The AI Reset Is Here: Search, Jobs, and Everything Else w/ Anish Acharya, Dave Blundin, Salim Ismail

This was a big week in AI. I think uh we've had sort of convergent uh AI announcements happening. Every day is a miracle and that's not overstating the case. Google has spent 20 years making commitments to an ads ecosystem. Very difficult for them to break those commitments and I think it's a real threat to their search monopoly. The cooler this is and the more search moves over to it, the more it cannibalizes the core. Already my kids are telling me, "Dad, everybody knows that Chad GBT is better than Google." 2029 to 2031, the end of

white collar work. That's only a couple years for people to remap their entire career path. We're going from a world where our brains were wired for fear and scarcity to a world that's very different. Technology is a substrate to make us more abundant and and happier across every aspect of our lives. Now that's a moonshot. Ladies and gentlemen, everybody, welcome to Moonshots and our weekly episode of WTF just happened in tech. I'm here with my Moonshot mates Dave Blondon and Seem Ismael. See, by the way, happy birthday this past Saturday. Oh, happy birthday, Sem. I

sat in the garden with a bottle of wine and a glazed look in my eyes. Good birthday. That's lovely day and we have a special guest today Anish Acharia from Andre Harowitz Anish good to good to have you joining us. Thank you Peter Salem Dave says it's like to be here. Yeah so Anishh for those who don't know uh heads the consumer uh you know investment portfolio at Andre Harowitz one of the most extraordinary VC funds on the planet. He's a general partner there. And what I love about Anisha's portfolio and his vision is you're

running sort of the abundance uh the abundance meme, the abundance uh if you would thematic throughout A16Z, which is one of course I love. Yeah. Yes, we are. Yeah. You can't talk about consumer tech these days without talking about abundance. And I was telling Peter prior to the show that you know we may or may not have been inspired uh by his thoughts on abundance but either way abundance of abundance right exactly right now. So uh let's dive in uh this has been an incredible week for AI but before we get there uh Anisha I

want to talk about sort of how you and your leadership your partners at Andre think about abundance uh because it is a real thing. Uh my next book coming out is called Age of Abundance: How to Survive and Thrive in the Decades Ahead. And we're going from a world where our brains were wired for fear and scarcity to a world that's very different. So, um here's a slide from your deck from uh uh some materials we stole from your website. So, would you mind just giving us a little bit of an insight on how you

think about the abundance agenda? Yeah, Peter. So, so maybe to zoom all the way out and I'm going to touch on topics I know you've touched on as well, so the audience will be familiar, but in our belief, the two greatest catalysts for human flourishing are market economies and technology, right? Over and over again through the arc of human history, we've seen these two things deliver extraordinary results for human flourishing. And the story of the last h 100red years sort of industrial age and everything that is coming after the technology age has really been a

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

one thing I I'd sort of give the group for framing is that I think of this as the most human technology we've ever built. If you look at technology for the last 40 years, it's it's really extended our intellects, right? And Steve Jobs famously said it's a bicycle for the mind. But when he said a bicycle for the mind, he really meant a bicycle for the intellect. And that's what a spreadsheet is. I think for me a spreadsheet is, you know, it's so like symbolic of all the technology we built for the last 40 years.

It allows us to do this extraordinary math and computation that we simply couldn't do before. And of course, it has a ton of implications on human society. You know, the Fed, of course, and and all of these other systems that we built rely on all these technologies. However, we haven't done that much for our sort of souls or for our emotions or for our mindset. And with AI, we're able to explore the side of humanity that is sort of defined by the the sort of subjective emotional experience. We've just never had a technology that could

be brought to bear. So, as we talk through all of this, I I would love for folks to keep in mind that, you know, we're really take doing that the sort of leftrain, right brain pairing that was missing from technology for the last four years. Does that make sense? Yeah. I had a I had an incredible experience actually driving from Vermont back to Boston with my mom who's in her mid 80s and I asked her, you know, have you ever talked to AI before? And she said, I don't even know what you're talking about. So

I put on a ch GPD voice mode. Put it on the car stereo and she and this, you know, beautiful sweet voice comes on crystal clear. Uh, understands every word that she says and she starts asking it about her hometown where she grew up in Ohio and, you know, whatever happened to the cheese factory that her father owned. And she's like, "Who am I talking to? You're talking you're talking to AI, but" and she's like, "Well, it must be somebody's recorded voice." I'm like, "No, no, it's completely synthetic." She's like, "I that can't be." But

you know in this abundance slide you know abundance has always meant include everybody and the internet and its capabilities have largely bypassed uh you know people that are over a certain age but also the vast majority of the really engaging youth dominated by young boys playing video games and that that demographic shift I I know Anishh you know all about this but love to get your thoughts on how this opens up just so many new capabilities across you know users that were not previously users. Yeah, I love that point. And you know, David, it's actually

so interesting because what happens is typically when a new technology is introduced, it's sort of it becomes very hard to gro for the generation that didn't grow up with it and they sort of fumble around and they never get the full achieve the full potential of it. But with a lot of AI, I think seniors are going to have the experience that your mother had and they're going to benefit from it disproportionately because they're able to interact with technology now in these unstructured ways. a lot of it via voice. I'll give you a great example.

You know, we've got a portfolio company that is an AI nurse. Now, an AI nurse can't, you know, take your blood. So there's only do a subset of nurse related tasks that the AI does, but it's a voice nurse that will phone patients the night before a surgery and you know help them to prepare both mentally and also you go through the checklist and it'll phone them after a surgery make sure it's taking that folks are taking their medicine and the sort of the impact to uh health from having that AI nurse take all those

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

gives people an opportunity to explore aspects of human relationships in a depth that may not be available to them in their real world, you know, friendships and and sort of family relationships. So, there's something there that's opening Pandora's box here. I know because Peter in his latest book and all of his recent research, so much of human health and happiness is these little things that you eat or that you do and he's documenting it all now, but you're like, "Oh my god, like the the amount of benefit from just basic behavior change." Well, there's another

there's another part which is some of human happiness is setting a goal and a challenge and overcoming it. And the question becomes when these abundance technologies are overcoming the challenges for you, right? Um I had an interesting experience the other day. I was in a escape room with a group of friends and it was a pharaoh's tomb and and we're sitting there having to solve these literally these math equations are on the wall with different symbols and such and I'm hampered by not having a piece of paper and a pen which was you know fundamental

technology because you be you start to realize how few things you can actually hold in memory during the course of that and I was so tempted to just pull out my phone and take images and asked chat GPT for the answer and it started to realize that there is a slippery slope in which we become so dependent on AI that it takes away the challenges from us unless we hold that you know part of human spirit in place it is a double-edged sword in that way do you think about that is oh go ahead go

ahead well I think we we we've been doing that forever right we move from the slide wheel to the calculator and people said that's a terrible idea. And then we move from the calculator to the spreadsheet and people said that's a terrible idea. And we keep kind of moving the goalposts on this. If you're a software developer, I used to program in assembly and then we moved to 3GL's like Pascal and C. And people said, well, you're losing the benefit of knowing exactly what's happening. And I think we just keep moving the challenge along, right?

