Chapter 8: The next wave of frontier models, and the Moonshots Live promotion

All right, you heard it here first, folks. And James Cameron, if you're listening, it's your next movie.

A few quick glances at what's coming in the near future. You know, I've mentioned this before. We've seen the release of new models going from every few months now to every 5 days. Uh, some predictions from Polymarket: uh, the next Grok model, 4.7 — again we're waiting for Grok 5, uh, when it comes out — but Grok 4.7 expected in the next week or two. Uh, so super cool.

And then uh GPT-6.1 released by when? Uh, again, this is going to be sort of leapfrogging each other. Uh, here it is, their prediction of, you know, 48% by end of October and 85% by the end of September. And then finally uh Anthropic with Fable 5.2 — two very similar numbers, again, uh, you know, 43% by October 31st and 86% by — no, uh — December 31st. And again, this is where the frontier labs are sort of playing chicken with each other, waiting for the model to come out and then the next day releasing their model.

Any thoughts on this, Alex, on model — just dwelling in particular on what the rumor mill on social media are alleging regarding future versions of Astra?

The pretty consistent rumor mill message is that sometime later this year we'll see — and we've started to see this a bit with Astra winning Pokemon, winning Portal, winning all of these other interactive, visually intensive, visually reasoning intensive games — the rumor mill is furiously alleging that sometime before the end of this year, we're going to see a future version of Astra that offers honest to goodness real time control, including third party extrapolations, that if you take Astra, you extrapolate, say, robotic control — maybe we'll talk about that in a bit — we're going to see real time generally intelligent embodiment, either controlling video games, which is again ironically where the whole industry of modern RL started, with the Google DeepMind folks trying to win at computer games using [unclear] and GPUs being developed for video games in the first place.

Well, the modern use of GPUs started with ImageNet and the ILSVRC for computer vision. Uh, and then we started to see out of the DeepMind folks in particular deep reinforcement learning for winning games like that. That's where RL started, and then we went off on this detour of LLMs that were just self-supervised objectives. But it seems, as alleged, in the next few months we're supposed to see a next version of Astra that will be general purpose, interactive, real-time, game-winning capable AI.

Um, any other thoughts on the release rate on models?

Well, I think there's a really interesting uh, you know, battle royale brewing between — you know, every corporation is going to need to become an AI company fundamentally. And to me, the bellwether is Moderna, uh, because it's right across the street and they're very AI forward, and you know, they exist to solve diseases, discovering RNA vaccines and other biotech breakthroughs. They have huge amounts of machinery. So they're not going to be crushed by an AI foundation model company anytime soon, but they need to become either an AI company partnered with Anthropic or OpenAI, or develop their own models internally starting with the open source that's available.

And so Alex Karp went on that Palantir rampage saying get some cojones and become an AI company or die. And so every corporate CEO has reacted to that and they're now deciding. So, OpenAI responded by saying, hey, we have a new deal here where you can rev share with us and we'll be your AI forever hereafter, but we'll let you live. Um, and so right now we're on the crossroads of those two things.

So I think that the new models will come out faster and faster and faster because right now there's too much parity with the Chinese open source models, and they need a lot more separation in order to make that rev share case stick and convince corporate America, corporate world, and — nationally, you know — entire sovereign nations to trust them to be their AI partner for the next hundred years as opposed to developing their own. So that's really pushing it, and that's why in the Polymarket you're seeing these dates are, you know, pretty heavily weighted toward very, very soon, because they need that separation.

Uh, Emad, close us out here.

I'm kicking myself for not going on Polymarket for the Millennium Prize solutions. You know, you get too busy.

That was — that was absolutely — we'll always have Yang-Mills, Emad.

Yang-Mills is next. That's another thing. Um, it's September 29th is the next one for OpenAI. Like, it's the DevDay. They're going to release it then. So, there's some easy money for people.

Not investment advice, not betting advice.

Not investment advice.

Yeah. This is an investment — this is betting, right? But look, um —

Even worse, gambling.

Yeah. Yeah. You have to kind of look at it this way. OpenAI now have a model that can solve Navier-Stokes. Obviously, it can solve reinforcement learning. And so what happens is they have this pre-trained Astra and then they're like, okay, we want to make it a bit better. Hey, mega Navier-Stokes model, make it better. Boom, you get more capability, more capability, until it approximates that capability.

