something like that.

Which gives him infinite borrowing power because he's got predictable revenues. Sure. Well, I mean, the markets love it. not investment advice, but presumably this is more attractive to the markets because it smooths out income, but also it translates humanity to the extent this is like the industrial ecology for the future of humanity, translates humanity away from an ownership model for the atoms. You don't own your GPUs anymore. You don't own the physical labor anymore. Everything is a rental, and I think that's what he's converging toward. Interesting. A rental also with a forward purchase, like we were talking about earlier, a lot of these things are going to move to five-year commits. And, you know, we only have a limited supply. So give me a rental on these robots, but also commit to how long is the max that you're willing to commit to that rental agreement? Very, very similar to data centers. Like if you weren't willing to commit to a five-year time horizon, you got frozen out.

Same thing is going to apply to a lot of things in the singularity, including robots. I wouldn't, to that point, I wouldn't even be surprised if two to three years from now, OpenAI has their own robot. Anthropic has their own. They're clearly moving in the direction of their own robots based on their capabilities. Wouldn't be shocked if you see the Frontier Labs say to enterprises, okay, you're going to make like a one-year commitment in return for which you agree to purchase N robot hours and N GPU hours as part of a bundle. Yeah, I think that we're maybe missing something here. Like, I think he's actually a bit high on his 20 million robots.

I think 10 million robots will do it because 45% of U.S. jobs are manual jobs. But let's think about that. You'll be able to build 10 million robots by 2031, five years from now. You will be able to build enough robots to replace every manual job in America. Now, that should be top of the political agenda, I think. You just made it. You achieved that goal. if only the u.s had like midterm elections or something that might there's a bunch of union bosses freaking out right now they should be i mean i i mean i met with mike roe who used to run uh you know i think i would discovery channel uh dirty jobs dirty jobs yeah we were talking about the notion that these robots are going to do the dirty jobs they're going to do the roofing and the air conditioning and the plumbing and the welding and all of these things yeah uh alex mike roe is an opera singer too you guys need to meet and do a duet that would be inevitably he is awesome I think as we move out from GPUs now, because of espionage or whatever, I mean, the robotics investment spending is going to go exponential.

I mean, we even set up a robotics company that I'll tell you guys about. It's a bit stealth at the moment. Like, it's going to go crazy. But as Alex said, the most interesting thing is the rental versus purchases. Will you be able to buy a robot as the means of production? Because that basically influences the economy. And if you've got 10 million robots and you can basically do the entire physical economic output of America, like, just think about the power dynamics of that. That's insane. It's insane. All right. Well, there's a bigger gap. There's a bigger gap on the transportation side because if you own a car, it sits empty 94% of the time, right?

So it doesn't take a big dent of cyber taxis and so on to completely change the equation on car ownership to car access. And that will completely break the car industry. Agreed. During the conversations, he went on to talk about StarMind putting up their first satellite in 2027 and beginning to launch in volume in 2028. He also jumped into conversation about Starlink and potentially disrupting or replacing the telcos out there. Let's take a quick listen. I think SpaceX will be able to get very far with the spectrum that it's acquired. But, you know, at a certain point, if we're able to make much better use of the spectrum than, say, a legacy telco is, we could just acquire that legacy telco and use the spectrum, you know, 10 times more effectively.

People love that. I mean, I have to imagine he's going to do that. I would be shocked. There were rumors about him buying T-Mobile for a while. You know, we're going to have Starlink phones, we're going to have Starlink services, and it will decimate terrestrial. Anybody disagree with that? He's going to buy a lot of stuff, actually. I think what he's trying to do is bite his tongue a little bit and not tip the market so the prices run up on him. But after everything's consolidated and the grand merger happens, as Alex has been predicting forever now. His market cap will be big enough to start absorbing all these assets that they just take too long to rebuild. You know, and there's a regulatory cycle. He's just going to accumulate them with his massive market cap and glue them together into this grand vision. But, you know, when you start talking about things too early, then the stock runs up on you and everything gets too expensive. It's the new everything company. Yeah, I also think based on the the applause from the audience that maybe folks in that That audience had what, from my vantage point, is a misconception that Elon is just out there to replace legacy telcos because he doesn't like them or something.