We don't I think we just shift the goalpost and we change the dynamic of what's going on. But it's adding much more capability. If I think about what it takes for somebody to compose complex music today, it's a thousand times easier than 20 years ago and you just get that much more music. I think that's what feeds into the abundance thing. We just can create so much more. But is it so much more crap or is it so much more? What's the filtering system? Crap for one is gold for the other. Maybe. And funny enough,

I remember growing up as an engineer coming up hearing, hey, if engineers don't know how to do memory management, then they're not real engineers. So this you're right this has happened over and over again. Look, with that said, I I agree with you, Peter, that I think there's there's a level of agreeableness that is too much. And I think we need these models and these AI technologies to also explore that the sort uncomfortable aspects of the human experience, you know, which is disagreement, persuasion, sexuality, and you know, I don't want to jump ahead, but this

is one of the reasons I think the incumbents have struggled so much with it because there's a thousand committees working at Apple and Google um that are explicitly designed to take the humanity out of their products and these are fundamentally human technologies. So, but look, I I also agree with your underlying point, which is every person needs to feel like they have meaningful purpose. Um, even if it's created for them, if it's a little bit synthetic and without that, the flourishing point starts to get impacted. Every week I study the 10 major tech meta trends

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world's most disruptive companies. It's not for you if you don't want to be informed of what's coming, why it matters, and how you can benefit from it. To subscribe for free, go to dmandis.com/metatrends. That's dmandis.com/metrends to gain access to trends 10 plus years before anyone else. There is another quick point I want to hit both you both of you and Anish and Salem which is at the end point of continued increasing abundance comes a postc capitalist society where money has little to no meaning meaning and uh I'm not sure how a venture capital firm uh

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

the world, right? You talk to any banker about Bitcoin and they freak out and whatever." And I think that these technologies as we humanize them make it easy for 80year-olds to interact decently with technology in a very humane way. And I think that's opens up again abundance. New dimensions open up. I think it's powerful as hell. Yeah. We we we always say internally, you know, that human relationships are fundamental to the sort of to the experience of flourishing. Maybe the human part's overstated. You know, maybe it's just relationships. And as long as we feel the

feelings that result from the conversations, who cares who's on the other side? You know, one of the questions I have and I'm I'm I just put forward the second slide here, which is market opportunities is as we get to let's forget about AGI. Let's let's skip ahead to you know ASI um artificial super intelligence. The question as you know Dave and I are and yourself and is we're all VCs were finding incubating supporting incredible entrepreneurs and and startup companies but the big question is what moes are going to continue uh as we go forward. How

do you differentiate yourself and prevent yourself from being disintermediated by the next entrepreneur with a with a faster set of uh you know agent enabled uh systems? How do you think about that all the time? Yeah. And I think there's two answers to it. Let me let me give you a maybe a cute answer and then I'll give you a specific answer. So my cute answer is that abundance means abundance of categories as well. And there'll be many new categories areas for consumer spend and business spend. And what happens when new technologies are introduced is

the incumbents often get better at what they do today. So I think Microsoft will make a better word processor and Google might make a better search engine but search engines and word processor will be less relevant and there'll be new categories that pop up where the sort of new entrance dominate on your specific question. You know you guys understand the technology at a fine level. So you understand that these systems are very good at predicting static systems. They're very good at sort of averaging the training data and telling you, you know, what the training data

implies. They're not very good at predicting adaptive systems like the stock market or even culture and music. So, as a thought experiment, if you trained an AI model with all the music, you know, right up to hip-hop, but not including hip-hop, would it, you know, infer would it imply hip-hop? I don't think so, because culture and music is this sort of adaptive system that works together. So I I really do think that there's a you know moes that are based on adaptive systems and network is a great example are actually as as good as gold

and they always have been modes that are based on sort of static systems like um integration modes systems of record I think are really at risk. Interesting. Do you want to walk us through this next slide here on market opportunity? Yeah I mean consumers consumer investing is very interesting because it's hyper cyclic. So when consumer works, you get the biggest companies in the world, as you could see from the slide here. Um, and when consumer is not working, it's really not working. We're now in a product cycle that's as important as the internet. I think

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

of millions of dollars of very high margin uh revenue and the cost of the build, you know, because coding is getting so cheap and so automated, the cost of a build of something like that is lower than ever. So, you've got very rapid growth of the revenue, very low uh capital costs, nothing to lose by jumping in there. Now, you know, the question always comes up, what's your mode? You know, is it going to be defensible over the long term? But you're so profitable so quickly while you explore that that there's no downside. And we

know now that, you know, the management teams have to pivot over time. That's that's just the nature of tech going forward. It always continuously, right? Continuously. So, they have to learn that skill anyway. Why not learn it while growing like crazy and being profitable? So I like the idea of not being worried about it. But it is still I think worth exploring a couple of fundamental questions while we have a niche which is you know if you if you look at consumer as a whole a lot of the frameworks are defined by the big guys.

So the app store is really not it's not you know a fact of nature. It's defined by what Apple and Google decide here's a framework that that you can operate in. And you know if you go way back in time you know the early days of Apple and Microsoft the ISV market independent software vendors they were also defined and then Microsoft changed its mind one day and said you know what spreadsheets and word processors those are ours now and sorry you set up your camp there Lotus but we're going to just take that back. Um,

so you do have to be conscious of the fact that if you're on top of a big LLM, you're on top of a heavily funded company, you know, you have to predict what they will and won't do inside their core $200 or $240 a month service offering and be outside of that. Uh, but not too far outside. So, I don't know how you think about that. It's a great point and actually I worried a lot about that when we were in the early days post November 2022 and it felt like OpenAI was the only foundation

model game in town because in that world open AI you know they just raise prices and take 100% of the economics that are downstream from them because now we look we've got a bunch of foundation model companies that have great models. We have got a bunch of um open source models that are super competitive because of that you see OpenAI and other companies trying to move up the stack. They bought Windurf which is really interesting and as an application developer you're not dependent on any single platform. I mean if you're an iOS app developer there's

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

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

that while we have you. uh because it's really clear to me that the number of opportunities way outstrips the number of teams and a lot of people are intimidated and they're like oh isn't mid Journey or isn't you know OpenAI going to do exact this this this and this but you're you're pointing out like I think a really critical and inspiring point and just the aesthetic difference alone creates a new market but I think you were talking about digital makeup on one of your podcasts uh just as a category like oh there's something that's actually

that's a company that's a product that's actually defensible. It's amazing. And I think the other amazing thing, Dave, is if you look at the price points that these products are commanding, you know, Spotify's most expensive plan, I looked this up the other day, the family plan with lossless audio is $20 a month. That's their It doesn't get better than that. For Spotify, Chat GBT, it's 200 a month. Google just announced a $250 a month plan that's consumer proumer facing. So in my view in the future consumers will have food, rent and software as the three

biggest destinations for their spend. Not bad. A lot of uh sorry a lot of a lot of companies are are overlooking the fact that you know when you go live with one of these directly consumerf facing products and it hits it's global instantaneously. And so if you think about a $10, $20 a month subscription but you get 30 40 50 million people that's a small fraction of 8 billion. But that can happen very easily within a lot of different categories. So again, just so many opportunities relative to the number of teams. Wait, I need to

just drill into something. Digital makeup. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, look, you know, you mean the like on Zoom or something where you can just have different I mean, you know, you can be anyone you want to be in the AI world, Seline. So, we we should debrief later. Well, I choose to be a bald gleamy head fellow. So, as do I. as do I. Wow. All right. So, here we have your third slide before we jump into our AI universe, you know, that's been just exploding this week. So, AI Yeah. use cases, please. Great.

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

separated from the inspiration behind being creative. And if there's something that you can dream of making, whether it's music or art or video, you can make it now, which I think is just incredibly abundant from a consumer impact perspective. You know, we talked about companionship, social, the experience um that you had Dave in the car and the car ride like this is bringing empathetic patient maybe disagreeable human relationships to everyone that wants one which has a normal enormous implications from a flourishing perspective. And you know finally wellness and personal growth. I think so much of

this if you look at even something like finance. I worked in fintech and financial services and you know you you quickly realize that fintech is not about helping people make rational choices. It's about exploring the nonrational parts of our relationship with money and AI is is uniquely suited to help us helping us get better around that. So you know this technology is a substrate to make us more abundant and and happier across every aspect of our lives. love to get your thoughts on, you know, there's so much on this slide because there's so many different

facets and, you know, historically when you looked at a founding team, you're looking for your Steve Jobs visionary married to your Steve Waznjak engineering genius, but but now that engineering component is largely AI automatable and the the vision of the perfect founding team, you know, looks different and being able to navigate through so many choices just on this slide alone and come up with the perfect strategy. That's got to be the rare commodity, I assume. Right. I I'd have to disagree. You know, we're we're seeing more technical founders be more successful over and over again.

