The AI Reset Is Here: Search, Jobs, and Everything Else w/ Anish Acharya, Dave Blundin & Salim Ismail | EP #173
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This was a big week in AI. I think we've had sort of convergent AI announcements happening. Every day is a miracle, and that's not overstating the case. Google has spent 20 years making commitments to an ads ecosystem. Very difficult for them to break those commitments, and I think it's a real threat to their search monopoly. The cooler this is...

And the more search moves over to it, the more it cannibalizes the core. Already my kids are telling me, Dad, everybody knows that chat GPT is better than Google. 2029 to 2031, the end of white collar work. That's only a couple years for people to remap their entire career path. We're going from a world where our brains were wired for fear and scarcity...

to a world that's very different. Technology is a substrate to make us more abundant and happier across every aspect of our lives. Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

Everybody, welcome to Moonshots and our weekly episode of WTF Just Happened in Tech. I'm here with my Moonshot mates, Dave Blunden and Salim Ismail. Salim, by the way, happy birthday this past Saturday. Oh, happy birthday, Salim. I sat in the garden with a bottle of wine and a glazed look in my eyes.

That's a lovely day. And we have a special guest today, Anish Acharya from Andreessen Horowitz. Anish, good to have you joining us. Thank you, Peter. Salim. Dave. So psyched to be here.

Yeah. So Anish, for those who don't know, heads the consumer investment portfolio at Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most extraordinary VC funds on the planet. He's a general partner there. And what I love about Anish's portfolio and his vision is you're running sort of the abundance meme, the abundance, if you would,

thematic throughout A16Z, which is one of the works I love. Yes, we are. You can't talk about consumer tech these days without talking about abundance. And I was telling Peter prior to the show that we may or may not have been inspired by his thoughts on abundance, but either way, abundance of abundance, right?

Right? Exactly right. Now, so let's dive in. This has been an incredible week for AI. But before we get there, Anisha, I want to talk about sort of how you and your leadership, your partners, and you should think about abundance, because it is a real thing. My next book coming out is called Age of Abundance, How to Survive and Thrive in the Decades Ahead. And we're going from

world where our brains were wired for fear and scarcity to a world that's very different. So here's a slide from your deck from some materials we stole from your website. So would you mind just giving us a little bit of an insight on how you think about the abundance agenda? Yeah, Peter. So maybe to zoom all the way out, and I'm going to touch on topics I know you've touched on as well, so the audience will be familiar. But

In our belief, the two greatest catalysts for human flourishing are market economies and technology. Over and over again through the arc of human history, we've seen these two things deliver extraordinary results for human flourishing. And the story of the last hundred years, the sort of industrial age and everything that is coming after the technology age has really been a story of technology and innovation.

So our belief is the more significant the technology and the technology change, the more significant the sort of results will be for consumers in terms of flourishing and, of course, abundance. We think about abundance in a lot of ways. I love the definition that you used, Peter, which is it's not about luxuries. It's about possibilities. And that's exactly the sort of thrust with which we've been exploring it.

There's a couple of areas in which the technology and the concept of abundance applies. But I guess the one thing I'd sort of give the group for framing is that I think of this as the most human technology we've ever built. If you look at technology for the last 40 years, it's really extended our intellects. Right. And Steve Jobs famously said it's a bicycle for the mind. But when he said a bicycle for the mind, he really meant a bicycle for the intellect. Right.

And that's what a spreadsheet is. I think for me, a spreadsheet is, you know, it's so like symbolic of all the technology we built for the last 40 years. It allows us to do this extraordinary math and computation that we simply couldn't do before. And of course, it has a ton of implications on human society, you know, the Fed, of course, and all of these other systems that we built rely on all these technologies. However, we haven't done that much for our sort of souls or for our emotions or for our mindset yet.

And with AI, we're able to explore the side of humanity that is sort of defined by the sort of subjective emotional experience. We've just never had a technology that could be brought to bear. So as we talk through all of this, I would love for folks to keep in mind that, you know, we're really doing the sort of left brain, right brain pairing that was missing from technology for the last four years. Does that make sense? Yeah, I had an incredible experience actually driving from Vermont back to Boston with my mom, who's in her mid 80s.

And I asked her, you know, have you ever talked to AI before? And she said, I don't even know what you're talking about. So I put on a chat GPD voice mode, put it on the car stereo. And she, and it's, you know, beautiful, sweet voice comes on crystal clear, but

understands every word that she says. And she starts asking about her hometown where she grew up in Ohio and whatever happened to the cheese factory that her father owned. And she was like, "Who am I talking to? You're talking to AI." And she's like, "Well, it must be somebody's recorded voice." I'm like, "No, no, it's completely synthetic." And she was like, "That can't be." But in this abundance slide, abundance has always meant include everybody.

And the Internet and its capabilities have largely bypassed people that are over a certain age, but also the vast majority of the really engaging youth dominated by young boys playing video games. And that demographic shift, I know Anish, you know all about this, but I'd love to get your thoughts on how this opens up.

just so many new capabilities across users that were not previously users. Yeah, I love that point. And you know, David, it's actually so interesting because what happens is typically when a new technology is introduced, it becomes very hard to grok for the generation that didn't grow up with it. And they sort of fumble around and they never achieve the full potential of it. But

With a lot of AI, I think seniors are going to have the experience that your mother had, and they're going to benefit from it disproportionately because they're able to interact with technology now in these unstructured ways. A lot of it via voice. I'll give you a great example. We've got a portfolio company that...

is an AI nurse. Now, an AI nurse can't take your blood. So there's only a subset of nurse-related tasks that the AI does, but it's a voice nurse that will phone patients the night before a surgery and help them to prepare both mentally and also go through the checklist. And it'll phone them after surgery, make sure folks are taking their medicine. And this impact to health

from having that AI nurse take all those actions is dramatic. And because it's over the phone and it's via voice, a lot of senior citizens, you know, they're not intimidated by it. So they really stand to disproportionately benefit. When we talk about companionship and loneliness, I mean, this is also an area that's very exciting. I think if you look at the last 20 years of technology as applied to relationships, it's been social media and we can have a really sort of rigorous conversation about social media, but

When you look at AI and what the impact is to human relationships, it feels like it gives people an opportunity to explore aspects of human relationships in a depth that may not be available to them in their real world, you know, friendships and sort of family relationships. Yeah.

So there's something there that's super important. Super opening Pandora's box here, I know, because Peter in his latest book and all of his recent research, so much of human health and happiness is these little things that you eat or that you do. And he's documenting it all now, but you're like, oh my God, like the amount of benefit from just basic behavior change. Well, there's another part, which is some of the human happiness is setting a goal and a challenge and overcoming it.

And the question becomes when these abundance technologies are overcoming the challenges for you.

Right. I had an interesting experience the other day. I was in a escape room with a group of friends and it was Pharaoh's tomb. And we're sitting there having to solve these, literally these math equations are on the wall with different symbols and such. And I'm hampered by not having a piece of paper and a pen, which was, you know, fundamental technology, because you start to realize how few things you can actually hold in memory during the course of that experience.

And I was so tempted to just pull out my phone and take images and ask ChatGPT for the answer. And it started to realize that there is a slippery slope in which we become so dependent on AI that it takes away the challenges from us unless we hold that part of human spirit in place. It is a double-edged sword in that way. Do you think about that, Anish?

Oh, good, good. Well, I think we've been doing that forever, right? We moved from the slide rule to the calculator and people said that's a terrible idea. And then we moved from the calculator to the spreadsheet.

And people said, that's a terrible idea. And we keep kind of moving the goalposts on this. If you're a software developer, you used to program in assembly. And then we moved to 3GLs like Pascal and C. And people said, well, you're losing the benefit of knowing exactly what's happening. And I think we just keep moving the challenge along. I think we just shift the goalposts and we change the dynamic of what's going on. But it's adding much more capability. If I think about what it takes for somebody to compose content,

complex music today. It's a thousand times easier than 20 years ago.

And you just get that much more music. I think that's what feeds into the abundance thing. We just can create so much more. But is it so much more crap or is it so much more, what's the filtering system? Crap for one is gold for the other. Maybe. Salim, and funny enough, I remember growing up as an engineer coming up hearing, hey, if engineers don't know how to do memory management, then they're not real engineers. So you're right. This has happened over and over again. Look, with that said, I agree with you, Peter, that I think there's a level of agreeableness that is too much.

