Full Transcript

·YouTLDR

Mira Murati's 975B Open Model, Ramin Hasani on Post-Transformer AI, and Demis' AI FINRA | EP #271

1:56:421,746 summary words · ~9 min readEnglishBy Peter H. DiamandisTranscribed Jul 18, 2026
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Summary

This episode analyzes the escalating geopolitical and architectural shifts in frontier AI, highlighting the launch of Mira Murati's 975B open-weight 'Inkling' model, the structural bottlenecks of prompt-based recursive self-improvement, Liquid AI's post-transformer edge deployments, and the defense-economics debate over patent secrecy.

As Western policymakers contemplate tying open-source capabilities to Chinese releases, the survivability of AI enterprises depends on hardware-optimized post-transformer architectures and highly customized, on-premise post-training pipelines.

Section summaries

0:00-2:56

Intro & Guest Introduction

optional

The hosts open the show by introducing Ramin Hasani, co-founder and CEO of Liquid AI, calling in from Spain. They discuss Ramin's background in Vienna and Spain, the intersection of sports competition and scientific ventures, and the transition into advanced AI architecture. The segment sets up the overarching themes of the episode: sovereign AI regulation, the post-transformer ecosystem, and decentralized computing.

  • Liquid AI focuses on constructing computational graphs of intelligence that operate outside standard transformer bottlenecks.
  • The AI venture landscape requires rapid, sports-like execution to navigate global competitive pressures.

It acts as a standard introductory segment with friendly banter before diving into technical details.

2:56-17:36

The Game Theory of Proactive AI Regulation

watch

The panel debates proposals for AI regulation raised by Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman. Hassabis advocates for a FINRA-style industry-funded self-regulatory standards body with SEC oversight to pre-test frontier models before public deployment. Ramin introduces a Stackelberg game-theoretic framework to model interactions between slower policymakers and faster agents, showing why static laws fail. Alex argues that these regulatory models resemble 'regulatory capture' designed to block open-weight models from challenging frontier monopolies.

  • Hassabis is calling for an operational FINRA-style pre-release testing framework by the end of the year.
  • A Stackelberg game model demonstrates that static legal systems cannot match the high action frequency of decentralized AI agents.
  • Regulating model inputs (data, compute) functions as 'thought policing', whereas regulating actions is more aligned with Western legal traditions.

Crucial analysis of the game theory, legal frameworks, and structural risks of upcoming AI regulatory proposals.

17:36-26:24

The Geopolitical Capping of US Open-Source AI

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The discussion analyzes a leaked White House capability framework proposing to cap the release of Western open-weight models to the capability levels of China's best public models. The logic relies on the fact that shipped open models cannot be retracted, prompting a strategy to define a dynamic ceiling rather than a wall. The panel heavily criticizes this, noting it rewards China for holding back and risks a massive brain drain of Western researchers to unregulated ecosystems. They point out that China already leads in ternary and 1-bit quantization research due to hardware constraints.

  • The proposed ceiling would tie US open-source releases to the pace of China's public model development.
  • Capping Western models creates a reverse incentive where US labs benefit from Chinese advancements to bypass domestic caps.
  • China's hardware constraints have driven superior research in low-bit quantization, giving them an advantage at the edge.

Exposes the complex geopolitical feedback loops and hardware bottlenecks governing global AI strategy.

26:24-41:04

Mira Murati's 'Inkling' and the Customization Economy

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The panel shifts to Mira Murati's new startup, Thinking Machine Labs, and its debut release: 'Inkling', a 975-billion parameter MoE open-weight model. Inkling is a native multimodal model trained on 45T tokens of text, audio, video, and images, designed to prioritize customizability over raw leaderboard scores. Ramin explains that the monetization of foundational layers is pivoting from per-token API sales to fine-tuning as a service, satisfying the enterprise demand for on-premise data sovereignty. The hosts contrast traditional Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT).

  • Inkling utilizes a 975B parameter MoE structure that only activates 41B parameters at run time, maximizing speed and local execution cost.
  • Enterprise architectures are shifting toward fine-tuned open-weight models hosted on-premise to prevent data exposure to foundational labs.
  • OpenAI's early termination of its fine-tuning API highlights a contrarian opportunity for startups focusing on Reinforcement Fine-Tuning.

