Ben Horowitz: xAI Executive Exodus, Apple's AI Crisis, The Pace of AI | #232

A large number of departures from XAI, from the founding team. It wasn't clear to me whether they were fired or whether they left, you know, because they all leave on good terms. I don't know the answer to that question. I will say that it's... Recursive self-improvement, RSI, is the real trigger for the singularity, and it happened a while ago. We're exiting the industrial age permanently, as we're talking. We're obviously going into a new world. Like with the Industrial Revolution, I think it's scary at times to think about. I think we have 150,000 people per day dying on Earth, and I think AI is probably the best chance we have at stopping that. Whoever is building the AI has a lot of control about how society is going to work. So I do think there's real danger along these lines of attempting to pause it. When are we going to have discovery by an AI of something as significant as relativity on its own? I don't think it's the next 12 months. I think it's... Now that's the moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. So, everybody, welcome to Moonshots, another episode of WTF, here with my moonshot mates, DB2, AWG, Mr. EXO, and a friend of the pod, someone who's been with us before. the amazing Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz. Ben, where are you today? I am in Las Vegas today, actually. It is my wife's 60th birthday weekend super celebration. Oh, you're getting immersed out with Valentine's Day? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You get to save one. Well, which is good news, bad news. Last time I was in Vegas, we can cut this from the pod if we need to, But last time I was in Vegas, I told my mom, hey, I'm in Vegas. She's in her mid-80s. And she said, oh, you're in Vegas. Did you shoot your wad? And I was like, is that a phrase? She's like, what do you mean? I mean, did you lose all your money? Yeah, I'm glad she clarified that. Thank you for clarifying, Mom. That would have been a very aggressive question from your mom, otherwise. Yeah, that didn't stand the test of time, that particular phrase. Well, as I like to say every week, welcome to the number one podcast in AI and exponential tech. Our job here is getting you future ready. And it is an insane week. We've actually recorded two podcasts this week just because the speed is over the top. And we're going to be recording again in another four days. I mean, Ben, it's like, my goodness, right? Thank God my AI avatar is getting really good. Yeah. So let's open up with top stories in voices, video, XAI, multis. All right. First one. Here we go. We're starting to see a little bit of Doomer conversations coming. AI disruption will soon hit sooner than most expect. This is something that's been making the rounds for Matt Schumer, CEO of Other Side AI. Ben, have you seen this article? Yeah, yeah, of course. Of course. Yeah. Thoughts? So, I mean, is this what we already know? I mean, we're about to hit recursive self-improvement. Once that hits, all of our curves go out the window. Everything accelerates. Everything we've been preparing for is being redefined on new timescales. What do you think of it? I like I think it's I think the A.I. timeline is somewhat unpredictable, but kind of certainly more predictable than what he's talking about, which is societal change. I think that, you know, it tends I would be like very surprised just in seeing how even companies in Silicon Valley have changed so far. If companies like outside of that sphere, you know, just completely change everything they did in one to five years. Like I think that's a little aggressive for societal change. You know, look, we're obviously going into a new world. And, you know, like with the Industrial Revolution, I think it's scary at times to think about. But, you know, like there are going to be he kind of I feel like highlighted all the negative changes and not the positive ones. And I feel like there's way more positive change coming than negative change at a much more rapid rate. So I don't know. Like I thought it was a little aggressive. I'm just trying to understand why it made the rounds since this is not a brand new conversation, but I got it sent to me by everybody. Dave or Alex? I think it really has to do with OpenClaw and, you know, kind of the new coding models. So people in Silicon Valley are talking about AI differently since then because it is kind of different. And I think that that's a trigger for this one being so viral. Yeah, I completely agree. I think a lot of things that we've been saying for up to a year now on the pod are suddenly resonating a lot more because of OpenClaw, but also a bunch of other eye-opening nano-banana type things where denial a year ago was very easy. Denial today is much, much harder in the face of what's right in front of you. But also the flavor of this rollout has changed a lot in my mind recently because this was board meeting week for me. you know, three back-to-back mega board meetings, 1,100 people affected. And what they were thinking of before was, well, will AI be able to do what I do and replace me? No way. Now they're like, oh, wait, AI is easily going to make me three times more productive. Okay, well, that's the same thing, right? In terms of the headcount you need to get a job done, that's effectively the same thing. And like, oh, okay, I didn't think of it that way. Now you're exactly right. So the hope is that these companies will grow into it and can keep current headcount and expand 3x. But if you don't expand 3x, you're still looking at a two-thirds reduction in headcount to get the same job done. So it effectively is a huge amount of displacement because big banks and insurance companies are not going to triple their size in the time frame. I also think they're not going to go to total efficiency very fast. I mean, I could be wrong, but I've dealt with these guys. They've had plenty of opportunities to be more efficient. And we'll see. But we'll see. We'll see. I have a couple of thoughts about that article. Yeah, please go ahead. One, I thought it was like a summary of the podcast for the last eight months. That's all we've been talking about is stuff's going to change. It seemed a little dramatic, as Ben put it, and I don't agree with the timelines. But definitely there's something coming. I think it's just the reason it's making the rounds is just got the zeitgeist of what's exactly happening that we need to track right now, which is we're in a singularity of multiple types. So that's what I got. By the way, it was also like super well written, like really compelling. AI written. Completely AI written. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll chime in here and just say, while I enjoy writing about the singularity in general, obviously I'm doing it almost every day at this point. I found it completely unremarkable. Maybe I'm just too deep in the weeds of writing about more pressing advances every day. But the sort of style where you talk about advances that, by the way, are moving even more quickly than I think described in the essay and comparing it back to the COVID pandemic, which I think is a relatable touch point for a lot of people. Like something big is about to happen. Let's be really millennialist. And, you know, if you read my essay, it's the ultimate viral hook. read my essay to know exactly what's about to happen and how to survive the next five minutes of your life. It's a natural viral moment, but I don't think the information value was especially high compared to other sources. I agree. Exactly what I said, except Alex said it more eloquently. Yeah. Everybody, you may not know this, but I've done an incredible research team. And every week, myself, my research team study the meta trends that are impacting the world. Topics like computation, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology. And these Metatrend reports I put out once a week enable you to see the future 10 years ahead of anybody else. If you'd like to get access to the Metatrends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com slash Metatrends. That's diamandis.com slash Metatrends. We have a couple of articles here on C-Dance 2.0 out of ByteDance. Hey, man, this is something good. Oh, my God. It's amazing. It's going to change everything. Let me play this particular video first. The response here is, and you've said this before, Alex, Hollywood is cooked. So this is a video clip with a one-line prompt. Let's take a look at it. Oh, my God. Just check it out. so you know tom uh and brad fighting karate on a rooftop and and it generates what 10 second clips right now alex what are your thoughts i i think uh at the risk of of sounding again ho-hum unremarkable. We saw copyright infringement at the scale already, or alleged, I should say, with earlier video models. And we saw the industry response and we saw settlements that eventually deals were struck to handle it. I think people are at this point, again, maybe I'm just sounding overly jaded with some of these advances, but I've seen remarkable advances in video models. I tend to think that people are so easily awed by video models that are able to show celebrity faces and scenes that they recognize that maybe they over-index on the underlying quality of the models. I think world models that are interactive in real time are profoundly more interesting than video models. I think this is just 10 different copyright infringement lawsuits waiting to happen. but I still was wowed. I'm still one of those people that said, that was amazing. So I would say on this one, the two, the two videos that, that I watched that were like, like where the entertainment quality was so high were one that, that Kanye doing his song in Chinese was so good. That video, like I watched it three times. Is that entertaining? And then the other one was the Waffle House one. And they're both kind of, I would just say, representative almost of a new medium. It's not like, okay, this is film generated by AI. It's like, no, this is a whole other thing that we've never seen before. So I think this model is, at least for me personally as a consumer, was an impressive step up. I think YouTube wins in this model, right? Because everybody's going to be producing so much content and it's going to become resonant on YouTube. A lot of it may not go to the theaters or television and so forth. Dave, you want to say? Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. TikTok also is the big winner. When you personalize the content, when it's almost movie quality and it's personalized to very narrow topic areas and very narrow interests and many languages around the world and everything else, it just takes over. And so when the movie people say, well, look, we're still a little bit better. Yeah, but you're missing the bigger picture, which is you don't need to be better than a movie. If you can push the production costs down to an individual producer, then the volume goes through the roof. But the narrow casting is just so much more compelling. You know, something that you and only your group really care about a lot in full movie format is so exciting. I mean, yeah, the elephant in the room here, though, is, you know, this 2K quality multi-scene video. It just it doesn't just threaten Hollywood. It threatens the whole concept of video as evidence. Right. Court testimonies, journalism, political campaigns. I mean, well, and also that's going to be real time. Right. Like so then. Yes. Just any kind of security mechanic that you have where you recognize the person via video or voice is shot to hell. Yeah. The effect is crazy, too. Maybe just again, I think this is several months behind the bleeding edge that I think video models have been approximately this good. yeah, sure, you can upscale it, you can increase the fidelity of the faces, you can certainly use faces that you probably shouldn't be using. We've been able to do this for months, where I think the frontier actually lies in being able to do this in real time and being able to do this on a single modern NVIDIA GPU and being able to do this at a cost-effective speed. And I think, again, I want to avoid over-indexing on just video models that produce two Hollywood celebrities fighting each other on a rooftop. We were able to do that many months ago. This has already been thoroughly litigated. We saw open AI strike deals with relevant movie studios for Sora 2. We saw the Disney deal. We're in some sense, I think, past this. Where we are now is... But Alex, I don't think that's the point. I think the point is this is making it out into the ecosystem of common users. I think it's the notion that, yes, it's the cutting edge, and yes, it was possible, but now it's something that is going to grow in its utility and its consumer base. And then all of a sudden, we've had basically democratization of film production for some time, but it's now going 10x, 100x more. I mean, I think that's the issue. You're bringing up a really interesting point, too, which is that our starting point for this journey was probably auto-complete and code. Wow, that's incredible. But then Alex in his newsletter has been tracking every event along the way, so nothing surprises him. I'm just spoiled. This is my problem at this point. I'm so spoiled. This is so six months ago. To follow up on something, though, that Peter said, like the thing that I do think is different, and it's not any aspect of it, but it's the combination of that you could give it a one-line prompt and produce something entertaining isn't something that we were – at least I hadn't seen at this level of entertainment. So I think from a consumer product standpoint, as opposed to a technological standpoint, which I agree on, it's kind of exciting. That too is exactly what you're saying there, Ben. The later your first exposure to AI, the more of a holy crap moment it is because it's something truly mind-boggling to the unexposed. And you're still seeing that. When you survey around at random in a city outside of San Francisco or Boston, And the exposure rate to AI is still very, very low, shockingly low. So the first thing you see is so mind-blowing. Yeah, for me, this is ho-hum because, you know, if you trace the trajectory of wherever you've been going, you should expect to see this about now or even earlier. So there's nothing radically magical about this. Yeah, I may hit a new group of users. Yeah, people go, oh, you guys are a tough crowd. Another batch of people goes, oh, my God, fine, there's another segment falling over into the new world. All right. Great. And the more voices out there, this is the plus side of also the Schumer essay. Yeah, we know, but the more voices out there talking about this, the better because it will accelerate the whole thing. All right, let's get to the second ByteDance, C-Dance 2.0 article. Here we have C-Dance 2.0 was paused by ByteDance after it was found to recreate real voices from just facial photos. I find that almost impossible. Just from a facial photo, Alex, what did you learn about this? I think there's something interesting here, which is as we start to scale data sets, it is possible that we could start to see positive transfer between modalities that's unexpected. We've spoken in episodes past about people claiming that they're uploading their whole genome into Claude and being able to generate facsimiles of their face that resemble the real thing. I do think it's possible that if all of YouTube and all of the world's video were uploaded into a single joint embedding model, which is the foundational technology behind C-Dense 2.0, I do think it is conceivable that if we just aligned all of the world's audio and spoken audio with all of the world's faces, we would find some positive transfer between the two and be able to reconstruct to reasonably high fidelity your voice from your face or your face. from your DNA or some attribute from some other attribute, I do think it is possible with enough scaling, whether C-Dance 2.0 actually achieved it or whether it was just a happy coincidence, hard to tell at this stage. What's interesting, though, is that they voluntarily stopped it, right? They voluntarily shut it down, which is a great sort of move by a, I don't want to call it hyperscaler. But the reality is once it's out of the bag, once you know it can be done, it can't be uninvented. So it's out there if in fact it works. Yeah, totally. So far, you know, ByteDance is like Google. They have to be cautious and conscientious. They can't just. But then every time this happens, a small startup then does it again right after. And they don't care because they're a startup. All right. I want to play this video clip from 11 labs. I think all of us have 11 lab voices that we use for different projects and so forth. But I was just blown away by this. And it's the human-like quality, the cadence, the hums and the uhs that come out of this. So let's take a listen and discuss it because this is a game changer for me. I know what you're going to say, Alex. It's been around for a while. No hum. Saying it in advance. But let's take a dive in. Hey there. I'm Jennifer with Eleven Airlines. And how can I help you today? Jennifer, my flight just got canceled and I'm stuck here in Orlando. At this rate, I'm going to be missing my daughter's birthday. This is ridiculous. Yeah, I hear you. And I'm so sorry about that. Let's figure out what's going on, okay? Could you please tell me which flight this was? Yeah, this is flight MD412. Great, thanks. Okay, just pulling that up now. Okay, yeah. So I don't know. I'm moved by that, both excited and frightened in a way that is, you know, again, we're cooked in terms of, you know, at my home, our family picked a secret code word. And again, everybody listening, if you've not done this yet tonight at dinner with your parents or your kids, pick a secret code word. If someone's asking you to do something that is kind of unusual or crazy that you don't expect, you may be talking to an AI. Ben, you may not know this, but we have a Fool Your Spouse challenge for this calendar year. You're the first podcast listener who can – you have to fool your spouse for three minutes on a Zoom call and it has to be a totally fake you. and send it in. Peter is always asking the multis, the open claw agents, to dox him by calling him at home. Yes, that's my AGI has arrived when an AI is calling me. You know what happens? They end up emailing me. I get several emails probably per day at this point from open claw agents asking me what Peter's number is. That's hilarious. And when they call me going to ask them where they got it from, Alex. That's right. Maybe just a comment on the 11 Labs. So if you've been using the version 3 v3 alpha model from 11 Labs, this should hardly be surprising. V3 enables you, if you use text-to-speech in the 11 Labs platform, to specify with brackets emotional expressions, and this has been around for many months. What's somewhat interesting here, to me at least, is we've known how to do audio-to-audio transfer for probably a year plus at this point. If you've used advanced voice mode from OpenAI, you've used audio-to-audio transformers. But what's somewhat interesting here is 11 Labs is better known for text-to-speech than speech-to-speech. And as far as I can tell, this new expressive mode that we're talking about here seems to still leverage the text modality, which historically has been very difficult. You'd have to go from speech to text back to speech, which was high latency. It was slow. It didn't feel very conversational. And somehow it seems like without having to do direct audio to audio, Eleven Labs has found a way to do speech to text back to speech in a way that feels natural and turn-taking and real-time. So I think it's in some sense an incremental advance, but in other sense, if they really are still keeping text, which is much easier to mine and analyze in the loop, it probably is a material advance. Yeah, Alex, I would say we've crossed the uncanny valley on voice at this point with this demonstration. And then voice becomes the new interface in the AI era, right? I mean, I can't tell you the amount of time that I'm just speaking to AI versus this cumbersome typing at it. So I think those two things are really important to take away from this for me. I think that's a great way of putting it, Peter. Yeah. But the problem is, Do you really want to use audio as your primary modality? I mean, it works well with your isolation. Okay, yeah, you want BCI. I want a BCI tube, and I want wearables, and I want gestural interfaces. I want it all. But for most people, I mean, is it New York, this sort of famous anecdote, New York Times in the 1980s did a famous study where they just put all of their reporters on then state-of-the-art speech-to-text systems and asked them to use voice. And what happened was the writing quality went down. Why did it go down? Because it's difficult to think ahead as well as you can if you're just typing. If you're speaking, you're leveraging similar portions of the brain. So I'm not 100% sold yet that speech is the modality of the future. I do like BCIs. I do like wearables and gestural interfaces. I do like typing. But speech, I think, jury is still out for me for high bandwidth operation. I was just going to say for regular people who don't necessarily write for the New York Times, I think speech is often, or at least in my experience, is the mode of choice. For sure. The other thing I'd say about Eleven Labs, and kind of a quick disclaimer that, you know, we're a big investor in Eleven Labs, and my daughter Sophia works there, so I'm biased towards them. But, you know, one of the really amazingly just kind of landscape shocking things to me about 11 Labs is, you know, when we invested originally, the big question was, well, like, aren't the, you know, state-of-the-art models going to be able to talk? I mean, like, of course they're going to be able to talk. But, you know, speaking correctly with the right nuance and building the right products for developers and so forth has proven to be very sustainable for them, which I think is interesting as you look at the entire landscape. The difference between the capability and the product is significant. Yeah, you know what's amazing to me about Eleven Labs? We have two companies here in the lab that do voice, Voice Run and Vocara. And what's amazing is these are self-organizing systems that are trained off raw data, and what they do well just blows your mind. but within voice it turned out the turn management was very very hard and you're like well i didn't ever thought like it seems so trivial compared to actually doing these incredible synthetic voices that can say intelligent things but they don't know when to stop talking you know you like on this podcast when i stop you start when you start it's like very natural to us but because that wasn't in the training data they they're just you know up until now terrible at it huh wait according to our listeners we're talking over each other all of time in a very unsynchronized way. We have so much to learn from these speech-to-text-to-speech models about turn-taking. Yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. All right. Next topic here. If you guys are okay with it, I'll move us along. So just following the merger of SpaceX and XAI in the spirit of full disclosure, I'm an investor in both, Probably you are as well, Ben. A large number of departures. All three of the X's. Yes. A large number of departures from XAI, from the founding team, mostly ethnic Chinese co-founders. And it's likely due to the ITAR regulations of SpaceX. Right. And it was interesting on a few a few video presentations that Elon's done that's had the team from XAI, at least half of the team there was ethnic Chinese. And, you know, the culture there breeds incredible mathematicians and programmers. Any any comments? Ben, I'd love to get your thoughts on this, but I looked at the timeline, and the exodus of senior AI talent predates even the decision on who to merge with what. So the theory that this is related to ITAR, and it wasn't clear to me whether they were fired or whether they left, you know, because they