And I think we need these models and these AI technologies to also explore the uncomfortable aspects of the human experience, you know, which is disagreement, persuasion, sexuality. And, you know, I don't want to jump ahead, but this is one of the reasons I think the incumbents have struggled so much with it, because there's a thousand committees working at Apple and Google that are explicitly designed to take the humanity out of their products.

And these are fundamentally human technologies. So but look, I also agree with your underlying point, which is every person needs to feel like they have meaningful purpose, even if it's created for them, if it's a little bit synthetic. And without that, the flourishing point starts to get impacted. Every week, I study the 10 major tech meta trends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from humanoid robots, AGI, quantum computing, transport, energy, longevity and more.

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At the end point of continued increasing abundance comes a post-capitalist society where money has little to no meaning. And I'm not sure how a venture capital firm thinks and deals with that. Yeah.

A, I think we're far enough away that we don't have to worry about that right away. But I think one thing that I'm encouraged by with all of this is that we may break through the whole Douglas Adams framing. When he wrote Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, he said, anything that's invented when you're born or that's in the world when you're born, we call that normal. Anything that's invented when you're young, that's called a career. And anything invented after you're 35 years old is just bad for the world. Yeah.

We talk about Bitcoin and whatever. And I think that these technologies, as we humanize them, make it easy for 80 year olds to interact decently with technology in a very humane way. And I think that opens up again, abundance, new dimensions open up. I think it's powerful as hell. We all say internally that human relationships are fundamental to the experience of flourishing. Maybe the human part's overstated.

Maybe it's just relationships. And as long as we feel the feelings that result from the conversations, who cares who's on the other side? One of the questions I have, and I just put forward the second slide here, which is market opportunities, is as we get to, let's forget about AGI, let's skip ahead to ASI, artificial superintelligence. The question, as Dave and I and yourself, Anisha, we're all very

VCs were finding, incubating, supporting incredible entrepreneurs and startup companies. But the big question is what moats are going to continue?

As we go forward, how do you differentiate yourself and prevent yourself from being disintermediated by the next entrepreneur with a with a faster set of agent enabled systems? Do you think about that all the time? Yeah, there's two answers to let me let me give you a maybe a cute answer. And then I'll give you a specific answer. So my cute answer is that abundance means abundance of categories as well.

And there'll be many new categories, areas for consumer spend and business spend. And what happens when new technologies are introduced is the incumbents often get better at what they do today. So I think Microsoft will make a better word processor and Google might make a better search engine, but search engines and word processor will be less relevant. And there'll be new categories that pop up where the sort of new entrants dominate. On your specific question, you know, you guys understand the technology at a fine level. So you understand that

These systems are very good at predicting static systems. They're very good at sort of averaging the training data and telling you, you know, what the training data implies. They're not very good at predicting adaptive systems like the stock market or even culture and music.

So as a thought experiment, if you trained an AI model with all the music, you know, right up to hip hop, but not including hip hop, would it, you know, infer what it imply hip hop? I don't think so. Because culture and music is this sort of adaptive system that works together.

So I really do think that there's a, you know, moats that are based on adaptive systems and network is a great example are actually as good as gold and they always have been. Moats that are based on sort of static systems like integration moats, systems of record, I think are really at risk.

Interesting. Do you want to walk us through this next slide here on market opportunity? Yeah, I mean, consumer investing is very interesting because it's hyper-cyclic. So when consumer works, you get the biggest companies in the world, as you can see from the slide here. And when consumer is not working, it's really not working. We're now in a product cycle that's as important as the internet. I think it's probably more significant than mobile.

And the biggest winners, I believe, are going to be consumer winners. And every consumer behavior, including some ones that don't exist today, are up for grabs. So all of which is to say it's a great time to be a builder or be around builders as all of us are. Dave, what do you think about that? Well, I totally agree. I think a lot about the fact that, you know, some of the mid-journey actually, I think, is an A16Z darling where...

the cash flow gets into hundreds of millions of dollars of very high margin revenue and the cost of the build, because coding is getting so cheap and so automated, the cost of a build of something like that is lower than ever. So you've got very rapid growth of the revenue, very low capital costs,

Nothing to lose by jumping in there. Now, the question always comes up, what's your mode? Is it going to be defensible over the long term? But you're so profitable so quickly while you explore that, that there's no downside. And we know now that the management teams have to pivot over time. That's just the nature of tech going forward. It always will be. Continuously, right? Yeah.

Continuously. So they're going to have to learn that skill anyway. Why not learn it while growing like crazy and being profitable? I like the idea of not being worried about it, but it is still, I think, worth exploring a couple of fundamental questions while we have a niche, which is, you know, if you look at consumer as a whole, a lot of the frameworks are defined by the big guys. So the app store is really not...

you know, a fact of nature. It's defined by what Apple and Google decide, here's a framework that you can operate in. And, you know, if you go way back in time, you know, the early days of Apple and Microsoft, the ISV market, independent software vendors, they were also defined. And then Microsoft changed its mind one day and said, you know what, spreadsheets and word processors are

Those are ours now. Sorry you set up your camp there, Lotus, but we're going to just take that back. So you do have to be conscious of the fact that if you're on top of a big LLM, you're on top of a heavily funded company, you have to predict what they will and won't do inside their core $200 or $240 a month service offering and be outside of that.

but not too far outside. So I don't know how you think about that. - It's a great point. And actually I worried a lot about that when we were in the early days, post November, 2022, and it felt like OpenAI was the only foundation model game in town because in that world OpenAI, you know, they just raise prices and take a hundred percent of the economics that are downstream from them. Because now we look, we've got a bunch of foundation model companies that have great models. We have got a bunch of open source models that are super competitive.

Because of that, you see OpenAI and other companies trying to move up the stack. They bought Windsurf, which is really interesting. And as an application developer, you're not dependent on any single platform. I mean, if you're an iOS app developer, there's only one game in town. That's the Apple App Store.

The web is not that way, and the AI game is not that way either because of the presence of multiple foundation models. You know, on your point, Dave, actually, if I may, on Midjourney as well, I think there's an interesting note there. You talk about defensibility, but what's happened in that market is it's fragmented, and now you see Midjourney as a really interesting player that points in a specific aesthetic direction. It's image generation, and it creates these beautiful, hyper-realistic images, but they have a very specific aesthetic that's

If you're a designer that's looking for a different aesthetic or more controllability, you'll work with a company like a CREA or an Ideogram that has a whole different aesthetic. And as a result, you've got two companies that both do image generation that are pointed in different directions. And there's a broader comment here, I think, which is when we have new technology, these markets are expansive in the same way the universe is. And companies tend to move away from each other over time, not toward each other. Yeah, I really want to riff on that while we have you, because...

It's really clear to me that the number of opportunities way outstrips the number of teams. And a lot of people are intimidated and they're like, oh, isn't Midjourney or isn't OpenAI going to do this, this, this and this? But you're pointing out, I think, a really critical and inspiring point.

And just the aesthetic difference alone creates a new market. But I think you were talking about digital makeup on one of your podcasts, just as a category like, oh, there's something that's actually a company, that's a product that's actually defensible. It's amazing. And I think the other amazing thing, Dave, is if you look at the price points that these products are commanding, Spotify's most expensive plan, I looked this up the other day, the family plan with lossless audio is $20 a month.

That's there. It doesn't get better than that for Spotify. ChatGBT, it's $200 a month. Google just announced a $250 a month plan. That's consumer-pro-sumer facing. So in my view, in the future, consumers will have food, rent, and software as the three biggest destinations for their spend. Not bad with them. Yeah, I think that's where a lot of...

Sorry, sorry. A lot of companies are overlooking the fact that, you know, when you go live with one of these directly consumer facing products and it hits, it's global instantaneously. And so if you think about a $10, $20 a month subscription, but you get 30, 40, 50 million people, that's a small fraction of 8 billion. But that can happen very easily within a lot of different categories. So it gives just so many opportunities relative to the number of teams. Wait, I need to just drill into something. Digital makeup?

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, look, you know. You mean like on Zoom or something where you can just have different? I mean, you know, you can be anyone you want to be in the AI world, Salim. So we should debrief later. Well, I choose to be a bald, gleamy head fellow. As do I. As do I. Wow. All right. So here we are at our third slide before we jump into our AI universe, you know, that's been just exploding this week.

