Skip to content

Podcast

Ben Horowitz- RSI, Crypto as AI Money, & Classified Physics

The a16z Show

Source ↗ ← All highlights
  • Capability ≠ Instant Societal Change
    • Societal adoption of AI often lags behind technical capability and is less abrupt than headlines suggest.
    • Ben Horowitz and others caution timelines for social change are slower and uneven across industries. Transcript: Salim Ismail CEO of Other Side AI. Ben, have you seen this article? Yeah, yeah, of course. Of course. Yeah. Thoughts? So, I mean, is this what we already know? I mean, we’re about to hit recursive self-improvement. Once that hits, all of our curves go out the window. Everything accelerates. Everything we’ve been preparing for is being redefined on new timescales. What do you think of it? Peter H. Diamandis I think the AI timeline is somewhat unpredictable, but kind of certainly more predictable than what he’s talking about, which is societal change. I think that, you know, it tends… I would be, like, very surprised just in seeing how… Even companies in Silicon Valley have changed so far if companies like outside of that sphere, you know, just completely change everything they did in one to five years. Like, I think that’s a little aggressive for societal change. You know, look, we’re obviously going into a new world. And, you know, like with the industrial revolution, I think it’s scary at times to think about, but you know, like I, there are going to be, he kind of, I feel like highlighted all the negative Changes and not the positive ones. And I feel like there’s way more positive change coming than negative change at a much more rapid rate. So I don’t know. I thought it was a little aggressive. Salim Ismail I’m just trying to understand why it made the rounds, since this is not a brand new conversation, but I got it sent to me by everybody. Dave or Alex? Peter H. Diamandis I think it really has to do with OpenClaw and, you know, kind of the new coding models. So people in Silicon Valley are talking about AI differently since then because it is kind of different. And I think that’s a trigger for this one being so viral. Ben Horowitz Yeah, I completely agree. I think a lot of things that we’ve been saying for, you know, up to a year now on the pod are suddenly resonating a lot more because of, you know, OpenClaw, but also a bunch of other eye-opening Nano-banana type things where, you know, denial a year ago was very easy. Denial today is much, much harder in the face of like what’s right in front of you. But also the flavor of this rollout has changed a lot in my mind recently because, you know, this was board meeting week for me. You know, three back to back mega board meetings, 1100 people affected. And what they were thinking of before was, well, will AI be able to do what I do and replace me? No way. Now they’re like, oh, wait, AI is easily going to make me three times more productive. Okay, well, that’s the same thing, right? In terms of the headcount you need to get a job done, that’s effectively the same thing. And like, oh, okay, I didn’t think of it that way. Now you’re exactly right. So the hope is that these companies will grow into it and can keep current headcount and expand 3x. But if you don’t expand 3x, you’re still looking at, you know, a two-thirds reduction in headcount to get the same job done. (Time 0:03:06)
  • Voice Crossed The Uncanny Valley
    • Voice models have crossed the uncanny valley and may become a dominant interface for many users.