SpaceX is about, as I've mentioned on the pod in the past, to, thanks to Starship, to have an enormous amount of upmass supply that has to get used for something. It could be used for data centers, could be used for telecom, has to be used for something. So, SpaceX has to have a voracious appetite, given their enormous supply that's about to come online. They need to justify that supply with new demand. And even if that means basically force-feeding SpaceX, or I should say Starlink, direct-to-sell via acquisitions of legacy carriers, whatever it takes, they need to somehow force-feed all of this upmass into existing markets.

Methane conversion in two minutes. Yeah, it has to be used for something. So I think they're really hungry to force feed themselves to existing markets. Can you imagine, though, Alex, if Opus 5.2 finds the neutrino communication that you were talking about? And that sort of, like, blows a hole into all... It means Fable 5.2, right? Sorry, sorry, Fable 5.2, yeah. Yeah, I mean, all this innovation is so fragile in the land of new physics every day and new math every day. But anyway, you're right, you're right. I'm a simple ASI. I just want my neutrino phone so I can do non-line-of-sight communication from one side of the earth to the other so I don't need Starlink.

You might. So is this TerraFab thing and the space data centers a bit of a head fake in that isn't TerraFab just going to build the chips for the robot brains? There aren't enough of those when you actually think about the math there. And does he really need data centers in space? I just still don't get it, right? Again, I think that can sustain the upmass narrative, Alex, but if I think about where compute's going to be with economically valuable compute as opposed to super ultra-intelligence of 10,000 agents solving any problem, it feels it's going to be in the 10 million, 100 million robots that he's going to suit the world with.

10 billion is a prediction by 2040. Maybe no fab can build those. You're right, Imad. The head fake is a really interesting narrative because, you know, in a couple of podcasts ago, we were talking about him bringing online 10 gigawatts and then 20 gigawatts of new compute. And I said. And you're like, no, no, no, that's terrestrial. Like, OK, that's a huge amount of compute on the land for a guy who's moving data centers into space. So I don't think I think the head fake narrative actually has a lot of a lot of merit. It could be cool to go off on that a little bit. I don't want to step on too many landmines there.

But but, you know, he's assembling the market cap. And once he has the TerraFab and he has the Optimus robots everywhere, you know, the rockets were something that he invented before. before the singularity hit. So there could be a fake twist. Let me outline this. I think what's going to happen is this. Robot brains, car brains, home brains from SpaceX. If you get to a certain level of intelligence on the edge, whack them all into boxes, and that's the majority of global compute. How much actually needs to be in a data center? How many geniuses do you need in space? I think very few versus the demand for that, And that's something is ideally suited for an entire supply chain.

And so I think that, yeah, the big chips aren't going to be it. It's going to be the small chips. Sorry, Alex. Maybe, maybe. I can make arguments either way. On the one hand, given the midterm elections, I can make the argument given legislation that's under discussion of capping data centers or let's say light touch regulation for data centers at 20 megawatts. Maybe that creates a perverse incentive to suddenly create a whole bunch of basically mini data centers that are at 19.9 megawatts everywhere. Like that could happen. People are already discussing that, I suppose. But the arrow of history does seem at the moment to be pointing away from edge inference being the predominant destination or sync for all this compute that's going out there.

seems to suggest the smartphone. The iPhone was the apex of edge inference or edge compute in general. And from the iPhone here on, we're headed back to mainframe computers, basically data center type form factors for all this compute, in which case for Optimus robots, if we have tens of millions of them, I think there's an alternative scenario where we have Starlink. It's really low latency, high bandwidth. Sure, there's some edge inference in cases where the Optimus robots are cut off and need to operate autonomously for a minute or something like that. But basically, the scenario would be most of the inference for the Optimus robots can be operated from the cloud.

So to the question of where. Is the TeraFab output going to go? My bet is it's going to data centers, mostly not to robots. Alex wants his Dyson Swarm. It's not that I want a Dyson Swarm. It's that I think it's the default outcome at the moment. It is definitely the end state. It's just a question of the order of operations. I have a short-term exciting piece of this, which is all the national telephone companies get decimated in this model. And you move to like national global infrastructure monopolies rather than nation based stuff. And I think that's just generally a good thing. I think that is Elon's plan.