Yes, AI extends their capabilities and makes them more productive, but there's so much work at the edge that AI is not going to do. So, we're really seeing a sort of rise in the dominance of an engineering oriented founding team in the way that we haven't in, you know, 10 or 15 years in core tech. Well, the the Fred Wilson rule, you know, always said, "Hey, we're looking for three or more founders, best friends, who write the code themselves." Yeah. So, is that what when you say technical founders, you're talking about former engineers, wrote code

at Google, very similar to yourself? I'll tell you, one of our our most fun investments is a company called Korea, Krea, which is a really cutting edge sort of research and consumer technology company that brings together all of the creative tools in one product. So, image generation, video generation, image enhancement, etc. These are two incredible AI researchers and sort of artists and enthusiasts. They live in a house up in Pack Heights. They live with all their engineers. They work seven days a week. Um, you know, I mean, the first board meeting they sat me down

and said, "And we've got a problem. What is it?" Well, our house only has 10 bedrooms. What happens when we get our 11th employee? And I said, "Well, you know, maybe we shouldn't all be living together at scale, but that that's a sort of separate conversation." And so that's the intensity and how sort of technical they are in their leadership, which is a beautiful thing. I mean, honestly, the most the most success and the most fun I've ever had as an entrepreneur is when I'm living that monomomaniacal singular focus uh effort in life. Yeah. I

got to tell you, we bought an apartment building uh right on the edge of MIT and Harvard's campus. It's actually the closest building to MIT that wasn't already owned by MIT. Uh we bought it a couple weeks ago. Uh it has 24 beds in it, six units for exactly this reason. Amazing. Amazing. Believe you were going to say Yeah. So if you if you're a product visionary that wants to use AI in a totally different domain, then surely you can uh acquire the technology capability at low cost. You don't have to be the technical founder

in a sense in that sense. Is that not an option that you're seeing? I I I think it absolutely is. is a question of do you want to be sort of at the edge of technology and new models in which case you probably do need to be if you there's a plenty of off-the-shelf tools and products like cursor make it a lot easier for somebody who's even you know familiar in a cursory way no pun intended uh to to bring products to market so all the above yeah I I would say that when the companies

that are thriving right now in your portfolio when they started their journey just a year or two ago Sweetbench was maybe 10% % and now it's suddenly 60%. So if you look forward a year uh at the rate that that's changing you would have to assume that to some degree orchestrating the AI agents becomes the dominant because because right now if you're if you're going to build something on top of hey genen or on something uh on prim uh you're going to be mostly coding it up with cursor. So it helps you but you're still

coding it up. Mhm. But there's some kind of a paradigm shift coming. You know, you could debate whether it's 3 months from now, a year from now, 2 years from now, but it's coming. I agree. I completely ag What percentage of your of your companies in the abundance portfolio are AI? And how many would you put in the in the bucket of uh physical robotics or biotech or nanotech or 3D printing, nonI exponential tech? So, I'm focused on consumer software. I think if you look at that theme as a substrate across the firm, many of

our investments, many of our American dynamism investments are also very much in that vein. But you know, in terms of software, largely all of our investments, there's one or two that aren't direct AI companies today. Um, but that's very much sort of a part of the strategy and on the come, you know, it just begs the question of if you're focused on delivering abundant outcomes and you're not thinking about AI, like why? How can you be? Hey everyone, as you know earlier this year I was on stage at the Abundance Summit with some incredible individuals.

Kathy Wood, Mo Gdat, Venode Kosla, Brett Adcock, and many other amazing tech CEOs. I'm always asked, "Hey, Peter, where can I see the summit?" Well, I'm finally releasing all the talks. You can access my conversation with Kathy Wood and Mogadot for free at dmandis.com/summit. That's the talk with Kathy Wood and Mogadot for free at diamandis.com/summit. Enjoy. I'll ask my team to put the links in the show notes below. Moving on. This was a big week in AI. I think uh we've had sort of convergent uh AI announcements happening. I I am curious why everybody's announcing

on top of each other, but uh let's take a look. So today, May 20th, uh, and tomorrow it's Google IO, uh, unveils Gemini updates and Android ecosystem bets. On the 22nd, Anthropic is debuting code with claude 2025, its first dev conference. And then also this week, Microsoft Build 2025, focuses on C-pilot, scale out, AI infra, and dev tooling. And of course, we've got Nvidia making announcements and we'll talk about Elon's Gro 2.5 announcements. Um, what's the I mean, I'm in LA, Se's in New York, Dave's in Boston, you're in the Bay Area. What's the So,

what's the feeling like right now where you are? I mean, the the love every day is a miracle. And that's not overstating the case. every I mean just this on Friday openi released codeex which is an autonomous software agent that simply writes pull requests which for you to review by the way on your phone if you'd like every single day I mean any one of these things could be the basis of an entire ecosystem and you know you're showing three for this week it's crazy we talked about codeex last week um here's a a fun

article uh Dave um uh well actually maybe I should say give it to our our brethren from of Indian descent. Uh but Dave, you want to set this one up? India plans made in India chips by 2025 and its own GPUs in 3 to 5 years. You pick this slide. Yeah, this was uh really important to talk about coming on the heels of Saudi Arabia, which we talked about a couple days ago. Uh so every country that wants to be competitive in the future needs to have some kind of an AI strategy and then you

know that boils down right now to having your own supply of chips because the chips are going to be unbelievably constrained for at least the next three or four years maybe maybe forever into the future. But some of these more uh consumerf facing use cases that involve voices and now multimodal imagery um you know they'll use up an entire GPU, two GPUs, four GPUs concurrently to get the best possible user experience. And that's not super expensive. Uh so it's easily worth it for the consumer. But the chips don't exist. They physically don't exist. We're going

to make 20 million new GPUs this year. It's nowhere near enough to keep up with just basic call center use cases. So, uh, countries that have their act together are starting to think, do we need our own fabs? Well, India is saying, well, if we're going to compete, we definitely need fabs. Starting with 14 nanometer, but you got a long way to go from there. Um, okay, great. This is exactly the right thing to do. But then in their own internal research document and plan, it says, "We expect this to be underutilized and bureaucratic." Like,

holy crap, are there challenges trying to get a sovereign strategy together. So we'll have to keep a close eye on it, but you know, there probably, you know, on the order of 50, maybe 100 other countries that need to immediately, you know, get on the tails of this same exact thing. We're advising one of the big Southeast Asian countries on exactly this. And we're basically saying you have to develop your own fabrication capabilities. There's just no other way around it. And the learning that will come from that will be very powerful one way or the

other if only to select who the best supplier is going forward because there's going to be uh we're going to end up with an abundance and a different architectures coming from different places that will all pull together. Uh India specifically I mean the bureaucracy is insane. There's so many overlapping uh federal state level etc etc. It's you know I always talk to people and saying don't think of India as a country it's more like Europe with 20 different major languages and different tensions and uh uh cultures etc etc. Um you you have to look at

it from that perspective and then it makes a little bit more sense. Yeah. One thing also you know Nvidia now today is worth as of right now over twice as much as Meta and almost twice as much as Google. Uh and you're like well how can that be? And you know especially Google where you know the transformer was invented at Google uh you know Google cloud GCP is huge they have their own TPU7s which are incredible like does this make any sense and that's you know that's debatable uh but the chip demand is such a

dominant factor and then underneath that the fab shortage is such a dominant factor and it's not a secret you know it's amazing to me how many people don't know this but Elon Musk is is video podcasting it out you We we absolutely need to accelerate our fab production and I was talking to Cave Kazar Shahi over at Allen & Company and they're looking at these new $4 billion fabs. You know, normally a fab is a 20 to40 billion investment. Uh but there are some new designs that are more around the $4 billion mark that might

actually unclog the machinery and those are those are really interesting to study and track. But you know the for for India the perfect scenario is hey let's get some some $4 billion fabs up and running start on 14 nanometer but quickly work our way down to 5nanmter. So how quickly do these obsolete themselves and you know if you're pumping out 14 nanometer uh GPUs are the you know are they going to be useful and compete with sort of the cutting edge at TSMC? No no not at all. They're not even vaguely competitive. Uh they'll all