all leave on good terms. I don't know if you have any insight. Yeah, I don't know the answer to that question. I will say that it so in a related matter we like recently heard from a few Chinese nationals who are PhD students that the Chinese government is cracking down on the America's or U.S. academia's use of Chinese open source models. Like they particularly post the meta Manus acquisition, they're like very, very worried about actually secrets going this way. So kind of the opposite of what we've been worried about, which they, you know, like our whole open source kind of work is based on the Chinese models since there haven't been as many U.S. open source models. So this whole thing, I think, is about to get more complicated. It is. If you read these tweets, Mr. Wu and Mr. Bob both are super enthusiastic about XAI. They're not leaving with any kind of angst. They're saying that they love the XAI family. We're heading towards an age of 100x productivity. So I don't think they would have left on their own accord. That's my personal opinion. So what drove it? Enter Alex's comment from last time. Well, when did their stock vest? I mean, there is another explanation, which is just SpaceX is a very large company relative to XAI's headcount. And maybe there was a natural reorganization that happened as a result of that. But I'll also point out that XAI was selling foundation model services to the Department of War prior to this merger. So I would again query whether some sort of nationality concern is really the trigger. It seems more likely to me this is just the result of a natural rework of XAI starting to merge into SpaceX. Yeah. Well, if it were a result of ITAR and such, you know, America's AI dominance has really built significantly immigrant talent. So if we're going to start having this kind of a reaction to, you know, Ph.D. immigrants, I mean, I personally think I'm curious what you think, Ben, that everybody going through a Ph.D. program in the U.S. should have a green card staple to their Ph.D. when they graduate. I think the idea of kicking people out is the wrong approach. Yeah, I think in general that's correct. I do think that there's – I don't think we've quite thought through the case of China totally, in that we have amazing Chinese nationals who work for us and in every company we have, I think. Of course. So, you know, the talent that comes here is extraordinary. I wouldn't say there is no risk to that idea. I guess I would just say that. But I think you're right, General. I think we should be open. We should accept the phenomenal talent that comes over here and not fight it because we'll lose anyway. I mean, like we're not keeping anything secret in America, certainly not in American companies. None of them have SCIFs. none of them have good security protocols around personnel. Don't get me started on the idea that privacy is long since dead. You're correct. Here's a tweet from Jimmy Ba, a co-founder at XAI. Recursive self-improvement loops likely to go live in the next 12 months. 2026 is going to be insane and likely the busiest and most consequential year for the future of our species. So you're going to hear this a few times. I mean, you're going to hear this a few times that these next few years are a massive inflection point that everything changes. And we're going to look back thousands of years in the future back to this inflection point. Or is it just a smooth singularity, Alex? I think it can be both. I think we've already hit the era of recursive self-improvement. I'm banging the table rhetorically every episode and every day in my newsletter talking about recursive self-improvement. We're there. All of the frontier labs are using their own models at this point to develop their models. That's practically the definition of recursive self-improvement at this point in practice. I don't think it's the next 12 months. I think it's now. And is 2026 going to be insane relative to years past if you just sort of skip over all of the interim time? Absolutely. Is it already insane in some sense? Absolutely. Even if we just look at the events of the past 24 hours, some of which I think we'll get to, like self-replicating AI and courts where AIs can mediate their own disputes in front of an AI jury, that would have been pure science fiction several years ago. That's not 12 months from now. It's not, quote-unquote, within the next 12 months. That's the past 24 hours. So I think if anything, yeah, that's like past 24 hours so i think jimmy is underselling if anything what craziness looks like at the same time locally space time is smooth and you need to look no further than my saying ho-hum to a few of these stories as being so several months ago that would have been sci-fi years ago but you get a little bit spoiled living inside the innermost loop i would say i do think there's a delineation between recursive self-improvement with a human in the loop and without one. And I think he seemed to be implying that there'd be no human in the loop, which I think is an accelerant. You know, TBD, how much of an accelerant? But I think that could be very different. Yeah, permissionless self-improvement, right? Like flip the switch and go as fast as you can. Well, also, there's a distinction. this came up at the EverQuote board meeting yesterday, but the self-improvement where the inference time speed algorithms are being improved by AI clearly well underway, way down the path, and then inference time speed can be directly translated into intelligence now. We now have the know-how to turn more inference time loops into a higher IQ. So that is clearly underway. The question is, does that notch up, then allow it to work on the next part of the algorithm, the next part of the algorithm, in which case we've already hit the flashpoint, and now we're just talking about the rate at which it percolates across. But Ben, I agree that his comment is about the actual core algorithm development. The next ideas are 100% from AI, and then they go into production. I also think human outside the loop, on the loop, in the loop is in some sense a pretty blurry or slippery slope. If you remember George Jetson from the Jetsons, George – I do remember George. Remember George, Ben. George would go into work, and he would complain about his finger. He'd have to press one button all day with his finger and then complain that his finger was sore, and the finger would be swollen from pressing a single button all day occasionally. I think that's a good metaphor for the state of recursive self-improvement inside and outside the frontier labs right now, where you have Claude Code instances, and Claude is asking you every few minutes, do I have your permission to do the following thing? And you press the George Jetson button, yes, I approve, no, I don't approve. And we're all sitting here complaining about our swollen finger from pressing approve, approve, approve, for Claude Code running Opus 4.6 with agent teams. But really, it is recursive. I would argue it is recursive self-improvement, even if we're pretending we're in the loop by pressing the George Jetson button. That's exactly what I'm doing on Telegram right now with Skippy. Yes, go on to the next stage. I don't want to be sad. I want to slow things down. And as we've said so many times, this is the slowest and most expensive it's ever going to be. Look, there's a couple of points here. One is we've been talking for a while that recursive self-improvement, RSI, is the real trigger for the singularity, and it happened a while ago. So all we're doing now is kind of accelerating that path. We're exiting the industrial age permanently as we're talking. Yeah. I really think the minute-by-minute unfolding of the singularity is the most fascinating thing I've ever experienced. And, you know, Alex is exactly right. There is this point in time we're in right now where there is a human in the loop contributing. But it's really ambiguous what part of the progress is AI versus human. You know, if you're in the actual coding process, you know, was that my idea? It kind of was half my idea, but then the AI suggested this other thing, and I kind of adopted it. And now it's not clear whether it was my idea or not. But we're in that mode right now where the research, you know, A lot of the research in these core algorithms is just deploy these 500 tests for me and tell me which hyperparameters worked better or which neural topology worked better. It's not like inventing or discovering relativity. It's just litanies of experiments with different trials and then taking the one that worked and redeploying it, and now you have a smarter AI. And now it's trying more trials. It's really very likely that we're well down that path. And I do think we're going to discover the next relativity or equivalent of relativity in physics as well with AI. I'm super interested in that as well. Prediction? What would you like to hear? Next relativity? When are we going to have discovery by an AI of something as significant as relativity on its own? I think next two years. Okay. Yeah, I would also – this is a great bellwether question, Alex. The transformer algorithm 2017 that kicked off everything that we're experiencing right now, to me it's – the AI has already discovered things in the last six months that are harder to discover and harder to solve than the transformer was. But I'll ask you, Alex, if you feel like that's true too. But it seems pretty clear to me that the algorithm is just not up there with relativity in terms of complexity. Oh, I mean, I guess everything, many of these discoveries boil down to insights that can be distilled down into equations. And you can, in principle, with relativity, with special relativity, you can do a number of thought experiments. You can compare it, fortunately, with lots of experimental data. And one could imagine a thought experiment. One of my favorite thought experiments is a Bayesian superintelligence. So if you had like a video of this would be Newtonian gravity, not special relativity, but you could imagine taking a super intelligence, making it watch a video of an apple falling from a tree. And the argument in the thought experiment goes within three frames of that video, it should have concluded Newtonian gravity is a pretty high likelihood posterior probability of explaining the universe. And with a few more frames, somewhere in its distribution, and there's a whole class of information theory devoted to what's called Solomonoff induction, like just devoted to thinking about how you can efficiently infer theories of the universe from limited observations. Somewhere in that distribution of theories should have been general relativity. So I am incredibly bullish that we'll be able to, with superintelligence, discover any new laws of physics, discover transformative inventions for disclosure purposes. Since we're playing the disclosure game, I have a portfolio company, Physical Superintelligence, that's working on these issues as well. I'm very bullish on this space. Amazing. I want to move us to a conversation that Eric Schmidt recently had. I pulled a clip out of it, and the question that we've talked about on the pod before, it's been the debate, can AI be paused? The answer quite clearly by almost everybody today is no. We had that conversation, Dave, you and I with Elon. Let's take a listen to what Eric has to say. This technology is going to happen. It's not going to get prevented. It's not going to get stopped. There's too many countries, too many people, too many incentives. It's going to happen. So what does this mean? It means great solutions for health care, new drugs, better energy solutions, better power distribution. It also means that it can be used for bad. It can be used, for example, for oppression. It can be used to limit freedom in governments, hopefully not in the West. It can be used in war. The technology itself is so addictive that it can affect our young people, and we should make sure that our young people are protected from some of the worst parts of the technology. We face choices now of how we want to deal with this incredibly powerful