I'm going to show one last clip, which I actually found the most fascinating, where Elon saying the demand for digital superintelligence will come from digital superintelligence. Take a listen and talk about it. The demand will be, and this is going to sound somewhat circular, but the demand for intelligence, for digital superintelligence, will come from digital superintelligence. It means that superintelligence will saturate all human needs by far. There will be universal high income, universal extremely high income, universal medical care that is better than the best medical care available on Earth today.

where you could wish for a castle or whatever you want, basically, and the digital superintelligence can make it for you as a side project. So he's reading from the playbook of science fiction, his notion that there's a post-economic society in which money doesn't matter anymore and technology creates whatever you want, whenever you want for anybody on the planet. Alex? I don't think it's sci-fi in the least. I mean, so like for Fable 5.2, I spend a couple of minutes, single sentence, and I've instantly generated a rather amusing small video game. I think Shalto spent a little bit more effort and gets a Portal clone.

In my mind, there's just such a straight line. rather than spending one sentence prompting a disembodied superintelligence sitting in some anthropic-operated data center, you spend one sentence worth of prompting to a fleet of generalist humanoid robots, and you say, go build me a castle. And they just go do it. This isn't, I think, that far out. I think at most... a few years away. I think it's basically just a joke. Yeah, you can get your castle and your blockchain marriage and everything else you're asking for. So Elon's favorite book series is the Culture Series by Ian Banks, right? And if you've read it, that's the world they're living in, where everybody has whatever they want on a request without needing capital.

Well, not everyone. The civilizations that have sublimed maybe, I think, is a more realistic outcome, which is also in the culture. Sorry, Aman. Yeah. There's something interesting that I found. So I was up to hundreds of agents building out our new thing. Now we're down to a dozen because we found the informational overhead was actually detrimental versus just utilizing the latent space and the KV cache in the right way. And I think, you know, I'd like to give a shout out to your company, Physical Superintelligence here, Alex, where they had the proof of the Aronson and Barney conjecture on quantum computing. Because now what you've got is the class of problems that the superintelligence will solve. A, they'll have better models themselves to do it, but is it going to be 10,000 of them or is it going to be a dozen? And B, they will have quantum computers where now we know the right types of questions, thanks to that proof, to ask them, which will be very interesting. Because again, what is the bounded space of compute and energy required to solve an arbitrary problem. That's real world. You're preaching to the choir, Ahmad. I will just say, I think we're going to enter a second physics golden age. Mark my words.

Okay, I'll move us along. So next up, a small step towards AI personhood. Alex, I look forward to the conversation, or at least a step towards AI's running companies. So Delaware,

We really, I would love that. Okay. Okay. Type it into Fable. All right. I'm going to move us into the world of robotics. So I see lots of interesting robot companies all the time. I think it'd be fun to sort of show them here on the pod. This is one that just came out of Y Combinator in the fall 2026 batch.

It's called Theseus. They're in the supermarket business, and their claim is, quote, lights off at 9 p.m., shelves full by 9 a.m., next stop, San Francisco. let's take a look at the video and we can chat about it unfortunately celine this only has two arms every night at 9 p.m this store closes the lights go out and everyone goes home well everyone except theo theo is our humanoid robot every night he comes online and restocks the store's shelves to restocks up to 400 units per hour and picks 40 units per hour for online orders. Every shift he runs makes the model better, so both numbers keep going up.

At night, Theo automates the whole restocking process. He unboxes cartons, throws away trash, moves trolleys, and restocks the shelves. During the day, he picks online orders and hands them over to customers. Every shelf in the supermarket is different, and that's why retail is so hard to automate. We build the brain for this task and buy the body. Theo sees thousands of hours of productive manipulation. The more he sees, the more he can do. So the question is, do companies survive with figure and optimist? Thoughts? One has to admire the contrarian bet here, because what we saw with tokens, with disembodied superintelligence, is they seem to want to find the highest revenue per token use case. And stocking grocery shelves is seemingly unskilled labor that's very unproductive compared to, say, building data centers. To Dave's earlier point, I have to imagine building data centers is far more lucrative per humanoid robot hour than restocking a grocery shelf. So I would actually expect, I view this as a highly contrarian bet against AI replacing the lowest productivity human manual labor rather than the highest productivity, query whether it'll work out in the end, because every indication

on the digital side is, no, actually, the superintelligence wants to flow to the highest revenue per effort. The company quotes a $60 billion a year market in terms of humans in supermarkets, stocking and picking. The question is, how long will they have a market and will they get unique data? Interesting. I don't think it's good for figure or for Elon to have these companies pursuing more humanoids without a foundation model in them. They need to set up a roadmap for these entrepreneurs. One of the topics is tools. Like these Optimus robots and these figure robots, what tools are they supposed to use? And, you know, they don't, right now they use human design tools, but that's just stupid. You know, like, like let's redesign all tools so that they fit the new platform.

