The State of AI: Humanoid Robots, AI Copyright Wars & China’s Growing Influence w/ Salim Ismail | EP #157
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The greatest foe that we have is not China. It is the rogue state. It is the individual who uses advanced AI to try and do harm to others. I think it's insane that our kids are not being properly schooled in how to use AI to

up level. I think what's going to happen faster than anybody realizes is a reckoning where if you're not using AI in everything to do with education, you're going to be left behind very fast. OpenAI, Google asked the US government to let them train on AI-copyrated content. Copyright has been misused for the last 50, 80 years. We are currently holding two futures in superposition. One future in which

AI has dystopian qualities. It's the other one in which it is one of the greatest stabilizing forces that we have in this digital superintelligence. You always have a period of huge chaos before you get to a period of stability. A lot of that future is determined by what we believe and how we act. Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

Everybody, welcome to Moonshots and our special episode of WTF Just Happened in Tech this week with my dear friend, my co-conspirator of everything exponential, Salim Ismail. Salim, are you back in Miami? I'm back in New York and recovering from that insane event that you put together. Yeah, it was great. We had year 13 of the Abundance Summit.

Really, I truly feel it was one of the best years ever in terms of sold out, you know, 500 CEOs in the room, a few thousand people on our live stream through our exponential mastery program. It's a difficult thing to say, but I think this is the best conference of the year anywhere.

Thank you. Thank you. And the bar is very high for that. So. Well, I appreciate that. I don't think of it as a conference. It really is a community that's trying to understand how fast things are going. How do they up level their work? How do they go from success to significance?

um anyway the world doesn't stand still a lot's happening this past week and i'd love to cover some of the the recent news across ai robotics you know crypto everything and then weave in some of the things we saw during the summit this past week because a lot of incredible leaders and conversations you up for it totally up for it a lot to go a lot to cover for sure

All right. Let me hit on the first item here. And it's a conversation I had with Brett Adcock on stage at the Abundance Summit. But it's also something he just texted me this morning and said, hey, check this out. And I did. This is

Their new factory. So Figure AI makes the Figure robot. They've just been producing Figure 2 and they've got Figure 3 ready for announcement very soon. What I find fascinating is they built a facility that's able to produce 12,000 of their robots per year right now, scaling up to 100,000 per year. Pretty extraordinary. What do you think about it?

Fantastic. It would be very, very poetic to have figure robots making figure robots. Yeah, self-recursive. What could possibly go wrong? But in all honesty, I think Brett has been screaming in terms of how rapidly he's iterating. I mean, he went from starting the company to delivering robots in 31 months, just over two years.

And then I think what he was saying on stage was they're iterating a new design of figure every 12 to 18 months, which is insane. And that seems to be about right in terms of the pace of the underlying technologies moving so quickly. I have a major announcement to make around this.

Please. Which is, you know, in previous episodes, I've been very leery of humanoid robots, right? Okay. You've always said, why don't they have six arms? Why don't they have... That and also it's going to take a lot longer to bring into play than we think.

And I need to eat crow and revise my assessments because what we're seeing now is off the charts incredible. A, they're doing incredible stuff. And let's talk about some of what they're able to do. But B, if you have a robot learning a task, then instantly 5 million other robots know how to do that task. And that hive learning makes it unbeatable over time. Yeah.

Agreed. What Brett said on stage is he's got, if he had 100,000 robots today, he has customers for them. And he reconfirmed his expectation on pricing that in volume, they're going to go from where they are now, probably sub 100,000 to sub 20,000. And again, that blows me away. They're in BMW. They just signed a contract for a large logistics company.

uh but what is really exciting is they're going to be heading into the home very shortly that's super cool i'd still like to have us have that i have six arms by the way so if i have a request for brett just leave some slots where like options on a car where you can slot in extra arms or stuff okay well that was an announcement this morning on on uh on x i'm gonna be putting out the podcast

that we recorded at the Abundance Summit with Brett Adcock. I figure it's going to be coming out very shortly right after this one. I think most of you know that the news media is delivering negative news to us all the time because we pay 10 times more attention to negative news than positive news. For me, the only news worthwhile that's true and impacting humanity is the news of science and technology.

And that's what I pay attention to. And every week I put out two blogs, one on AI and exponential tech and one on longevity. If this is of interest to you and it's available totally for free, please join me. Subscribe at dmangus.com slash subscribe. That's dmangus.com slash subscribe. All right, let's go back to the episode. All right, let's go to our next story here. Uh,

This is not a surprise. So Sam Altman is basically saying DeepSeek is state controlled and he calls for a ban on Chinese models. So number one, do you think it's true? Number two, is this, you know, open AI using the U.S. government as sort of a

competitive blocker? How do you think about it? I think both are very true. There's no way I believe the Chinese government isn't using deep seek in that way, just like it's very clear it was using TikTok in that way. It's also a little rich for Sam to be calling IP violations when most of the data he trained was sucked out of places that they shouldn't have gotten it. But I

And it's defensive in that sense, but there's no question on the Chinese side, in my opinion. Yeah. You know, we had on stage during our patron day at the summit, Alvin Graylin, who I have a huge, deep respect for. He was very senior at HTC that creates VR headsets.