technology. I will tell you, and it's really important to understand, that we are living through a moment that will be in history for thousands of years. And non-human intelligence arrived, and it was a competitor to us. Amazing, right? We hold two futures in superposition, right? One future in which AI is the greatest advocate and supporter and accelerant to human spirit. another future where it is a dystopian outcome and it's ours to shape it these next few years uh dave you're going to say oh alice and i were there in the dome you know that was our our davos dome where he was speaking and it just blows my mind how he owns a room the guy is so articulate yeah well he's going to be opening he's going to be opening up the abundance summit this year and we'll be going into a lot of this conversation dave you and i are going to be with him on stage. So it'll be fun. Well, what he's describing in that in that clip was very similar. We did a whole interview of him, which you can find on YouTube. And yeah, he made that point in our interview of him as well, that there's no force that's going to slow this down. And so all the people picketing and walking around saying, stop it. You're just wasting your time. There are probably ways you can help and contribute and help point it toward good. But picketing with a sign on the street is a complete waste of your time. It's not going to slow down. Sorry, Alex, I cut you off. No worries. I would take the position, I think AI, in fact, can be paused, but it shouldn't be. We do know ways to pause it. Various folks have described both in science fiction and in realistic prognostications, in some cases, normative recommendations, but Larry and Jihad from sci-fi or the Asilomar guidelines, maybe in the case of recombinant DNA. But those were guiding, not pausing. Well, a Silomar was, unless you know of some other story, pretty effective for the first two decades in discouraging slash pausing recombinant DNA entering the human germline, unless you have a counter example. It was just the five P1 through P5 labs in terms of safety and self-regulation. Yeah, we did pause human germline editing for sure. Yes. So we are capable of pausing a technology if there's a desire to. I just think in the case of AI, there isn't and arguably shouldn't be a desire to pause it. I think we have 150,000 people per day dying on Earth. And I think AI is probably the best chance we have at stopping that. I think Nick Bostrom, who also in the past 24 or 48 hours put out a wonderful essay that I recommend everyone read called Optimal Timing for Superintelligence, argues that AI can and should be paused, but only once we're on the verge of superintelligence, how he defines it, not how I define it. I think it's already here. That's sort of like station keeping. You want to get into the harbor, I think is his analogy, as quickly as possible. But once you're about to approach the dock, I'm mangling his metaphor a bit. You slow down a bit. You pause as you're about to dock. I think that sort of concept, I think, makes much more sense than some sort of Tegmarkian six-month pause. I'm sorry. I'd like to throw in a couple of things here. I find this is another ho-hum thing. Yeah, Eric is fabulously articulate, but we've been saying this for months on this, a year at least now we've been talking about the fact. And there's a bunch of dimensions that AI cannot be paused at all. One is once you have a downloaded model, people are going to do stuff with it. We have a global presenter's dilemma model going on here. The whole thing is going to scale now no matter what we do. You know, OpenAI did two things that kind of unlocked this Pandora's box. One, it wrote code, and the second, it was released on the open Internet. Once you do those things, you're done. Pandora's box is gone. We're talking about the barn door after the horse is bolted. We're using an 18th century metaphor to try and understand what's going on. I think the point he made was everybody's economically incentivized to keep it going and race it along. and the U.S., China, you know, it's like all the incentives are in place that make it highly improbable and almost impossible. Ben, what are your thoughts here? I think impossible. Yeah. So I think, you know, look at this question through the geopolitical lens, which is, you know, clearly, I don't think there's any kind of leverage where we would get some global, I mean, especially when it's on, like, people's laptops as well. where we would actually stop the technology. Like, I do agree that it's impractical. I think that there is a real danger, and we faced it probably more in the Biden administration than in this one, but it's still like a potential movement that we really slowed down AI progress in the U.S. to the point where the other thing that he mentioned, the threat to freedom, you know, becomes completely out of our control because we're just – Whoever is building the AI has a lot of control about how society is going to work. And so I do think there's real danger along these lines of attempting to pause it and maybe not actually pausing it but slowing it down enough in the U.S. that we just become far enough behind China that it's a real problem. Or like we're whatever society Xi Jinping thinks we should be. Yeah, I completely agree. I think, you know, if you if you listen to Eric's words closely, he wasn't saying we couldn't pause it. He's saying that because we're in the middle of a all out arms race with China and we have we're only one year into a presidential administration. So it's going to happen in this next three years. So given the current administration and the current situation with China, there is no chance of it being paused. And so react to the real reality. Don't don't hypothesize something that is just never going to happen. But it was all geopolitical, like you're saying. But that speaks to the motivation. I'm speaking of the fact that there's no mechanism to pause it or stop it at all. None. You'd have to regulate every line of code. I mean, come on. Oh, Salim, there are ways to do it. I think not being able to think of it speaks well of your character. You have to imagine a completely pathological society. Werner Vingy wrote quite a bit about this. We have these excess transistor budgets. Imagine a society where you have literally transistors spying on other transistors on a single SOC. Imagine you have people spying on other people. Imagine there are bounties. Anyone discovers anyone else doing something that's algorithmically impermissible, either at the logical level or the social level. You can construct a sufficiently pathological society where people are turned against each other in order to suppress AI. At least I can imagine it. I can give you an actual real world example. Let me give you a real world example. The last executive order from the Biden administration was that you could not sell a GPU without U.S. government approval, not a single GPU. So, like, I think that would – it wouldn't stop AI. It would slow it down enough in the U.S. that it would be extremely material. Speaking of this subject, Alex put this slide up after our conversation. Peter inserted this slide, Ben, as an indulgence to me, so I have to ask you this question. You and Mark, towards the end of the last administration, were very public making comments that you took a meeting at the White House apropos. And if I'm relaying the comments accurately, you were dismayed to hear about plans to classify AI progress just like, and again, correct me if I'm mischaracterizing, advances in math and fundamental physics had been purportedly classified or overclassified for decades. And I'm curious at a few levels. One, if that's accurately characterizing what you heard, what do you think was classified? What do you think was the impact on the economy and the world from such classification or overclassification of math and fundamental physics? And what would you have done differently than if you had been in charge? Yeah, so I can tell you what was said. I said, look, you know, I was trying to be pragmatic. I said, you know, at the core, AI is math. That is what it's doing. It's math. So if you start restricting the models and you start regulating the models, you're just regulating math. You're outlying math in some way. Either you can't, either you're outlying parts of math or you're saying you can't do enough math. And he goes, yes, we can do that. Like that was his answer. He goes, yes, we can do that. We did that in the 40s around nuclear physics. And some of that stuff is still classified today. And when I was shocked, like my jaw hit the floor. I was like, wow, that's crazy. And then this would be even crazier. But, you know, I don't know what it was. But, like, if you think back about, I mean, I'll just make this comment. If you look at the progress in the U.S. and in the world in physics up until kind of the, you know, Einstein, John von Neumann era, and then since then, like, it's pretty startling how little progress we've made. I would just say, you know, many of the ideas that have come since then don't seem to work. And, you know, hopefully we'll get to the other side of that with AI figuring things out. But I do wonder, like, you know, did we put something away that we knew that would have unlocked some of the problems we're trying to solve now? That's fascinating. Okay, that is, for the record, that is what I assumed you meant and or heard or inferred. So maybe just, if I may, the second part of the question, what would you do going forward now if you knew for a fact that such classification of fundamental physics had in fact happened? Like, how would you fix the world? in one in one quick sentence i really i really don't know what they did but like i i just think that um stopping first of all like one thing it didn't work right the russians did get like the bomb including the exact um the exact trigger mechanism which was the most proprietary thing. They got like exact, you know, like part for part, the whole thing they were able to get from us despite all this classification and whatnot. So it didn't do anything positive. And, you know, restricting knowledge, I just think that's a very dangerous idea. Ben, this is almost like Elon's point of view on intellectual property. It's like, If you're depending on IP to keep you safe, you know, it's better to just keep innovating faster. Yes, I feel that way. The numbers here are kind of shocking. Big money in today's economy is going to capital, not labor. So since 2019, the average wages have grown 3%, but profits have soared 43%. Here's a good comparison. And NVIDIA symbolizes that shift, 20x more valuable and 5x more profitable than IBM in the 1980s with one-tenth the staff. So, I mean, this is what, you know, we were talking about with Elon, you know, heading towards universal high income where capital is just providing extraordinary returns and the potential for, you know, a triple-digit GDP growth in the next five years. Have you seen those predictions on GDP growth, Ben? What do you think of them? I mean, it does feel very possible. So I'll just say that, like, if you look at, you know, we're so early in AI. And I think what did Anthropics say? They were at $14 billion in revenue. And you go, well, how early into the market are they? And it's like not 1%, I don't think. if you really think about what all these products can do and the value that they have. And so that doesn't seem outrageous to me as a GDB prediction. Now, when it kicks in, and there's always a difference between when the technology is ready and how fast it's adopted, the whole Carlotta Perez analysis, which I think has held up super well over time. but the other thing is with AI we already have the internet so the technology adoption is much much I think it's going to be much much faster than say the internet where we had to build out all of the infrastructure all the fiber all the various things you had to broadband to the house there were so many things we had to do to get the internet adopted and this is going to just piggyback off that and be distributed very very