So AI use cases, please. Great. Yeah. So maybe like I'll touch on each of these in turn very quickly. So creativity, productivity. The thing about creativity that's so interesting is that we all grow up believing we're creative, right? We all drew pictures and colored pictures and we're three, four, five. And then we get to a point in our lives where we start to self-select into being good at it or bad at it. We're talking about the technical skill when we say that, not the inspiration behind it.

So with AI, the technical skill of being creative gets separated from the inspiration behind being creative. And if there's something that you can dream of making, whether it's music or art or video, you can make it now.

which I think is just incredibly abundant from a consumer impact perspective. You know, we talked about companionship, social, the experience that you had, Dave, in the car ride. Like this is bringing empathetic, patient, maybe disagreeable human relationships to everyone that wants one, which has enormous implications from a flourishing perspective. And, you know, finally, wellness and personal growth. I think so much of this

If you look at something like finance, I worked in fintech and financial services. And, you know, you quickly realize that fintech is not about helping people make rational choices. It's about exploring the non-rational parts of our relationship with money.

And AI is uniquely suited to helping us get better around that. So, you know, this technology is a substrate to make us more abundant and happier across every aspect of our lives. Love to get your thoughts on, you know, there's so much on this slide because there's so many different facets. And, you know, historically, when you looked at a founding team, you're looking for your Steve Jobs visionary married to your Steve Wozniak engineering genius. But now that engineering component is largely AI automatable, right?

And the vision of the perfect founding team, you know, looks different. And being able to navigate through so many choices just on this slide alone and come up with the perfect strategy, that's got to be the rare commodity, I assume, right? I have to disagree. You know, we're seeing more technical founders be more successful over and over again. Yes, AI extends their capabilities and makes them more productive. But there's so much work at the edge that AI is not going to do.

So we're really seeing a sort of rise in the dominance of an engineering-oriented founding team in the way that we haven't in 10 or 15 years in core tech.

Well, the Fred Wilson rule always said, hey, we're looking for three or more founders, best friends who write the code themselves. Yeah. Is that when you say technical founders, you're talking about former engineers, road code at Google, very similar to yourself? I'll tell you, one of our most fun investments is a company called KREA, K-R-E-A, which is a really cutting edge sort of research and consumer technology company that we're

that brings together all of the creative tools in one product. So image generation, video generation, image enhancement, et cetera. These are two incredible AI researchers and sort of artists and enthusiasts. They live in a house up in Pack Heights. They live with all their engineers. They work seven days a week.

You know, I mean, the first board meeting, they sat me down and said, Anish, we've got a problem. What is it? Well, our house only has 10 bedrooms. What happens when we get our 11th employee? I said, well, you know, maybe we shouldn't all be living together at scale, but that's a sort of separate conversation. So that's the intensity and how sort of technical they are in their leadership. Which is a beautiful thing. I mean, honestly, the most...

the most success and the most fun I've ever had as an entrepreneur is when I'm living that monomaniacal, singular focus. I got to tell you, we bought an apartment building right on the edge of MIT and Harvard's campus. It's actually the closest building to MIT that wasn't already owned by MIT. We bought it a couple of weeks ago. It has 24 beds in it, six units for exactly this reason. Amazing. Amazing. Yeah.

filling you're going to say? Yeah. So if you're a product visionary that wants to use AI in a totally different domain, then surely you can acquire the technology capability at low cost. You don't have to be the technical founder in a sense, in that sense. Is that not an option that you're seeing?

I think it absolutely is. It is a question of do you want to be sort of at the edge of technology and new models, in which case you probably do need to be. There's plenty of off-the-shelf tools and products like Cursor make it a lot easier for somebody who's even familiar in a cursory way, no pun intended, to bring products to market. So all of the above, Salim. Yeah.

I would say that when the companies that are thriving right now in your portfolio, when they started their journey just a year or two ago, Sweet Bench was maybe 10 percent and now it's suddenly 60 percent. So if you look forward a year at the rate that that's changing,

You would have to assume that to some degree orchestrating the AI agents becomes the dominant. Because right now, if you're going to build something on top of Haygen or on something on Prim, you're going to be mostly coding it up with Cursor. So it helps you, but you're still coding it up. But there's some kind of a paradigm shift coming. You could debate whether it's three months from now, a year from now, two years from now, but it's coming. I agree. I completely agree. Anish, what percentage of your companies in the abundance portfolio are AI? Yeah.

And how many would you put in the bucket of physical robotics or biotech or nanotech or 3D printing, non-AI exponential tech? So I'm focused on consumer software. I think if you look at that theme as a substrate across the firm, many of our investments, many of our American dynamism investments are also very much in that vein. But in terms of software investment,

largely all of our investments. There's one or two that aren't direct AI companies today, but that's very much sort of a part of the strategy and on the come.

It just begs the question of if you're focused on delivering abundant outcomes and you're not thinking about AI, why? How can you be? Hey, everyone. As you know, earlier this year, I was on stage at the Abundance Summit with some incredible individuals, Cathie Wood, Mo Gadot, Vinod Khosla, Brett Adcock, and many other amazing tech CEOs. I'm always asked, "Hey, Peter, where can I see the summit?" Well,

I'm finally releasing all the talks. You can access my conversation with Kathy Wood and Mogadot for free at diamandis.com slash summit. That's the talk with Kathy Wood and Mogadot for free at diamandis.com slash summit. Enjoy. I'll ask my team to put the links in the show notes below.

Moving on, this was a big week in AI. I think we've had sort of convergent AI announcements happening. I am curious why everybody's announcing on top of each other, but let's take a look. So today, May 20th,

And tomorrow, it's Google I/O unveils Gemini updates and Android ecosystem bets. On the 22nd, Anthropic is debuting Code with Cloud 2025, its first dev conference. And then also this week, Microsoft Build 2025 focuses on Copilot, Scale-Out, AI Infra, and Dev Tooling. And of course, we've got NVIDIA making announcements. And we'll talk about Elon's Grok 3.5 announcements.

What's the I mean, I'm in LA Salim's in New York Dave's in Boston. You're in the Bay Area What's the sort of what's the feeling like right now where you are? I mean the the love every day is a miracle and that's not overstating the case every I mean just this on Friday opening I released codex Which is an autonomous software agent that simply writes pull requests which for you to review by the way on your phone if you'd like and

Like, every single day. I mean, any one of these things could be the basis of an entire ecosystem, and you're showing three for this week. It's crazy. We talked about Codex last week. Here's a fun article. Dave... Well, actually, maybe I should say, get it to our brethren of Indian descent. But Dave, you want to set this one up? India plans made-in-India chips by 2025 and its own GPUs in three to five years. Yes.

You pick this slide. Yeah. This was really important to talk about coming on the heels of Saudi Arabia, which we talked about a couple of days ago.

Uh, so every country that wants to be competitive in the future needs to have some kind of an AI strategy. And then, you know, that boils down right now to having your own supply of chips because the chips are going to be unbelievably constrained for at least the next three or four years, maybe, maybe forever into the future. But some of these more, uh, consumer facing use cases that involve voices and now multimodal imagery, um,

you know they'll use up an entire gpu two gpus four gpos concurrently to get the best possible user experience and that's not super expensive uh so it's easily worth it for the consumer

But the chips don't exist. They physically don't exist. We're going to make 20 million new GPUs this year. It's nowhere near enough to keep up with just basic call center use cases. So countries that have their act together are starting to think, do we need our own fabs? Well, India is saying, well, if we're going to compete, we definitely need fabs, starting with 14 nanometer. But you've got a long way to go from there.

OK, great. This is exactly the right thing to do. But then in their own internal research document and plan, it says we expect this to be underutilized and bureaucratic. Holy crap. Are there challenges trying to get a sovereign strategy together? So we'll have to keep a close eye on it. But, you know, they're probably, you know, on the order of 50, maybe 100 other countries that need to immediately, you know, get on the tails of this same exact thing.

We're advising one of the big Southeast Asian countries on exactly this. And we're basically saying you have to develop your own fabrication capabilities. There's just no other way around it. And the learning that will come from that will be very powerful one way or the other, if only to select who the best supplier is going forward, because there's going to be, we're going to end up with an abundance and a different architecture is coming from different places.

that will all pull together. India specifically, I mean, the bureaucracy is insane. There's so many overlapping federal and state level, et cetera, et cetera. I always talk to people and say, don't think of India as a country. It's more like Europe with 20 different major languages and different tensions and cultures, et cetera, et cetera. You have to look at it from that perspective and then it makes a little bit more sense.