Similarly, Anthropic will have Mythos 5.2 or 5 or whatever their unreleased model, because when you train a model on 100,000 GPUs, it doesn't serve at the speeds that you see Astra. The mathematics doesn't make sense. We know that they actually have a bigger model that they distill down to the model that we get. And now they figured out how to make that bigger model have a leap forward, which is this RSI loop. I mean, as Alex said, you're going to get daily releases probably by the —

I've been trying to say that when you say it with a British accent and a super high IQ, it just is more likely to resonate with the audience.

But it's such an important fact. I'm so glad you said it.

All right, I'm going to move us forward.

It is Star Trek's 60th anniversary and guess what? There is an incredible documentary uh on the 60 years of Star Trek, executive produced by William Shatner. And I'm very proud, gentlemen, that we're going to be hosting the red carpet Hollywood premiere of this documentary the night before Moonshots Live. And everybody listening, if you want to join us, we're going to have, I think at last count, 25 of the cast members and crew uh at this event. Um, it's uh the evening of September the 24th in downtown LA. Uh, we're going to have the uh, you know, the premiere, the red carpet treatment. Afterwards, we're going to have the cast members on stage answering questions. And after that, there's a VIP reception uh which everybody involved at that event — it's limited to 550 people. So, uh, please, please, please, if you're interested, go to moonshots.com/trek and you can either join as a VIP of the Moonshots Live event or you can get a special ticket for this evening before.

And let's take a second and talk about what we're going to be doing the next day, on the 25th, at Moonshots Live. Uh, all of us are going to be there uh and super pumped about that. I think there — there two. And by the way, Rod Roddenberry, who I mentioned earlier, uh the son of Gene Roddenberry, will be there the night before and with us uh during the day at Moonshots Live.

But uh for the entrepreneurs out there, first of all, it's going to be a massive networking opportunity. We're very much — it's by application. So if you want to go, go to moonshots.com and apply. We're really bringing incredible builders and creators. And I'm excited about the two XPRIZEs we're going to be awarding. Uh, and I love your comments on the first one — is the largest hackathon ever done. Um, we've asked teams around the world to basically pick a problem that impacts 100,000 people and start with a clean sheet of paper and build, in under 90 days, a company with the greatest revenue. And so we're going to have the five finalists for the Build with Gemini XPRIZE there. And if you're a builder or someone who wants to learn how to build, those five teams are going to be sharing what they did, how they did it. This is about inspiring you and giving you the realization that you don't need to wait for a job from somebody, that you have agency. You can build your own company.

Um, Peter, remind people how many people applied and entered that contest.

26,000 teams entered the Build with Gemini XPRIZE.

Crazy.

I don't think those are going to — need to get a lot of credit here. Like, 26,000. That's the largest hackathon in history by a very large margin.

And that many businesses got launched.

Hello. That's just an amazing thing. And the top five we get to talk to. I can't wait.

Yeah. You know, those are going to be great to be whittled down from that big of a number. You know, those are going to be truly great ideas to learn from.

And for me, the most important thing is the lessons that everyone in the audience is going to learn. Um, we have an incredible group of judges who are going to be uh, you know, crowning the winner. Um, and uh so that's one of them.

The second XPRIZE is the Future of Vision XPRIZE. You know, just think about all the technologies that Star Trek inspired, all of the engineers, all of the scientists — like Alex, like Emad, Dave, Salim, myself. Uh, and so this is a competition for a future version of XPRIZE, a film that shows a hopeful, compelling vision of the future. We had over 5,000 uh teams registered for this. Uh, I'm in the, you know, the review right now. We've narrowed it down to 25. We're going to be narrowing it down to 10 and finally five on stage, uh, showing their three-minute film trailer. And then we're going to make the winner's movie. We might make a bunch of the winners' movies. I mean, they're amazing. Uh, they're amazing trailers.

Uh, we're going to have uh Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of the judges there. Uh, Neal Stephenson, an incredible science fiction author. Uh, Rod Roddenberry. Uh, Mira Lane from Google. Uh, that's going to be extraordinary as well, right? Creating a new generation of positive storytelling.

I mean, the group of breakthrough thinkers you have there is unbelievable. And so the opportunity to meet all those is unreal.