And he's written a number of successful books. And, you know, his point is, listen, rather than competing with China, why don't we collaborate? And I would love to see a world in which we could collaborate because the greatest, and this was something Eric Schmidt said during the FI Summit.

during a conclave, said the greatest foe that we have is not China. It is the rogue state. It is the individual who uses advanced AI to try and do harm to others. And I believe that. So the question is, how do we collaborate with

China and Europe and other parts of the world, the Middle East, to make sure that AI is being used to maintain safety and that we're actually looking to find those rogue actors that are, you know, insane or just, you know, dystopian in their nature. I think we need, you know, a hundred years ago, we had the Bretton Woods Conference where after World War II, they worked out

and laid the groundwork down for the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, etc. And we've had the most peaceful 100 years in the history of humanity. We had in the 70s the Asilomar guidelines to work out biotech safety, and we've not had a major accident in biotech.

It might be a great idea to revisit and combine those two and have a global convening of countries dealing with AI so that we have a clear set of, okay, how are we going to navigate this? And let's be open about everything because this affects all of humanity. One area goes rogue, it'll affect the whole world. So this really does behoove us to operate in that way. It'd be amazing if we could make something like that happen.

All right. On the point you just made a second ago, this comes out in TechCrunch. OpenAI, Google asked the U.S. government to let them train on AI-copyrighted content. So here you go. It's like throw copyright out the window. In order to win the race with China, we need access to all the content, whether it's copyrighted or not.

I have two views on this. A, yes, makes sense. You're saying that the government should let them use all copyrighted content?

Yes. And I have a reason why. Why? Because copyright has been misused for the last 50, 80 years. It keeps getting extended by Disney to protect Mickey Mouse. It's called the Mickey Mouse Act, honestly, because they've been extending copyright to protect the Disney characters for like freaking ever.

And so it's grotesquely twisted from the original intent of have copyright for, say, 15 or 20 years, and then it should become public domain. And it's now an 80-year cycle or something absurd like that. So it's been badly twisted out of original proportion to protect corporate actors. And so that should be one level of it.

On the other hand, it's very convenient for Google and opening out to want this. The bigger challenge, I think, is we're running out of data. And as we run out of data, we need synthetic data or access to the deep web or copyright content or something. But I think they need to figure out how to compensate the content owners for this in some way, shape, or form. I don't know what that obvious model is. Well, there is a solution, and...

And Bill Gross spoke about that on Tuesday morning. I think you were out for that presentation. I saw the highlights of it. I thought his ideas were totally, his constructs were really good because it aligns incentives. And that I think is a really powerful model. Let me mention what it is. And full disclosure, my venture fund's an investor in it. It's called ProRata AI. And what he's done is he's gone and he's created a model

in which he gets a number of content creators. So I've got a number of books, I've signed up for this. He's spoken to a huge number of content creators and

Pro rata AI sucks in all of the data and then when it looks at and a large language models results It says okay, the results are 38 percent from Time magazine 24 percent from Bloomberg You know point zero zero zero zero one percent from DM and this and then it apportions the money along those lines You know vastly difficult but very possible and

And we have to remember that Bill Gross was the guy who came up with the... AdWords. AdWords, effectively became AdWords. It was Overture originally and the model that Google used to become a trillion dollar company.

I think it's a very, directionally, it's exactly the right way to go. And there's some bonfire over how much of the percentage should go in that model to the content creators, etc. But if you structure something like that, I think it makes it reasonably fair. And what everybody's looking for is a reasonably fair playing field.

Yeah. And that would be a nice thing. Ultimately, we've got these massive companies that are pouring in. Do you remember what the figure we heard during the Abundance Summit was of how much? It's like a billion dollars a day. A billion dollars a day is going into AI. It's crazy. It's insane. I mean, honestly, a billion dollars a day. I would have never imagined it. But do the math. Hundreds of billions of dollars per year.

And I think we'll be reaching close to a trillion dollars a year soon enough. Anyway, here's the next article. So the Abundance Summit this year, we had a whole day or a significant portion of a day on longevity. I didn't see this, otherwise I would have discussed it during that day, but I found this fascinating. So out of Stanford Medical School, using AI, the faculty there came up and identified a peptide

uh, that produces the same type of weight loss as Ozempic without the side effects. And, and this is what I've been, I've been saying, we're in the middle of a health span revolution, not because we have anything other than AI helping us understand how the body works. And, uh,

The umbrella here is that AI is going to spot things in ways that we could never see as human beings, right? And this is one small example. We had another dozen examples at the summit of talking through this. It's incredible what we should see coming out of this. New models that are very low cost and have ridiculous outcomes and benefits. So this is incredibly exciting to see this type of thing occur.