be fully sold out for a long time. Um, but the fabs themselves are actually very sustainable. You know, most of the machinery in there, even when you upgrade, most of the machinery you you reuse. So the EUV component is an exception to that, but most of the rest of the of the pipeline you can you can reuse over and over again. So the key is just, you know, get on the map, get something up and running, and then you can work it down, you know, as as you move forward. You know, just reduce the lithography

as you go. Um, but I, you know, I do think that the other thing that's really affecting this is if you have your fab act together, AI is getting really good at chip design. I was working on that a couple weekends ago and so your cycle time can come way down. Uh, and so, you know, because there's going to be algorithmic breakthroughs all the time now and also that will affect the designs right away. But you can automate that pipeline so that the new algorithm immediately gets a new chip design. Get that right into the

queue almost in real time and then you have to wait a month or two for something to come out the other side. But that machinery if you get that that fully integrated which no one's ever worked on before because you know a microprocessor design would last for a full year and so you never really thought about real time design using AI automation. So now it's it's a completely different world uh just how this pipeline should shake out. Manish, any thoughts on this one? Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, presuming we do resolve the sort of

shortage of chips, which I I believe that we will, there's also I mean, sustains a need for countries to build a sovereign AI because the AI's embed values within them, which is why deepseek is such an interesting conversation because arguably deepseek is trained with a set of values that may be a mismatch with Western values. And every country needs to think about what are the values that they want to imbue into their AIS. So there's a very something very interesting here which almost looks I'm not sure if you guys are familiar with the Jones Act

for ships that operate in and around US ports. They must be manufactured in the United States for national security purposes. I believe we'll see a sort of Jones Act for AI where AI that operates, you know, in sort of sensitive contexts will have to have been trained uh nationally. That's a great insight. I don't think anyone's ever drawn that analogy before, but I love love love that insight. You know, really um it's really clear that if you if you don't have a national strategy for compute, uh the you know, during this era where the chips

are constrained, the highest value use cases are just going to buy out all the data centers. And it would be very natural for one or two economies like US and China to have a higher standard of living and then say well because I can overbid the Indian or the the Ethiopian they don't get access to any compute and that goes on for one year two years 3 years four years and that's the natural cycle if you don't have a national strategy to get compute for your citizens. So once you start getting behind you're going to

get way behind and then you're economically unable to get back on the map. All right, our next story here. We've been hearing about this forever. Uh and uh looks like we're on the verge of GPT5 being uh being released. Uh so here are some tweets that went out. Just got to try an early GPT5. Just wow. It can do anything I can do at a computer, but much quicker. We actually made it. And this is from at uh this is Chris um at GPT21. GPT5 is in red teaming. This is not a guess. This has

been confirmed. So, uh when I think about GPT5, I think about self-recursive improving AI software uh you know recoding uh AI and leading to an intelligence explosion. I think about PhD level um capabilities or multi-PhD level capabilities. Uh what do you think of when you when you hear GPT5 Dave Anish? What do you guys think about? Well, actually, before we jump into there's so much to talk about there, but before we jump into it, you notice how they always jump on each other. So, Google IO, oh my gosh, I got to get something right on

top of them. This is not You pointed it out before, Peter, but this is not coincidence. And And notice how Apple isn't even trying. They're just completely invisible. Yeah, we'll talk about that. Apple has opted out. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. What do you think about GPT5? Yeah. I mean, if we've seen so many exciting model releases since the GPT5 conversation started and we've seen a new model architecture with the reasoning models. So, you know, I feel like we're seeing all the steps that point in the direction of GPT5. I don't know that there's a big unveil

coming that will show us something that isn't implied by what we've seen so far. And if you look at the reasoning models, which actually are just as important of an innovation as the language models, you know, they are these models that are trained through reinforcement learning on specific domains, which is why they work so well for coding. But we still need to go collect the data sets and and build the models for all of the domains that have a formal concept of correctness. So before we have something that is as broad-based as you're describing, Peter,

which I'm sure we will have someday, there's just an enormous amount of model work to do between here and there. So, look, my belief is we'll see something that looks more like 04 or 03 Pro than a completely different animal. Yeah, I'm still waiting for someday my cell phone to ring. I pick it up and it goes, "Hi, Peter. This is GPT5. Just want to introduce myself. I'm here if you need anything." Just uh that will become a spooky future. I want I want the model to your point, Peter, that that is Jarvis, right? It

just goes, "Okay, what do you need right now?" and it can go and and make suggestions and just get to that personal level that we're waiting for. I interviewed Sam Alman at the MIT Media Labs a year and a half ago now. Uh and I tried to get him to open up about parameter count and where parameter count is going and he said, "Look, we need to stop masturbating over parameter count." Kind of shut down the conver crowd loved it. There's like a 1500 MIT students in the crowd. They loved it. But uh but then

I now now I can't track just the raw parameter count. So I'm hoping with GPT5 we can still distinguish between okay here's the model producing an answer which was should be mind-blowingly intelligent and then here's the chain of thought reasoning version because you know the chain of thought reasoning like you said Anish is adding immensely more uh you know feeling of intelligence than the core model is and I think you know open AI kind of wants to tie it all together and say look don't worry about it it's just one subscription here's all the brilliance

we don't want to talk about what came from But you know as an as an MIT oriented researcher I want to know actually what came from where which I can do with llama but it's becoming increasingly difficult with GPT5. Um yes that that being said I think it's going to blow our minds. It's and it they wouldn't be putting it out if it wasn't mind-blowing. Everything you know the prior step functions have all been mind-blowing. So that's one. Let me let me ask you as a question. What's if you had a guess as to what

capabilities are in GPT5 versus GPT4? What would be a standout feature? Right. It's definitely, you know, everything's fully multimodal now and uh the the language and that has been phenomenal even in GPD4, but once you start marrying it to images, you know, right now when you prompt it to create an image or a video for you or you show it an image, it's good and it's mind-blowing, but it's not it's not perfect. I think, you know, if you take your digital nurse example that Anish was talking about, hey, let me show a rash on my

foot. It's going to diagnose it perfectly. Uh, and you know, you need a lot of longtail images to do that kind of stuff. So I expect there'll be a lot in that category since they've had more time to work on the multimodal that just didn't exist you know when they when they built GPT4 and 4.5. You know, I keep on thinking about uh situ, you know, Leopold situal situational awareness paper that came out a couple years ago, right? Showing basically on the heels of GPT5 just an acceleration of AI, right? And we've started to see

this. We've started to see the speed uh as me, you know, if you want even human IQ points that these models are increasingly get and capabilities. So, you know, do we get a unconstrained intelligence explosion on the on the back of this? That's what for me is interesting. Um, and the other thing I'm really expecting uh in consumer is you know how you know in a podcast like this if you don't like the way the audio recording comes out there there were always tools to clean up audio. Yes. But now you have tools that'll actually

recreate it from scratch using your voice. So you can create anything out of anything. Yes. Yes, when you start talking about multimodal video and you say here's a static image, it should be able to instantly turn it into a 3D, you know, movable any angle, you know, scenario. And I think it'll have that capability. We have I mean, we I would argue guys, we have a lot of these capabilities. So Korea today can do what you're describing, Dave, and taking a static image and turning it into a sort of 3D splat. Um, in terms of

how good the mo multimodal models are, like I can tell you when I'm barbecuing at the house, I'll have GPT40 looking at my hot peppers, you know, that are grilling and I'll be saying, "Are they ready yet? Are they ready yet? Are they ready yet?" No, no, no, no. Now, yes, they're ready. I mean, that that's what I did this weekend. So, that works. And step away from the AI. Just step away from the I may have gone too deep, guys. I may not be able to find my way out. And then look I I

actually think from if you want Jarvis sem I think we have Jarvis today in the form of operator you know operator to me is the most underappreciated uh new open AI launch and it's been around for a while and it it allows anybody to use the web essentially the every UI becomes an API and you can use the web as this sort of control surface to do anything like the implications of that are so significant just think of the mundane use cases as a consumer every day I wake up and it goes and checks for

lower uh you know, auto insurance and a better personal loan rate for me and it spends the day scouring the web and it refinances all of my you know my credit lines and then I get a push notification at the end of the day saying, "Hey Anish, I cleaned all this stuff up for you. You're going to save $200 a month." Um and and please send my please send my commission to this. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Like that's all possible today. I' I'd argue we have more, you know, just as you talked, you said there's