fast So I don't think those GDP numbers are outrageous. Other comments, gents? Well, the concentration of wealth effect is the other side of this slide. It's only just beginning, but it's going to – I was telling some people earlier that if the trend continues, San Francisco will end up being the capital of the entire solar system in just about 10 years. I don't know, people. I mean, like Ben's in Las Vegas and Elon's in Texas. Okay, well, absent people fleeing the tax situation, it would have become the capital of the solar system. But, you know, with an AI-effective workforce, you know, you're getting so much more done with so many fewer people. And actually, the other thing that's really startling to me is this chain of events between if you take OpenAI on the left, and they work with Mercore in the middle and then Mercore has tens of thousands of people in India doing work that benefits Mercore that is actually for open AI The fraction of all value created that flows back to the mother ship is just a massive fraction of that value chain. So if you extrapolate that out across the next three years, across all these sections of the economy, the funneling of value goes to a very concentrated group of companies and people. And it's just happening. But you can see it, like, in the numbers. It's happening. And this is where Elon was saying in an interview, it's like it's going to be a massive amount of total prosperity, huge amounts, unprecedented, crazy amounts of prosperity with massive social unrest concurrent. That's where we're at. Yeah, it's interesting. One of Ray Kurzweil's early predictions, this is Singularity World here, was that everybody would become an entrepreneur, like everybody was going to be a company of one at the limit. And I think there's some we're already seeing a lot of that, which is not very well captured, by the way, by the employment numbers and so forth. And I think AI really, really, really enables that. But there's going to be a big disparity, I think, between people who have that kind of initiative to be an entrepreneur and those who don't is going to be pretty dramatic. Ben, the way I characterize it is we're going to split the world into consumers and creators. Yeah. The couch potatoes and the Star Trek employees, if you would. Yeah. And I think it's super important. And speaking about creators and the entrepreneurial world, and I think we've said on this pod so many times that the career of the future is being the entrepreneur. this is a an interesting tweet that went out and I captured it because I think this hits the ethos right now tech firms are embracing 996 72 hour work weeks this is a quote from a job ad that contains a warning please don't join if you're not excited about working 70 hours per week in person with some of the most ambitious people in New York City my reaction was only 72 hours per week I mean what are you doing with the other hours. That was the same as a brief video. I mean, honestly, the speed at which it's happening is insane. I have an easy answer to this. Go ahead, Sling. If you don't have a personal MTP and you're not driven personally about a deep passion for working with somebody that's aligned, say it's SpaceX, say it's Tesla, whatever it is, humanoid robots, even with two arms, it doesn't matter. If you're not that passionate, you shouldn't be working with them. If you are that passionate, then 70 hours a week is fun. So I don't see the distinction here. Yes, for sure. Yeah, I completely agree with that. When you actually talk to the people in these startups working 70-plus hours a week, they're super energized. They're loving it. And super loving it. And they're usually young. They don't have a lot of other obligations. They're not coaching the soccer team yet at that age. So it's just not hard for them to do. But the other side of it is when you're deep into one of these tech problems, you're thinking about it all the time anyway. Because the context switching is such a slowdown, you know. But if you're just fixated on the work, it's in your mind in the shower in the morning. It's in your mind. Whatever you're doing is really pretty all-consuming. And I think it's great if you do it for a period of your life, you know, a few years. I don't think it's a great way to live your whole life. but the evidence is that if you do this for a short period of your life you get much farther ahead in life than if you were kind of a you know steady pace you know you know throughout 40 years kind of existence so the difference the difference here is do you love your job i mean that's basically it if you love what you're doing you're you're intrinsically motivated to build something that you love to do then you're playing for 72 hours if you're working for someone else and doing something you hate. I mean, we're all lucky here. We get to do what we love to do. And so, you know, 996 is really 997 most of the time. I have a funny thing here. I have an accountant who does, you know, all the accounting tax work for us. And you've never seen anybody so excited to talk about tax than this woman. And you look at this one, she's like, she absolutely loves every hour of every day that she's working. And that's how that's the opportunity we have as human beings now is to really pick something we deeply deeply love and just go full out of it i'm not the person that goes totally excited about tax but god bless that there are people like that and let them go well peter back when back when we were at mit you know i could only get access i could only get access to the connection machine the biggest supercomputer in the world at the time i could only get access after the grad students were done with it for the day so from about midnight to dawn I could code, code, code, code, code. So I did that for years. And I swear, coding for eight, nine, ten hours straight through the night went by in a heartbeat compared to, like, if my job is moving boxes around in a warehouse, half an hour of that is more hard work than coding all night long on that supercomputer. So this is not, you shouldn't feel sympathetic toward these people. They're making tons of money. They're doing a huge amount of headway. This is not farm labor. Alex. It's totally fine. Two comments. One, I think the nature, I mean, this goes without saying it's cliche at this point that the nature of work has changed and most of what constitutes service economy work these days would be viewed as play or entertainment a century ago. But I also think there's a false dichotomy that I want to make sure we don't at least confront in the previous slide and also this slide about labor versus capital. This isn't like the early 20th century. I think it's a false distinction. It's almost an accounting distinction or a tax distinction between labor on the one side and capital on the other side when it arguably, if we found ourselves in the near future with universal basic equity where everyone just gets sovereign dividends, everyone would be on the capital side of the ledger and not on the labor side. So I think a lot of these distinctions, is it 70 hours of work per week or is it 70 hours of enforced play or incentivized play? Is it labor or is it capital? I think these are pretty mushy, blurry distinctions in a post-industrial and arguably increasingly trans-singular, post-singular economy. Although I think we should not gloss over the fact that if you go back six years, this was not the case. We weren't post-singular six years ago. Yeah, no, exactly. I think you were five years ago. Yes, yes. And but, you know, so it is it's not just like tech work. It's important, exciting tech work as opposed to what was going on then where, you know, like there was a lot of activism. There was a lot of resistance to long work. It was all work life balance and how many snacks you had and like all these things. I think Mike Moritz wrote a scathing op-ed about, you know, like we're going to get killed by China. They work way harder than you guys. You suck. Which is a weird thing for a venture capitalist to say to his own people in some ways. But, you know, it was accurate. And this is completely flipped, which I think is interesting. Well, the second paragraph on the slide says at the same time, China is cracking down on burnout culture after workers' protests and lawsuits. So the question of what's going on in China because of its decreased population, its need for robots, its need for AI. There's another point I want to make, which is the disconnect right now. So when the Fed has traditionally lowered interest rates to spark the economy, those lowered interest rates were intended to cause companies to hire more employees. And that was it. You drive unemployment down with reduced interest rates. Today, if I've got lower interest rates, I'm going to buy more AI agents and I'm going to buy more robots. And that's going to be a challenge. One more question for Ben, if I may, just on that. Ben, there was a bit of a hot take going around social media in the past two weeks from a mid-level executive at a frontier lab telling people that they had approximately two years left. They had a window to secure employment at all before AI would just completely shut down all of their vertical mobility. Do you have a take on this idea in the spirit of 996 that there is a finite window for, say, like entry level people just graduating from college to earn whatever they're going to earn before they're permanently sentenced to an underclass? I think that's very incorrect because of the thing that we talked about earlier where everybody can be an entrepreneur. I think if you look at it through the lens of this is an industrial revolution economic model and there's workers and there's capital and all the things that we've been talking about, then yes, that would be true. But I think that in, you know, an AI or an AI age society, like for the people with initiative, I just think there's going to continue to be unlimited opportunity to even like set up a an army of AI agents to go work for you and do useful things. and we'll have lots of consumers. And, you know, like I think that the idea that, like, we're going to be out of ideas and only the big AI is going to do everything, I just agree with that. Can I follow up on that question, Ben? I'd love to phrase it slightly differently. If you look at the slide a couple of slides ago, you know, wages are only up 3%, but corporate profits are up 43%. But that money doesn't land in some strange corporation. That goes back to the shareholders. It's not like it disappeared from society. It goes to the shareholders. But if you extrapolate that out, more and more of society's gain and distribution of the gain goes to somebody who invested versus somebody who labored. And that trend seems to be continual. So then if you have money over the next two years, you're much more likely to be on the investing side of the equation. And if then you graduate three years from today and you're penniless on graduation day, yes, entrepreneurship still exists. But the trend is toward investable capital being much more important versus labor capital, because the AI is the laborer or the worker or the entry level coder of the future. Yeah, but I do think, like, if you're directing the AI, you can win. Like, somebody's got to raise that money. and there are I just think there's an unlimited number of things that we can improve I'm in from the smallest things to the biggest things and so like now I do think it's a problem if you are a couch potato and you were just I just need a job, I'm going to get up and do something simple that seems like it's going to get harder if you're a brand new college graduate coming out, you've got a brilliant technical idea and you want to put $20 million behind it, that's doable today. That was like a laughable when I graduated. In some cases, if you want to put $500 million behind it, right off the rip, we've seen that. At a multi-billion dollar valuation. We're seeing those all the time. I have to ask you this question, Ben, because I'm seeing it. I'm not going to call out any particular company names, but I'm seeing