And we're going to see it in treating cancers. We're going to see it in treating all diseases. Everything. I have a colleague, Michael Johnson, and a friend of his has these, his son has these weird seizures that nobody could figure out. Loaded up the blood test into, into grok and the grok said, Oh yeah, you need to go do that. That type of test. You'll figure it out. It's unreal. Yeah. Yeah. Uh,

I don't want to disclose the details of it, but one of our faculty members on stage this year who was part of our AI content, his house burned down during the fire and it forced him to go to Palm Springs, Palm Desert, where he was living. And he had had medical problems. He had been tested left, right and center. Nobody knew what it was. Maybe it was stress. He goes to Palm Desert.

and he finds a new doctor there who says, "Oh, look, you've got to look at it. It turns out it was multiple myeloma." He then took all of the data, medical data he had had from three months earlier before his house burned down. He put it into one, I think he's using Sonnet 3.7 from Anthropic.

And it instantly said you have multiple myeloma. I mean, after three months of the doctors getting it wrong. So, yeah. Incredible. I saw that piece. It was so mind-boggling. Because as we apply AI to these things and it can spot things that human beings can't see, you should expect to see huge early diagnosis of all sorts of things. I mean, let's consider that when you go to the doctor today, you get the wrong diagnosis about 30% of the time anyway, right? Yeah.

And for the poor doctors, what hope is there in catching up with all the treatments, conditions, drugs, et cetera, that's coming out? I remember Daniel Kraft saying every day there are several hundred cancer research papers published, right? So if you're a cancer doctor, you can't read several hundred of these a day. You need an AI to read them for you and see these are the five patients these apply to. Go read those five.

I mean, honestly, if you or someone in your family is ill, the very first thing you should be doing is asking for your data, putting it into the models and getting additional second and third diagnoses. Just to build on that, I came across a startup that is aiming by the end of this year to release a completely free, fully fledged AI doctor.

Yeah. That's going to be nuts. It's going to happen. So right now, you know, I'm a huge believer and supporter and the chairman of Fountain Life. And one of the things that we do that I love is when we upload you, it's the most exhaustive upload of data ever. It's 200 gigabytes of data. It's your full genome, all full body MRI, everything knowable about you.

And all of that data then becomes resonant on your app, on your phone with, I think we're using cloud 3.7 as well, so that you can query your data.

One of the cool things I love is like, hey, take a photo of the menu you're eating. You're going to the restaurant and say, given my genetics and my current blood biomarkers, what on this menu should I eat or should I not eat? I love that. Everybody, Peter here. If you're enjoying this episode, please help me get the message of abundance out to the world. We're truly living during the most extraordinary time ever in human history. And I want to get this mindset out to everyone.

Please subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcasts and turn on notifications so we can let you know when the next episode is being dropped. All right, back to our episode. All right, let's go to this next one. And it's two articles back to back. And really, they are so important for us to discuss, buddy. Both of us have kids.

Your son's 13. My two boys are 13. So this is Estonia to roll out chat GPT for education for all secondary schools. And the second article back to back here is Beijing to roll out AI courses for kids to boost sectors growth in primary and secondary schools.

So we had this year at the Abundance Summit a teen program for the first time and the teens were amazing. We had a dozen teens there. They were brilliant. I mean, were you impressed by them?

Ridiculous. You know, I did that late night meeting of life session and they were sitting there nailing me with questions. You've got that wrong about the meeting of life. This should be this way. And I was like, ah, you're still wet behind the ears. Come on. But they're incredible. Just unbelievable to see the depth of wisdom coming from this generation. I mean, honestly, we should just take all of our global politics, et cetera, hand it over to 25 year olds or 20 year olds or teenagers. They'll figure it out. Yeah. Yeah.

We just need to get out of the way. And just don't give them the button and control the football. But in all honesty, when I was having my session with the teens, I asked, OK, there's 12 of you here. I think it was three or four girls and eight boys. And I said, how many of you are asked to use AI in the classroom?

And how many of you are told not to use? And so all of them were being told not to use AI in their high school. And here I see Beijing and Estonia saying, no, no, we're going to make AI a part of the primary education. At least eight hours of AI to primary secondary students to enroll in at least eight hours. I assume that's per week of AI during the year. So

I think it's insane that our kids are not being properly schooled in how to use AI to up level the content. So the dominant conversation in education today is an immune system response from all the legacy actors, teachers, unions, whatever, saying we should ban AI because you can't own property, etc., etc., etc.

I think what's going to happen faster than anybody realizes is a reckoning where if you're not using AI in everything to do with education, you're going to be left behind very fast. And it's going to break the immune system problem we have in education we've had for a very long time. Because God help you if you're trying to update academia, right? It's a vicious, vicious environment. I am going tomorrow. We moved our kids to a new school called Qualia School of Deeper Learning.

And tomorrow I'm going to go and spend the entire day at the school

working with the kids in the classrooms and then meeting with the teachers that I'm meeting with them again on Friday. And it's really about how do you actually bring AI into the classroom? And the realization I have is, okay, if let's talk, let's say our kids are in middle school. If you have middle school kids solving typical middle school problems, if they're given AI to solve those middle school problems and they're trivial and like, you know, of course you're not, you know, it's like,

Writing becomes trivial. Math problems become trivial. But what if instead you gave those middle school kids extremely difficult problems?

like come up with a brand new socioeconomic system or create a program that does this, that and the other thing. And then you said, okay, you normally don't think you can solve this, can you on your own? But now here's a bunch of AI tools, go out there and complete this. I mean, it allows us to up-level the challenges that our kids feel confident pursuing. So I did an interesting experiment.