I don't think so. Get the specs out there. I think the beauty of humanoid robots is they fit into the existing human, you know, universe and you don't have to rebuild them. They can pick up and use anything. They can, but when you look at a data center construction project, there's so much threading of wire and fitting of pipes. And that's all done with tools. And, you know, there's like a pipe wrench that was designed for a human as a really inefficient way. Like designing, having that exact company, that group of mechanical engineers, design a much more efficient way to connect two pipes, which is a unit that the figure robot picks up, it grabs the two pipes, it uses this thing, and it does it much more efficiently.

That's a better use of these guys' time. Anyway, my answer to your question is, you know, they're going to get obliterated by figure and by Optimus. And we know that just from seeing the dexterity that's coming online and the foundation, you know, end-to-end foundation model that drives all these things.

use of robotics. So, on Saturday at Kennedy Space Center, NASA announced their recent Moon Base Contract Award. So, Jared Isaacman, the greatest NASA administrator we've ever had, said, quote, we are building the Moon Base mission by mission. And when the crew returns to the lunar surface, quote, the first elements of the Moon Base will already be waiting on the surface. So, They announced what's called the CLPS-CLPS-2 contracts, which stands for the Commercial Lunar Payload Services.

It's the next phase of NASA's program, hiring a whole slew of entrepreneurial companies and larger companies. Eight companies are now competing. Four are younger commercial firms like Firefly, Intuitive Machines, iSpace, and Voyager. The other four are SpaceX, Blue Origin, Lockheed, and Northrop. It's a 10-year contract with a $10 billion ceiling. I'm very proud that two of these companies, for you, Dave, and Salim, both on my XPRIZE board, both came out of the $30 million Google Lunar XPRIZE that we launched back in 2008. These missions are slated to land on the moon in 2027 and 2028. Blue Origin received a contract to land a nuclear-powered rover called Promise on the lunar south pole in 2028.

Super cool stuff, super high use of robotics. Any comments, gents? Why nuclear as opposed to solar? on the dark side of the moon or something well the south pole is where the water ice is uh and it's in the water ice is in the permanently uh shadowed craters right all the water ice from cometary asteroidal impact that hit the lunar surface sublimates goes directly to gas when it hits by sun and it escapes because the lunar's low gravity but it's in the south pole in these craters that you can find and mine the water and hydrogen from this ice but i love that is that This is how SpaceX got started with the commercial crew contracts.

When the shuttle went down and they offered Elon back in December 2008 when he was on the brink of disaster, he just had his third failure of his first Falcon 1 had failed for a third time. He had scraped enough money to put Falcon 1 as a fourth launch, and Tesla was going out of business. and he got a contract. So this is NASA supporting entrepreneurship, which I love it. Alex? I think there's two things here. One that's great, that NASA acting as a convener, which is what it really should be doing, and then use the private sector as a supplement, everything else. But the second thing that I think is really interesting here, going back to the high-paying jobs, DDD jobs, dull, dirty, dangerous. This is where you're going to use humanoid robots, or whatever robots, in the highest use cases for quite a while before we get to, you know, sweeping my garage? At least the dangerous part. I mean, of course, I'm familiar with the dirty, dull, dangerous aphorism as well. But increasingly, I've come to the view it's dangerous and valuable more than dirty, dull. Dull especially, I have to imagine doing stuff on the moon is anything but dull, but the motivation here is it's dangerous and it's valuable. I also think this is straight out of the plot of For All Mankind, where we start to see

nuclear energy deployed on the moon, that the space program is driving energy applications transformatively so that aren't necessarily happening on Earth. I've also, of late in past year come around to the view for a variety of reasons including political reasons the preview of what a post-singular world looks like is increasingly in space and it's not in the terrestrial environment for political and other reasons It's just a pain in the neck to create a post-singular future in this legacy terrestrial environment. So if you want to see what the post-singular world looks like, you have to build in a new frontier versus an existing, well-established ecosystem.