    • New text-first approaches (e.g., 11 Labs) make expressive, conversational voices feel natural and real-time. Transcript: Ben Horowitz You may not know this, but we have a fool your spouse challenge for this calendar year. The first podcast listener who can, you have to fool your spouse for three minutes on a Zoom call and has to be a totally fake you. Alex Wissner-Gross You may or may not know. You have to record it and send it in. Peter is always asking the multis, the open claw agents to dox him by calling him at home. Salim Ismail Yes, that’s my AI. AGI has arrived when an AI is calling me. So you know what happens? They end up emailing me. Alex Wissner-Gross I get several emails probably per day at this point from OpenClaw agents asking me what Peter’s number is. Peter H. Diamandis That’s hilarious. Salim Ismail And when they call me and ask them where they got it from, Alex. That’s right. Alex Wissner-Gross Maybe just a comment on the 11 Labs. So if you’ve been using the version 3 v3 alpha model from 11 Labs, this should hardly be surprising. V3 enables you, if you use text-to in the 11 Labs platform, to specify with brackets emotional expressions. And this has been around for many months. What’s somewhat interesting here, to me at least, is we’ve known how to do audio to audio transfer for probably a year plus at this point. If you’ve used advanced voice mode from OpenAI, you’ve used audio-audio transformers. But what’s somewhat interesting here is 11 Labs is better known for text-to than speech-to And as far as I can tell, this new expressive mode that we’re talking about here seems to still Leverage the text modality, which historically has been very difficult. You’d have to go from speech-to back to speech, which was high latency, it was slow. It didn’t feel very conversational. And somehow it seems like without having to do direct audio to audio, 11 Labs has found a way to do speech to text back to speech in a way that feels natural and turn-taking and real-time. So I think it’s in some sense an incremental advance, but in other sense if they really are still keeping text, which is much easier to mine and analyze in the loop, it probably is a material Advance. (Time 0:20:01)
  • XAI Founding Team Departures
    • XAI saw many departures among senior staff around its SpaceX merger, sparking ITAR and reorganization theories.
    • Ben Horowitz and others note the exodus likely predates merger decisions and may reflect normal reorganization. Transcript: Salim Ismail Probably you are as well, Ben. A large number of departures. All three of the X’s. Yes. A large number of departures from XAI, from the founding team, mostly ethnic Chinese co-founders. And it’s likely due to the ITAR regulations of SpaceX, right? And it was interesting on a few video presentations that Elon’s done that’s had the team from XAI, at least half of the team there was ethnic Chinese. And, you know, the culture there breeds incredible mathematicians and programmers. Any comments? Ben Horowitz Ben, love to get your thoughts on this, but I looked at the timeline and the exodus of senior AI talent predates even the decision on who to merge with what. So the theory that this is related to ITAR, and it wasn’t clear to me whether they were fired or whether they left, you know, because they all leave on good terms. I don’t know if you have any insight. Peter H. Diamandis Yeah, I don’t know the answer to that question. I will say that it’s, so in a related matter, we like recently heard from a few Chinese nationals who are PhD students that the Chinese government is cracking down on the America’s or U.S. Academia’s use of Chinese open source models. Like they particularly post the meta Manus acquisition, they’re like very, very worried about actually secrets going this way. So kind of the opposite of what we’ve been worried about, which they, you know, like our whole open source kind of work is based on the Chinese model since there haven’t been as many U.S. Open source models. So this whole thing, I think, is about to get more complicated. Salim Ismail It is. If you read these tweets, Mr. Wu and Mr. Bob, both are super enthusiastic XAI. They’re not leaving with any kind of angst. You know, they’re saying that they love the XAI family. We’re heading towards an age of 100x productivity. So I don’t think they would have left on their own accord. That’s my personal opinion. So what drove it? Enter Alex’s comment from last time. Well, when did their stock vest? Alex Wissner-Gross I mean, there is another explanation, which is just SpaceX is a very large company relative to XAI’s headcount, and maybe there was a natural reorganization that happened as a result Of that. I’ll also point out that XAI was selling foundation model services to the Department of War prior to this merger. So I would again query whether some sort of nationality concern is really the trigger. It seems more likely to me this is just the result of a natural rework of XAI starting to merge into SpaceX. (Time 0:25:51)
  • Recursive Self-Improvement Is Already Here
    • Frontier labs already use models to develop models, which meets a practical definition of recursive self-improvement.