I did my degree in theoretical physics, and in one course on relativity, they had us rebuild Einstein's theories from the bottom up and show the mathematical formalism behind it to understand it better, etc. And it took like the whole year to figure it out.

I went back and looked at that again, and I redid it with Einstein, with an AI, to say, hey, why is this relevant? Why is this relevant? Why is this relevant? And if I had to redo it again, I figured I could learn the whole thing again in about three days rather than the year. And I think this is the potential that you're pointing to here. It's unbelievable how much quickly we could accelerate our kids. Agreed.

All right, here's the challenge. Let's just point out the big challenges of the regulatory side and getting that out of the way and changing that. And God help us. We need to do that like yesterday. Yeah. So the question becomes, how did the teachers unions feel confident in embracing this and making their job more fulfilling?

So I've talked to them, to the teachers quite extensively. The individual teachers generally tend to get it, but at a group level, the unions freak out because, you know, when you say to them, hey, what the role of the teacher should go back to the way it used to be, rather than giving endless lessons repeatedly, be the guide from the side and help mentor the kids and spend the time with the kids on the difficult problems they're facing rather than just giving the stupid lesson every time.

Right. It is that old switch classroom or flip classroom approach where you watch the lesson in the evening and do the homework collaboratively in class, which is what real life is like. And they can't get their heads around it. It's a structural problem. They just can't cope with that. Just in the same way that doctors have a difficult time having AI in the diagnosis room.

But it's going to ride around them so quickly, I think they'll be forced to adapt. It'll be one of those where you either adapt or you get thrown by the wayside as we move very, very quickly forward because the pace of change is not slowing down. I think about when Google came out and library attendance probably fell through the floor, right? Yeah. Yeah.

And over time, they came to accept it. And then librarians, by the way, and library science is one of the most important fields in the world today because just the retrieval of knowledge is really, really powerful as a discipline. All right, here's our next article out of Wired. And this is Google's Gemini Robotics AI model reaches into the physical world. And I love this.

This is the realization that if you think about robotics, there are two sides of the equation. There's the physical robot and building that physical robot with all the parts. And then there's the AI model that controls it. And I think part of the interesting progress here is imagine building an AI software layer

That enables you to interface with any physical system, any robotic system. This is huge because, you know, the real holy grail is movement in the physical world. I remember one of our Singularity University faculty saying, you really only reason you need brains is to move around in the physical world.

And at the end of the day, most of these AI models, yeah, they're doing cool stuff, writing code, et cetera, et cetera. But at some point, that code reaches the physical world through finances or through health care or through whatever. And I think once you put that layer in, allowing AI to interface with robotics into the physical world in a generalized way, in the EXO book, we call it interfaces, right?

Now you have incredible potential because you can put so much functionality into that layer and the end use of it becomes much more trivial to program. So this is massive. Yeah, agreed.

There are a few theories that say AI will become conscious when it is materialized in the physical world. Yes. In fact, it turns out that that's the predominant theory of consciousness is to understand and adapt to the physical environment. And consciousness allows us a faster feedback loop.

because we have cognitive processes that can be brought to play. There's one thing I really loved about this particular article, Peter, is that bit at the bottom, they have no plans for commerce.

I really love some of these folks like Meta doing open sourcing their LLMs and Google kind of going, we're doing this because we just think it's important for the world. I think that's so great that they're doing stuff like this. It just uplifts everybody and everybody wins when you do stuff like this. If this kind of thinking could reach our politics, we'd be in really, really great shape. Yeah, just a quick note. Google was our major sponsor at the Abundance 2025 event.

underwriting the Google tech hub through Google Cloud, a lot of super cool stuff. And I'll get into that a little bit later with you. So I found this next article fascinating. So Ilya Setskever creates a startup and it's focused on super intelligence.

And he's in talks at the beginning. Talk about a founding round to raise $2 billion at a $30 billion valuation. Why did we choose to use the term superintelligence? The reason is that superintelligence is meant to convey something that's not just like an AGI. With AGI, we said, well, you have something kind of like a person, kind of like a coworker. Superintelligence is meant to convey something far more capable than that.

When you have such a capability, it's like, can we even imagine how it will be? But without question, it's going to be unbelievably powerful. It could be used to solve incomprehensibly hard problems if it is used well. If we navigate the challenges that superintelligence poses, we could radically improve the quality of life. But the power of superintelligence is so vast.

So, you know, the theme of the Abundance 360 Summit next year is super intelligence unleashed. I have to get Ilya to be our opening speaker. That'll be my goal. Okay.