One thing also, NVIDIA now today is worth, as of right now, over twice as much as Meta and almost twice as much as Google. And you're like, well, how can that be? And especially Google, where the transformer was invented at Google. Google Cloud GCP is huge. They have their own TPU7s, which are incredible. Does this make any sense? And that's debatable. But the chip demand is such a dominant factor that

And then underneath that, the fab shortage is such a dominant factor. And it's not a secret. You know, it's amazing to me how many people don't know this. But Elon Musk is is video podcasting it out. You know, we we absolutely need to accelerate our fab production. And I was talking to Kaveh Khazrashahi over at Allen and Company, and they're looking at these new four billion dollar fabs. You know, normally a fab is a 20 to 40 billion dollar investment.

But there are some new designs that are more around the $4 billion mark that might actually unclog the machinery. And those are really interesting to study and track. But, you know, for India, the perfect scenario is, hey, let's get some $4 billion fabs up and running, start on 14 nanometer, but quickly work our way down to 5 nanometer. So how quickly do these obsolete themselves? And, you know, if you're pumping out 14 nanometer GPUs, you know,

Are they going to be useful and compete with sort of the cutting edge at a TSMC? No, no, not at all. They're not even vaguely competitive. They'll all be fully sold out for a long time.

But the fabs themselves are actually very sustainable. Most of the machinery in there, even when you upgrade, most of the machinery you reuse. So the EUV component is an exception to that, but most of the rest of the pipeline you can reuse over and over again. So the key is just get on the map, get something up and running, and then you can work it down as you move forward. Just reduce the lithography as you go.

But I do think that the other thing that's really affecting this is if you have your fab act together, AI is getting really good at chip design. I was working on that a couple of weekends ago. And so your cycle time can come way down

And so, you know, because there's going to be algorithmic breakthroughs all the time now. And also that will affect the designs right away. But you can automate that pipeline so that the new algorithm immediately gets a new chip design, get that right into the queue almost in real time. And then you have to wait a month or two for something to come out the other side.

But that machinery, if you get that fully integrated, which no one's ever worked on before, because, you know, a microprocessor design would last for a full year. And so you never really thought about real-time design using AI automation. So now it's a completely different world, just how this pipeline should shake out. Manish, any thoughts on this one?

Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, presuming we do resolve the sort of shortage of chips, which I believe that we will. There's also, I mean, it sustains a need for countries to build a sovereign AI because the AIs embed values within them, which is why DeepSeek is such an interesting conversation because arguably DeepSeek is trained with a set of values that may be a mismatch with Western values. And every country needs to think about what are the values that they want to imbue into their AIs.

So this is something very interesting here, which almost looks, I'm not sure if you guys are familiar with the Jones Act for ships that operate in and around US ports. They must be manufactured in the United States for national security purposes. I believe we'll see a sort of Jones Act for AI, where AI that operates in sort of sensitive contexts will have to have been trained nationally. That's a great insight. I don't think anyone's ever drawn that analogy before, but I love that insight. You know, really interesting.

It's really clear that if you don't have a national strategy for compute, during this era where the chips are constrained, the highest value use cases are just going to buy out all the data centers.

And it would be very natural for one or two economies like U.S. and China to have a higher standard of living and then say, well, because I can overbid the Indian or the Ethiopian, they don't get access to any compute. And that goes on for one year, two years, three years, four years. And that's the natural cycle.

if you don't have a national strategy to get compute for your citizens so once you start getting behind you're going to get way behind and then you're economically unable to get back on the map all right our next story here we've been hearing about this forever

And looks like we're on the verge of GPT-5 being released. So here are some tweets that went out. Just got to try an early GPT-5. Just wow. It can do anything I can do at a computer, but much quicker. We actually made it. And this is from Chris at GPT-21. GPT-5 is in red teaming. This is not a guess. This has been confirmed.

So when I think about GPT-5, I think about self-recursive improving AI software, you know, recoding AI and leading to an intelligence explosion. I think about PhD level AI.

capabilities or multi-PhD level capabilities. What do you think of when you hear GPT-5? Dave, Anish, what do you guys think about it? Well, actually, before we jump into it, there's so much to talk about there, but before we jump into it, you notice how they always jump on each other. So Google I.O., oh my gosh,

I got to get something right on top of them. This is not, you pointed it out before, Peter, but this is not coincidence. And notice how Apple isn't even trying. They're just completely invisible. Yeah, we'll talk about that. Apple has opted out. Yeah, what do you think about GPT-5? Yeah, I mean, we've seen so many exciting model releases since the GPT-5 conversation started. And we've seen a new model architecture with their reasoning models.

So I feel like we're seeing all the steps that point in the direction of GPT-5. I don't know that there's a big unveil coming that will show us something that isn't implied by what we've seen so far. And if you look at the reasoning models, which actually are just as important of an innovation as the language models...

you know, they are these models that are trained through reinforcement learning on specific domains, which is why they work so well for coding. But we still need to go collect the data sets and build the models for all of the domains that have a formal concept of correctness. So before we have something that is as broad based as you're describing, Peter, which I'm sure we will have someday, there's just an enormous amount of model work to do between here and there. So look, my belief is we'll see something that looks more like

oh four or oh three pro than a completely different animal. Yeah. I'm still waiting for someday my cell phone to ring. I pick it up and he goes, hi Peter, this is GPT five. It's why I introduced myself. I'm here. If you need anything, no, I'm just, uh,

That will become a spooky future. I want the model, to your point, Peter, that is Jarvis, right? It just goes, okay, what do you need right now? And it can go and make suggestions and just get to that personal level that we're waiting for.

I interviewed Sam Altman at the MIT Media Lab a year and a half ago now. And I tried to get him to open up about parameter count and where parameter count is going. And he said, look, we need to stop masturbating over parameter count. Crowd loved it. There's like a

1,500 MIT students in the crowd. They loved it. But then I... Now I can't track just the raw parameter counts. I'm hoping with GPT-5 we can still distinguish between, okay, here's the model producing an answer which should be mind-blowingly intelligent. And then here's the chain of thought reasoning version. Because, you know, the chain of thought reasoning, like you said, Anish, is adding...

immensely more feeling of intelligence than the core model is. And I think OpenAI kind of wants to tie it all together and say, "Look, don't worry about it. It's just one subscription. Here's all the brilliance." We don't want to talk about what came from where. But as an MIT-oriented researcher, I want to know actually what came from where, which I can do with LLAMA, but it's becoming increasingly difficult with GPT-5.

That being said, I think it's going to blow our minds. They wouldn't be putting it out if it wasn't mind-blowing. The prior step functions have all been mind-blowing. Let me ask you as a question. If you had a guess as to what

capabilities are in GPT-5 versus GPT-4, what would be a standout feature? Well, it's definitely, you know, everything's fully multimodal now and the language and that has been phenomenal even in GPT-4. But once you start marrying it to images, you know, right now when you prompt it to create an image or a video for you or you show it an image, it's good and it's mind-blowing, but it's not perfect. I think, you know, if you take your digital nurse example that Anish was talking about, hey, you

Let me show a rash on my foot. It's going to diagnose it perfectly. And, you know, you need a lot of long tail images to do that kind of stuff. So I expect there'll be a lot in that category since they've had more time to work on the multimodal that just didn't exist, you know, when they when they built GPT-4 and 4.5. You know, I keep on thinking about, you know, Leopold situational awareness paper that came out.

couple years ago, right, showing basically on the heels of GPT-5, just an acceleration of AI, right? And we've started to see this. We've started to see the speed as, you know, if you want even human IQ points that these models are increasingly getting capabilities. So, you know, do we get a unconstrained intelligence explosion?

on the back of this. That's what, for me, is interesting. The other thing I'm really expecting in consumer is, you know how in a podcast like this, if you don't like the way the audio recording comes out, there were always tools to clean up audio. But now you have tools that will actually recreate it from scratch using your voice. So you can create anything out of anything. When you start talking about multimodal video and you say, here's a static image, it should be able to instantly turn it into a 3D image.

movable, any angle scenario. And I think it'll have that capability. - Well, I would argue, guys, we have a lot of these capabilities. So CREA today can do what you're describing, Dave, in taking a static image and turning it into a sort of 3D splat.

In terms of how good the multimodal models are, like I can tell you when I'm barbecuing at the house, I'll have GPT-4-0 looking at my hot peppers, you know, that are grilling. And I'll be saying, are they ready yet? Are they ready yet? Are they ready yet? No, no, no, no. Yes, they're ready. I mean, that's what I did this weekend. So that works. Okay, at least step away from the AI. Just step away from the AI.