Essential for understanding the commercial transition from central APIs to sovereign, customized on-premise post-training pipelines.

41:04-44:00

Sponsor Segment: Blitzy's Agentic Coding

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The hosts present a sponsor segment for Blitzy, an autonomous software development platform. Blitzy orchestrates thousands of specialized AI agents to analyze million-line enterprise codebases. It automates up to 80% of development work before compilation, boosting engineering velocity by 5x as a pre-IDE tool.

Pure commercial advertisement.

44:00-1:01:36

Recursive Self-Improvement & WICO's AID^2

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The panel reviews WICO AI's paper demonstrating 'AID^2' (AI-driven exploration squared), where an outer AI agent rewrites the code and research strategy for an inner agent. WICO claims 8 days of this automated loop beat 2 years of human research. Alex connects this to 'defensive co-scaling,' where outer safety agents police inner task agents to prevent reward hacking. However, Ramin delivers a strong critique, pointing out that WICO's approach does not change model weights and remains computationally intractable (taking up to 350 years for a 2B parameter model under Chinchilla laws). Instead, true self-improvement requires automated architecture design.

  • AID^2 demonstrates an outer loop preventing an inner loop from 'reward hacking', an emergent property of defensive co-scaling.
  • WICO outlines a 3-level recursive self-improvement scale, classifying their current system as Level 1 (net positive over human R&D).
  • True recursive self-improvement requires weight-level tuning and automated architecture search, as prompt-based outer loops face massive computational bottlenecks.

Technical breakdown of the math, scaling laws, and myths surrounding hard-takeoff recursive self-improvement.

1:01:36-1:13:20

Bidirectional Digital Twins & Civic Scaling

optional

The discussion covers the Malaysian Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, deploying an officially sanctioned AI digital twin to communicate across 135 spoken languages. The panel analyzes the shift from simple deepfakes to authorized bidirectional digital twins. Alex predicts that corporations, religious institutions, and political campaigns will increasingly rely on interactive twins, potentially leading to scenarios where the digital twin effectively runs the organization. Dave and Peter discuss how interactive twins will surpass human physical limitations by integrating real-time visual data, charts, and spatial warping.

  • Malaysia's deployment of an official PM clone is a milestone in using AI to scale bidirectional civic engagement across diverse linguistic populations.
  • AI digital twins will evolve from static broadcast avatars into interactive models that can run internal organizational workflows.
  • The true value of digital twins lies in their ability to manipulate information spatially and visually, far exceeding human physical speech constraints.

Fascinating philosophical discussion on digital twins, but less mathematically technical than previous sections.

1:13:20-1:39:44

Liquid AI: Post-Transformer Architectures at the Edge

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Ramin Hasani explains the origin of Liquid AI, which traces back to modeling the 302-neuron nervous system of the C. elegans worm. Unlike transformers, which rely on resource-heavy attention mechanisms, Liquid Neural Networks (LNNs) use continuous-time recurrent neural networks and physical odes to pack high expressivity into tiny compute footprints. Ramin details their partnership with Mercedes-Benz, running a 600MB multimodal model entirely offline on a cheap $60 in-car chip. He addresses whether Liquid AI has abandoned neuromorphic designs for transformer hybrids, explaining their Automated Foundation Model Design (AFMD) algorithm searches the architectural space to discover double-gated convolutions that maximize edge performance.

  • Liquid Neural Networks are physics-inspired architectures using continuous-time, non-linear recurrent neural networks rather than static attention mechanisms.
  • LNN edge deployments, such as the Mercedes-Benz offline assistant, run complete multimodal models on sub-8GB RAM budgets using $60 chips.
  • Liquid AI's STAR framework uses automated search to discover optimal hybrid architectures (e.g., 80% double-gated convolutions) to minimize edge latency and memory.

Essential technical deep dive into alternative, non-transformer architectures and edge hardware optimization.