Can I get on my favorite soapbox here? Yeah, get on it. Get on it. What the hell do we mean by superintelligence? We have no idea what artificial general intelligence is. Can we please spend some time defining these terms before we start throwing them out like bathwater? That would be my first question for Ilya. Yeah, please define it. Now, we have emotional intelligence and spatial intelligence and spiritual intelligence.

if anybody that's a leader is bringing a lot of that to bear when they make decisions and choices. So what the

What do we mean when we mean super intelligence? And I've seen so many different definitions of just AGI that I'm really kind of struggling with this. So what are we exactly talking about here? But having said all that, right? Fantastic. All power to him. I love the fact that he's making safety a key part of this. I don't know how he's going to do it.

Because when you have a super intelligence, we're kind of toast anyway, if they're going down that path. But go, go, go. And amazing that you can get a startup valuation like that. 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 and 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, right? 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. Oh, yeah. I mean, the startup valuation. So we've seen a number of companies that go from like literally first outside financing round in the multiple billions. Yes.

Yes. I was talking to somebody about this and they were like, well, that's just a ridiculous valuation. I'm struggling to raise money for my startup at this valuation, et cetera. And so that's just bullshit. And I said, well, would you rather be him or you? You'd rather be there. So here's the question, right? AGI, again, very fuzzy definition, but it sort of sounds like

and AI that can do as good as the best human in every possible field. So an AI that is the best physician and the best mathematician and the best cook and the best whatever.

That's sort of the blurry line that we call AGI today. Now, digital superintelligence, in my definition, is just following the law of accelerating returns that says, OK, 10 doublings later, you're a thousand times better. And that's super intelligent.

That's great. What would it do? I mean, I think the area where I would point out

point it would be two areas that I would like to kind of get. One is, you know, figure out deep problems like the wave particle duality of light, right? And solve some of the grand unification theories in physics that nobody's been able to crack yet, etc. Right? That's one. The second would be figure out the right model for civilization to follow, right?

and figure out a way for getting the entirety of humanity to follow that right governance model and right around all the political bullshit we have going on today. So those would be two areas I would assign to an ASI.

So I think that is the point. Solve problems that have been unsolvable by humanity to date. Okay. Whatever that might be. Double human lifespan. You know, unified field theories. Understanding what dark matter is. You know, get us through our next dilemmas. Yeah. I mean, that would be... How can I reach into a parallel universe and go down that path instead of this path? Sure. Would be what I would ask. Sure. Yeah.

I think that sounds like a perfect definition, reaching into parallel universes. I'll make sure we put that one forward, buddy. Next one, open AI employee on the future of the web. So here, let me read this quote. It's 2025 and most content is still written for humans instead of LLMs. 99.9% of web attention is about to be LLM attention, not human attention. So how does he pronounce his name? Andredge?

Andre Karpathy. Andre. So Andre's point is, listen, we've been building the web for us meat sacks as carbon-based life forms. And going forward, the value of the web is going to be to feed the large language models. We have to restructure how we write it. Fascinating thought. Absolutely fascinating. I think there's a huge layer to be built here. I put this in the category of

AI like electricity. It just becomes this invisible layer that just is part of everything. And this is one of those examples where the reality is a human being can't go through many pages on the web anyway. So you want to pass this whole thing over to an AI and let it navigate it and give you the more relevant pieces for you. And so I think this is super exciting to see if we can make this happen.

I mean, I think the point is an important one. And I'm surprised we haven't heard this much before, but it's probably very true. Let's go into some of the conversations that came out of the Abundance Summit. I think there are some fun ones. Kathy Wood at ARK Invest was giving us her 2025 report and comments.

I think just a huge believer in all things exponential. In particular, she was focused on humanoid robots and, you know, robo taxis with, you know, making the note that Tesla's cyber cab should be up and operating by this summer in Texas and soon thereafter L.A. and then hopefully nationwide.

We had a great session on investing in AI with Anj Mehta, who heads AI investing from Andreessen Horowitz and Dave Blunden, who is my partner in Exponential Ventures, and Rana El-Khouloubi, who is interviewing them. One of the things I found fascinating was Dave talking about two key points. One was, it turns out, MIT,

is the number one AI school on the planet. The CSAIL, Computer Science AI Lab, has more graduates, more compute than any other location. Yes. And then it's producing more unicorn startups

than any other university more than so number one is MIT and unicorn startups number two is USC which shocked everybody and number three is Stanford the the other thing that he mentioned was he showed a graph of the average age for an entrepreneur starting an AI company

In particular, out of MIT and the bell curve used to peak in the 30s. Now it's moved to early 20s, like 20 through 23. That's amazing. Yeah. I saw the same thing, by the way, in the Bitcoin blockchain world. All the founders are in the early 20s.

like if you're over 25 there's some bylaw that you have to be under 25 to work on blockchain it's written somewhere and i think we're seeing the same thing the paradigm shifts are so big that anybody over a certain age can't get their heads around it they're not native to it yeah i mean that's the part not native but the other part is so i think the number is like 75 of incoming mit freshmen want to start a company before they graduate and now the ability the ability to find a great partner

and come up with an idea and actually test the idea and launch it inside of a year or two. Yeah. That's crazy. So we had so out of exponential ventures, out of MIT, two companies went from zero to $2 billion valuations in two years. That's insane. Incredible. I think we're going to see a lot of that as we kind of decimate the real world or the old world with AI.