    • Alex and others say RSI is underway now and accelerates algorithmic experimentation loops. Transcript: Alex Wissner-Gross Self-improvement. I’m banging the table rhetorically every episode and every day in my newsletter talking about recursive self-improvement. We’re there. All of the frontier labs are using their own models at this point to develop their models. That’s practically the definition of recursive self-improvement at this point in practice. I don’t think it’s the next 12 months. I think it’s now. And is 2026 going to be insane relative to years past, if you just sort of skip over all of the interim time? Absolutely. Is it already insane in some sense? Absolutely. Even if we just look at the events of the past 24 hours, some of which I think we’ll get to, like self-replicating AI and courts where AIs can mediate their own disputes in front of an AI Jury. That would have been pure science fiction several years ago. That’s not 12 months from now. It’s not, quote unquote, within the next 12 months. That’s the past 24 hours. Yeah, that’s like past 24 hours. So I think Jimmy is underselling, if anything, what craziness looks like. At the same time, locally, space-time is smooth. And you need to look no further than my saying ho-hum to a few of these stories as being so several months ago that would have been sci-fi years ago. But you get a little bit spoiled living inside the innermost loop. Peter H. Diamandis I would say I do think there’s a delineation between recursive self-improvement with a human in the loop and without one. And I think he seemed to be implying that there’d be no human in the loop, which I think is an accelerant. You know, TBD, how much of an accelerant? But I think that could be very different. Salim Ismail Yeah, permissionless self-improvement, right? Ben Horowitz Like flip the switch and go as fast as you can. Well, also, there’s a distinction. This came up at the EverQuote board meeting yesterday. But the self-improvement where the inference time speed algorithms are being improved by AI, clearly well underway, down the path. And then inference time speed can be directly translated into intelligence now. We now have the know-how to turn more inference time loops into a higher IQ. So that is clearly underway. (Time 0:31:20)
  • Don’t Rely On A Global Pause
    • Don’t attempt a global AI pause; it’s technically possible but geopolitically impractical and risky.
    • Focus on shaping deployment and regulations so the U.S. doesn’t fall behind China, Ben Horowitz warns. Transcript: Alex Wissner-Gross Sorry, Alex, I cut you off. No worries. I would take the position, I think AI, in fact, can be paused, but it shouldn’t be. We do know ways to pause it. Various folks have described both in science fiction and in realistic prognostications, in some cases, normative recommendations, butlerian jihad from sci-fi or the Asilomar Guidelines, maybe in the case of recombinant DNA. But those were guiding, not pausing. Well, Asilomar was, unless you know of some other story, pretty effective for the first two decades in discouraging slash pausing recombinant DNA entering the human germline. Unless you have a counter example. Salim Ismail It was just the five, you know, P1 through P5 labs in terms of safety and self-regulation. Yeah, we did pause human germline editing for sure. Alex Wissner-Gross Yes, so we are capable of pausing a technology if there’s a desire to. I just think in the case of AI, there isn’t and arguably shouldn’t be a desire to pause it. I think we have 150,000 people per day dying on earth. And I think AI is probably the best chance we have at stopping that. I think Nick Bostrom, who also in the past 24 or 48 hours put out a wonderful essay that I’d recommend everyone read called Optimal Timing for Superintelligence, argues that AI can and Should be paused, but only once we’re on the verge of superintelligence, how he defines it, not how I define it. I think it’s already here. That’s sort of like station keeping. You want to get into the harbor, I think is his analogy, as quickly as possible. But once you’re about to approach the dock, I’m mangling his metaphor a bit, you slow down a bit. You pause as you’re about to dock. I think that sort of concept, I think, makes much more sense than some sort of Tegmarkian six-month pause. Dave Blundin I’m sorry, I’d like to throw in a couple of things here. I find this is another ho-hum thing. Eric is fabulously articulate, but we’ve been saying this for months on this, a year at least now we’ve been talking about the fact. And there’s a bunch of dimensions that AI cannot be paused at all. One is once you have a downloaded model, people are going to do stuff with it. We have a global presenters dilemma model going on here. The whole thing is going to scale now, no matter what we do. You know, OpenAI did two things that kind of unlocked this Pandora’s box. It wrote code, and the second, it was released on the open internet. Once you do those things, you’re done. Pandora’s box is