AI Venture Capitalist: These Tech Predictions Will Change Everything by 2030 w/ Vinod Khosla | EP #159
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The only thing we know about the future is it'll be uncertain. We have to figure it out in increments.

How do you think about the future of programming? No more programmers or everyone's a programmer? In the past, users of computers have had to learn computers. I think in the future, computers will learn humans. There are no resource limitations. Technology is a force that converts whatever was scarce into abundance. This business of bipedal robots will be larger than the auto industry within 20 years. And the auto industry doesn't know it. What's going to be the impact...

Well, let me put it this way. Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome, Vinod. Thank you. It's been too long. It's been long, but it's great to see people who believe in abundance. Yes. To see so many people who believe in it. So congratulations for that.

My favorite saying is skeptics never did them possible. Yes. So that's a good place to start. It is. And, you know, I've had the pleasure of knowing you for, I don't know, a couple of decades now and to be in some deals together through Bold Capital, but always love your vision. But I think it's important for you to realize that Vinod, beyond being a great investor, is a entrepreneur and a company builder.

You've built some extraordinary companies. Thank you. I want to read a... I have to say, in 40 years, I haven't once called myself an investor. Yes. Because I don't like investors very much. So in December 23, I have a wide range of questions. I'll try and get through as many as we can. And please take your questions down for Vinod, because we'll be going to Q&A with him and Brett shortly. So December 23, you predicted a billion bipedal robots by 2040. Yes.

and that the robots would play a larger role than the auto industry. And six months ago, you suggested robots could be at 10K and be as essential as a smartphone. So coming off of Brett's presentation, talk to me about your thoughts on that. I think Brett is right. It is going to be a large business. And from a situational awareness point of view, how many people have read the situational awareness paper?

It's amazing. For the rest of you, you should read it. And if you don't want to read the whole thing, grab the paper, put it in Notebook LM, and listen to the podcast. That's a good idea. I'm serious. It's an extraordinary paper. Yeah, it is extraordinary. I think what I would say is this business of bipedal robots or some equivalent like that in various form factors and configurations is

will be larger than the auto industry within 20 years. And the auto industry doesn't know it. So if we have a billion bipedal robots, and I think that's an underestimate. I agree with you. First, these robots will do more work than all of the manual labor humanity does across 7 billion people today. And there may be many more than a billion.

And they'll be working 24-7, not eight hours with breaks. So the capacity for labor goes up dramatically. While AGI, we can address that, increases the capacity for human thinking and human expertise, which will essentially be free. We can come back to that. But it's such a large opportunity.

There are very few people and almost nobody in the group that should understand this, which is the auto industry. Their biggest opportunity has failed to recognize it, except Elon. He's doing robots. Elon says it will be bigger. It'll be the biggest part of Tesla will be Optimus. I believe that. Yeah.

You go on in your predictions, you mentioned expertise will be free with AI-based tutors and doctors 24-7. And so for the abundance members here that are running healthcare education companies, what's going to be the impact on them? Well, let me put it this way. It was 2012, I wrote a blog, or two blogs. The first one was called Do We Need Doctors?,

Just to be a little conversational. And now it's clear they will play a minor role in health care. They will play a role in certain levels of human connection. That'll be important.

And my second blog was Do We Need Teachers? And frankly, I just saw a piece out of Beijing today about why the Chinese government is going to adapt AI tutors for kids. So this was 2012. Almost certainly, no matter what expertise you're talking about,

AI doctors, AI teachers, AI oncologists, AI structural engineers, AI accountants. And by the way, we're investing in all these. Any place the U.S. Bureau of Labor says there's more than 100,000 workers in a category, we should be investing in all these categories. So what will its impact be? At the level, you know, you have to talk about timeframes.

The next five years, all of you should be thinking every single professional can get five AI interns. So if you're an MD, you can supervise five AI interns just like they graduated out of Sainford Medical School. If you're an accountant,

You already hired junior accountants fresh out of school. Imagine five AI intern accountants, and whether they grow up in three years, five years, or 10 years, a little hard to predict, it'll vary by category, but that's a good model to think about. First, leveraging expertise, but the more interesting question that I've asked a number of boards I speak to in the healthcare business is if all expertise were free,

how would you design a healthcare system? And I think that's the right question. That's the right model. That's the right model for if you're a healthcare provider of any sort. But let me go a little further and say at the national policy level, if a farm worker and an oncologist have exactly the same expertise up level to what an AI has, how do you pay people? Interesting question to ask. Everybody, I hope you're enjoying this episode. You know,

You know, earlier this year, I was joined on stage at the 2025 Abundance Summit by a rock star group of entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors focused on the vision and future for AGI, humanoid robotics, longevity, blockchain, basically the next trillion dollar opportunities. If you weren't at the Abundance Summit, it's not too late. You can watch the entire Abundance Summit online by going to exponentialmastery.com. That's exponentialmastery.com.