I may have gone too deep, guys. I may not be able to find my way out. And then look, I actually think from if you want Jarvis, Salim, I think we have a Jarvis today in the form of Operator. You know, Operator to me is the most underappreciated new open AI launch. And it's been around for a while. And it allows anybody to use the web. Essentially, every UI becomes an API.

and you can use the web as this sort of control surface to do anything, like the implications of that are so significant. Just think of the mundane use cases. As a consumer, every day I wake up and it goes and checks for a lower auto insurance and a better personal loan rate for me, and it spends the day scouring the web, and it refinances all of my credit lines, and then I get a push notification at the end of the day saying, "Hey, Anish, I cleaned all this stuff up for you. You're going to save $200 a month."

And please send my commission to this Bitcoin address. Yeah, that's right. Send me a tip. Like that's all possible today. I'd argue we have more, you know, just as you said, there's like more ideas than teams, Dave. Like we have these magical, miraculous new capabilities that are underexplored because there's so many of them. All right. Let's head to Muscoville. Elon Musk unveils Grok 3.5, AI that reasons for first principles.

Let's hear it from Elon's voice directly. So really the focus of Grok 3.5 is...

sort of find the fundamentals of physics and applying physics tools across all lines of reasoning and to aspire to truth with minimal error. Like there's always going to be some mistakes that are made, but aim to get to truth with acknowledged error, but minimize that error over time. And I think that's actually extremely important for AI safety.

My ultimate conclusion is the old maxim that honesty is the best policy. A quick aside, you probably heard me speaking about fountain life before, and you're probably wishing, Peter, would you please stop talking about fountain life? And the answer is no, I won't, because genuinely, we're living through a healthcare crisis. You may not know this, but 70% of heart attacks have no precedence, no pain, no shortness of breath,

and half of those people with a heart attack never wake up. You don't feel cancer until stage 3 or stage 4, until it's too late. But we have all the technology required to detect and prevent these diseases early at scale. That's why a group of us, including Tony Robbins, Bill Kapp, and Bob Haruri,

founded Fountain Life, a one-stop center to help people understand what's going on inside their bodies before it's too late and to gain access to the therapeutics to give them decades of extra health span. Learn more about what's going on inside your body from Fountain Life. Go to fountainlife.com slash Peter.

and tell them Peter sent you. Okay, back to the episode. Okay. So how do you guys feel about the basic concepts of Grok of maximally truth-seeking AI? And then what I do love is the idea of applied physics as part of, in first principle, thinking as part of its structure. Anish, what

What does that sound like to you? Does it sound real?

you know, allow you to interact with them in some ways that the big companies never would. So, and you know, those things we may consider sort of banal, like the, the, the like adult sexy chat features of Grok, but he's, he's been pushing the edges and I think he's going to do the same thing with reasoning models. And this is an example of that. Dave.

Well, truth is definitely in the eye of the beholder and varies by country. And we learned that in Saudi this week in a big way. So the message is right on target. But then the definition and the implementation, there's no single answer to it. And like Anish said earlier in the podcast,

The LLMs that we're using, transformer-based, are very good at interpolation, not quite as good at extrapolation. So it's going to fill in the blind spots between the training data that you give it and don't give it. I love the message of give it first principles physics, but I think everyone's going to do that. It's not controversial about physics. It's when you start including some X data and not other X data, or do you include all X data?

That's where the devil's in the details. I'd be very curious to know, though, is Elon going to roll out versions or is there just one Grok? Because then you're like, okay, Grok has this opinion of the world. Gemini has this other opinion. ChatGPT has this other opinion. Or are there 20 Groks, 20 GPT, and you tune them?

So, you know, TBD. Yeah. So, I mean, the biggest challenge we've had even in the social media space is echo chambers. And so the question becomes, are you able to take rock 3.5 and build your own echo chamber? Or will it say, Peter, I'm sorry, your point of view is absolutely wrong. And here's the data about why it's wrong. Is it going to challenge us in that way? I mean, you know, Elon is pushing boundaries all the time. And will, will,

Will Grok call him or President Trump or Biden or anybody else on things that they say, which is which are not defendable by specific evidence? Well, one thing I think about a lot, and this is right in Anisha's wheelhouse, is how much can the can the user control?

And especially when it comes to copyrighted material, because a lot of the most interesting and fun things you can do as a user involve copyrighted material. But the foundation model companies are under a lot of scrutiny and they have to be very, very, very careful with copyright material. But if you put it in the hands of the user, right?

to decide what they want to create, what they want to do, what voice they want on it, then it's outside of the control of Grok and then you can start using copyrighted material. It's easier for me to steal it than for Google or OpenAI to steal it. Yeah. Okay. I mean, I think we have to be careful not to have a zero-sum conversation about that, though, Dave. If you look at, for example,

For example, sampling in hip hop was very controversial. The genre wouldn't exist without it. And I would argue that it sort of drove more royalties and traffic back to the tracks that were sampled than would have happened otherwise. So I do wonder if there isn't a positive sum version of a lot of this. I would love to get you and Bill Gross at the same time talking about that because that's his whole focus at Prorata AI. You guys could go for probably an hour on that topic. That would be really interesting. Love to.

So here's our next article. XAI deploys 170 Tesla megapacks for Colossus II, the power backbone. And we can see in this image all those power packs. I mean, what we're seeing is just an extraordinary building race, faster than ever before. And I was just reading some articles that regulation of getting access to power or building permits had been the constraint

But perhaps not now. Perhaps people are taking the constraints off regulation, building permits and so forth. Any comments on Colossus 2? I mean, how big is it going to be? Do we know how many GPUs it will be? Yeah, I think it was 200,000 in the next wave, mostly H100. The B100s are not ready yet. I thought the first Colossus was upgrading to 200,000 and maybe Colossus 2 is going to be a million. But, you know, what's the order of magnitude between friends?

Yeah, no, I was talking about the prior iteration. So this is what they're planning in the next iteration? In the next iteration. Yeah. Well, we'll see. I don't know. But I know the B100s are not in volume yet. So you're still using the prior iteration. What's amazing about this is, you know, Elon is immensely practical, right?

And the reason the Tesla packs are so important is because when you use NVIDIA chips for these massive scale single training runs, the power spikes like crazy because it does these huge all collect, all distribute operations that are massively communications intensive. And so then the GPU is kind of idle while they're waiting to transfer data and the power drops like crazy and it's fluctuating all over the place. You can't use lithium to store anywhere near enough energy

To power these things, but you can use it to smooth out the power flow. So that's that's a pretty big advantage for for Elon. I found this next article on NVIDIA's breakthroughs. It's so let me read this out loud. One spine of NVIDIA's NV link fusion can transfer more data than the Internet.

Holy shit, that's incredible. 130 terabytes per second connects, you know, what is that, GB200 chips, the next generation chips across 5,000 coaxial cables connected to 72 GPUs. Peak traffic of the entire internet was 900 terabytes per second. So the spine transfer is 16% more data than the entire internet. Let's take a listen to Jensen speak about this.

And so this is the MV-Link spine. Two miles of cables, 5,000 cables structured, all coaxed, and pins matched, and it connects all 72 GPUs to all of the other 72 GPUs across this network called MV-Link switch. 130 terabytes per second of bandwidth across the MV-Link spine. So just put in perspective, the peak bandwidth

traffic of the entire internet, the peak traffic of the entire internet is 900 terabits per second. This moves more traffic than the entire internet. Wow.

I just feel to you like we're building some version of Skynet right now. Well, when I call it Stargate, it's like all these things, the terminology lines up. I completely don't understand a single word of this. Like what is a spine of what? So it's the interconnect. So one of the things that Elon did when he built Colossus, the first version,

Right. Was he was able to basically co-locate all the GPUs and effectively, for lack of a better term, harmonize them to get them all talking to each other. And this, at least from my point of view, is the capability to do that within a full NVIDIA system. Anish, what do you think about this? Yeah, I mean, to me, it actually illustrates something more mundane, which is so much of the work that we need to do is actually engineering work.

Of course, there's work at the edge and research, but there's just so much raw engineering work that needs to be done to make these systems operate at scale. And a lot of the sort of constraints that we're going to see are going to be engineering related. And also a lot of the upside, if you look at DeepSeq, the reason it was so cheap to train supposedly is a lot of it was just really clever engineering techniques. So there's a lot of upside in the day-to-day engineering work as well. That's what I see. Yeah. And all of this stuff is happening contemporarily.

which is what makes it so exciting to be here right now. You know, really, Daniela Roos and I were touring one of the biggest deployments. Actually, it's the biggest B100 deployment ever.

