Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Welcome back to a New Year's Day episode of The Light Cone. We wanted to hit you guys with predictions on what's going to happen in 2025. Diana, do you want to start us off? Sure. So last year, AI won two Nobel Prizes. The first one was the Nobel Prize in Physics with Jeff Hinton on his seminal work on deep neural nets.
And the second one was a Nobel Prize on chemistry from Demis and his team on alpha fold and protein folding. And we're seeing how AI is really accelerating abundance with discoveries with science and technology. And there's a total of six Nobel Prizes. There's four more to go. So why not winning one more? It could be the one on math, perhaps. It could be interesting. I know there's been a lot of collaboration going on.
with OpenAI and Terence Tao, the famous mathematician and a bunch of researchers trying it too. Could be one in economics. I don't know if we come up with some interesting economics theories, but maybe those. I think the peace one in literature might be a bit more tricky. All right. My one is a
dangerous one to make on camera. It's that next year crypto is going to go mainstream. Very specifically, my prediction is this time next year, you and everyone you know will have bought at least one thing during the year that's real, whether it's a cup of coffee or a book using a stablecoin. And the reason I think
this will happen is payment. When you think about it, like payment networks are actually just marketplaces, the marketplace businesses, you just have like vendors on one side and consumers on the other. And we all know from our work with startups and marketplace businesses are incredibly hard to start because you have a chicken and egg problem. But when you do figure out how to crack the chicken and egg problem, you have incredibly sticky and during business. They actually, the biggest YC companies are almost all marketplaces and
Airbnb, DoorDash, Instacart. I mean, Coinbase itself essentially started out as a marketplace, though it has like an exchange as a marketplace, really. I think what's happened with crypto is clearly everyone came in initially for the speculation and buying things where the numbers went up. But stable coins have emerged as like a truly like valuable use case. And so many, many people have a crypto wallet, which at this point is hundreds of millions of people.
will recognize that stable coins are a really great way to just buy things. And so you basically have one side of the marketplace lined up. There's hundreds of millions of people who will have stable coins in their crypto wallets.
All you need now are the merchants to start accepting USDC or a stable coin. And I think that's actually the much easier part of the marketplace to get. Yeah, there's a lot fewer of them. Yeah, there's fewer of them. And it's just a more traditional like ground sales game. And I think people, especially now the regulatory environment is great.
looking more optimistic. I think next year you'll just see a big push and you'll walk into your local coffee shop and they'll accept USDC payments. I think it's going to be huge. It's pretty clear that stable coins are sort of desperately needed in finance overall. I mean, when you look at something like that Synapse disaster, that startup that lost...
you know, tens to hundreds of millions of dollars of user funds. You know, if you had, you know, open ledger, I think that you would be able to figure it out. But right now they don't even know, you know, where the money went and they don't know how to track it down for people. So it's a pretty wild situation when you really think about it. It's overdue.
So I think for mine, I also have one that is kind of crypto related in that I think if Doge, the sort of Elon Musk and Vivek attempt to reduce government waste works, then Dogecoin will go up in a very circuitous sort of way. I think that
interest rates are largely sort of driven by a lot of different factors. But one of the bigger ones is actually whether or not the government is actually doing a lot of deficit spending. And I think the markets, the way they're moving, at least right now, as we're watching it in late December, they think that Trump is probably going to spend a lot more money. But
you know, if Doge is able to actually reduce spending, well, that means that interest rates will come down and, you know, sort of a hopefully the economy will actually pick up, there will be more GDP growth, but also interest rates rule everything around us, as we've learned the last, you know, three or four years. So, you know, sort of concretely, as crypto prices go, they turn out to be
highly correlated to interest rates. So interest rates go down, crypto prices and hopefully GDP goes up. And likewise, it's probably true that the reverse is also going to happen. If Doge fails in their mission, it seems pretty clear that
Trump left to his own devices would probably increase, you know, spending the way he did in his first term. And so I don't know. I mean, what can I say? We're we're rooting for you, Elon. Yeah.
Yeah, I think another aspect that ties into what we've been talking about is the worry with lowering interest rates is that inflation will spur back up. But tech in general is deflationary and AI in particular may be like the greatest, single greatest deflationary force of our lifetimes. And so if that plays out, you may well be able to lower interest rates without stimulating huge amounts of inflation. All right, I've got an AI one, which is a product that I'm just like personally excited about.
to see and play with that I think is going to come out next year. And it's basically, you will be able to have a Zoom call with an AI.
Like in 2024, that was the year where you could finally have a phone call with an AI and they got the latency low enough that it felt like natural and real. And I think next year we're going to be able to do the same thing, but it's going to be like a Zoom call where there's like a face and a whole like virtual avatar, but it's actually like real time and you're interacting with like a virtual like AI person on a screen.
That doesn't feel uncanny valley. Because right now there are different versions of it that are very uncanny. There are, but the latency is bad and the lip syncing is bad. And it's just like, it's just like not a good experience yet. But I think it's going to, yeah. Like a 3D tearing test. It's going to happen. Yeah.
Like a 3D turn test, yeah. Maybe we'll get them to do the light cone episodes for us. Surprise. This is actually all AI. Just kidding. It's still real. It's still real. So with that, we just wanted to give you a lightning episode of our predictions for 2025. Happy New Year, and we'll catch you guys next time. ♪