You've said that the most consumer access of the internet could be agents acting for consumers. I don't think my agent is going to be interested in Google ads or is interested in a TV commercial of somebody with white hair.

teeth on a toothpaste. What happens to advertising if agents are doing the buying? I actually might disagree. First, I'd say the one thing that's clear is the level of unpredictability in all this, including what I say. The only thing we know about the future is we'll probably be wrong. Well, the only thing we know about the future is it'll be uncertain. We have to figure it out in increments. But

What is advertising? It's information. To emotionally induce us into buying a $300 pair of jeans when $30 Levi's will do just fine, that's a filter the AI can apply.

So the nature of advertising, I suspect, will change to more informational, which is the original purpose of advertising. It has switched to one of my big beefs with capitalism is mostly capitalism is about making you buy things you had no intention of buying. That's what advertising has become. But that's not what it was.

And so making people buy things they don't want to buy or had no intention of buying makes them unhappy. That doesn't add to societal good. But information is valuable. And frankly, I think people will pivot into other models. I mean, ChatGPD has been phenomenally successful. And nobody thought consumers would pay $20 a month.

You know, look, if that was true, that's more revenue per user than Google or Facebook get. In fact, they should have tried this model earlier if they added enough value, which, you know, in the past, pre-AI, they had added a lot of value. So where will this stop? You know, the $200 a month level of ChatGPT is incredibly valuable. How many people have tried it?

A good number of hands. How many people have tried deep research? Yeah, it is amazing. Like, it is way more valuable. I'll tell you a fun story. My chief of staff is a PhD in viral immunology, and we were researching a particular application, like a model for developmental biology, a fundamental foundation model for developmental biology.

She did an 18-page report for me, including recommending what indications to go into. After she'd finished, I said, just enter into deep research and give it some time to think. Coincidentally, it came back with an 18-page report and the same two end disease indications to go after.

Now, that's mind-blowing. It is. How much did you pay deep research for that? Not a lot. Not a lot. Well-worth it for anybody who hasn't tried it. I was just talking to the CFO. So I gave you a very technical example. I was talking to the CFO of OpenAI, and she was talking to a retailer. You've been a big investor supporter of OpenAI. Yeah, we committed in 2018.

And you have to believe in things, and I believed in it enough to make the largest initial investment I'd ever made by a factor of two. In 40 years of venture capital, I'd never even made an investment half the size because I was a believer. That's turned out well. Yeah, it has turned out very well. But my point is, this retailer's CEO was talking to her, right?

And he said he had just finished a large strategy review on what products to add to their retail operation. She, while on the call, summoned deep research. It came back with a report she gave to him almost instantly, tens of minutes. And he said, you know, to be honest, this was a better report than my strategy team produced over the last year.

However many months. So we are at the transition point. And I think that's one of the things I tell people, you know, you're not using this technology, even a fraction of your potential, right? Is it open in every board meeting? Is it open every executive meeting? Are you giving it the same challenges you're giving your team?

Let's talk about... Yeah, look, the other thing I want to add is the range of applicability is large. From what product should a retailer add? Yes. I was sitting in a scientific meeting for a couple of days, multiple days. A small group of scientists going after a particular topic of personal interest to me, so I sat in.

And anything I didn't understand, Chad TPD was able to explain to me where I could really not only follow the conversation, but ask not so dumb questions. Yeah. I mean, it is a superpower. And one of the things I love, I keep on mentioning this, is the ability to ask it to look at something from a completely different perspective. Right. My favorite is like, how would Steve Jobs answer this question? Yeah. Yeah.

And we are so limited inside our organization by the knowledge and the opinions that we have in our team that why would you limit yourself in that way? Well, the best example is the row 37 example. Yes, of course. You know, centuries of humans hadn't come up with the row 37 example because we look incrementally upon what others have done, not think outside the box. So that's a real...

massive accelerator for humanity pretty soon when AI does science and scientists and things. Do you believe that most Nobel Prizes in the future will get basically derived from AI-human partnerships or AI alone?

Possibly AI alone. I think that will happen. Now, whether us humans will... Allow, recognize it as such? Recognize AI as winning, capable of winning a Nobel Prize, that's a human limitation.

But that's also true in most creative tasks. Let's go into programming. So probably the single area that's had the most success with the LLMs besides just written word has been programming. How do you think about the future of programming? Is it a future of no more programmers or everyone's a programmer? Both. Both.