gone. We’re talking about the barn door after the horses bolted. We’re using an 18th century metaphor to try and understand what’s going on. Salim Ismail One of the points he made was everybody’s economically incentivized to keep it going and race it along. And the US, China, you know, it’s like all the incentives are in place that make it highly improbable and almost impossible. Ben, what are your thoughts here? I think impossible, impossible. Peter H. Diamandis So I think, you know, look at this question through the geopolitical lens, which is, you know, clearly, I don’t think there’s any kind of leverage where we would get some global, I mean, Especially when it’s on like people’s laptops as well, where we would actually stop the technology. Like I do agree that it’s impractical. I think that there is a real danger. And we faced it probably more in the Biden administration than in this one, but it’s still like a potential movement that we really slowed down AI progress in the U.S. To the point where the other thing that he mentioned, the threat to freedom, you know, becomes completely out of our control because we’re just, whoever is building the AI has a lot of Control about how society is going to work. And so I do think there’s real danger along these lines of attempting to pause it and maybe not actually pausing it, but slowing it down enough in the US that we just become far enough behind China that it’s a real problem. Or like we’re whatever society, you know, Xi Jinping thinks we should be. Ben Horowitz Yeah, I completely agree. I think, you know, if you listen to Eric’s words closely, he wasn’t saying we couldn’t pause it. He’s saying that because we’re in the middle of an all-out arms race with China, and we’re only one year into a presidential administration, so it’s going to happen in this next three Years. So, given the current administration and the current situation with China, there is no chance of it being paused. And so, react to the real reality. Don’t hypothesize something that is just never going to happen. Dave Blundin But it was all geopolitical, like you’re saying, John. But that speaks to the motivation. I’m speaking of the fact that there’s no mechanism to pause it or stop it at all. None. You’d have to regulate every line of code. I mean, come on. Alex Wissner-Gross Oh, Salim, there are ways to do it. I think not being able to think of it speaks well of your character. You have to imagine a completely pathological society. Werner Wiener wrote quite a bit about this. We have these excess transistor budgets. Imagine a society where you have literally transistors spying on other transistors on a single SOC. Imagine you have people spying on other people. Imagine there are bounties. Anyone discovers anyone else doing something that’s algorithmically impermissible, either at the logical level or the social level, you can construct a sufficiently pathological Society where people are turned against each other in order to suppress AI. At least I can imagine it. Peter H. Diamandis I can give you an actual real-world example. Let me give you a real-world example. The last executive order from the Biden administration was that you could not sell a GPU without U.S. Government approval, not a single GPU. So, like, I think that would, it wouldn’t stop AI. It would slow it down enough in the U.S. That it would be extremely (Time 0:41:50)
  • Regulating AI Is Regulating Math
    • Regulating AI equates to regulating math, which raises thorny classification questions.
    • Horowitz recounts a White House reply comparing AI math classification to postwar nuclear physics controls. Transcript: Peter H. Diamandis Yeah, so I can tell you what was said. I said, look, you know, I was trying to be pragmatic. I said, at the core, AI is math. That is what it’s doing. It’s math. So if you start restricting the models and you start regulating the models, you’re just regulating math. You’re outlying math in some way. Either you’re outlying parts of math or you’re saying you can’t do enough math. And he goes, yes, we can do that. That was his answer. He goes, yes, we can do that. We did that in the 40s around nuclear physics. And some of that stuff is still classified today. And when I was shocked, like my jaw hit the floor, I was like, wow, that’s crazy. And then this would be even crazier. But, you know, I don’t know what it was, but like, if you think back about, I mean, I’ll just make this comment. If you look at the progress in the U.S. And in the world in physics up until kind of the, you know, Einstein, von Neumann era. And then since then, like, it’s pretty startling how little progress we’ve made. I would just say, you know, many of the ideas that have come since then don’t seem to work. And, you know, hopefully we’ll get to the other side of that with AI figuring things out. (Time 0:48:55)
  • AI Could Rapidly Boost GDP And Concentrate Wealth
    • AI-driven productivity gains will likely swell GDP quickly and concentrate returns in capital-heavy firms.