So Daniela runs CSAIL at MIT, the biggest AI lab in the world, and we were touring it together. And the chips are all liquid cooled now, which means those racks are dead silent. And I was expecting this really eerie, awesome, silent experience. But the interconnect spine is still air cooled, and it sounds like a jet engine. And so it's right next to it, so it takes all kind of the magic. What really surprised me, though, is that the GPUs are all in a rack, $6 million a column.

And then the interconnect is physically a rack over. I would have expected it to need to be much closer together to get optimal performance, but it's actually physically separated into separate columns for some reason. That really surprised me. But it's an incredible tour to take. You should definitely throw it on the to-do list. Use your A16Z all-access card to anything. That's right. Anish, do you want to walk us through Google I.O. is happening right now?

Are you plugged into this? Yeah, please. Yeah, I'm... Oh, please. Yeah, take it away on this slide. Tell us about it. No, no, no. I mean, it's so interesting. I've only had a chance to try a few of the products so far. I tried the AI mode. You know, I was a little bit overwhelmed. Sorry, underwhelmed. You know, like what stands out to me and is notable, number one, I think Vio, their video models, video generation models are incredible. Yeah.

Video is probably the only video model that has been competitive with the Chinese models, which are less constrained on copyrighted training data, let's say. So I think Google has actually shown real strength in video generation. So that's one thing that I'm interested in spending more time with. The second is the price point that we discussed earlier, $250 a month.

Has Google ever had a consumer product that's priced this way? We've even seen many. And it's extraordinary that they think that they can command these prices. And I think they will. I do think that their AI mode felt to me a bit like a watered down perplexity. It's just not that good. And it really shows the power of counter positioning because Google has spent 20 years making commitments to an ads ecosystem and all the blue links and everything else that now this sort of competitive setup is demanding that they break.

Very difficult for them to break those commitments. And I think it's a real threat to their search monopoly. Yeah, I'd love to follow up on that. You know, I noticed the stock went down pretty significantly during this, which is really unusual during this kind of an event. But I think it's for exactly the reason you were saying. The cooler this is,

And the more search moves over to it, the more it cannibalizes the core. Correct. That's exactly right. It's such a challenging position for them to be in. And look, the front door of the Internet, they have been the front door of the Internet for the last 20 years.

It's the most interesting place to be on the internet from an economic perspective. The front door to the internet is up for grabs. Already my kids are telling me, dad, everybody knows that chat GPT is better than Google. So there's a near term threat from products and then there's a sort of long term threat from generational change in the products that they prefer to consume. Yeah.

And the fact of the matter is there will be something that will come along and bypass open AI and Google and everything else. And we haven't haven't met the founder yet, haven't heard what he's called. But that's just the reality. It's I'll never forget when Jeff Bezos got at a it was an all hands meeting and he said in 30 years, Amazon may not exist anymore.

which is pretty extraordinary. So, Salim, I think those sirens happening in New Jersey? They're here. No, that's a niche, I think. In San Francisco. The mean streets of San Francisco. For me, the one that struck me for this was the 3D video communications, Google Beam. That's the one I'm really looking forward to.

I think it would be really, really amazing to watch. We had that at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at

And now Google Beam. I didn't actually know they were going to call it Beam. That's great. I mean, it's a media consumer product. And then Project Aura, right? They're smart glasses. I think it's going to be with full Gemini integration. It's going to be great. I think we'll probably start to see AR wearables on the street.

Remember the first time we started seeing people wearing AirPods and people on the street talking to themselves? Well, we're going to start to see these smart glasses as well. Can't wait. I mean, for me, it's the future of education as well.

Let's move on here. Okay, so here's what we said a little bit earlier. It really drives me nuts that Apple still cannot spell my wife's name or my name properly when I dictate it. I mean, it's embarrassing. So why Apple still hasn't cracked AI? This is an article that came out. Let me just read this real quick. Siri overhaul delayed repeatedly. New features failed internal tests and missed 24 and 2025 rollout goals. Okay.

Apple spent billions on AI chips and startups, but internal disagreements on budget allocations led to lack of GPU supplies. Seven years after hiring ex-Google AI chief John Giandrea, Apple is still lagging in AI versus its competitors. I mean, this is so sad. I mean, this could be a wound that truly damages Apple significantly. If someone had a beautiful high-end device

phone with full AI integration, this could be up for grabs. And yeah, $3 trillion. So I have a fully entrenched high-level theory on this. But before, Anish, do you see in the Valley truly great people going to Apple to work?

I mean, Apple, it has a very sort of specific, slightly insular culture. So less people come in and out of Apple, in my experience, than come in and out of places like Google and Meta. Look, I read this article too. I think that they have a real challenge as a consumer using Siri every day is like a stick in the eye.

I think they have a cultural problem because I really think that the AI has, as we talked about earlier, sort of disagreement, sexuality, persuasion, all of these aspects of the human experience that Apple has tried to sort of polish away. And then finally, I think they've not had a great track record of partnering yet.

They really do want to build everything and that served them well. But, you know, the models are moving too quickly and it's not a core capability of their technology team today. So I think they're in a pretty tough position. With that said, fixing things like voice translation in Siri, like, come on, it's just a daily reminder that they can't do AI. It's crazy. So here's my high level observation. I'd love to get your thoughts on it.

The visionary integrator model. So Eric Schmidt, good friend of Peter, he talked when you guys were on stage, you know, in the side by side chairs, he talked for maybe 20 minutes on the visionary integrator model. And Eric told this story about, you know, he was walking through the streets of Silicon Valley with Sergey and Larry. And Sergey said, Eric, that building right there, we need that building. And Eric said, we don't we don't need that building, Sergey. And

And Sergey said, "Yes, we do." And he said, "Okay, well, you're the visionary. If you say we need that building, then we'll make it work. We need that building." And he made it work. And that defined what is now the visionary integrator model that Elon Musk's perfected. He's got so much vision, but he needs a perfect, can finish my sentences, integrator for every business, every operation. So it's really obvious that Steve Jobs was the visionary, Tim Cook was the integrator for years.

But now if I go to Google Trends and I see how many searches are on Steve Jobs' name versus Tim Cook's name versus Elon Musk's name, it's 102 for Steve Jobs, one for Tim Cook. So here, 14 years after Steve Jobs has passed away, still twice as many people are searching his name as Tim Cook's name. Meanwhile, in Saudi this week, Tim's not there. All the visionaries are there.

So then you're like, well, who is the visionary? Who's the integrator in the company? Because the visionary needs to attract talent.

which means you need to be on this podcast or in Saudi Arabia or on All In or whatever it is that in that era gets people inspired to come and work for your company, that's a huge part of the visionary job. And I don't see that dynamic. And I'd love to throw Google in that same bucket. We're just talking about Google's kind of little underwhelming I.O.,

But if you can't name the visionary and the integrator, then you're not following the known-to-work current model. Yeah. And having a company that is founder-led, where the founder can basically say, I don't care what the board says or what everybody else says. This is where we have to go, where it's an AI-first, founder-led company are going to eat the lunch of everybody else.

Especially at scale, you need the founder-led model just to cut through all the bureaucracy. Otherwise, you end up in terminal political fights and nothing gets done, which is what we're seeing. And I've had a few friends who sold... The founder-led is in the Apple list of choices, but I think that there's got to be still a solution that creates a visionary role, even though you can't obviously go back to the founder. Yeah. And I've had friends of mine who had the chance to sell their company to Google's

Google or Apple. And I'm like, if you go to Apple, you will be swallowed up into a giant NDA, not be able to talk to anybody, not be able to go and speak at a conference or an event. And it's really a real challenge.

Listen, Anish, let me give you a chance to close out. I know you have to jump on a thousand board calls right now. Grateful for you joining us. But any closing thoughts here on the AI world that you're deep into at this moment? Oh, thank you, Peter. Well, it was a pleasure, Salim. Dave, Salim, I would love to join you in the garden for that bottle of wine next time. That is one closing thought. I love having these conversations. I do feel like this is the most human technology that we've ever invented.