So we're investors, to be fair, in cognition. That doesn't give you a co-pilot like Microsoft does for a programmer. It does the programming for you. And their model is very much what I explained earlier. They'll give you a software intern who can program, an intern programmer today. And they'll grow up in seniority and experience over time.

At the other end, we are investors in Replent. Which company? Replent. So you don't need to know anything about programming or even know the names of the language you're coding in. You just speak an English language and it codes for you. So whether you're an individual, your son or daughter asks you a particular question, you want to build a model of the planetary system,

You just code it in Repl.it without ever having touched code or knowing anything about coding. That, as well as, you know, if there's an employee in a large enterprise and this is starting to happen, every employee can write their own applications without going to IT. So any of you who worked in large companies and need to go through IT and security reviews and all that other stuff,

Know how freeing it is if you don't have to deal with IT at all. You can just program your apps in English language. So there's a fundamental thing I like to say. In the past, users of computers have had to learn computers. You get trained on SAP or Oracle or Workday or your favorite application.

I think in the future, instead of humans learning computers, computers will learn humans. And humans won't have to adapt to how our program works. The notion of a menu will go away, I think. It was about 13 years ago, I had my two kids, my two boys. And I remember at that moment in time, I made a decision to double down on my health.

Without question, I wanted to see their kids, their grandkids. And really, you know, during this extraordinary time where the space frontier and AI and crypto is all exploding, it was like the most exciting time ever to be alive. And I made a decision to double down on my health. And I've done that in three key areas. The first is.

is going every year for a fountain upload. You know, fountain is one of the most advanced diagnostics and therapeutics companies. I go there, upload myself, digitize myself about 200 gigabytes of data that the AI system is able to look at to catch disease at inception. You know, look for any cardiovascular, any cancer, neurodegenerative disease, any metabolic disease.

These things are all going on all the time and you can prevent them if you can find them at inception. So super important. So Fountain is one of my keys. I make that available to the CEOs of all my companies, my family members, because health is a new wealth.

But beyond that, we are a collection of 40 trillion human cells and about another 100 trillion bacterial cells, fungi, viri. And we don't understand how that impacts us. And so I use a company and a product called Viome. And Viome has a technology called metatranscriptomics. It was actually developed by

in New Mexico, the same place where the nuclear bomb was developed as a biodefense weapon. And their technology is able to help you understand what's going on in your body to understand which bacteria are producing which proteins. And as a consequence of that, what foods are your superfoods that are best for you to eat? Or what food should you avoid? What's going on in your oral microbiome?

So I use their testing to understand my foods, understand my medicines, understand my supplements. And Viome really helps me understand from a biological and data standpoint what's best for me. And then finally, you know, feeling good, being intelligent, moving well is critical, but looking good. When you look yourself in the mirror,

Saying, you know, I feel great about life is so important, right? And so a product I use every day, twice a day is called One Skin, developed by four incredible PhD women that found this 10 amino acid peptide that's able to zap senile cells in your skin and really help you stay youthful in your look and appearance.

So for me, these are three technologies I love and I use all the time. I'll have my team link to those in the show notes down below. Please check them out. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that. Now back to the episode. I remember early on the Palm Pilot.

uh, had us adapting to it to have a, the proper language. And then finally the computer got smart enough to adapt to us. Energy. Energy is one of the single most important things from so many with tips, health, it tips AI, it tips everything. You've been a huge investor proponent across a multitude of different energy investments. How are you thinking about where we're in the near term and the middle term? Well, so, uh,

I am pretty optimistic about energy and about climate solutions. So let's talk about energy. Coincidentally, the year we committed to OpenAI, which was 2018, we made two other investments I'm very proud of. One was called Wealth Fusion. Yes. Happened to be the same time. They weren't orchestrated. I didn't connect AI will need more power, so it wasn't that visionary.

And the third was another one of my favorites, which hopefully we'll have time to talk about, public transit using AI. It completely upends every assumption about public transit. There is no chance if you have a chauffeured car, it'll be more convenient than public transit. That's the world we are going towards, I suspect.

Most cars in most cities will be replaced by 2050, but let's talk about energy. So let's talk about, so Commonwealth is a fusion company. Last time I looked, Vinod, there were some, I mean, blows me away. There was something like 40 VC funded fusion companies, which I would have never imagined. Yeah. Well, you couldn't imagine that till 2018. Nobody wanted to fund fusion. I won't name the names who said never. Right.

To me, when we funded it, they said, you're being ridiculous. It's 50 years. Yeah. It's always been 50 years in holding. Yeah. And the Department of Energy didn't want to talk about fusion as an energy source when I visited them. We invested anyway. Almost certainly, this won't be a question in five years. So my current perspective is everything we can make happen by 2030. Right.