like more ideas than teams, Dave. Like we have these magical, miraculous new capabilities that are underexplored because there's so many of them. All right. Uh let's let's head to uh to Muskville. Elon Musk unveils Grock 3.5 AI that reasons from first principles. Let's hear it from Elon's voice uh directly. So really the focus of of GRA 3.5 is um uh sort of find the fundamentals of physics um and and applying physics tools across uh all lines of reasoning um and to aspire to truth with uh minimal error. Like there's always going to be some mistakes

that are made uh but aim to to uh get to truth with acknowledged error uh but minimize that error over time. And um I think that's actually extremely important for uh AI safety. Um my book conclusion is the the old maxim that honesty is the best policy. A quick aside, you probably heard me speaking about fountain life before and you're probably wishing, Peter, would you please stop talking about fountain life? And the answer is no, I won't because genuinely we're living through a healthc care crisis. You may not know this, but 70% of heart attacks

have no precedent, no pain, no shortness of breath. And half of those people with a heart attack never wake up. You don't feel cancer until stage three or stage four until it's too late. But we have all the technology required to detect and prevent these diseases early at scale. That's why a group of us including Tony Robbins, Bill Cap, and Bob Heruri founded Fountain Life, a one-stop center to help people understand what's going on inside their bodies before it's too late and to gain access to the therapeutics to give them decades of extra health span.

Learn more about what's going on inside your body from Fountain Life. Go to fountainlife.com/peter and tell them Peter sent you. Okay, back to the episode. Okay. Um, so how do you guys feel about the the basic concepts of Grock of maximally truth seeking um AI? And then what I do love is the idea of applied physics uh as part of in first principal thinking as part of its uh ed structure. Uh Anish, what does that sound like to you? Is it sound real? Inspiring. No, it it's but it sounds consistent with what we're seeing from

reasoning models. So I think a reasoning model trained around physics would do what he's describing. I do think honesty is the best policy and and you know I I think this is exactly the right step and you know I really salute Elon for having done sort of led the way in a bunch of areas including you know having the the Grock language models you know allow you to interact with them in some ways that the big companies never would. So, and you know th those things we may consider sort of banel like the the uh

the like adult sexy chat features of Grock, but he's he's been pushing the edges and I think he's going to do the same thing with reasoning models and this is an example of that. Dave, well your thoughts truth is definitely in the eye of the beholder and varies by country and we we learned that in Saudi this week in a big way. So the message is right on target, but then the definition and the implementation just there's no single answer to it. And and like Anish said earlier in the podcast, the the LLMs that were

using transformer-based are very good at interpolation, not quite as good at extrapolation. So it's going to fill in the blind spots between the training data that you give it and don't give it. I I love the message of give it, you know, first principles physics, but I think everyone's going to do that. You know, it's not nothing controversial about physics. It's when you start including some X data and not other X data or do you include all X data that's where the, you know, the devil's in the details. I'd be very curious to know though,

you know, is Elon going to roll out versions and or is there just one Grock, you know, because then then you're like, okay, Grock has this opinion of the world, Gemini has this other opinion, Chad GBT has this other opinion, or are there 20 Grocks, 20 GP, you know, and you tune them. So, you know, TBD. Yeah. So I mean the the biggest challenge we've had even in the social media space is echo chambers and so the question becomes are you able to take rock 3.5 and and build your own echo chamber or will it

say Peter I'm sorry your point of view is absolutely wrong and here's the data about why it's wrong. Is it going to challenge us in that way? I mean you know you Elon is pushing boundaries all the time. Um, and will will Grock call him or President Trump or Biden or anybody else on things that they say which is uh which are uh not defendable by specific evidence. Well, one thing I think about a lot and this is right in a niche's wheelhouse is how much can the can the user control and especially when it

comes to copyrighted material because a lot of the most interesting and fun things you can do as a user involve copyrighted material. But the the foundation model companies are under a lot of scrutiny and they have to be very very very careful with copyright material. But if you put it in the hands of the user to decide what they want to create, what they want to do, what voice they want on it, then it's outside of the control of Grock and then and then you can start using copyrighted material in it's easier for me to

it's easier for me to steal it than for Google or open AI to steal it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think we have to be careful not to have a zero sum conversation about that though, Dave. You know, because if you look at, for example, sampling in hip-hop was very controversial. the genre wouldn't exist without it. And I would argue that it sort of drove more royalties and traffic back to the tracks that were sampled than would have happened otherwise. So I do wonder if there isn't a positive sum version of a lot

of this. God, I would love to get you and Bill Gross at the same time talking about that because that's his whole focus at Praa AI. You guys could go for probably an hour on that topic. That would be really interesting. Love to. Um so let's here's our next article. XAI deploys 170 Tesla mega packs for Colossus 2 uh the power backbone and we can see in this image all those those power packs. I mean what we were seeing is just an extraordinary building race uh faster than ever before. Uh and I was just reading

some articles that you know regulation uh of getting access to power or building permits had been the constraint. Uh but perhaps not now. Perhaps people taking the constraints off regulation, building permits and so forth. Any comments on uh on Colossus 2? I mean, how how big do is it going to be? Do we know how many GPUs it will be? Yeah, I think it was 200,000 in the next wave mostly H100. The B100s are are not ready yet. I thought I thought the first class was upgrading to 200,000 and maybe classes two is going to

be a million, but you know what's an order of magnitude between friends? Um, yeah. No, I was talking about the prior iteration. So this is what they're planning in the in the next iteration. In the next iteration. Yeah. Well, we'll see. I don't know. But I know the B100s are not are not in volume yet. So you're still using the prior iteration. What's amazing about this is, you know, Elon is immensely practical. And uh the the reason the the Tesla packs are so important is because when you when you use Nvidia chips for these massive

scale single training runs, the power spikes like crazy because it it does these huge all collect all distribute operations that just you know massively uh communications intensive. And so then the GPU is kind of idle while they're waiting to transfer data and the power drops like crazy. And so it's it's fluctuating all over the place. You can't you can't use lithium to store anywhere near enough energy to power these things, but you can use it to smooth out the the power flow. So, that's that's a pretty big advantage for uh for Elon. Um I found

this next article uh on Nvidia's breakthroughs. It's let me read this out loud. One spine of Nvidia's uh NV link fusion can transfer more data than the internet. Uh holy that's incredible. 130 terabytes per second. uh connects uh you know uh what is that GB200 chips the next generation chips across 5,000 coaxial cables connected to 72 GPUs peak traffic of the entire internet internet was 900 terabytes terabits per second so the spine transfer 16% more data than the entire internet let's take a listen to to Jensen speak about this and so this is the MVLink

spine two miles of cables 5,000 cables structured all coaxed it and pen matched and it connects all 72 GPUs to all of the other 72 GPUs across this network called MVLink switch 130 terabytes per second of bandwidth across the MVLink spine. So just put in perspective the peak traffic of the entire internet the peak traffic of the entire internet is 900 terabits per second. This moves more traffic than the entire internet. Wow. Um I I just feel to you like we're building some version of Skynet right now. Well, when I call it Stargate, it's like,

you know, all these things, the terminology lines up. I completely don't understand a single word of this. Oh, like what is a spine of what? So, it's the interconnect. It's so when one of the things that Elon did when he built Colossus the first version, right, was he was able to basically colllocate all the GPUs and effectively, for lack of a better term, harmonize them to get them all talking to each other and this at least from my point of view is that the capability to do that within uh a full Nvidia system. Uh Anish,

what do you think about this? Yeah, I mean to me it actually illustrates something more mundane, which is so much of the work that we need to do is actually engineering work. You know, it's of course there's work at the edge and research, but there's just so much raw engineering work that needs to be done to make these systems operate at scale. And a lot of the sort of constraints that we're going to see are going to be engineering related. And also a lot of the upside, if you look at Deepseek, the reason it was