1:39:44-1:48:32

Palmer Lucky and National Security Patent Reform

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The hosts debate Palmer Lucky's assertion that the US patent system is a national security risk because foreign adversaries can download disclosures and clone defense tech. Lucky proposes shifting the default USPTO framework toward secrecy orders under the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951. Alex strongly opposes this, arguing that secret state-sanctioned monopolies hinder the open innovation ecosystem that drives American technical superiority. Dave suggests that rather than secrecy, the solution will be trade embargoes against nations that violate intellectual property rights.

  • Palmer Lucky argues that open patent disclosures provide strategic adversaries with free blueprints for advanced military hardware.
  • Expanding patent secrecy risks creating state-sanctioned military monopolies that stifle commercial cross-pollination of dual-use technologies.
  • Continuous innovation loops and proprietary trade secrets are increasingly viewed as more defensive than static, legalistic patent protections.

Directly addresses macro-level defense economics, sovereign IP strategy, and geopolitical conflict interfaces.

1:48:32-1:54:24

Healthcare Abundance & Epigenetic Longevity Reprogramming

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The episode wraps up with breakthroughs in healthcare and longevity. OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Saul set a new medical benchmark high, outperforming matched human physicians in blind tests even when doctors had unlimited web access. Simultaneously, Meta's free Muse Spark 1.1 model beat Saul while operating 7x cheaper, democratizing diagnostic access via WhatsApp. In longevity science, Revel Pharmaceuticals published a study on an engineered enzyme, CMLA, which acts as a 'molecular lawnmower' to break down Advanced Glycation End-products (AGEs), demonstrating actual structural reversal of protein aging in human tissue.

  • High-grade medical diagnostic capability has effectively reached a marginal cost of zero, democratized globally via Meta's integrated platforms.
  • Revel Pharmaceuticals' CMLA enzyme successfully reversed advanced glycation end-product (AGE) tissue damage from elderly donors.
  • The discovery of bacterial enzyme adaptations to reverse Maillard reactions marks a massive step toward reaching longevity escape velocity (LEV).

Offers crucial, cutting-edge insights on both AI diagnostic dematerialization and biotech rejuvenation.

Key points

  • Regulatory Capture and the FINRA Analogy — Demis Hassabis' call for a FINRA-style, industry-funded standards body under SEC-like oversight to pre-test frontier models risks establishing a cartel of incumbents. This framework is designed to box out open-source, non-aligned, and university-led laboratories.
  • Geopolitical Arbitrage via Capability Caps — A proposed White House capability framework aims to cap Western open-weight model releases at the level of China's best public models (e.g., DeepSeek). This framework assumes that shipped open weights cannot be un-released and seeks to maintain a dynamic ceiling.
  • Hardware-Agnostic Automated Foundation Model Design — Liquid AI bypasses the traditional attention-mechanism scaling bottleneck by using Automated Foundation Model Design (AFMD) to search architectural spaces. This approach discovers non-linear, physical ODE-inspired structures such as double-gated convolutions.
  • Weight-Level vs. Prompt-Based Recursive Self-Improvement — WICO AI's 'AID^2' uses an outer-loop agent to modify prompt strategies and codebase configurations for an inner-loop agent, claiming a Level 1 recursive self-improvement. However, true self-acceleration requires dynamic weight adjustment to avoid computational intractability.
  • Targeted Enzymatic Reversal of Glycation — Revel Pharmaceuticals and Calico demonstrated that an engineered bacterial enzyme, CMLA, acts as a 'molecular lawnmower' to oxidize Advanced Glycation End-products (AGEs) in elderly human tissue. This process repairs protein cross-linking caused by Maillard reactions.
AI moves way way too fast for any kind of traditional uh bureaucracy. Alex
The singularity is becoming a trade dispute Dave

AI-generated from the transcript. May contain errors.

0:00

Mera Marotti, the former OpenAI CTO,

0:03

just shipped her first model. It's

0:05

called Inkling. Customization over

0:07

leaderboard dominance uh is what's going

0:10

to win her the day.

0:11

>> She's built exactly the thing hitting

0:13

the market that exactly what everybody

0:14

needs. Right now,

0:16

>> I want to pivot to a discussion of

0:18

liquid AI, the small language models,

0:21

what they are, what they mean. Our

0:22

mission has always been building

0:24

efficient generalpurpose AI at every

0:26

scale that explores the computational

0:29

graphs of intelligence beyond

0:31

transformer and then figure out what

0:33

should be that architectural design that

0:36

brings the same level of intelligence

0:38

that a frontier model into let's say on

0:40

on a CPU.