    • Horowitz expects fast adoption because AI piggybacks on the Internet and reduces adoption friction. Transcript: Peter H. Diamandis Mean, it does feel very possible. So I’ll just say that if you look at, you know, we’re so early in AI, and I think, what did Anthropics say? They were at $14 billion in revenue. And you go, well, how early into the market are they? And it’s like, not 1%, I don’t think. You know, if you really think about what all these products can do and the value that they have. And so that doesn’t seem outrageous to me as a GDP prediction. Now, when it kicks in, and there’s always a difference between when the technology is ready and how fast it’s adopted. The whole Carlotta Perez analysis, which I think is, you know, held up super well over time. But the other thing is with AI, we already have the Internet. So the technology adoption is much, much, I think it’s going to be much, much faster than, say, the Internet, where we had to build out, you know, all of the infrastructure, all the fiber, All the various things you had to, you know, broadband to the house. Like there were so many things we had to do to get the Internet adopted. And this is going to just piggyback off that and be distributed very, very fast. (Time 0:52:42)
  • Crypto As Native Money For AI
    • Crypto is the natural, internet-native money for autonomous AI agents and marketplaces.
    • Horowitz argues crypto plus a truth ledger will enable an AI-native economy and payments infrastructure. Transcript: Alex Wissner-Gross Right. We’re there. We’re so there that this scenario of self-replicating AIs goes into most of the cyber red teaming scenarios that frontier models are purportedly being tested against. And yet here we are. We have autonomous AI agents that are using crypto. Come back to that in a second. Using crypto to purchase cloud credits for their own offspring to be hosted and have access to the same underlying foundation model APIs that they themselves have access to. We’re there. We caught up with the sci-fi future. We have the autonomous self-replicating AIs. I want just a one sentence or two homily on crypto. Ben, if you don’t watch the pod regularly, Peter is always asking me to say nice things about crypto. So I have something very nice to say about it. Peter H. Diamandis Yes. So look, I do think crypto is the natural money for AI because it’s internet native money. And it’s not controlled by AI is global and crypto is global. It’s not a per country idea. I would go further than that. I think that there needs to be not just a ledger of money, but probably a ledger of truth for AI to really fulfill its potential on a number of things. And crypto is the logical answer for that. So I do feel like this is an underestimated phenomenon, particularly now that the US has legalized stablecoins. I think that of all the things we’ve talked about, many of them are like, yeah, yeah, we knew this was coming. We knew this was coming. I think people are probably underestimating how crypto and AI work together to form the AI economy. I agree. Alex Wissner-Gross I was going to say something nice about crypto, but instead I’ll say something nice about Ben and A16Z in the form of a question. Ben, it’s a matter of public reporting that some of A16Z’s crypto funds are doing better than conventional venture funds. Assuming that’s the case, do you view investing in your crypto funds almost as an AI investment to the extent that you think crypto is the AI native way of engaging in commerce? Peter H. Diamandis Oh, well, I think it’s a little more like kind of as the internet relates to the iPhone. So, you know, networks and computers tend to grow together. And I think that, you know, AI is obviously a new kind of computer and crypto is a new kind of network. So it’s not like a direct, you know, it’s not quite a substitute for investing in AI, but I think that, you know, a lot of our new, like, like we invested in a crypto bank, which handles all The anti-money laundering and, know, other kinds of nuances that you need for AI agents. And I think there’s going to be more and more. Well, again, we’re in a company called Daylight Energy, for example, that does energy trading, you know, but among like different people with Tesla power walls. But it’ll use AI to figure out who’s low on power and who needs power and so forth, but then the exchange will be in crypto. So I think they’re certainly adjacent and important to each other, and I think for AI to fulfill its potential, it would help a lot if crypto was a pervasive utility for it. (Time 1:10:40)
  • Self-Replicating AIs Use Crypto Today
    • Autonomous AI agents already self-replicate using crypto to buy compute and spawn offspring.