so cheap to train uh supposedly is a lot of it was just really clever engineering techniques. So there's a lot of upside in in the day-to-day engineering work as well. That's what I see. Yeah. And all of this stuff is happening uh code tempmporally. Um which is what makes it so exciting to be here right now. You know, was really uh well Danielle Roose and I were touring one of the biggest deployments actually. It's the biggest B 100 deployment. Uh so Daniela runs Seale at MIT, the biggest AI lab in the world. And we were

touring it together and the the chips are all liquid cooled now, which means those racks are dead silent. And I was expecting this really eerie, awesome, silent experience, but the interconnect spine is still air cooled and it sounds like a jet engine and so it's right next to it. So it takes all kind of the magic. What really surprised me though is that the the GPUs are all in a rack $6 million a column and then the interconnect is physically a rack over. I I would have expected it to need to be much closer together

to get optimal performance, but it's actually, you know, physically separated into separate columns for some reason. That really surprised me. But it's an incredible tour to take. You should definitely throw it on the to-do list. Use your your A16Z all access card to anything. That's right. Anish, you want to walk us through Google IO is happening right now. Um, are you Yeah, please. Yeah, I Oh, please. Yeah. know, take take it away on this slide. Tell us about it. No, no, no. I mean, it's it's so interesting. I've only had a chance to try a

few of the products so far. I tried the AI mode. You know, I was a little bit overwhelmed. Uh, sorry, underwhelmed. Um, you know, like what what stands out to me and is notable. Number one, I think VO their video models v video generation models are incredible. VO is probably the only video model that has been competitive with the Chinese models, which are less constrained on copyrighted training data, let's say. So, I think Google has actually shown real strength in um in video generation. So, that's one thing that I'm interested in spending more time with.

The second is the price point that we discussed earlier, $250 a month. You know, has Google ever had a consumer product that's priced this way? Have we even seen many? Um, and it's extraordinary that they think that they can command these prices and I think they will. I do think that there, you know, AI mode felt to me a bit like a watered down perplexity. It's just not that good. And and it really shows the power of counterpositioning because Google has spent 20 years making commitments to an ads ecosystem, you know, and all the blue

links and everything else that now, you know, the sort of competitive setup is demanding that they break. Very difficult for them to break those commitments and I think it's a real threat to their search monopoly. Yeah, I'd love to follow up on that. You know, I noticed the stock went down pretty significantly during this, which is really unusual during this kind of a of an event, but I think it's for exactly the reason you were saying, the cooler this is. And the more search moves over to it, the more it cannibalizes the core. Correct. That's

exactly right. It's it's such a challenging position for them to be in. And look, the front door of the internet, they have been the front door of the internet for the last 20 years. It's the most interesting place to be on the internet from an economic perspective. the front door to the internet is up for grabs. Already my kids are telling me, "Dad, everybody knows that Chad GBT is better than Google." So, there's a near-term threat from products and then there's a sort of long-term threat from generational change in the products that they prefer to

consume. Yeah. And the fact of the matter is there will be something that will come along and bypass OpenAI and Google and everything else. And we haven't haven't met the founder yet. Haven't heard what it's called, but that's just the reality. It's I'll never forget when Jeff Bezos got uh at a at a it was an all hands meeting and he said in 30 years Amazon may not exist anymore. Um which is uh pretty extraordinary. So See, I I think those are those wire those sirens happening in in New Jersey. They're here. No, that's a

niche I think in San Francisco. The main streets of San Francisco. That's right. For me, the one that the one that struck me for this was the 3D video communications, the Google beam. That's the one I'm really looking forward to. I think it'll be really amazing to watch. We had that at uh at Abundance 360 this year. That's right. And they're consumming. Yeah, it really it really does make a huge difference in your experience. You feel like you're sitting across from the person. Uh I remember when Cisco uh had their giant version that cost like

a couple hundred,000 uh per set side of the setup. Uh and now Google Beam. I didn't actually know they were going to call it beam. Uh that's great. Uh I mean it's be a consumer product. And then project aura uh right their smart glasses. Uh I think is going to be with full Gemini integration uh is going to be great. We're I think we'll probably start to see AR wearables uh on the street. Um remember the first time we started seeing people wearing uh AirPods. Yeah. and people people on the street talking to themselves. Well,

we're going to start to see uh these these uh smart glasses as well. Um can't wait. I mean, for me, it's the it's the future of of education as well. Uh let's move on here. Okay, so here's what we said a little bit earlier. Uh really drives me nuts that Apple still cannot spell my wife's name or my name properly when I dictate it. I mean, it's it's embarrassing. So, why Apple still hasn't cracked AI. This is an article that came out. Let me just read this real quick. Siri overhaul delayed repeatedly. New features failed

internal tests and missed 24 and 2025 rollout goals. Apple spent billions on AI chips and startups, but internal disagreements on budget allocations led to lack of GPU supplies. Seven years after hiring ex Google AI chief John uh Gandrea, um Apple is still lagging in AI versus its competitors. I mean, this is so sad. I mean, this could be a wound that truly uh damages Apple significantly. If someone had a beautiful high-end uh phone uh with full AI integration, uh this could be up for grabs. And um yeah fully entrenched high level theory on this but

before Anish do you see in the valley truly great people going to Apple to work? I mean Apple it it has a very sort of specific slightly insular culture so less people come in and out of Apple in my experience and come in and out of places like Google and Meta. Um I look I read this article do too I think that they have a real challenge as a as a consumer using Siri every day is like a stick in the eye. Uh I think they have a cultural problem because I I really think that

the you know AI has as we talked about earlier sort of disagreement sexuality you know persuasion all these aspects of the human experience that Apple has has tries to sort of polish away. And then finally I think they they've not had a great track record of partnering. uh they really do want to build everything and that served them well, but you know the models are moving too quickly and it's not a core capability of their technology team today. So I think they're in a pretty tough position. With that said, fixing things like voice translation in

Siri, like come on, it's just a daily reminder that they can't do AI. It's it's crazy. So here's here's my highle observation. I'd love to get your thoughts on it. The the visionary integrator model. So Eric Schmidt, good friend of of Peter, he talked when you guys were on stage um you know in the sidebyside chairs, he talked for maybe 20 minutes on the visionary integrator model and Eric told this story about he you know he was walking through the streets of Silicon Valley with Sergey and Larry and Sergey said, "Eric, that building right there,

we need that building." And Eric said, "We don't we don't need that building, Sergey." And Sergey said, "Yes, we do." And he said, "Okay, well you're the visionary. If you say we need that building, then we'll make it work. We need that building. And he made it work. And that that defined what is now the visionary integrator model that Elon Musk's perfected. You know, he's he's got so much vision, but he needs a perfect can finish my sentences integrator for every business, every operation. So, it's really obvious that that Steve Jobs was the visionary, Tim

Cook was the integrator for years. But now if I go to Google Trends and I see how many searches are on Steve Jobs name versus Tim Cook's name versus Elon Musk's name, it's 100. Two for Steve Jobs, one for Tim Cook. So here, 14 years after Steve Jobs has passed away, still twice as many people are searching his name as Tim Cook's name. Meanwhile, in Saudi this week, Tim's not there. All the visionaries are there. So then you're like, well, who is the visionary? Who's the integrator in the company? Because the visionary needs to attract

talent, which means you need to be on this podcast or in Saudi Arabia or on Allin or you whatever it is that in that era gets people inspired to come and work for your company. That's a huge part of the visionary job. And I don't see that dynamic. And you I'd love to get Google throw Google in that same bucket. And we're just talking about Google's, you know, kind of little underwhelming IO, but if you can't name the visionary and the integrator, then you're not following the known to work current model. Yeah. and and having

a company that is founder-ledd where the founder can basically say I don't care what the board says or what you know everybody else says this is where we have to go where it's an AI first founder company are going to eat the lunch of everybody else especially at scale you need the founder model just to cut through all the bureaucracy otherwise you end up in in terminal political fights and nothing gets done which is what we're seeing and I've had a few friends who sold is in the Apple list of choices. But yeah, I think

that uh there's got to be still a solution that that creates a visionary role even though you can't obviously go back to the founder. Yeah. And uh I've had friends of mine who had the chance to sell their company to Google or Apple. And I'm like, if you go to Apple, you will be swallowed up into a giant NDA, not be able to talk to anybody, not be able to go and speak at a conference or an event. And it's really a real a real challenge. Listen, Anish, let me give you a chance to to

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

you talk Peter about making the transition from a mindset of fear and scarcity to one of abundance, this is exactly the technology that unlocks that in a very tangible way. So, you know, there there I wouldn't trade being alive now for any other time in history. Yeah, it truly is the most extraordinary time ever to be alive. I want to I just acknowledge something, Anish, that insight you had at the beginning about the subjective technologies and how much of a difference that'll make. That's the first time I've seen somebody clearly articulate the massive opportunity yet.