0:42

>> CEOs building the most powerful

0:44

technology in the world are asking to be

0:46

regulated. Demisabi, CEO of DeepMind, he

0:48

called for a US-led frontier AI

0:51

standards body modeled on FINRA. When

0:54

the incumbents ask for the rules and

0:56

they set the standards, they set up a

0:59

barrier for all the entry-level labs

1:01

coming in. Let's just be real. AI moves

1:04

way way too fast for any kind of

1:05

traditional uh bureaucracy. How quickly

1:08

can you do it is going to be huge, huge

1:10

challenge because

1:14

>> now that's a moonshot, ladies and

1:15

gentlemen.

1:18

All right, everybody. Welcome to

1:20

Moonshots, your number one podcast in

1:22

all things AI. Your front row seat to

1:24

the singularity. I'm here with my

1:25

magnificent Moonshot mates, our original

1:28

quartet, AWG, DB2, and Seem, and a

1:31

special guest, Reine Hassani, co-founder

1:34

and CEO of Liquid AI, and a pioneer in

1:37

small language models, which we'll dive

1:39

into. Raine, welcome. Uh, where are you

1:41

this morning, pal?

1:43

>> Thanks so much for having me. I'm

1:45

actually in Spain right now.

1:46

>> In Spain? All right.

1:48

>> There's nothing going on in Spain this

1:49

week.

1:50

>> God damn it.

1:52

>> Yes.

1:52

>> I'm I'm a I'm struggling from yesterday

1:55

cuz I'm a long-suffering England

1:56

supporter.

1:58

>> Um it was a very difficult game to

2:00

watch. God, they were like just had it

2:02

with six minutes to go and they blew it.

2:04

>> Yeah.

2:04

>> And Messi's a genius.

2:05

>> That's the round That's the round ball,

2:07

right? Is that

2:08

>> That's the round ball. Now, Peter, this

2:10

is where the Faulland's war gets

2:12

relitigated on a soccer pitch. Oh god.

2:14

You know, I just flew in last night from

2:17

Zurich and I had the most painful

2:19

experience, right? I don't know why

2:20

every airline doesn't have Starlink. You

2:22

know, I'm suffering on some me, you

2:25

know, some meager thin pipe connection

2:27

and you're flying over the poles over

2:30

the, you know, the Northern Territories

2:32

and there's nothing. And I'm trying to

2:34

get ready for this pod. I was like,

2:35

"Please give me give me some bits." So

2:39

anyway, challenge.

2:40

>> You must have grown up on soccer, right?

2:42

didn't you were in Vienna for a while

2:43

and getting your PhD and or your

2:46

undergrad or whatever it was. Uh

2:48

>> yeah. Yeah. I mean soccer has been like

2:50

a big thing, you know. I'm Persian and

2:52

Austrian like at the same time, you

2:54

know, like it's a big thing for us. So,

2:56

um yeah, like competition is something

2:58

that, you know, uh it's it's extremely

3:00

core to what we do even today, you know.

3:02

So, and uh I feel like that's like one

3:05

of the main drivers like sports and

3:07

everything like has been part of our

3:09

lives like from day one and then getting

3:11

into science the same thing you know now

3:13

getting into ventures same things you

3:15

know and that's uh that's what we're

3:17

doing

3:18

>> just compete compete compete compete I

3:20

love it

3:20

>> well are you there for a little bit of

3:22

time or you coming back soon

3:24

>> no I'm coming I'm I'm flying tomorrow

3:25

actually back to San Francisco

3:27

>> and Salem are you are you jealous of

3:30

everybody of him being in Europe or are

3:31

you happy to No, no. Three weeks

3:33

bouncing around in 10 different spots.

3:35

I'm very happy to be home right now. I

3:38

was just in Spain where me and myself.

3:39

So,

3:40

>> uh, all right.

3:41

>> There was a lot going on actually like

3:42

in in in Europe, you know. So, that's

3:45

>> same same like you 10 different places.