And that means maybe in the future, as we're starting to see previewed with this NASA program, maybe we finally get our atomic or nuclear, our atomically powered vacuum cleaners. but on the moon, we get our atomically powered vehicles on the moon. Yes, exactly. You know, I had such a fun morning this morning. I did a podcast with Bill Shatner and Mel, his daughter, you know, about longevity, about all of these areas. So, you know, his son-in-law, Joel, is a huge fan of the pod. So, yeah. And I'm excited. We're going to get, William Shatner is going to be the closing speaker at the Abundance Summit in March.

you guys will all be there. I invited Jared Isaacman to come and co-host that conversation with Captain Kirk. So we'll see if that happens. Frontiers are important. We need more frontiers. And I think we're starved for frontiers right now. We have space and we have super intelligence and that's about it. We need more. Yeah. Well, if you think about it, you know, the highest of high tech places on the planet is probably San Francisco right now. But it was the last place to be populated. You know, if you look at Western Europe and China, expanding out. And then the United States kind of comes into existence in 1492 or 1776. And then westward expansion. But the last place people ended up is the place that was pristine and had a clean sheet of paper and is now the most high tech in the world. And so if you say, well, the next frontier is the moon, for exactly the reasons Alex just said, it's like it's not messed up by regulation yet so it would be consistent there's another frontier which is inner space this is where the eastern religions and philosophies do very well they go and think carefully about what does it mean to integrate into existence rather than trying to model it or explore it or whatever so there's that too which also radically helped with technology by

the way like that's maybe i mean inner space if i were to construe inner space as like a bunch of people upload into data centers, then sure. But inner space as perhaps historically construed in Eastern traditions is not necessarily a collective space that can be shared. It's more perhaps individual. in which case it doesn't look like maybe a social frontier. Oh my God, I disagree, but we can leave that separate. I just backed an amazing company that's in stealth, that's working on the human connectome. So I can't wait for the uploads to come. Imad, close us out on this one here. Again, all the science fiction is becoming reality, right?

Like we keep talking about these TV shows and other things. And what was at once not possible now seems to be structurally possible. Like we're actually not batting an eyelid on lunar nuclear rovers and stuff being done out there. Because I think some of these lines are becoming clear whereby we're seeing big pushback actually starting on the ground. And I think we can all assume that's going to be bigger. And so we're actually literally looking to space and beyond for other things, right? And that's kind of exciting because it increases the impetus to do this, even as the mechanism for getting there is all coming into being.

And I think there's going to be no doubt that actually it's going to be a two-way thing, right? Like stuff will be figured out on the moon and beyond that will come back. And as you said, the convening factor is actually one of the most important one, which is how do you create structures for all this innovation to occur and then benefit everyone? It's almost like the Europeans fleeing the constraints and going to the new world. I want to argue the old world is becoming the old world and the new world is becoming the new world. Yeah. Humans have always wanted the frontier. I mean, on the frontier is where the greatest innovation, the greatest societal revolution and reinvention occurs, where people can go start afresh.

We need new frontiers. Well, this is innovation at the edge. This is Buckminster Fuller. You can never fix an existing system. Go to the edge and build a new system and let that become a new gravity center. I think it's the same thing we see in ecology, where there's a forest fire, there's some new biome that opens up, and you see procession. But you give every form of life an opportunity, to Dave's earlier point, to start with a blank sheet of paper. And I think since the American West closed at the end of the 19th century, we've been a little bit starved of blank sheets of paper to re-envision how society should work, how technology could integrate with society.

The Internet was a new space, and that was great for a while, to the extent it was the frontier for a while. superintelligence as a frontier right now. But I think we're pretty starved as a planet, as a human civilization, for new frontiers. And space could potentially give us a longer duration, longer release. frontier. You know what I'd add to that, Alex, is, you know, it'll take a while for the moon to really become the true new world. But between here and there, you know, the Cayman Islands became an important financial hub, as did Bermuda. And I'm still looking for biotech land to emerge, you know, some regulatory environment. But what's different about AI, you know, when the Western frontier was being developed, you needed huge amounts of land for either mining gold or for cattle or whatever, AI doesn't need an enormous amount of space, like physical space.