The creative destruction is going to be incredible. There's one more point that they made that I think was worth pointing out. A big challenge is when do you invest in AI? And they made the point that you really need to just get into it and invest in it because it's the only way you're going to keep track of tabs of what's going on.

And I thought that was a really important point that we should all take account of. You need to get into it quickly. When we advise companies, the big question is always when do you tap into some technology or not? And the mission, the minute it's mission critical, you should be in it right away so that you're learning and not being left behind. Yeah. Your mind goes, your attention goes where your money goes. Great point. Yeah. Yeah.

Max Hodak came on stage. I love Max. He's the CEO of science He is building what I consider the most extraordinary BCI company out there He was the co-founder and the president Neuralink with Elon hmm, and it's Quite a journey. He went to Elon University on Neuralink. He broke away and

and started science and he's got something called a bio-hybrid neural interface which I love. So let me take a second to dissect this literally. So when you put a Neuralink device into your neocortex you're putting like a thousand to two thousand very fine filaments into the neocortex so that these filaments can read and write onto neurons but these filaments even as thin as they are are destroying

you know, millions of neurons when you poke them into the brain. Right. That's a problem. And then there's a limited number. Do you, I don't know if you remember, do you remember the bit rate at which the brain communicates with the outside world? It's like 10 or 20 or something. Yeah. It's in like the 10 to 40 bits per second of bits, uh, you know, uh, baud rate. Yeah. Bits, bits per second. So, uh,

Which seems like nothing compared to you know, gigabits and petabytes that were we're going out but what he's built and he's demonstrating animal models and will be going into primates later this year and humans hopefully a couple years after that is imagine having a physical computer circuitry with millions of micro wells and

and in those wells are nutrients in which you place neural stem cells and the neural stem cells are interfacing with the electronics on this piece of material and then the neural stem cells

those micro wells are placed on the surface of the brain and the neural stem cells grow their exons and dendrites into the brain like roots into the soil and they don't kill any neurons but you've got millions of these yeah into the brain and connecting and forming you know forming appropriate neural connections and it's a brand new strategy and approach to BCI yes

I find this fascinating. I've been saying for a long time that, you know, one of the challenges is we don't understand how the brain works, right? A hundred billion cells, all true neurons, all operating. And each of them has like hundreds of connections, 10,000 connections to the nearest neuron. It's like totally, the numbers go totally insane. But you don't have to understand it as long as you can interface effectively to it.

And that becomes really powerful. Can I tell you a fun little story? Of course. Back in 2010, Loic Lemur used to run this event called LeWeb. I remember LeWeb. It's like the big web conference in Europe. And he said to me, hey, Slim, come and give a talk via your learnings of singularity on whatever you want.

So I thought, huh, neuroscience. So I went and interviewed all of our neuroscience folks at Singularity University, Chris DeSharme, a bunch of others. And I tried to get a common definition of the brain. And the best common agreed, the only agreed common definition I should get to was something like a fractal chaotic brain.

fractal chaotic information processing system that may or may not generate consciousness. You're like, really? That's what you got for me? It really blew. And they said, we have no idea why any of this stuff, we have no idea why we sleep still after all these decades. Oh my God. Right? So, but I think interfacing with it, like Max's

figuring out how to do will give unbelievable potential because the brain will figure out how to optimize the connections and use the computing capabilities. It'll figure it out. We don't have to do that for it. And now things become really, really interesting. Yeah. One last point on this. I remember one of Ray Kurzweil's predictions was that we would have high bandwidth brain computer interface by 2033.

And I was always like, you know, Ray, you've been right on so many things on this one. I just don't believe you. I don't see the technology there. You know, we've got eight bits per second, 30 bits per second. How do we get high bandwidth BCI?

And then I met Max. And then boom. And then boom. It's one of those you just shake your fist at the prescience that Ray has. I don't think he's a human being. I think he's an avatar from a different dimension coming in to kind of poke us and jiggle us so that we kind of stay on the right path. All right. Next up, we had Joshua Su from Hey, Jen.

who is up there and HN is an extraordinary company creating high fidelity avatars and visual and voice models. It was amazing. They were in our Google tech hub and they gave everybody there a chance to image themselves. You'd go into the studio for two minutes

The data will be collected and all of a sudden you would have this visual representation of yourself. Do you remember how many languages your HGN avatar can speak? It was like dozens instantly. No, it was like a couple of hundred languages. It was like a hundred languages like that. That's crazy.

I'm actually really looking. I've waited for a while to try and create an AI twin. I feel that now is the right time to do it because having an AI of me that can remember all of the things I've ever said and analyze everything the way I've done it over decades is going to be so much smarter than the real me.

You just want to go let that thing go do presentations at conferences. It's going to be amazing. I've been waiting until the right time, and I'm hoping this is now, actually. Yeah, it is. I remember a couple of points here about a year ago with Steve Brown, who's been my chief AI officer supporting me at PhD Ventures.