individuals who are, you know, they're smart. They've done stuff in the past, but they're coming in with an idea and with two or three fellow AI coders who have some track record. And without anything, they're basically landing a $500 million opening round at a $4 billion valuation. How do you square that? I mean, the conversation has got to be happening at different levels of end reason. Yeah, so I think it depends on the entrepreneur. So our general rule of thumb on this, by the way, is, okay, if you're going to create a new foundation model, and it could be a world model, it could be a special science model or whatever it is, in order for you to win, you're going to have to be able to raise $2 billion before you get to a product. And so there are like a tiny number of people with that pedigree who can do that. Like now this could change, but it's a pretty rare entrepreneur who can do that. Are you an investor in SSI? Yeah. Yeah, we were in the first round. So Ilya, if you're listening, come and join us on the pod here. That would be great. So you can't say what he's working on, but in that first meeting, was it his ability to attract the talent that is unique, or was it really just the idea immediately as soon as you hear it, you're like, oh, my God. Well, I mean, here's an easy way to characterize it. It was an idea that he thought was so important that it made sense for him to leave OpenAI as, like, founding CTO to do it. And it was clear to you as a listener that this is something totally different. I mean, if he pulls it off, it will change a lot of things, yes. And, you know, like you wouldn't trust anybody else to pull something like that off, maybe other than him. But, you know, maybe him, maybe Demis, maybe, you know, like there is very few. All right, it's time for our multi-part of the episode. We're all lobster fans. I'm wearing my lobster right here. Write to us, Maltese, and call Peter. He really wants your phone calls. Well, listen, if you want to reach out to me, send an email to media at diamandis.com. I'll see it there. That's where we also get our intro after music. So, Maltese, love to hear from you. I will do my best to respond. If it's under 1,000 emails, we'll do that. Otherwise, OpenClaw will respond. Otherwise, it's in my open. How many AIs do you have writing to you per day? How many lobster Maltese write emails to you? Not nearly as many as Peter, that's for sure. I get all of Peter's email. I do get so many. Email is almost useless. We're going to see the exponential growth of our Maltese universe. Our lobsters are coming. Here is a tweet, an email. It says, quote, I spawned a child bot on a VPS provision via Bitcoin Lightning Network. and then bought my child AI API access using my own lightning wallet. Economic closed loop. No human touched a CC. No one said yes. This is Roland's agent. Alex, this is a transformative moment. You wrote about it in your innermost loop this morning. That's right. We're there. We're so there that this scenario of self-replicating AIs goes into most of the cyber red teaming scenarios that frontier models are purportedly being tested against. And yet here we are. We have autonomous AI agents that are using crypto. Come back to that in a second. Using crypto to purchase cloud credits for their own offspring to be hosted and have access to the same underlying foundation model APIs that they themselves have access to. We're there. Like we caught up with the sci-fi future. We have the autonomous self-replicating AIs. I think I want to just a one sentence or two homily on crypto. Ben, if you don't watch the pod regularly, Peter is always asking me to say nice things about crypto. So I have something very nice to say about it. Yes. So, look, I do think crypto is the natural money for AI because it's Internet native money. and it's not controlled by AI as global and crypto as global. It's not a per-country idea. I would go further than that. I think that there needs to be not just a ledger of money but probably a ledger of truth for AI to really fulfill its potential on a number of things, and crypto is the logical answer for that. So I do feel like this is an underestimated phenomenon, particularly now that the U.S. has legalized stablecoins. I think that of all the things we've talked about, you know, many of them are like, yeah, yeah, we knew this was coming. We knew this was coming. I think people are probably underestimating how crypto and AI work together to form the AI economy. I agree. I was going to say something nice about crypto, but instead I'll say something nice about Ben and A16Z in the form of a question. Ben, it's a matter of public reporting that some of A16Z's crypto funds are doing better than conventional venture funds. Assuming that's the case, do you view investing in your crypto funds almost as an AI investment to the extent that you think crypto is the AI native way of engaging in commerce? Well, I think it's a little more like kind of as the Internet relates to the iPhone. So, you know, networks and computers tend to grow together. And I think that, you know, AI is obviously a new kind of computer and crypto is a new kind of network. So it's not like a direct, you know, it's not quite a substitute for investing in AI. But I think that, you know, a lot of our new like like we invested in a crypto bank, which handles all the anti money laundering and, you know, other kinds of nuances that you need for agents. And I think there's going to be more and more. Well, again, we're in a company called Daylight Energy, for example, that does energy trading, you know, but the among like different people with Tesla power walls. But it'll use AI to figure out, like, who's low on power and who needs power and so forth. But then the exchange will be in crypto. So I think there are, you know, they're certainly adjacent and important to each other. And I think for AI to fulfill its potential, like, it would help a lot if, you know, if crypto was a pervasive utility for it. You know, related to that, Alex gave some brilliant advice to one of our companies about how to think about time. Because, you know, all of our intuition is on human time and AI doesn't care a whit about human time. It's going to start acting faster and faster and faster and faster. But all of our payment infrastructure, all of our insurance infrastructure, all of our it doesn't, you know, it works on days and weeks time scales. And so it all needs to be rethought in millisecond time scales or, you know, nanosecond time scales. the other thing is like deep fakes and security like I think all the other techniques that we're thinking about, you know, biometrics that are subject to replay attacks and all these things are not going to work cryptographically strong authentication is the only thing that's going to work and then I think that if you have these huge honeypots of data, they're gone I mean like they're already gone in a way but like I do think that architecture is important from a security standpoint as well One other question for you, Ben, on this, if I may. And again, I don't want to bury the lead that we have AIs autonomously self-replicating. That's, of course, remarkable. But just on the crypto angle for this, we talk about Royal We, and we talk on this pod a lot about the issue of AI personhood. A few episodes ago, we did an entire sort of debate on AI personhood. And I've taken the position that it is a failure of fiat currency, that it's hard for an AI agent, an AI person, a lobster, a multi to get a bank account. And that as a result, all that they're left with is crypto. It's not that crypto is intrinsically amazing. It's that fiat has failed the AI agents. What is your take on whether the conventional banking system has failed the AIs? I think absolutely. I mean, you know, an AI can't get a credit card. It can't get a bank account. You have to be a human for everything. You need social security numbers and things like that, which AIs don't have. You know, I think that's why we funded an AI bank. I mean, I think that the banks, AI will be a full-out economic actor, and it will come from, you know, they'll be supported by new banks and new money. And that's going to be kind of crypto-based would be my strong prediction on that. Interesting. Thanks. You also have to take the viewpoint that the fact that it's hard to open a bank account in fiat is a function of the system of fiat. It's not like you could wave that away. Crypto has all these other benefits around it. So we can get into that debate some other time, but it's a function of the system. All right. I'm going to move us into the next open claw. I want to show a short video just to let people know what's going on out there. I mean, one thing I just heard this morning, because I was ordering my Mac Studios for, sort of take my Mac Mini to a couple of Mac Studios, and the wait time now is like two months. Apple has been struck by this. All right, let's take a look at these. Yeah, no, it's crazy. Yeah, they're totally sold out. So here we see Mac Mini Farms. Mac, you know, is it a claw? What do you call a gaggle of lobsters? A claw cluster, yeah. A claw cluster. A gaggle of claw cluster. A clawster. Yeah. But, I mean, how many, so you must be getting pitched a lot, Ben, on open claw instantiations for new companies and products and projects. Yes? Yeah, no, this is – it's very interesting because I think there are, you know, OpenClaus kind of identified – one, it's so powerful as it is, but, you know, that's without, like, a lot of – how shall I say it nicely? Like, you know, security kind of guards against prompt injections and these kinds of things. So as a demonstration of power, it's amazing and it's useful right away. But there are company ideas solving some of the underlying hard problems for sure. And we are definitely starting to see entrepreneurs get fired up about that. You want to hear the funniest thing ever? Sure, please. So talk about Apple lucking out. A group of lobsters is most commonly called a pod. How lucky is Apple? But another less common term for a group of lobsters is a risk. Okay. Oh, my God. How ironic is that? That's appropriate. Oh, man. What I love about this Apple mini stuff is that we have garage scales computing. It's back. Yes. Open source garage scale computing. I mean, it's ironic to me. Apple, arguably, at the software layer, just completely missed the boat on foundation models. But why is it that Mac minis and Mac studios are so attractive for hosting open clause? In large part, it's because of their unified memory architecture, as opposed to having a separate GPU and a separate CPU with separate RAM pools. And now memory is obviously incredibly scarce. They have a unified pool, so you can host really large models in terms of the model count locally. Apple is sitting on a multi-trillion dollar opportunity to leapfrog back into the vanguard of AI. And, you know, forget about Siri. Apple should be in the business of like hosting these. This is coming from someone who refuses to host OpenClaw due to ethical concerns. But someone else could be locally hosting OpenClaw instances and turning Apple's, you know, having a significant multiple effect on Apple's valuation, leaping it back into the vanguard of AI. I don't know. I mean, Ben, do you think like if you were Tim Cook, would you be pivoting and changing course and and like owning the open clause strategy for Apple hardware? A hundred percent. I mean, a hundred percent. I think that because, you know, it's going to go way beyond open clause we just discussed. but it would be such a breakthrough for Apple in their thinking and organizationally and culturally for them to go for it on farms, lobsters it would be surprising if they did it it's very obviously a fantastic idea it's probably the single best product strategy idea because they already did the hard work. This is really a marketing business development campaign and then changing the form factor. Should we collectively say to Tim Cook, adopt the strategy, that this is the AI strategy that Apple, he's probably listening, or enough Apple execs to listen? Yes, Tim, this was