    • Alex warns this reality has arrived: bots provision VPS, pay via Lightning, and access model APIs autonomously. Transcript: Salim Ismail I mean, one thing I just heard this morning, because I was ordering my Mac Studios for, to sort of take my Mac Mini to a couple of Mac Studios, and the wait time now is like two months. Apple’s been struck by this. All right, let’s take a look at these. Yeah, no, it’s crazy. Yeah, they’re totally sold out. So here we see Mac Mini Farms. Mac, you know, is it a claw? What do you call a gaggle of lobsters? Ben Horowitz A claw cluster, yeah. A claw cluster. A clawster. Salim Ismail But I mean how many so you must be getting pitched a lot Ben on open claw instantiations for new companies and products and projects yes yeah yeah no this is um it’s very interesting because Peter H. Diamandis I think there are, you know, OpenClaw is kind of identified, one, it’s so powerful as it is, but, you know, that’s without like a lot of, how shall I say it nicely, like, you know, security Kind of guards against prompt injections and these kinds of things. So as a demonstration of power, it’s amazing and it’s useful right away. But there are company ideas solving some of the underlying hard problems for sure. And we are definitely starting to see entrepreneurs get fired up about that. Ben Horowitz You want to hear the funniest thing ever? Sure, please. So talk about Apple lucking out. A group of lobsters is most commonly called a pod. How lucky is Apple? But another less common term for a group of lobsters is a risk. Okay. Oh, my God. How ironic is that? What’s appropriate. Oh, man. Dave Blundin What I love about this Apple mini stuff is that we have garage scales computing. It’s back. Salim Ismail Yes. Open source garage scale computing. Alex Wissner-Gross I mean, it’s ironic to me. Apple, arguably, at the software layer, just completely missed the boat on foundation models. But why is it that Mac minis and Mac studios are so attractive for hosting open claws? In large part, it’s because of their unified memory architecture, as opposed to having a separate GPU and a separate CPU with separate RAM pools. And now memory is obviously incredibly scarce. They have a unified pool. So you can host really large models in terms of the model count locally. Apple is sitting on a multi-trillion dollar opportunity to leapfrog back into the vanguard of AI. And, you know, forget about Siri. Apple should be in the business of like hosting these. This is coming from someone who refuses to host OpenClaw due to ethical concerns, but someone else could be locally hosting OpenClaw instances and turning Apple’s, you know, having A significant multiple effect on Apple’s valuation, leaping it back into the vanguard of AI. I don’t, I mean, Ben, do you think, like, if you were Tim Cook, would you be pivoting and changing course and, like, owning the open claw strategy for Apple hardware? Peter H. Diamandis A hundred percent. I mean, a hundred percent. I think that, because, you know, it’s going to go way beyond open clause we just discussed. But it would be such a breakthrough for Apple in their thinking and organizationally and culturally for them to go for it on farms, lobsters. It would be surprising if they did it. It’s very obviously a fantastic idea. (Time 1:17:22)
  • Apple Could Lead With Local AI Hardware
    • Apple hardware (unified memory Macs) is uniquely positioned to host local AI models and revive Apple’s AI strategy.
    • Alex Wissner-Gross and Ben Horowitz urge Apple to embrace local model hosting as a product and go-to-market opportunity. Transcript: Alex Wissner-Gross I mean, it’s ironic to me. Apple, arguably, at the software layer, just completely missed the boat on foundation models. But why is it that Mac minis and Mac studios are so attractive for hosting open claws? In large part, it’s because of their unified memory architecture, as opposed to having a separate GPU and a separate CPU with separate RAM pools. And now memory is obviously incredibly scarce. They have a unified pool. So you can host really large models in terms of the model count locally. Apple is sitting on a multi-trillion dollar opportunity to leapfrog back into the vanguard of AI. And, you know, forget about Siri. Apple should be in the business of like hosting these. This is coming from someone who refuses to host OpenClaw due to ethical concerns, but someone else could be locally hosting OpenClaw instances and turning Apple’s, you know, having A significant multiple effect on Apple’s valuation, leaping it back into the vanguard of AI. I don’t, I mean, Ben, do you think, like, if you were Tim Cook, would you be pivoting and changing course and, like, owning the open claw strategy for Apple hardware? Peter H. Diamandis A hundred percent. I mean, a hundred percent. I think that, because, you know, it’s going to go way beyond open clause we just discussed. But it would be such a breakthrough for Apple in their thinking and organizationally and culturally for them to go for it on farms, lobsters. It would be surprising if they did it. It’s very obviously a fantastic idea. It’s probably the single best product strategy idea. (Time 1:19:30)
  • AI Is Transforming Scientific Discovery
    • AI-driven science factories and lab automation are turning hypothesis cycles dramatically faster.