We created Peter Bot. Yeah. Uploaded all of my content. There's actually a moonshot. You did a whole podcast episode with Peter Bot. And I was like so impressed by Peter Bot. I mean, it was much more eloquent, remembered everything, was able to make much more clear. Better looking. Yeah.

than I could. So that was fun. And this year, what we did at the Abundance Summit, and I should probably do a podcast, was with Peter at 120 years old. So we created a version of me, 120 years old. So I'm 63 now. This is 57 years into the future.

And I interviewed this version of Peter about how do we get through the singularity? What do you do to get to longevity escape velocity? You know, is crypto? I still love I asked, I asked, so what is crypto at in the year or whatever, 57 years from now is. And and it said it's running at five million dollars in twenty, twenty five dollars at Bitcoin. So that's that's my Peter Botts prediction. Boom.

And I said, is the dollar still a thing? He said, it's kind of like a novelty, but we've definitely gone to a crypto default currency across the world. So that was fun. Can I make a quick point about that? Of course.

We have all grown up, everybody that's over, say, 25 has grown up with the only major currency we've ever known to be the US dollar, right? So everything is in terms of how much dollars does it cost to do something. That's the unit of account for the last five generations, right? Whereas if you go hang out in these NFT Discord channels with all these young pups who are trading NFTs,

You never, ever, ever, ever, ever hear the word U.S. dollar. You only ever hear Ethereum and now Bitcoin with the ordinals world. So this is a generation growing up where the U.S. dollar is not the dominant unit of account. It's going to be very easy for them to flip over to a different model. Yeah.

Let's go to the mogadot of it all. But before I do that, by the way, we released the new Abundance logo, that A-like gold carrot. What do you think of it? I like the rocket ship flavor to it. Yeah. I thought that was great. Well, what I told everybody was that carrot, you know, in...

The phrase that you and I put forward in the very first year of Singularity University was 10 to the 9th plus and that upward carrot is the exponent portion. Oh, excellent. Yes. Love it. Beautiful. So I love that and our new logo. So Mogadot comes on stage. I love Mo. We're producing a documentary called Scary Smart together.

Kristin, myself, Mo co-funded this and it's Atlantic Productions is producing it and Mo is interviewing people around the world about this and Mo got very emotional on stage and we've done some podcasts with him on the Moonshots channel here but Mo is very concerned about dystopia on the way to abundance. He thinks we'll finally reach an extraordinary world of abundance but

that for the next five to 12 years, we're going to have a period of dystopian concerns that we need to be forewarned about. What do you think about that? I think he's right. For those who haven't gone and listened to it, the podcast that Peter and I did with Mo a few weeks ago was off the hook. The amount of wisdom he dropped in that was incredible. I think that's exactly right. I would put the framing that it's always darkest before the dawn.

You always have a period of huge chaos before you get to a period of stability. We've seen that in World War I, World War II, etc. Unfortunately, we're coming into that period now where there's extraordinary volatility and anything could happen. One of the geopolitical folks that I pay a lot of attention to said with the US pulling away, every country in the world will try and go for nuclear weapons as a defensive stance.

And that's just a bad outcome with the potential outcome with so many, too many, it's in too many hands and bad things could happen as things go down that way. The only good news is the point that warfare is now being fought largely with drones and not by human beings. And so that's something good in that level. But it's going to be a scary decade or two.

One of the things that I put forward that feels very real to me is I said, we are currently holding two futures in superposition, right? From a Schrodinger's cat point of view, one future in which,

AI has dystopian qualities and it has the potential to threaten us. The other one in which it is one of the greatest stabilizing forces that we have in this digital superintelligence. I call it Star Trek versus Mad Max. Yeah. And we need to do a lot of that future is determined by what we believe and how we act. So...

Can I throw out two ideas here? Yeah, of course. People often ask me, you know, why am I so positive about the world and optimistic about the world?

I think there's two comments. One is from Ray, who said that technology is a major driver of progress in the world. Frankly, it might be the only major driver of progress we've ever seen. Now that we have a dozen technologies, and I think one of the most profound things that we saw at Abundance Summit this year was just the unbelievable real convergence of all these technologies into new breakthrough applications and domains that are being created.

The second is as anything becomes more intelligent, it tends to become wiser and more benevolent. And we've never seen the alternative.

And so that gives you encouragement that as AI evolves, it should become wiser and smarter and go, wow, these human beings are nutty. Let's just figure out ways of protecting themselves from themselves while we move them along to their next level. In the same way, we would protect a natural species that doesn't know it's killing itself off. So let's just protect its environment for it. And so those are the kinds of things I'm encouraged by as we hurdle into this very volatile couple of decades. Yeah.

We had a bunch of other fascinating speakers. We had the team from Google, Alphabet's company called Wing that does drone deliveries. And we actually had Wing delivering stuff to everybody from the sky. It was amazing. And, you know, just in time,

I've got two thoughts about that. One is the fact that this is kind of standard in China today. You can order coffees and have a drone delivered to you, etc. We need to get our regulatory act in order very, very fast. We're so behind on that.

on that aspect of it. But the sheer granularity of the capability and the speed is unbelievable. I'm so excited by this because it'll totally change life for the better if you can do stuff like that, especially in emergency situations where you have to get a defibrillator somewhere because somebody's having a heart attack. The potential here is unbelievable. You know, I love it.