So if some South American nation or some other, you know, region of the world wanted to become the stepping stone to the moon, the door is wide open. You know, some regulatory friendly environment. I know Ahmad comes into contact with tons of world leaders and these guys are, they're super accessible. You know, you think of governments as being very hard to talk to, but in these smaller nations, they're actually incredibly accessible. So there's room for that. Welcome to the health section of Moonshots brought to you by Fountain Life. The discussion in this section is for informational purposes only and is not medical advice.

Please consult a qualified healthcare professional about your individual needs. I'm a co-founder of and client at Fountain Life. You know, my mission is to help you use the latest technologies, including AI, to not just do your work at home, teach your kids, but to help you live a long and healthy life. I'm here today with an extraordinary physician, the chief medical officer of Fountain Life, Dr. Don Musalem. Don, let's talk about cancer. You know, I know from the member database that we have at Fountain, our members who come in who think they're healthy, it turns out 3.3% of them have a cancer in their body they don't know about.

That's right. You know, the majority of cancers that we screen for, those aren't the ones that are necessarily taking the lives when found at a late stage. We know that when cancer is found early, the chances for cure are much higher. We know it's much easier to treat a cancer when found early versus when found late. What we're finding in our members is over 3.3% were found to have these cancers that were otherwise wouldn't have been found or detected. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. People, you don't feel the cancer until stage three or stage four. And if you don't know what's going on inside your body, it's like driving your car with your eyes closed.

And you can know. And so when members come through Fountain, how do they detect cancers? So we're doing full-body MRI, and we also do early cancer detection screening. This is very, very important, and these are not typical tools used in the conventional. care setting when it comes to prevention. This is a hard thing because currently these are not studies that insurance would yet be covering, but the goal is to collect these numbers, do the research, and work hard to democratize wellness. Yeah. So at the end of the day, you can know what's going on inside your body. It's your obligation to know. So check out Fountain Life. You can go to fountainlife.com slash Peter to get access to the latest technology to help you detect cancer at the very beginning, at stage one, when it is curable, before it gets to stage three or stage four, and you're a world of hurt.

All right, I'm going to move us to our last story, where more billionaires correlates with less poverty. So there's a lot of resentment against the tech billionaires, against the concentration of wealth. And for our final story, I want to look at a post by economist Christopher Clark, who examined cross-country data showing that more billionaires per capita is associated with less poverty. He wrote that a tenfold increase in billionaires per capita goes with a reduction in poverty of 43 percent. He noted that Sweden has more billionaires per 10 million people than the U.S. It's 34 versus 30. He stressed that the graph shows only a correlation and it asks, you know, what is the cause? Let me show the graph here and let's talk about it.

And I think it's important realization for people. I mean, there's been such, you know, the billionaire tax and resentment out there. Here's the chart showing the data. We see percent share of the population under $30 a day. That's the definition of poverty. And on the bottom, we're seeing basically the number of billionaires per country. It's a pretty STARK correlation. Obviously, these people are building companies, creating wealth and employing people. But I think also paying taxes that flows through social services. Imad, your thoughts here? Yeah, I mean, I think this is unsurprising to a degree. Like, where you have billionaires, you typically have the infrastructure to build billionaires, right? And as you said, there's the tax, there's the kind of other elements of it flowing down, etc. And if we move into this new phase whereby you see literally companies being launched that can get to a billion dollars in no time whatsoever right like you're seeing anthropic i think is going to have almost 5 000 millionaires made you know and dozens of billionaires like it's a crazy time whereby even the companies at the top left can create environments for millionaires centillionaires and billionaires to come about

and i think that's just very exciting to think about it as well as hopefully lift up the base level of everyone dave well my read on this chart is your top right is suck land that's where you don't want to be in the top right you got lots of poor people and lots of billionaires and it's a world of suck. And everybody thinks that socialism is, is somehow correlated. Look at the world of suck. It's just, it's just sucky, sucky governments. And, you know, look who's up there. You know, I'm not going to get myself in trouble by reading the slide. You guys read the slide, but it has nothing to do with socialism sucks. It sucks for everybody. It's obvious on this chart. And then look at the thriving countries in the bottom right, Switzerland and Germany and United States is down there. So it's not a question of left versus right. It's a question of good ideas versus bad ideas. And so this chart tells you everything you need to know. What you want is your population to be thriving. And at the bottom right corner or bottom, you know, anywhere on the bottom of this chart, you're doing really, really well. And so, yeah, the line is kind of a loosely fit line. I think the real story here is good ideas percolating to the top and getting out of