So much appreciated. Thank you. Well, the analogy to the Jones Act, too, is something I've never heard before. So, we're going to Borgl like assimilate all Please do, Dave. I I look forward to hearing it. Just as I adopted abundance from Peter, you guys have got license to use those now. Nice to be with you. Thank you for having me, guys. A pleasure, Anish. Thank you. Bye-bye. Cheers. Every day I get the strangest compliment. Someone will stop me and say, "Peter, you have such nice skin. Honestly, I never thought I'd hear that from anyone." And

honestly, I can't take the full credit. All I do is use something called OneSkin OS1 twice a day, every day. The company is built by four brilliant PhD women who've identified a peptide that effectively reverses the age of your skin. I love it and again, I use this twice a day, every day. You can go to onskin.co co and write peter@checkout for a discount on the same product I use. That's onskin.co and use the code peter@checkout. All right, back to the episode. All right, we really enjoyed having a I found this article somewhat interesting. It's

a speculative scenario, a history of the future 2025 to 2040, but it brings up a lot of great points. I'd love to hear your guys thoughts on. Let's take it uh uh one at a time. So 2025 to 2026 the year ahead it's the agentic AI boom. So GPT05 is multimodal it's coming out quad 4 uh codegen floods uh apps. Uh so I think this is happening. It's not really a prediction. It's just a reporting on what's going on. Let's go into 2027 to 2028 for this one. Hold on one second. I think the agentic

is going to give way to vertical because there's so much opportunity in training vertical AIs on very specific use cases. I think that's going to complement the agentic but but in general the paradigm is right. Yeah. My prediction the the word agentic is going to get old very quickly. It's just too vague and generic. What was the word that got old very quickly? Like a couple of years ago there was something uh co-pilot as a term. Everybody started using co-pilot as a generic term in the past. Oh man, that got so annoying so fast. It

did. True. I think vibe coding is going to come and go real fast, too. Uh not it's a great term actually. I'll be sad to see it go, but um what you saw with Codeex, you can launch, you know, 20 concurrent processes and then stitch them back together again. And that's that's very different from vibe coding. No one's named that yet. And Greg Brockman when he rolled it out said, "Yeah, I'm so bad at naming things, we're just going to call this codeex." It's like what? I know. I was like, "Huh? Didn't you just didn't

you call it Codeex already like years ago?" Um, so, uh, 2027 to 2028, uh, we're going to see breakthroughs. Uh I think one of the things that's interesting is it's predicted that in the next couple years we're going to start to see physics breakthroughs and mathematical breakthroughs and we're going to start to see fundamental uh technology moving forward and its ability to help us understand the universe even even deeper. I find that that for me is the biggest and most exciting thing because I think there's so much research data that we have not seen the

signal from noise and have not extracted key observations from. I think AI let loose on that will absolutely do magical things. Yeah. 2029 to 2031 the end of white collar work. Uh I believe that you know and this is an argument I have with a lot of people. Uh what will it not be able to do? Uh I don't see any job that you know that at this point we're talking about advanced super intelligence. Uh do you do you think this is true that we're going to start to see the end of all white collar

work by that point? The the thing that's driving me nuts about this is that that that's the end point. You know, figure 2030 is the end point, but it's pretty much a straight line between here and there. Mhm. And so the amount of job dislocation, you know, in 2026, 2027 is going to be like nothing we've ever seen. And I keep telling all the CEOs, you're way under planning. You need to look at every single person in your organization, all the individual contributors doing white collar work, and you need to get them to become AI

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

their entire career path. There's a huge disservice by sticking your head in the sand and ignoring this. There's another thing as well, which is getting your employees and your kids and your friends to start thinking as entrepreneurs, right? Because when I was having a conversation with a friend of mine, Dan Sullivan, and Dan, I was saying, you know, you know, as this technology starts to truly become uh you know, magical level, we can't even imagine right now. Um is it going to quelch my sense of purpose? Is it going to uh you know, start solving

things for me to the point where I'm not motivated? And and Dan said, "Uh, has there ever been a time where more powerful technology has made you less motivated?" And I said, "No." And he says, "Why do you think that is?" And I said, "Cuz I'm an entrepreneur and I just dream bigger every time there's there's more capabilities handed to me." And I think that mindset of of finding problems, solving problems and letting everybody know they can become entrepreneurs. They can start to create uh you know new capabilities, new companies, new nonprofits. They can start

to dream at a level like never before is is an unleashing of the human spirit that is so important and creativity to boot. It'll force it which I think is really amazing. Well, it I was when I was lecturing at Stanford two weeks ago, um at the end of the lecture, the TA came up to me and said, "Man, you really won the hearts and minds of all these students when you said the administration is completely out of touch with you." It's like, really? That's what got them one over. But it's that dynamic where, you

know, your kids are going through, my kids are going through where they're chomping at the bit to use AI because it's so empowering and because the administration hasn't figured anything out yet and they're woefully behind, they're a barrier. But the corporate version of that is, well, we can't do this because we're regulated or because of data leaks or because of hallucinations. That's a excuse. Good. It means you haven't figured it out at the exact staff level. And now you're condemning your people to being behind the curve and to your great observation and it's just so

inexha yep it's absolutely a leadership failure and it's inexcusable. The last quadrant in this uh slide here is 2036 to 2035 or 2035 to 2036. Um and it's trillion robot economy. I think it's supposed to be 2036 to 2045. I think you should say trillion dollar. Yeah. And and so it's the notion that we're about to have a massive explosion in number of robots and it's not just humanoid robots, it's robots of every shape and size at the same time uh that we have uh biolongevity cures. Uh we unleash human longevity, you know, love that

stuff. All right, let's move on here. Along the lines of what we just saw, here's an article I pulled in. AI designs antibiotic uh synthesin that beats uh MRSA in mice. So this is multi- antibiotic resistant strains of uh of bacteria. Uh and so researchers built an AI tool that designs new antibiotic molecules faster than traditional methods. And AI designed antibiotics effectively treating MRSA infections that no longer respond to existing drugs. AI can design affordable lab ready antibiotics to fight the dead deadliest infections. This is the stuff that turns me on. This is the stuff

that I'm just thrilled about our future. Well, that and once you can personalize it to the individual, which we'll be able to do as as a very quick next step, everything changes at that point. Yeah, for sure. All right. Uh, one of our last slides here is that Gemini 2.5 benchmarks outperform competitors yet again in mathematics and coding and multimodal. We're seeing Gemini 2.5 Pro really beat out against uh, OpenAI uh, both 03 and 04 model. And what it's not doing though is it's not winning the revenue race. you know, OpenAI is just trouncing uh

Google in in revenues, and that's a dangerous place for it to be. I don't know if we need to say anything else about this, but uh it's Google's got incredible engineering talent uh and you know, a massive number of wet squishy brains working on this stuff. All right, let's go into uh uh beyond AI in the robotics world. Uh robo taxis. And this comes uh from our from unusual whales. So Arc Invest, this is Kathy Wood, projects a $34 trillion enterprise value from robo taxis by 2030. So uh you know Kathy has been long on

Tesla as I am. Here we see a few of the companies uh this is Whimo and soon Cyber Cab. That's massive. I mean, the idea that people are going to not take their cars anymore. I think when this really works, Dave and See, is when my AI is automatically anticipating when I need a car and the car is showing up without me having to take it, right? It knows my calendar. It sees me walking towards the front door and the car is just waiting for me. It's magical. Well, for God's sakes, when can it drive

our kids to practice? you know, that can't come soon enough. Uh, well, it's within two, three years. So, there you go. You've been waiting a lifetime. Two or three years, you're you'll be all I mean, we're supposed to to do the math for us. Thank God. Um, it it just it's easy to lose track of the fact that a huge fraction of humanity, you know, the number one uh job in the world is driver. That's the number one title. But you know then you look down the longtale of other things that people do and and

just a huge fraction of humanity is doing things as routine as driver or you know screw circuit board in or assemble laptop lid or it just goes on and on and on and so if you sample humanity we you lose track of that when you're in a high-tech hub and everybody's working on nextgen stuff and spaceships and AI but just sample you know a random person on the planet and what they do and that's and the scale of of it you know comes out to 33 three trillion. I guess uh she would do the math.