And I do think as you talk, Peter, about making the transition from a mindset of fear and scarcity to one of abundance, this is exactly the technology that unlocks that in a very tangible way. So, you know, I wouldn't trade being alive now for any other time in history. It truly is the most extraordinary time of our lives.

ever to be alive. I want to just acknowledge something, Anish, that insight you had at the beginning about the subjective technologies and how much of a difference that'll make. That's the first time I've seen somebody clearly articulate the massive opportunity yet. So much appreciated. Thank you guys. Well, the analogy to the Jones Act too is something I've never heard before. So we're going to Borg-like assimilate all of this knowledge. Please do, Dave. I look forward to hearing it just as I adopted abundance from Peter. You guys have got license to use those now.

Nice to be with you. Thank you for having me guys. - A pleasure Anish, thank you. - Bye bye, cheers. - Everyday I get the strangest compliment. Someone will stop me and say, "Peter, you have such nice skin." Honestly, I never thought I'd hear that from anyone. And honestly, I can't take the full credit. All I do is use something called OneSkinOS1 twice a day

The company is built by four brilliant PhD women who've identified a peptide that effectively reverses the age of your skin. I love it, and again, I use this twice a day, every day. You can go to oneskin.co and write Peter at checkout for a discount on the same product I use. That's oneskin.co and use the code Peter at checkout. All right, back to the episode.

All right. We really enjoyed having Anish on. I found this article somewhat interesting. It's a speculative scenario, a history of the future, 2025 to 2040, but it brings up a lot of great plans. I'd love to hear your guys' thoughts on it. Let's take it...

one at a time. So 2025 to 2026, the year ahead, it's the agentic AI boom. So GPT-05 is multimodal. It's coming out, Cloud 4, CodeGen floods apps. So I think this is happening. It's not really a prediction. It's just a reporting on what's going on. Let's go into 2027 to 2028. For this one, hold on one second. I think the agentic is going to give way to vertical.

because there's so much opportunity in training vertical AIs on very specific use cases. I think that's going to complement the agentic. But in general, the paradigm is right. Yeah, my prediction, the word agentic is going to get old very quickly. It's just too vague and generic.

What was the word that got old very quickly, like a couple of years ago? There was something, uh, co-pilot as a term, right? Everybody started using co-pilot as a generic term. Yeah. And that got so annoying so fast. I think vibe coding is going to come and go real fast too. Uh, it's a great term actually. I'll be sad to see it go, but, um,

What you saw with Codex, you can launch, you know, 20 concurrent processes and then stitch them back together again. And that's that's very different from vibe coding. No one's named that yet. And Greg Brockman, when he rolled it out, said, yeah, I'm so bad at naming things. We're just going to call this Codex. Like what? You know, I was like, huh? Didn't you call it Codex already like years ago?

um so uh 2027 2028 uh we're gonna see breakthroughs uh i think one of the things that's interesting is it's predicted that in the next couple years we're gonna start to see physics breakthroughs and mathematical breakthroughs and we're going to start to see fundamental technology moving forward and its ability to help us understand the universe even even deeper i find that

That, for me, is the biggest and most exciting thing, because I think there's so much research data that we have not seen the signal from noise and have not extracted key observations from. I think AI let loose on that will absolutely do magical things. Yeah. 2029 to 2031, the end of white-collar work. I believe that, you know, and this is an argument I have with a lot of people, you know,

What will it not be able to do? I don't see any job that, you know, that at this point we're talking about advanced superintelligence technology.

Do you? Do you think this is true, that we're going to start to see the end of all white-collar work by that point? The thing that's driving me nuts about this is that that's the end point. You know, figure 2030 is the end point. But it's pretty much a straight line between here and there. And so the amount of job dislocation, you know, in 2026, 2027 is going to be like nothing we've ever seen.

And I keep telling all the CEOs, you're way under planning. You need to look at every single person in your organization, all the individual contributors doing white collar work, and you need to get them to become AI users right now.

Otherwise, you're condemning them to being sitting ducks and you're like, well, it's two or three years in the future. They've been working and doing their career planning for 20 years. Yeah, they're stuck. Yeah, you've got to get them on the platform now and free up the time for them to learn and put formal education programs in front of them now. Because if you draw a straight line between now and 2030, which is probably more like 2029, 2028,

That's only a couple years for people to remap their entire career path. You're doing a huge disservice by sticking your head in the sand and ignoring this. There's another thing as well, which is getting your employees and your kids and your friends to start thinking as entrepreneurs. Yes.

Right. Because it would, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine, Dan Sullivan and Dan, I was saying, you know, you know, as this technology starts to truly become, uh, you know, magical level on, we can't even imagine right now. Um, is it going to quelch my sense of purpose? Is it going to, uh, you know, start solving things for me to the point where I'm not motivated. And, and Dan said, uh,

Has there ever been a time where more powerful technology has made you less motivated? And I said, no. And he says, why do you think that is? And I said, because I'm an entrepreneur and I just dream bigger every time there's more capabilities handed to me. And I think that mindset of finding problems, solving problems, and letting everybody know they can become entrepreneurs, they can start to create opportunities.

new capabilities, new companies, new nonprofits, they can start to dream at a level like never before is unleashing of the human spirit that is so important. - And creativity to boot, it'll force it, which I think is really amazing. - Well, when I was lecturing at Stanford two weeks ago, at the end of the lecture, the TA came up to me and said, "Man, you really won the hearts and minds of all these students when you said the administration is completely out of touch with you."

It's like, really? That's what got them won over? But it's that dynamic where your kids are going through, my kids are going through, where they're chomping at the bit to use AI because it's so empowering. And because the administration hasn't figured anything out yet and they're woefully behind, they're a barrier. But the corporate version of that is, well, we can't do this because we're regulated or because of data leaks or because of hallucinations.

That's a bullshit excuse. It means you haven't figured it out at the exec staff level, and now you're condemning your people to being behind the curve. It's a great observation. Yeah, it's just so inexcusable. It's a leadership failure. Yep, it's absolutely a leadership failure, and it's inexcusable. The last quadrant in this slide here is 2036 to 2035, or 2035 to 2036, right?

And it's trillion robot economy. I think it's supposed to be 2036 to 2045. I think you should say trillion dollar. Yeah. And so it's the notion that we're about to have a massive explosion in number of robots. And it's not just humanoid robots. It's robots of every shape and size. At the same time that we have bio longevity cures, we unleash human longevity. You know, love that stuff.

all right let's move on here along the lines of what we just saw here's an article i pulled in ai designs antibiotic uh synthesis that beats uh MRSA in mice so this is multi antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria and so researchers built an ai tool that designs new antibiotic molecules faster than traditional methods

And AI-designed antibiotics effectively treating MRSA infections that no longer respond to existing drugs. AI can design affordable lab-ready antibiotics to fight the deadliest infections. This is the stuff that turns me on. This is the stuff that I'm just thrilled about our future. Well, that and once you can personalize it to the individual, which we'll be able to do as a very quick next step, everything changes at that point. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

All right, one of our last slides here is that Gemini 2.5 benchmarks outperform competitors yet again. In mathematics and coding and multimodal, we're seeing Gemini 2.5 Pro really beat out against OpenAI, both 03 and 04 model. And what it's not doing, though, is it's not winning the revenue race. OpenAI is just trouncing.

Google in revenues. And that's a dangerous place for it to be. I don't know if we need to say anything else about this, but Google's got incredible engineering talent and a massive number of wet, squishy brains working on this stuff. All right, let's go into beyond AI in the robotics world.

RoboTaxis, and this comes from unusual whales. So ARK Invest, this is Kathy Wood, projects a $34 trillion enterprise value from RoboTaxis by 2030. So Kathy has been long on Tesla, as I am. Here we see a few of the companies. This is Waymo and soon CyberCab.

That's massive. I mean, the idea that people are going to not take their cars anymore. I think when this really works, Dave and Salim is when my AI is automatically anticipating when I need a car and the car is showing up without me having to take it. It knows my calendar. It sees me walking towards the front door and the car is just waiting for me. It's magical. Well, for God's sakes, when can it drive our kids to practice? Yeah.

You know, that can't come soon enough. Within two, three years. So there you go. You've been waiting a lifetime, two or three years. You'll be home. I mean, we're supposed to have cyber. You would to do the math for us. Thank God. It just it's easy to lose track of the fact that a huge fraction of humanity is

The number one job in the world is driver. That's the number one title. But then you look down the long tail of other things that people do, and just a huge fraction of humanity is doing things as routine as driver or screw circuit board in or assemble laptop lid. It just goes on and on and on. And so if you sample humanity, you lose track of that when you're in a high-tech hub and everybody's working on next-gen stuff and spaceships and AI.