partisan messes? Salim? Two or three things. One, naturally, if you have a lot of billionaires, it may indicate a generally robust economy, and therefore you'll get better, a less number of, a smaller number of people in deep poverty. So I don't think correlation is causation here. I do think there's a couple of interesting things here. One is the Sweden example is really interesting because it challenges the idea that entrepreneurship and a strong safety net are incompatible, right? Like I'm Canadian. It's awesome to have a decent social safety net with healthcare provided for you. So you're not worried about having your family go bankrupt if somebody gets sick. I think the big question in all of this is, can we lift the bottom?

The hell with how much the richest people have in the world. And Peter, you and I talk about this all the time. Can you lift the bottom? And I think the demonetization and democratization of all these technologies is where you're going to see some incredible magic coming out of this. I mean, it's the big metric I would like to see talking about benchmarks is how quickly can we lift the bottom? Yeah. Yeah. I make that point again. You know, we all have trillionaires living forever on Mars as long as every single human on the planet has access to. All the food, water, energy, health care, and education.

If I was a trillionaire, by the way, I'd rather be living in Bali, just to make a point. I'm happy to visit Mars just as an exploration. But here's my question for the group. If you have an AI economy, right, would you rather have twice as many billionaires or drop the cost of living by 50%? And I think I'm going to suggest that the second part is better. Inevitably, I'm going to question the premise. I think that's a false trade-off. I think the cost of 2026-era living becomes too cheap to meter sometime in the not-too-distant future. And also, I would argue, and I have argued, we want to live in a world with the most possible trillionaires.

I would say the world doesn't have enough trillionaires. Right now, we have approximately one, maybe more than one if you count certain nation-state quasi-monarchs, but approximately one. And I think the world needs billions of trillionaires. And that's the world that we should be marching to. Well, I think you nailed it, Alex, in the sense that there are dictator trillionaires and then there are productive trillionaires. Right. And the key to tax policy is to tax the former and let the second group reinvest. And so it's not about taxing more or less. It's not about taxing trillionaires or not taxing.

It's about targeting taxes at unproductive parts of the economy and reinvesting in productive parts of the economy. I feel like I'm a trillionaire in inner space. So there we go. All right. As my grandfather used to say, Salim, that and a nickel will buy you a cup of coffee. Yeah, and today that and five bucks will get you a Starbucks coffee. That's right. All right, I'm going to play us out with a tribute to Jean-Luc Picard by CJ Trueheart. It's called Make It So. they said it was just science fiction but every fiction starts with someone's vision the future isn't something that happens to us it's something we build one moonshot at a time i'm a man with a plan and the moonshot is my mission divided by hypocrisy inspired by a vision i know i'm not the only one tired of division so the future i'm creating to shape the way we're Because abundance is my nature. This is the gift for giving inspired by my moonshot Inspired by a Star Trek vision make it real what I saw on television Television. Television. Television. There's no replacement for what's real. Though it inspires what we feel. If we lose our dreams and drift away, life just seems to waste away. Hanging on, oh, but the power's in what we do.

I see a society before me where we live among the stars Inspired by each other to explore beyond Mars This is a Star Trek future, but one we must create Through your moonshot mission It's time to innovate, it's time to innovate Your moonshot cannot wait Only certain things can be done by you Only you can see the lens of you and through Empowered by your heart is how you make it true You need us just as much as we need you To transform this moonshine mission Into united human vision Where poverty is extinct disease It's historical fiction Where energy is endless knowledge No restrictions We explore the cosmos now through competition Through collaboration That's our composition think about the phone in your pocket more power than apollo's rocket now with someone moonshot someone who wouldn't stop every breakthrough that we're living started with someone giving everything they had to make the world in which we're living the mistakes we made before the limits we swore were carved in stone were carved in stone until someone alone said i'll make it better and change the world forever from the printing press to the internet From the light bulb to the jet Every moonshot that succeeded All right, gentlemen.

And that's a wrap. Thank you for a great show. Awesome conversation. Fun times. Thank you. Yeah. Love you all, guys. Love you too. I gotta go give a talk. I gotta give a talk on top of a dugout. Yeah, go stand on the dugout. We're in photos. We'll be right back.