By 2030, nobody will be debating whether fusion is an economic possibility. There may be some question of exactly how much it costs. So educate us one second on Commonwealth. Where are they? What have they been able to demonstrate? So, you know, without going into details, they expect to demonstrate positive energy. Net energy output. Net energy output by early 2027.

and start soon thereafter the construction of their first plant, and they've announced a site for it. In the interest of time, let me just say they won't build fusion power plants. The fastest way to deploy fusion, I believe, one of my forecasts is, we will replace every coal and natural gas plant in this country by just repowering the boiler.

So we'll have a fusion boiler. Love that vision, by the way. You know, the environmentalists who say, well, we need to shut down all the coal plants. I think we will repower them with fusion boilers and maybe a turbine change and steam conditions. There's lots of technical detail. But you don't need 10 years of permitting, 10 years of getting a grid connection, power lines, all that stuff. You

You just retrofit the same locations. That's why I'm optimistic this won't be a problem. There's another technology that nobody's talking about. Please. Geothermal. Ah, yes. We've toyed at the edges. We need better drilling. Yeah. So turns out the same well, if it's at 200 degrees or 250 degrees, which is almost all geothermal anywhere in the world today,

produces a certain amount of power. But you take that drill to 400 degrees or 450 degrees, you get 10 times the power out of the same well. Suddenly, super-hot geothermal, as it's called, is cheaper than natural gas.

And I think that will be deployed well before 2030. We have two different efforts. The hard part is drilling at high temperatures because metal becomes soft and metal can't drill in hard rock. And sometimes hard rock is hard to frack. Both those technologies are well on their way and will surprise us in how much power they can generate. Do you want to jump into cultured meat?

Do you want to jive into transportation? What are you most excited about? I'm very excited about transportation. Let's go there. What does it look like? I want to go from point A to point B in the future. Yeah. So here's what it looks like. First, let me start by what it shouldn't be and what the right role for self-driving cars are. If when we added Uber to cities, what happened? Congestion increased. Simulate driverless cars and they'll increase even more.

So we'll have gridlock, but people won't be driving. Which is, you know, driverless cars are cool. I recommend everybody fly to a site that has driverless cars and try them. They're amazing. But they increase congestion. So what should you do? Driverless public transit, that is personal vehicles. So you get off your restaurant job at 1 a.m.,

A car shows up for you. You don't need to know when on the schedule. Why? Because there's no driver, so your cost is zero to have a car available when you show up, not when the public transit is scheduled.

It gets to where you're going, independent time of day, traffic lights, doesn't stop anywhere, gets to your destination and drops you off. And because it's personal, nobody gets picked up or dropped off along the way. So it will always be faster than a chauffeur driven car. That's the right use of self-driving. And then off these fixed routes,

is when a Waymo might make sense for the last mile. And I think it has a useful purpose. But here's the fundamental thing. What is the one thing, if you ask basic question, that's limited in cities? It's street widths. Only one thing limited. Everything else you can change. And so if you can increase the throughput of streets,

Because you're not going to destroy the buildings on both sides of a street. You've got solved congestion. Turns out, with a self-driving system like this, if you model it, it can 10x the capacity of a street by building more capacity than light rail in a bicycle lane width.

That's the system we are designing. It can run in bicycle lanes on the road in cordoned off areas, not interacting with other traffic because that's key to throughput. But 10x the capacity of street, you've suddenly created 10 streets wherever you had one. And regular cars can just still flow without disrupting the thing.

This is a far better solution than congestion charges and, you know, New York has 14 streets you can't have public or private cars on. Constraints isn't the right way to go.

Getting 10x more capacity is the right way to go. And then you can solve the housing problem too because you can live further away and have the same 30-minute commute. I love that. I want to close on a question before we go to the Q&A. So please, again, get your questions ready. You know, I have been so adamant since I wrote Abundance with Stephen Kotler about there is no resource constraints.

There are no resource limitations. Technology is a force that converts whatever was scarce into abundance. I think you agree with that. I 100% agree with that. And I would urge somebody to ask me the question that always gets asked. Well, we have restricted amount of minerals or metals or ores. Turns out it's a constraint because we are not looking or not looking with the right tools.

So we have a separate effort to look under the Earth's surface for minerals and metals

We only mine stuff that's on the surface, mostly. The most convenient stuff you run into. Yeah, accidentally run into. And if we can look a kilometer under the Earth's surface, we'll have plenty of abundance of minerals, metals, cobalt, lithium, whatever you're looking for. Yeah, amazing. All right, guys, let's give it up for Vinod Khosla. If you enjoyed this episode, I'm going to be releasing all of the talks, all the keynotes from the Abundance Summit episode.

exclusively on exponentialmastery.com. You can get on-demand access there. Go to exponentialmastery.com.