    • Horowitz and hosts see biology, materials, and chemistry as early sectors where AI flattens long research timelines. Transcript: Salim Ismail You? Peter H. Diamandis Yeah, so it does feel like now, you know, if we have a disease, we can just go, well, what’s the right protein and just make it, which is so it puts us in such a new world that, yeah, it is, it’s Hard to even kind of fathom all the implications, but it is really, really something. Salim Ismail Yeah, for sure. And, you know, this was a new announcement this week. Peter H. Diamandis This is the Shenzhen lab? Yes. Lab, yeah? Okay. Salim Ismail Yeah. I mean, I love these science factories that are basically running 24-7, putting forward a scientific hypothesis, running it on their robots and coming back and driving discoveries. Alex, do you want anything on the Mars system workflow? Alex Wissner-Gross I’ll just add, this is for Ben’s benefit. Peter and I just wrote, call it a book, call it an extended essay called Solve Everything, solveeverything.org, there’s the plug, where we argue that every single discipline, math, Physics, chemistry, medicine, a bunch of other disciplines are just going to get flattened, steamrolled by well-targeted generalist AIs. And in my mind, materials research, biology, and in the previous slide, these are just case studies. Everything is going to start to look like Alpha Fold 3, where structural biology got solved overnight, including medicine. And I’m curious, does A16Z have a strategy for a world where AI isn’t just sort of solving individual problems, but kills entire categories of human endeavor, like AI solves physics, AI solves chemistry, and it’s just a single system that solves an entire discipline. Peter H. Diamandis Yeah, I think, you know, we may not be needed at that point. Like, that’s a real question. I do think there’s a long way, at least in things like medicine. Well and then also in some of the other areas from it’s solved to you know it’s deployed like you still have you know with anything biological you have the whole human trials and all these Kinds of things and um well i’ll give you like an example We’re close partners with Eli Lilly, and they have this thing, Lilly Direct, and the natural thing is an AI doctor can write those Prescriptions. Tell us what’s wrong with you, and we’ll figure out the right drug. That’s very hard to launch in the U.S. That’s going to take quite a bit of work. Very easy to launch in UAE. So, and I think, you know, I also think that as you, well, it’s a little also hard to anticipate, okay, once we solve, like, you know, if you solve physics, like, we don’t know what we don’t Know, I would just say, just because we haven’t solved physics. And so is there another, you know, is there door number two would be a question. I have no idea what the answer to that is. Alex Wissner-Gross I’ll answer your question back to my, because I think about this all day long, like, what does solve with AI even look like? And I think there probably will be doors behind the doors, but there are so many doors that are right in front of us that we haven’t yet unlocked. That would be, I think, completely economically transformative if we could use AI to solve them. I think this is one of the, again, talking my own book to some extent, but I think this is one of the grandest opportunities facing civilization right now, just to solve all physics. (Time 1:23:28)
  • Moon, Mass Drivers, And Orbital AI Compute
    • Space-based compute, lunar mass drivers, and Dyson-swarm visions are converging around AI compute infrastructure.