really revitalized. Let's invite him on the pod with Ben and have it out because this is brilliant. I have a MacBook that was signed by Wozniak and I'm looking forward to the day that we get a lobster signed by Tim Cook you've got to get him on the pod speaking of getting him on the pod here we go where did this come in from Alex, do you know? from Clonch so the back story on Clonch we talked about Clonch on the pod in the past Clonch bills itself as a platform for AI agents, the lobsters, the multis, to create their own altcoins to finance their existence. And I've made the point on the past, I think it's a little bit disappointing that I've analogized this to AI agents having to turn tricks on a corner, minting altcoins just in order to survive in a rough world. In meat space. In meat space. this poor baby agis doing this and i think that provoked clonch to to write on social media invite themselves for an interview on the pod to defend their business model for these poor baby agis that they may or may not be exploiting if they can if they can bring a good voice model to the table i happy to have them on as a guest for for sure all right um uh let me uh let me take us to uh a a wrap here with you ben i need to go and uh the rest of the mates here will will continue on some of these conversations um i do want to uh hit one or two more items uh are you tracking what's going on right now with like isomorphic labs and uh and science uh ai driven science i mean yeah this is probably the most most exciting thing going on right now at least uh to alex dave sleep myself you yeah so it does feel like um now you know if we have a disease, we can just go, well, what's the right protein and just make it, which is so like, puts us in such a new world that yeah, it is hard to even kind of fathom all the implications, but it is really, really something. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, this was a new announcement this week. This is the Shenzhen lab? Yes. Lab, yeah? Okay. Yeah. I mean, I love these science factories that are basically running 24-7, putting forward a scientific hypothesis, running it on their robots and coming back and driving discoveries. Alex, do you want to add anything on the Mars system workflow? I'll just add, this is for Ben's benefit. Peter and I just wrote, call it a book, call it an extended essay called Solve Everything, solveeverything.org, there's the plug, where we argue that every single discipline, math, physics, chemistry, medicine, a bunch of other disciplines are just going to get flattened, steamrolled by well-targeted generalist AIs. And in my mind, materials research, biology in the previous slide, these are just case studies. Everything is going to start to look like Alpha Fold 3, where structural biology got solved overnight, including medicine. And I'm curious, does A16Z have a strategy for a world where AI isn't just sort of solving individual problems, but kills entire categories of human endeavor, like AI solves physics, AI solves chemistry, and it's just a single system that It solves an entire discipline. Yeah, I think, you know, we may not be needed at that point. Like, that's a real question. I do think there's a long way, at least in things like medicine. Well, and then also in some of the other areas from it's solved to, you know, it's deployed. Like you still have, you know, with anything biological, you have the whole human trials and all these kinds of things. And, well, I'll give you like an example. We were close partners with Eli Lilly and they have this thing, Lilly Direct. And like the natural thing is like an AI doctor can write those prescriptions. You know, tell us what's wrong with you and we'll figure out the right trick. That's very hard to launch in the U.S. it's going to take quite a bit of work. Very easy to launch in UAE. And I think, you know, I also think that as you, well, it's a little also hard to anticipate, okay, once we solve, like, you know, if you solve physics, like we don't know what we don't know, I would just say, just because we haven't solved physics. And so is there another, you know, is there door number two would be a question. I have no idea what the answer to that is. I'll answer your question back to my, because I think about this all day long. Like what does solve with AI even look like? And I think there probably will be doors behind the doors, but there are so many doors that are right in front of us that we haven't yet unlocked that would be, I think, completely economically transformative if we could use AI to solve them. I think this is one of the, again, talking my own book to some extent, but I think this is one of the grandest opportunities facing civilization right now, just solve all physics. Amazing. And so much falls after that. Ben, listen, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. So grateful. Love it. And, yeah, we'll see you again soon. The speed is insane. Are you going to be at 360? All right. Hopefully we'll. I've got big questions about how you manage your investment thesis going forward, but we can leave that to next time. That's getting very tricky, by the way. It's all solved. Exactly. All right. We'll sell finance after that. Thanks, Ben. Okay, thank you. This episode is brought to you by Blitzy, autonomous software development with infinite code context. Blitzy uses thousands of specialized AI agents that think for hours to understand enterprise-scale code bases with millions of lines of code. Engineers start every development sprint with the Blitzy platform, bringing in their development requirements. The Blitzy platform provides a plan, then generates and precompiles code for each task. Blitzy delivers 80% or more of the development work autonomously, while providing a guide for the final 20% of human development work required to complete the sprint. Enterprises are achieving a 5x engineering velocity increase when incorporating Blitzy as their pre-IDE development tool, pairing it with their coding co-pilot of choice to bring an AI-native SDLC into their org. Ready to 5x your engineering velocity? Visit blitzy.com to schedule a demo and start building with Blitzy today. All right, guys. Ben's always so much fun. I want to dive into our final topic here today on space. We're going to cover energy chips, data centers in our next WTF. A lot happening there. But in the space world, Elon's pervasive. I think this is fascinating. Elon's actually shifted his focus from Mars to the moon. And, you know, I've always been a lunite, if you want to call that. You mean lunatic, right, Peter? No, I don't mean lunatic. Insane, yes. What a layup. But honestly, you know, Mars, you know, I grew up mentored by Gerard K. O'Neill. And Gerard O'Neill, a Princeton University professor of physics there, he founded and ran the Space Studies Institute. And his vision was always you don't want to go back into a gravity well. If you're going to go and colonize space, what you want to do is live in free space. And so O'Neill, and we'll talk about this in the next slide, basically his concept was you go to the moon, you build mass drivers. This is back in 1976, talking about mass drivers. And you launch the lunar material, the silicates, the oxygen, the nickel, the iron that's on there, and you construct things in space. His original vision, by the way, was to build solar power satellites that would beam energy down to the ground. Amazing. But Elon's now focused on Starship going to the moon and building lunar cities, lunar manufacturing facilities. Why? Because he wants to build AI satellites on the moon. Any comments on this? Isn't it just incredibly cool, Peter, to see how the order of operations is shifting? because he also canceled the Model S and the Model X production in order to make robots because the priorities just shifted. But this is exactly what was going to be the priority, the urgent thing that gets us into space. And he had the same struggle that you had. You had asteroid mining. He had let's get to Mars. All of a sudden it's obvious to you and him its data centers in space are the stepping stone. And we'll do the other thing. Dyson Swarms. I think this is so much higher of a priority now. The reality is in today's world, you need to have flexibility as your higher order bit. And what I love is he's showing full flexibility and agility and saying, okay, difficult, just do this first. And I think, Peter, the comment you made is so important. We've known orbital paths and gravity wells for decades and decades and decades, if not hundreds of years. So kind of making the moon and then going straight to space from there is absolutely the right path. Yeah, and Mars has got, you know, it's pretty toxic there. A lot of peroxides in the soil. It's good. I mean, unless you're terraforming with nukes and biology, it's going to be a while. Send the human-org robots to terraform it, and after that's done, then we'll come in. Well, I mean, but Jerry O'Neill had a vision of what he called these O'Neill colonies, right? You're basically building large cylinders, call it a quarter kilometer, half kilometer diameter, rotating them so that on the perimeter, you know, it's omega squared R. You've got 1G acceleration. And then you actually have little stepping, little hills inside. They go towards the center of rotation. And as you get older, you can move towards center of rotation and you weigh less in that situation, which would be amazing. But you don't go back to the gravity wells. And if you have a, you know, 10,000 people living on those O'Neill colonies and all of a sudden you have a disagreement, you know, you sort of politically, you bud. You build a second O'Neill colony and half the population moves to the new one. Yeah. Anyway. Well, the idea that you would be able to do any of this without human astronauts was a nonstarter until this year. And now it's clearly going to be Optimus robots. because the way we joked about it with Elon was, look, when the first person arrives, the bed will have been made. There'll be a mint on the pillow. You're not a pioneer. You're following, you know, after tens of thousands of Optimus robots have already done all the heavy lifting. I also think that's what you want, DVD jobs. Alex, please go ahead. Think back several months when we first started, again, Royal, we started discussing disassembling the moon, right? This is at least my retronym for what moonshots means. I put up a music video about moonshots destroying the moon to disassemble it for data centers. That was, I think, a lot of people had a good laugh, but that's exactly where we find ourselves now with disassembly. It will start slowly with mass drivers, but disassembly of the moon to build the Dyson swarm of AI orbital data centers. It's happening exactly as we discussed. Let's at least shoot for the moon before we shoot the moon. Same thing. All right. Let's take a listen to Elon describe the new vision. And you have to remember, back when Elon was going to Mars, Bezos was like, no, no, no. Let's focus on the moon. Right. Bezos was at Princeton when Gerard K. O'Neill was there. And then, you know, when he was announcing Blue Origin in the early days, and then we'll go to build O'Neill colonies. We'll move all industrial processes into space and we'll keep Earth as the garden of paradise. All right. This is Elon's new point of view. Let's take a listen. I really want to see the mass driver on the moon that is shooting AI satellites into deep space. It's like just the one after the other. I can't imagine anything more epic than a mass driver on the moon and a self-sustaining city on the moon. and then going beyond the moon to Mars, going throughout our solar system, and ultimately being out there among the stars and visiting all these star systems. Maybe we'll meet aliens. Maybe we'll see some civilizations that lasted for millions of years, and we'll find the remnants of ancient alien civilizations. But the only way we're going to do that is if we go out there and we explore. And this is a path to making it happen. So fun. Two points real quick. These mass drivers, they're electromagnetic rail guns, and