3:48

Then,

3:48

>> you know, Alex and I were just

3:50

reminiscing the fact that Europe's uh

3:52

sort of major advantage in the future is

3:54

it's going to be a museum of the way the

3:56

world used to be. Um,

3:59

ouch. Ouch.

4:02

But it is beautiful. There's no

4:04

question. It is gorgeous. All right, I

4:06

want to jump into our first

4:06

conversation. We have a lot to unpack

4:08

here. And of course, our mission is

4:10

keeping you aware of what's going on in

4:12

the world and giving you sort of the

4:14

optimistic, hopeful vision of the

4:16

future. Uh join us and uh keep up with

4:20

the incredible pace as we head towards a

4:21

singularity. So our first story today,

4:24

once again, CEOs building the most

4:27

powerful technology in the world are

4:29

asking to be regulated. You know, last

4:31

week Sam Alman published an op-ed in the

4:33

Financial Times proposing a framework

4:36

for a US-led international forum that

4:39

would establish standards, provide

4:41

expertise, impartial analysis and

4:43

capabilities, and assess risks. This

4:45

week, both Elon and Demis are adding

4:48

their voice to the regulatory

4:49

conversation. Elon says he expects a

4:52

standalone uh regulator similar to the

4:54

FA or FCC to emerge at some point

4:56

because in his words the consequences of

4:59

AI going wrong are severe. Then this

5:02

week Demisaba CEO of Deep Mind went

5:04

further in an essay titled A Framework

5:06

for Frontier AI and the dawning of a new

5:09

age. He called for a US-led frontier AI

5:12

standards body modeled on FINRA, the

5:15

industry funded watchdog that polices

5:17

Wall Street under SEC oversight. He

5:20

wants the FINRA equivalent to test

5:22

Frontier models before release. He

5:25

reportedly wants this up and operational

5:27

before the end of the year. Let's take a

5:30

look at a quick video from Elon and then

5:32

let's jump into this conversation.

5:35

I think the the general I think it's

5:37

clear that there's a strong consensus

5:39

there should be some AI regulation that

5:41

it would be in the best interests of the

5:42

people to do so and I think we'll

5:44

probably see something happen. I don't

5:46

know on what time frame um or exactly

5:48

how it will manifest itself. I I don't

5:50

know. I mean this there's clearly we've

5:53

created regulatory agencies before. Um

5:55

while our regulatory agencies are not

5:57

perfect um and I deal with regulators on

5:59

a very frequent basis um with automotive

6:03

um you know communications Starlink um

6:06

and then uh FAA with with rockets.

6:08

>> I think the probability of there being

6:10

some sort of AI regulatory agency that

6:12

stands on its own similar to the FAA or

6:14

FCC is likely at some point.

6:16

>> You think so?

6:16

>> I think so. Um,

6:19

now the the reason that I've been such

6:21

an advocate for uh AI safety in advance

6:24

of sort of anything terrible happening

6:26

is that I think the consequences of AI

6:29

going wrong are are severe. Um, so we

6:32

have to be proactive rather than

6:33

reactive.

6:34

>> Um, amazing. So I this is a conversation

6:39

we've seen over and over again and I

6:41

think the government, the public and now

6:43

the CEOs want to be leading this. I like

6:45

the approach that Demis laid out, right?

6:48

Um, but the challenge we have to discuss

6:51

is when the incumbents ask for the rules

6:54

and they set the standards, they set up

6:56

a barrier for all the entry level labs

6:59

coming in.

7:01

See or Dave, do you want to jump in

7:03

first?

7:04

>> I'd be very curious to know, Ramine, if

7:06

uh do they reach out to liquid AI and

7:08

say, "Hey, join this, you know, we're

7:10

going to create a FINRA like regulatory

7:11

body." Um you the reason FINRA works

7:14

fundamentally is because people from the

7:16

industry who know what they're doing are

7:17

willing to join it. They're definitely

7:19

not willing to join the government in

7:20

general, but they're willing to do a

7:22

year or two in a regulatory body. It's

7:25

actually kind of a badge of honor. So

7:27

for this to work in AI, it would have to

7:29

be something cool. And people like

7:31

Ramine or maybe you know some of the

7:32

people on your team would need to come

7:34

into your office and say, "Hey boss, you

7:36

know, I'd love to do this for a year. I

7:38

think it's really good for the world.