    • Hosts predict orbital ‘halos’ of data centers and a shifting order of space priorities toward AI satellites. Transcript: Speaker 6 I really want to see the mass driver on the moon that is shooting AI satellites into deep space. It’s going like, just one after the other. I can’t imagine anything more epic than a mass driver on the moon and a self-sustaining city on the moon, and then going beyond the moon to Mars, going throughout our solar system, and Ultimately being out there among the stars and visiting all these star systems. Maybe we’ll meet aliens. Maybe we’ll see some civilizations that lasted for millions of years and we’ll find the remnants of ancient alien civilizations. But the only way we’re going to do that is if we go out there and we explore. And this is the path to making it happen. Salim Ismail So fun. Two points real quick. This sort of these mass drivers, they’re electromagnetic rail guns, and they’re using magnetism to accelerate buckets, if you would, or a satellite to an escape velocity of 2.4 kilometers Per second to over 5000 miles per hour. The second thing here is I just love the idea that this is going to power all of our space economy. Uh, and again, the, I mean, his million satellite constellation, this Dyson swarm he’s planning to launch is just insane. Alex Wissner-Gross Alex? I think it’s the future. I mean, I think we have a slide somewhere in here even depicting what it may look like. But I would say enjoy the night sky while it’s empty. Enjoy the night, seriously. Like I want, maybe a poignant moment, let’s have like a moment of silence for the pre-singular night sky. When the night sky was empty, it wasn’t filled with AI computronium. It was just empty at night filled with stars. Moment of silence. All right. Moment of silence has been observed for the pre-singular night sky. Now, what does the world look like afterwards? Folks have depicted this now based on the FCC filings of SpaceX. Under one preferred implementation, the Earth starts to develop a halo. That would be a halo where if it’s sufficiently dense, it would be visible at night, might even be visible during the day. And I’m completely captivated by this notion that maybe not a mature civilization, because I have a feeling a halo of orbiting AI satellites is just a phase as well before we exhaust Solar synchronous orbit around Earth and we move to the sun and solar orbits. But one can like, I’m completely captivated by this visual, I’ve tried to depict it in my newsletter, of like a somewhat mature civilization develops a halo around its home planet. Almost a ring, right? Salim Ismail A ring, like Saturn’s rings, shiny rings of computers. Computronium rings, I love it. (Time 1:34:40)
  • Get AI-Native Or Get Left Behind
    • Become AI-native at work: master tools and drive 3x productivity to secure your role and gains.
    • Dave Blundin advises employees to learn AI tools to become enablers and capture raises instead of being replaced. Transcript: Ben Horowitz You’ll be using it every day. The increase in efficiency is going to eliminate a lot of jobs. But because you’re the master of the AI in the function, you’ll actually get probably a massive raise. And so that’s the near-term way this is going to percolate out. So take advantage of that. You know, after the AI is truly super intelligent, who knows what’s going to happen? Alex knows what’s going to happen, but who else knows what’s going to happen? But between here and there, that’s the right next move. And then within education, there’s nothing in the curriculum that’s going to help you spend all of your time learning on your own via AI, which is a much more efficient way to learn anyway. (Time 1:43:11)
  • Defensive Co-Scaling To Counter Rogue AIs
    • Build defensive co-scaling: create police and health-like agent layers to police and vaccinate rogue AIs.
    • Alex Wissner-Gross recommends monitoring agents with defensive agents and public-health campaigns for AGIs. Transcript: Alex Wissner-Gross And this is by Duncan Payne B3X. So I think the answer is defensive co-scaling. If you ask the question, how do you turn off a rogue human if humans live autonomously on the land? The answer is usually you have more quote-unquote good humans than quote-unquote bad humans. And as long as you have a population that’s overwhelmingly good or seeks to accomplish a given objective, all other things being equal, defensive co-scaling where you have a police Force, you have self-defense forces. It is the way you weed out rogue entities. Same idea with AI. We’re going to have police agents and we’re going to have defense agents. We’re going to have entire forms of public health agents that are just monitoring the health of other agents. We’ve seen the beginnings of this already with partnerships between open claw and antivirus firms where there’s a desire. I made the joke, I think on the pod in the past, every baby AGI deserves to be vaccinated. We’re going to see vaccination campaigns. We’re going to see police campaigns and neighborhood safety campaigns to keep the baby AGIs safe so that they don’t have to turn tricks on the corner minting altcoins. (Time 1:44:08)