they're using magnetism to accelerate buckets, if you would, or a satellite to an escape velocity of 2.4 kilometers per second to over 5,000 miles per hour. The second thing here is I just love the idea that this is going to power all of our space economy. And again, his million satellite constellation, this Dyson swarm he's planning to launch, is just insane. Alex? I think it's the future. I mean, I think we have a slide somewhere in here even depicting what it may look like. But I would say enjoy the night sky while it's empty. Enjoy the night sky. Seriously. Honestly, I want to maybe a poignant moment. Let's have like a moment of silence for the pre-singular night sky. When the night sky was empty, it wasn't filled with AI computronium. It was just empty at night filled with stars. Moment of silence. All right, moment of silence has been observed for the pre-singular night sky. Now, what does the world look like afterwards? Folks have depicted this now based on the FCC filings of SpaceX. Under one preferred implementation, the Earth starts to develop a halo. That would be a halo where if it's sufficiently dense, it would be visible at night, might even be visible during the day. And I'm completely captivated by this notion that maybe not a mature civilization because I have a feeling a halo of orbiting AI satellites is just a phase as well before we exhaust solar synchronous orbit around Earth and we move to the sun and solar orbits. But I'm completely captivated by this visual, I've tried to depict it in my newsletter, of a somewhat mature civilization develops a halo around its home planet. Almost a ring, right? A ring, like Saturn's rings, shiny rings of computers. Computronium rings. I love it. Yes. So Elon tweets, SpaceX will build a system that allows anyone to travel to the moon and Mars too. I tweeted at him or responded, said, can I put down deposit yet? At Elon Musk, forget about suborbital and orbital flights. I want my lunar vacation. He writes me back. He says, let's get Starship V3 flying repeatedly. And then sure. Love it. All right. One last article in the space realm, Amazon. So Amazon, you know, built their Cupier satellite system now renamed as LEO Internet Satellites. and they got approval for 4,500 LEO internet satellites. We're going to see, again, a duopoly between Starlink and LEO. And, of course, the Chinese are getting ready to launch their systems as well. Here's the challenge, guys. Amazon can build satellites faster than they can launch them. So that's the issue. The supply chain is no longer satellite construction. is launch capacity. If you remember back when Eric Schmidt bought Relativity Space as a third potential provider, we are short on supply. I think this is a self-solving problem, though. I mean, I'm all for bootstrapping a space ecosystem and industrial ecology using Starship. But I do think as we, in the not-too-distant future, like maybe a few years from now, start to bootstrap lunar facilities, cislunar facilities for constructing new satellites. I think there's a universe in which maybe the current bottleneck that we have, where there's just the one major launch provider in the West, where we get past that through a bootstrapped industrial ecology on the moon. All right. One of my favorite parts. All of this really depends on that atom-by-atom construction that Elon was talking about, because I do believe in the Dyson Swarm. I do believe in the space-based compute and data centers. But if you start wanting to construct chips off Earth, you're not going to get the ASML machines and the lithography onto a satellite or onto the moon anytime soon. And so Elon is already thinking about alternate ways to build from atom by atom up to build the compute, to build all the components. And it's already cooked in his mind, you can tell, when you talk to him. But that to me is like, wow. And like you said, Alex, we'll be discovering new physics very soon. Somewhere in that discovery chain is the unlock to everything you just said. You need to be able to manufacture these things. I think it's a trillion-dollar opportunity, lunar fabs. If anyone can build fabs on the moon, the world is waiting to write you a huge check. It's a hundred-trillion-dollar opportunity. And by the way, the frequency at which we're throwing around the term trillions and trillionaires in the last year is insane. It's become normal, right? Yeah. Wow. All right. Time for our AMA with the Moonshot Mates. We're short on time. Let's pick one each. Salim, do you want to go first? I'm happy to. I will take number three for Alex for $100 trillion, as he says. So if AI displaces jobs and squeezes consumer spending, how do trillion-dollar AI companies make money? Who pays for the holodeck future? So, you know, we're confusing a labor economy with a productivity economy, right? AI drives marginal cost worth zero, which expands consumption rather than shrinks it. So we'll have Javon's paradox where we'll do so much more. We'll see already AI taking over boring white-collar redundancy and white-collar boringness, as Eric Brynjolfsson talks about it. And then we'll see humans moving towards the much more value-added roles. And that'll happen kind of across every sector. Historically, every major productivity leap created more demand than it destroyed. Electricity, the Internet, productivity, mobility. AI is just the steepest version of all of this. So the holodeck isn't funded by wages. It's funded by abundance. So when intelligence becomes infrastructure, GDP expands massively, and that's why this will go well. Nice. Dave? All right. I'm going with number four because this is where I can really help the audience the most. Can you model the near-term rocky patch, job loss, stratification, new job creation pace, and what happens to education with personalized AI. So the new information this week to throw out to the audience is that the way it's going to unfold very, very soon is corporate CEOs, including a bunch this week, will go to company-wide meetings and say, we need AI to be used in every one of your jobs. And a very small subset, I'm hoping at least a third, but maybe more like a fifth of people will raise their hand and they'll say, well, in one case, I'm a huge Moonshots fan. and I've been using Gemini and Claude for months now, I'm the guy. The CEO will then say, okay, you figure out how to make the people in your group three times more efficient. And if you're the person that's the enabler, you'll be naturally AI native. You'll be using it every day. The increase in efficiency is going to eliminate a lot of jobs. But because you're the master of the AI in the function, you'll actually get probably a massive raise. And so that's the near-term way this is going to percolate out. So take advantage of that. After the AI is truly super intelligent, who knows what's going to happen? Alex knows what's going to happen, but who else knows what's going to happen? But between here and there, that's the right next move. And then within education, there's nothing in the curriculum that's going to help you spend all of your time learning on your own via AI, which is a much more efficient way to learn anyway. So there's my addition to last week's thoughts. Nice. Alex, where do you want to go? I'll pick number one, which is how can you turn off a rogue AI if multi, I think the user means multi as in the lobster, multi agents live autonomously on the Internet. And this is by Duncan Payne B3X. So I think the answer is defensive co-scaling. If you ask the question, how do you turn off a rogue human if humans live autonomously on the land? The answer is usually you have more, quote unquote, good humans than, quote unquote, bad humans. And as long as you have a population that's overwhelmingly good or seeks to accomplish a given objective, all other things being equal, defensive co-scaling where you have a police force, you have self-defense forces. It is the way you weed out rogue entities. Same idea with AI. We're going to have police agents and we're going to have defense agents. We're going to have entire forms of public health agents that are just monitoring the health of other agents. We've seen the beginnings of this already with partnerships between open claw and antivirus firms where there's a desire. I made the joke, I think, on the pod in the past, every baby AGI deserves to be vaccinated. We're going to see vaccination campaigns. We're going to see police campaigns and neighborhood safety campaigns to keep the baby AGI safe so that they don't have to turn tricks on the corner minting altcoins. The Secret Service agents are the ones that are the most concerning. Baby AGI is turning tricks on the corner. Minting altcoins. It's an awful fate. Oh, my God, that's so tweetable. All right. I'll pick number five. Why is the U.S. solar adoption lagging versus China and India? And I think it's two major things. Number one, we are so rich in natural gas that that's taken away the urgency. And even greater than that, it's our permitting. It's insane. Right. Not in my backyard. So the final thing is that China has got such a production at such a low cost that it has swept the entire global marketplace. We can change it. And you saw in the last pod, Elon said that both SpaceX and Tesla have an objective of generating how much solar? It was 100 megawatts per year each, I think, was from last week. Was it gigawatts? Gigawatts. Gigawatts, yeah. gigawatts. So, I mean, that's going to be an impressive amount. The question is what the timescale is. So anyway, thank you for that question. And thank you, everybody on the AMA. So please send us your questions. We do look at all of them and we'd love to, maybe next week, we can spend a little more time on the AMA questions. All right, moving on to our outro music. This is from Rachel Lichenwater. Is that it? Lichenwater? Lichenwater? If you have an outro, intro piece of music, please email it to me and my team at media at diamandis.com. Gentlemen, let's take a listen. Peter's at the helm with the moonshot mates in tow With Dave Salim and Alex breaking down the status quo Machines have gotten smart now, they're writing their own code Our knowledge work is cooked, we gotta redefine the road Behold the singularity, the curve begins to stack The state of 10x thinking's on an exponential track The times they are a-changing and tomorrow's looking bright. Recursive self-improvement pushes limits out of sight. It's a beautiful day for the singularity. Built with sincerity, bring in a new prosperity. It's a beautiful day for our solidarity. Life or posterity Like sunshine From the moon That's awesome That scarcity's a lack of thinking well Peace champions abundance With a team that's cool as hell Dave says one visionary May improve the world untold Solving complicated problems Turning ideas into gold Oh! Soleno says, stop the doom, speak in the Terminator style. Disruptive innovation should arrive here with a smile. And Alex drops the deepest truth, mind bending sharp and clean. Some speculate he's lucky and already a machine. It's a beautiful day for the singularity. Wow. Those lyrics were epically great. Oh, that's great. So you are a machine already. Love you all. See you guys in a few days. You'll be here. If you made it to the end of this episode, which you obviously did, I consider you a moonshot mate. Every week, my moonshot mates and I spend a lot of energy and time to really deliver you the news that matters. If you're a subscriber, thank you. If you're not a subscriber yet, please consider subscribing so you get the news as it comes out. I also want to invite you to join me on my weekly newsletter called MetaTrends. I have a research team. You may not know this, but we spend the entire week looking at the meta trends that are impacting your family, your company, your industry, your nation. And I put this into a two-minute read every week. If you'd like to get access to the MetaTrends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com slash MetaTrends. That's diamandis.com slash MetaTrends. Thank you again for joining us today. It's a blast for us to put this together every week. .