But just sample a random person on the planet and what they do. And the scale of it comes out to $33 trillion. I guess she would do the math. It is what it is. Well, here's an example. So Waymo outpaces Lyft in San Francisco. 300 Waymo vehicles now complete more rides than 45,000 Lyft drivers in San Francisco. And each Waymo averages the workload of 150 human drivers operating 24-7.

Have you guys taken away my ride yet? Oh, yeah. I did one in Phoenix. It was pretty mind-boggling. And that was like ages ago. So it's gotten way, way better since then. It has. And you don't need to tip your driver. You know, you can have confidential conversations. You know, I'm always wondering if my driver is listening to my conversation as I'm just, you know,

In the heat of discussion, you listen. I mean, you know, I had a back to back where I did a Waymo ride in San Fran the next day I was in New York and I was in a smelly yellow cab. It was like the thing that jumped out at me about the Waymo that I completely overlooked is you can control the lighting and the music and they'll keep adding things to it. So it becomes like your your little travel cabana.

And, you know, we'll add flat screen TVs that'll sync to your phone. And it's going to be just such a different experience. It's not just about being driven. It's about control of your environment. So I hadn't anticipated that. Yeah. I can't wait for the lie down beds so I can like, you know, get a nap on my way to work. Hmm.

This was a fun article out of the Wall Street Journal. Apple does support brain implant control of its devices. It's teaming up with Synchron to bring brain computer interface to consumer devices. Now, albeit this is specifically for people who are impaired, who have severe disabilities. But this is the direction we're heading. Again, Ray's predicted BCI, our ability to connect

everything to the neocortex in the early 2030s. I just love seeing these little hints towards that direction. Yeah, these are the early signals around that, but it'll become mainstream pretty quick after this. Well, I'm very much a humanist. I think it's kind of, it gets really creepy to me when you start punching directly into your neurons. But I'll put that aside for a second. Ray...

is going to emerge as one of the greatest prognosticators in the history of the world. After going, you know, up and then way down, and then 2029 artificial superintelligence predicted 30 years ago, it's going to land, like, on the exact moment. It's super annoying because he's so outrageous but always correct. Drives everybody crazy. Yeah.

It's funny. I don't know him. You know, you guys know him personally very well. I don't know him personally, but the books were so inspiring to me. I mean, just reinforcing everything I was already thinking, but then really quantifying it. So I, I just, I'm going to love that, that, that when it lands right on the, on the minute, um,

Yeah, it'll be great for Singularity as a brand too, I think. Yeah. All right, let's close out our conversation today on Moonshots with a look at crypto once again. Here we go. We're seeing U.S. enacts stablecoin bill in 2025. So prediction market, polymarket shows a 95% probability that the U.S. will pass a stablecoin bill in 2025 of 35% from prior weeks.

Any comments on this, Salim? I think this is going to be huge. They have to first pass a budget, so let's give them some time to figure that out. But when they figure out the stable coins, this will completely unleash the crypto world and give it a bridge from the crypto economy into the real world economy. And I think all sorts of things become possible. I think the opportunity for AI agents to do microtransactions using this is going to be amazing.

So huge opportunity. Yeah, I think that last point is by far the most important one that we should track closely week to week because the ability to move back and forth instantaneously digitally from a stable coin back to Bitcoin or whatever you want is intimately tied to the agent to agent microtransactions. And, you know, that that's going to be

We get Cathie Wood to do the math for us, but that's going to be the biggest part of the economy by 2040 is those transactions. Oh, yeah. There will be hundreds of billions of agents each doing microtransactions. I mean, this is the half of the Internet. You know, the Internet when it was built.

You allow this to share imagery and data and documents, but not financial transactions. This is the other half of the equation and it's coming fast. We're playing with codecs, you know, pretty much all weekend.

You can spawn agents to do all kinds of things for you. And the interface they put on front of it, you know, each time you spawn an agent, it creates a new row. And there's a little bar turning. You're like, this interface, like right out of the gate, I want to do a thousand agents. And then it's going to be a million agents. And it's immediately obvious that we're all going to be fighting for inference time compute.

Like you can think of things so fast and deploy so many agents to do them for you so quickly. You know, like the gating factor is, well, I can't get the compute and this interface obviously is not going to support the scale that I need either. Well, the thing that Anish said as well is having his agent going out and shopping for lower cost insurance or mortgage rates and such. So,

I love that idea. You're going to be able to optimize everything. You're going to have your agents constantly searching the web at minimal cost. And then I want an army of agents that are going out and making investment trades for me, going out there and just an army making money. For me, I've been waiting for my boys, my two boys, to actually get excited about trading crypto. But I think the agents will get there first. Yeah.

Well, you know, another topic, I wish we had more time with Anish to talk about it because I know he's big on disposable code and personalized code. And like, well, what's an example of that? Well, the example Anish usually gives is imagine if you're using Suno or Udio to create a song, but the song is about this exact podcast.

And it has content in it that's related to our topics today. That's a great theme song to play as a pre-roll. So the software created this thing specifically for the podcast. It uses a fair amount of compute, but it's still like 12 cents. No big deal. You create it and then you throw it away. Well, I can think of a lot of those things. Let me spawn all those agents to create them and I'm going to throw them away when they're done. That's a lot of compute. It's so worth it.

But where's all that compute going to come from? Wow. My last slide for today, still on a Bitcoin roll. At this moment, Bitcoin is running at $106,000, roughly $500. Pretty good. We're approaching near highs. And this article came out. Bitcoin has become America's reserve asset. More Americans own Bitcoin than gold. Wow.

That's pretty extraordinary. I think this is kind of predictable just because it's so much more democratized. It's so much a thousand times easier to own Bitcoin than it is to own gold. So I would have expected to see this sooner. The thing that I think will become really powerful is when we have people owning at gross level more Bitcoin than they do gross level gold. I think that'll be amazing. Pleasure as always, gentlemen. Onwards. This was a big week in AI. We have one last thing, Peter.

What's that? Well, I think, Dave, you have a slide or a photograph, right? Do you want to just show that? I'll stop sharing. Can the team pull it up for me? Yeah, or I can show something. If you have it. Given that it's your birthday, Peter, we found an MIT photograph of you from a ways back, and we thought this was absolutely worth showing.

So talking about AI agents and retro, we want to hear that guy's voice. Peter, I got this from Matt Rita. He sent me with an emoji of a hair pick along with it. So I didn't include that, but I was really reluctant to drag it out of the archives because I know it can come back around. It's quite all right. I want to show you one other thing, though. Hold on. Hold on. I want to show you one other thing. I've got two images that I thought were really interesting.

Where is my image gone? Oh, my God. We have to cut this out somehow. I mean, I respect you guys. I spend my birthday doing a podcast with both of you. How's that? Hold on. Let me share this now. Congratulations and happy birthday, by the way. Thank you, pal. Thank you. I started my birthday by doing 100 continuous push-ups in a row. So still driving that.

Very nice. And then hold on. Is that part of that celebration? Yeah. That was a, yeah. There are two favorite photographs of you. One is this little 3d printed image of yours that I kept. And then one of the, the next generation. Oh my God. Yes. My boy, three of our boys all born within like a month of each other. They're now all turning 14.

Yeah, that doesn't look like me. But anyway, hey. And I wanted to show one little more surprise. Lily, come on along. We brought you a birthday cake.

Thank you. But unfortunately, you can't eat it because you're an avatar. Unless there's salmon in the middle of it. Nah. I'll reach out using Google's beam. Lots of blood.

Well, you know, the guys around Cambridge talk about you all the time. I don't know if that photo, that photo was long, long gone. Yes. I dug it out of the archives, but I'll just start it all over again. But just so you know, when your ears are ringing, that's everyone out here talking about you. Thank you, brother. Thank you. Thank you. Love you both. Have a beautiful day, Salim. And happy birthday again from Saturday or Sunday, whenever it was Saturday. Yeah. All right. Take care, Dave.

Take care, Sling. If you could have had a 10-year head start on the dot-com boom back in the 2000s, would you have taken it? Every week, I track the major tech meta-trends. These are massive, game-changing shifts that will play out over the decade ahead. From humanoid robotics to AGI, quantum computing, energy breakthroughs, and longevity, I cut through the noise and deliver only what matters to our lives and our careers. I send out a meta-trend newsletter twice a week as a quick,

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