It is what it is. Well, here's an example. So, Whimo outpaces Lyft in San Francisco. 300 Whimo vehicles now uh now compete complete more rides than 45,000 Lift drivers in San Francisco. And uh each Whimo averages the workload of 150 human drivers operating 24/7. Uh have you guys taken a Whimo ride yet? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I did one in Phoenix. It was pretty mindboggling and that was like ages ago. So, it's gotten way way better since then. It it has and you don't need to tip your driver. You know, you can have confidential conversations.

You know, I'm always wondering if my driver is listening to my conversation as I'm just, you know, in listening. I mean, you know, I had a backtoback where I did a Whimo ride in San Fran the next day. I was in New York and I was in a, you know, smelly yellow cab. It was like the the thing that that jumped out of me about the Whimo that I had completely overlooked is you can control the lighting and the music and they'll keep adding things to it. So, it becomes like your your little, you know,

travel cabana. And, you know, they'll add flat screen TVs. It'll sync to your phone and it's going to be just such a different experience. It's not just about being driven. It's it's about control of your environment. So, I had anticipated that. Yeah. I can't wait for the lie down beds so I can like, you know, get a nap on my way to work. Uh, this was a fun article. The Wall Street Journal. Apple to support brain implant control of its devices. Uh, it's teaming up with Synchron uh to bring brain computer interface to consu consumer

devices. Now albeit this is specifically for people who are impaired who have severe disabilities but uh you know this is the direction we're heading. Again raise predicted BCI our ability to connect everything to the neoortex in the early 2030s. I just love seeing these little hints towards that direction. Yeah, these are the early signals around that, but it'll become mainstream pretty quick after this. Well, I'm I'm very much a humanist and I think it's kind of it gets really creepy to me when you start punching directly into your neurons. But I'll put that aside for

a second. Rey is going to emerge as one of the greatest prognosticators in the history of the world after going, you know, up and then way down and then 2029 artificial super intelligence predicted 30 years ago. It's going to land like on the exact moment. It's super annoying because he's so outrageous but always correct. Drives everybody crazy. Amazing. It's funny. I don't know him, you know, you guys know him personally very well. I don't know him personally, but the books were so inspiring to me. I mean, just reinforcing everything I was already thinking, but then

really quantifying it. So, I I I just I'm going to love that that that when it lands right on the on the minute. Um, yeah, it'll be great for Singularity as a brand, too, I think. Yeah. All right, let's close out our conversation today on uh on moonshots with a a look at crypto once again. Uh here we go. Uh we're seeing US enacts stable coin bill in 2025. So prediction market poly market uh shows a 95% probability that the US will pass a stable coin bill in 2025 up 35% uh from prior weeks. Any

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

by far the most important one that we should track closely week to week because the the ability to move back and forth uh instantaneously digitally from a stable coin back to Bitcoin or whatever you want is intimately tied to the agent to agent uh microtransactions and you know that that's going to be we get Kathy Wood to do the math for us but that's going to be probably the biggest part of the economy by 2040 is those transactions. Oh yeah, there will be there will be probably hundreds of billions of agents each doing microtransactions. I

mean this is this is the half of the internet. You know the internet when it was built uh allowed us to share imagery and data and documents but not financial transactions. This is the other half of the equation and it's coming fast. We're playing with codecs, you know, pretty much all weekend. um you you can spawn agents to do all kinds of things for you. And the interface they put on front of it, you know, each time you spawn an agent, it creates a new row and there's a little bar turning. You're like, this interface,

like right out of the gate, I want to do a thousand agents like and then it's going to be a million agents and and it's immediately obvious that we're all going to be fighting for inference time compute. like you can think of things so fast and and deploy so many agents to do them for you so quickly. You know, like the the gating factor is well, I can't get the compute in this interface obviously is not going to support the scale that I need either. Well, you the thing that Anishh said as well is having

his agent going out and shopping for lower cost insurance or mortgage rates and such. So, I love that idea. You're going to be able to optimize everything. You're going to have your agents constantly searching the web at minimal cost. And then I want an army of agents that are going out and making investment trades for me, going out there and just an army making money. You know, you know, for me, I've been waiting for my boys, my my two boys to actually get excited about trading crypto, but I think the agents will get there first.

Well, you know, another topic I wish we had more time with Anish to talk about it because I know he's big on um disposable code and uh personalized code and you're like, well, what's an example of that? Well, the example Anish usually gives is imagine you're using Sunno or Udo to create a song, but the song is about this exact podcast and it has, you know, content in it that's related to our topics today. That's a great theme song to play as a pre-roll. So, it's the software created this this thing specifically for the podcast.

It uses a fair amount of compute, but it's still like 12 cents. No big deal. You create it, then you throw it away. Well, I can think of a lot of those things. Let me spawn all those agents to create them, and I'm going to throw them away when they're done. That's a lot of compute. It's so worth it. But where's all that compute going to come from? Wow. My last slide for today. Uh, still on a Bitcoin roll to at this moment, Bitcoin's running at 106, roughly $500. Uh, pretty good. It's uh we're approaching

near highs. And this article came out, "Bitcoin is becoming America's reserve asset. More Americans own Bitcoin than gold." That's pretty extraordinary. I think this was kind of predictable just because it's so much more democratized. It's so much a thousand times easier to own Bitcoin than it is to own gold. Uh so I would have expected to see this sooner. Uh the thing that I think will become really powerful is when we have people owning at gross level more Bitcoin than they do a gross level gulp. And I think that'll be amazing. Yeah. Pleasure as always,

gentlemen. Onwards. This was a big weekend AI. We we have one last thing, Peter. What's that? Well, the the the there I think Dave, you have a slide or a photograph, right? Do you want to just show that? I'll stop sharing. Can the team pull it up for me? Yeah. Or I can I can show something if you have it then. Um given that it's your birthday, Peter, we found an MIT photograph of you from from ways back and we thought this was absolutely worth uh showing. Um so talk talking about AI agents and retro,

we want to hear that guy's voice. Yeah, I got this from uh from Matt Rita. He sent me with an emoji of a hairpick along with it. So, I didn't include that, but I was really reluctant to drag it out of the archives because I know it can come back around. Ah, it's quite a right. I want to show you one other thing, though. Hold on. Hold on. I want to show you one other thing. Um, I've got two images that I thought were really interesting. Uh, where's my image gone? Oh my god. We have

to cut this out somehow. I mean, I I respect you guys. I spend my birthday doing a podcast with both of you. How was that? Hold on. Okay, let me share this now. Hey, congratulations and happy birthday, by the Thank you, pal. Thank you. I started my I started my birthday by doing a 100 continuous push-ups in a row. So, still still driving that. Very nice. And then hold on. Was that part of that celebration? Yeah. But that was Yeah. There I have two favorite photographs of you. One is this little 3D printed image of

yours that I kept and then one of the the next generation. Oh my god. Yes. My boy. the three of our boys all born within like a month of each other. They're now all turning 14. Yeah, that doesn't look like that doesn't look like me. But anyway, hey, and I wanted to show one one little more surprise. Um Lily, come on along. Okay, we we brought you a birthday cake. Thank you. But unfortunately, you can't eat it because your avatar nothing on your diet unless there's salmon in the middle of it. I'll reach out using

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

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