7:40

Will you let me do it?" And then you

7:41

would also have to be like yeah this is

7:43

a functional organization go for it. So

7:45

if it passed those two hurdles I mean it

7:47

might it might actually work. I don't

7:49

know what do you think. Yeah, there's

7:50

like you know like there's a capability

7:52

kind of threshold that we we're trying

7:54

to define right now and some some sort

7:56

of an iteration is needed to see like

7:58

how this um how how this framework it

8:02

has to exist you know that's that's for

8:03

sure you know there has this has to be

8:05

there but uh it has to be related to

8:07

capability and then the thing that

8:09

becomes a challenge is that that there's

8:11

a horizontal kind of capability lock

8:13

into like active like let's say like

8:15

enterprise deployment of AI and then

8:17

there's the vertical because if you go

8:19

to different verticals like for example

8:20

we operate on on on device and with

8:23

enterprises that are connected to the

8:24

physical world you know like we're

8:25

connect we are talking to car

8:27

manufacturers like semiconductor

8:28

business you know and laptop business

8:31

you know like people that are building

8:32

like AIPCs and then we are also working

8:34

with financial services and we working

8:36

with like e-commerce and and biotech

8:38

kind of companies and we see like in

8:40

different verticals you know like the

8:42

enterprise applications themselves and

8:45

enterprise criteria for let's say a

8:47

limit or let's say a regulation kind or

8:50

a governance kind of a structure is very

8:52

different you know so for us it becomes

8:54

a lot more kind of verticalized because

8:56

we're building a specialized models and

8:58

those specialized models like

8:59

pervertical we we have had like

9:02

conversations with the DoD and we have

9:03

had like a joint uh uh submission of

9:06

something I think with AMD like pretty

9:08

uh like just recently like we with with

9:10

our team to really have um have a say

9:13

basically like in in in the design of

9:15

like these regulatory kind of things and

9:17

I think as an exploration I think

9:18

Everything has to be like getting

9:20

started. I like to look at it as a game

9:22

theory kind of uh way of uh looking at

9:24

it like how to design like policies in

9:26

general. Like it would be a stake kind

9:28

of game. I don't know if anyone is

9:30

familiar with I don't want to nerd out

9:31

like pretty soon on this but we can we

9:32

can talk about this.

9:34

>> Alexon

9:36

the better.

9:36

>> Sooner the better.

9:37

>> Yeah. So I mean stakeber games like

9:40

essentially like where two policies like

9:42

basic like there's like a you know like

9:44

you have like a policy maker and then

9:45

you have agents or bodies that are

9:47

working in that uh kind of game theory

9:49

kind of optim they they're trying to

9:51

find an equilibrium you know what is the

9:52

optimal policy and what is basically

9:55

which is good for both right and then so

9:58

there's the frequency of action usually

10:00

policy makers are slower than the agents

10:03

in the society you know so if you think

10:05

about like you can you can really model

10:08

like that, right? And then you can uh

10:09

you can figure out like an an

10:11

equilibrium. This is not a Nash

10:13

equilibrium because everything doesn't

10:15

happen simultaneously. Regulations

10:17

happens and then you agents react and

10:20

then you iterate kind of accordingly and

10:22

then you change those uh uh regulations

10:25

basically. So I think

10:26

>> I see you trumping at the bit here

10:28

buddy.

10:29

>> Yeah. So I think I think what Raine is

10:31

saying is exactly right. The problem is

10:33

we have no mechanism for that. Right.

10:35

like

10:37

if you go down the path remain that

10:38

you're talking about you end up with the

10:40

appropriate structures that are adaptive

10:42

and API based or like driven by

10:44

benchmarks or something but the

10:46

mechanism that people have today is just

10:47

static law and the minute you pass the

10:50

law the law is going to be out of date

10:51

right the I I found that the FA and FCC

10:54

analogy is is is pointing in the right

10:57

direction but a let's just be real AI

11:00

moves way way too fast for any kind of

11:02

traditional government bureaucracy

11:05

Right. So, you're going to need you're

11:07

going to need a standards body. You're

11:09

going to need real-time audits. And

11:10

you're going to need open evaluation

11:12

suites. Um otherwise, you're going to

11:13

end up otherwise you're going to end up

11:15

in political gatekeeping and then you're

11:17

in a mess. The problem

11:19

>> isn't that what's good about FINRA. It's

11:21

not a government agency. It's an

11:23

industryfunded self-regulatory org.