And it's in Dallas right now. Can't wait for it to become available. And the accuracy with which they can deliver is extraordinary. One of the things that we did for every day at the end of every day, we uploaded all the content from the summit into deep research and then into Notebook LM.

And we created a podcast the next morning, which I found fascinating. Yeah. Did you get a chance to play with Google's new video teleconferencing capability? Video teleconferencing? No. So they built and they demonstrated at the summit something called Starline, which you sit in a room, you've got a video screen in front of you, and someone else is

is in a different room, other side of the country, wherever it might be with a video screen and the camera's there. I kid you not, it gives you this 3D imagery like the person is sitting in front of you, like you reach out, you know, in their demo, they'll hand you an apple and it feels like the apple is like a few inches in front of you. And I brought my kids in there and they said it was by far the coolest demonstration in the entire Google tech hub. So that was fun.

Starline. I got to go check this out. And they're going to be commercializing it by the end of this year. So this is the new telecom, a new version, if you would, a version of Zoom that doesn't feel like a flat screen in front of you. Yeah. We had a session on Zoom.

longevity, which was amazing. We had sessions on how to upload your brain into the cloud. Travis Kalanick was there for our moonshots, but we ended the summit on Palmer Lucky. Palmer was with us two years ago, such a hit, and he did not disappoint again this year.

What do you think of Palmer's closing presentation? I thought, first of all, the amount of wisdom and brashness coming at the same time, right? You often get people with a lot of brashness and daring do, but not a lot of wisdom. And he's got freaking both of them. It's really annoying in a good way. I just love the fact

that he was like, yeah, I'm going to do this just to take revenge out on all the people that thought I would never make it and count that down to me. I'm just really, really glad he's on our side, would be one thing. That was one. I really loved the fact that they've been in Ukraine from day one helping out because it's really devastating to see what the Ukrainians are going through and God help us, they need all the help they can get. So that was really fantastic.

I thought the one thing that I thought was really awesome was the way when this whole follow your dream stuff is bullshit. Figure out where you can make the most impact and shut up and just go do that. This dream stuff is just getting in trouble every time. I thought that was such a great...

Kind of dimension to add to what we always talk about, right? Yeah. So I thought it was great. A couple of things. One of the things that I found fascinating, I said, Palmer, it's pretty crazy that you had started Oculus basically in your garage and then a few years in,

Zuckerberg offers you the ability to sell it for a billion dollars and you turn him down. That's what he said. I was like, honestly, I turn it. There's a word for that called chutzpah. Chutzpah, yes. And then a good Greek term. And then he takes like 2.2, 2.3 billion dollars. And I said...

Then he goes, but that wasn't it. That wasn't the reason I sold for that amount of money. The reason I sold for that amount of money was that Zuck promised me that he would spend a billion dollars a year developing the technology for the next 10 years. For 10 years, yeah. And when I did the calculus...

I could either try and do the work on my own. And could I ever get $10 billion of R&D budget on my own and still have some control? Or, and he said, that was it. I sold it for that reason. Yeah. And then he got thrown out. And then when Facebook changed her name to Meta, he invested way back into Meta again. Just committed to this technology. That's the...

See, so all this stuff about figuring out where you go, that's his, that's, I feel he counterpoints his own thing because that was his dream was to figure out the metaverse, etc. The part that I also loved when he added was that they said they were going to spend a billion a year, but they ended up spending 60 billion. Oh, my God. So that's like crazy amazing. I mean, the metaverse will take longer to get there than just because of the feature footprint of the hardware. Right.

But it's going to be amazing when it does, and it'll open up whole new worlds, literally. Yeah, we'll be releasing the podcast with Palmer on the Moonshots channel here. So I don't want to ruin it for folks, but it was most definitely one of the most fascinating conversations. He does not disappoint. Yeah. All right, brother. Listen, thank you for breaking free on a Saturday to record this episode of WTF just happened this week in tech. I love you. I care about you.

and can't wait to see you again very soon. I have to tell you massive congratulations for what was the best conference anybody's ever been to. So for folks listening, figure out a way, scrape together whatever you can, change your plans, get to next year's Abundance Summit. And if you can't come physically...

Our exponential mastery program is a chance to join via live stream as well as a chance to get all of the, Salim and I and others recorded, got 17 hours of training content so that all of the stuff we discuss at these summits makes sense to you.

Anyway, have a beautiful weekend, brother. Same to you. Big hug to the family. Thanks, you too. Everybody, thanks for listening to Moonshots. You know, this is the content I love sharing with the world. Every week I put out two blogs, a lot of it from the content here, but these are my personal journals, the things that I'm learning, the conversations I'm having about AI, about longevity, about the important technology transforming all of our worlds.

If you're interested, again, please join me and subscribe at dmadness.com slash subscribe. That's dmadness.com slash subscribe. See you next week on Moonshots.