I'm super excited about the AI and investing section that I'll be running, because uh, you know, we're coming into the most amazing investment cycle in the history of the world. You know, we're already maybe in the third inning of a nine-inning game. Uh, and a lot of people are frozen. They're just stuck, you know, like, well, if AI is going to do everything, you know, what could I invest in that could possibly matter? But there's some really, really fertile themes around robotics, around biotech, around data center buildout, a whole bunch of other areas. I just can't wait to go through it all. But we're really in a sweet spot right now.

Again, this is a moment in time, right? Like I said earlier, we're no longer the smartest things on the planet. Things are only going to accelerate, and by the time we get to Moonshots, it's a real chance to be amongst the people that see that. Like, I think, think about the billions of people on Earth — like, just the listeners on this podcast are already ahead in thinking about that. And the people who turn up to this Moonshots gathering are the people who genuinely believe that, and I don't think you'll ever have another moment like that.

This is going to be — this is our inaugural event, and in success we'll do it year on year. Uh, but this is sort of the largest gathering of optimists as well. Uh, one of the things we're doing — we're going to be having a live uh recording of Moonshots there uh with all five of us as the mates, and then we're going to be uh interviewing three incredible moonshot engineers. Palmer Luckey, right, the creator of Oculus and the creator of Anduril. Um, we're going to be diving into Palmer's brain, how he thinks about entrepreneurship, and he's one of the most brilliant thinkers I've met. Uh, Ben Lamm, the CEO of Colossal — all right, that is bringing back extinct species, but beyond that, he's building companies at the intersection of AI and synthetic biology, building living products. And then Astro Teller, the captain of moonshots, uh, who's going to, you know, share with you how do you build a moonshot company.

And so my hope for everybody attending is that you're going to walk away massively inspired on, you know, what your massive transformative purpose is and what your moonshot is and how to go after it. Um, and of course at night, Alex, you're going to be uh bearing all your truths, right?

Well, maybe not all of them, but I will say singularities seem to happen relatively infrequently on a per planet basis, and we're in the middle of one right now. And I just think there aren't enough venues out there for celebrating the singularity that we're in. I see far too many events that are overly focused on safety or doomerism. I think there is an important niche that Moonshots Live has that we seem to be relatively unique in occupying, which is actually celebrating the singularity that we're in. And so I, for one, as Manfred Macx in Accelerando would perhaps say, I look forward to this floating meat party to celebrate the singularity.

Um, you know, let me just say one other thing. Uh, if you go to moonshots.com, uh, please apply. We're also setting aside a hundred scholarships uh for young builders, so you can learn about and apply for a scholarship if you can't afford — it's a $1,500 price tag. It's, I guarantee you, an extraordinary party, right? Uh, going from 7:00 a.m. in the morning at registration, 8:00 a.m. you can take photographs with the moonshot mates. Uh, and then the programming starts at 9 and goes through 10 p.m. It's a full day of optimism and moonshots. So, uh, again, moonshots.com and you can learn all about it and we hope to meet you there.

Everybody, welcome to the health section of Moonshots, brought to you by Fountain Life. You know, we talk about AI on this Moonshots podcast all the time. One of the most important things AI is going to be able to do for you, besides educating your kids and helping you with your taxes, is making sure that you're living a healthy lifestyle, that you get a chance to get to 100 plus. I'm here today with Dr. Dawn Maslar [unclear], the chief medical officer of Fountain Life and a part of my medical team. Dawn, a pleasure.

Great [unclear].

You know, the thing that people are concerned about most about living to 100 or 120 is their cognitive abilities, making sure they don't have dementia. And uh the numbers about dementia are problematic. Uh, can you share what you've learned?

Such an important point, and you're right. At Fountain Life, our members — the number one thing people are most concerned about is losing their brain health, forgetting the name of their child, forgetting the face of their loved one. We know that when it comes to dementia, the conservative estimates are that 45% are entirely preventable. What was amazing is with the advanced testing we're doing at Fountain Life, one quarter of our members had advanced brain age.

Wow.

But what was really awesome is, again, back to that prevention, when we partnered it with healthy living — this gives me chills — eating healthier, moving our bodies, sleep, optimizing sleep is so important. You know what we saw? We saw that we improved that brain age by 26%. That is a big, big number, to show that the majority of those individuals were able actually to improve the brain age.

And one of the things I love about Fountain is we're searching the world for the best therapeutics, the best approaches, and making sure we bring it to our members. So, if having healthy brain function uh till 100, 120 is important to you, check out Fountain Life. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. Make sure you become the CEO of your own health. All right, now back to the episode.