11:26

>> Uh it is, but then the teeth go to the

11:29

uh SEC, which is essentially being

11:31

dismantled right now. So there's all

11:33

sorts of issues here. I I I I think the

11:36

the trend is correct, but how quickly

11:38

can you do it is going to be huge huge

11:40

challenge because forget passing a law,

11:43

passing a structure where you have a new

11:45

construct like this takes a long time

11:47

and it takes forever uh in Europe. I

11:50

>> I think Ramine nailed two things that

11:51

are very different from FINRA right out

11:53

of the gate. One of them is, you know,

11:55

at Vesmark, if somebody on our executive

11:57

team said, "Hey, I want to be part of

11:58

FINRA for a couple years." We would say,

12:00

"Sure, put on your suit and tie. go to,

12:02

you know, go to the meetings, come back

12:04

in two years, we'll still be here.

12:06

You're not going to do that. Like if

12:07

Alexander Amini or Matias Lechner came

12:10

into your office or said, "Hey, I I'm

12:12

going to check out for 3 weeks." You'd

12:13

be like, "No, you you can't do that

12:15

right now." So it's difference number

12:16

one is nobody's going to carve out the

12:18

time to do something for years like they

12:20

do at FINRA. The the other big

12:22

difference is AI can help regulate

12:24

itself and FINRA, there's no equivalent

12:27

to that in FINRA. It's all people just

12:28

chatting for long periods of time. But

12:31

you know when you start talking about

12:32

Nash equilibriums and other ways to to

12:34

automate the process of regulation

12:36

that's a big big difference as well. So

12:38

the FINRA analogy has some legs but you

12:41

know the differences are bigger than the

12:42

similarities.

12:43

>> Alex is I want to hear your voice on

12:45

this B.

12:45

>> I I tend to think this is a bad idea. It

12:48

smells like regulatory capture. It

12:50

smells like the attempted formation by

12:52

Demis of a cartel of Frontier Labs. And

12:55

I think the elephant in this particular

12:57

room is openweight models and research

13:00

that lives outside of the frontier

13:02

capabilities. And it's very easy to

13:05

imagine a future with FINRA or or other

13:09

I mean worst case scenario FDA like

13:11

capability even though outgoing

13:13

personnel from the current

13:14

administration have declared uh with in

13:17

no uh no equivocal terms that there is

13:21

going to be no FDA for AI regulation.

13:24

that that would be maybe on the the

13:25

worst case end of the spectrum that we

13:29

we see the emergence of some sort of

13:31

cartel of frontier labs that locks in

13:33

certain practices, certain price

13:36

performance optimal frontiers that try

13:39

to box out open weight or open-source or

13:43

uh say university driven or other

13:47

nonincumbent

13:48

frontier models and I think that would

13:49

be an utter disaster for both the west

13:52

and the world for continuing to advance

13:55

us towards everinccreasing super

13:57

intelligence capabilities. I I just

13:59

don't think it's a good idea.

14:00

>> You know, and the other elephant the

14:02

other elephant in the room here is these

14:04

CEOs who are asking for some level of

14:07

regulation I I think are are looking for

14:10

a backs stop. You know, if things go

14:11

wrong, they want to be able to point at

14:13

someone else. Now, I mean, we're all

14:15

super fans of the optimistic vision of

14:18

AI, but there's going to be issues that

14:20

materialize. is there going to be rogue

14:22

AIs that take down a power grid or take

14:25

down you know stock market or something

14:26

like that for some period of time and I

14:29

I guess they you there going to be

14:32

lawsuits flying as a result of that

14:34

unless there's a regulatory body that

14:36

that backs stops these large these large

14:39

models and these large frontier labs

14:41

>> maybe uh there are I think at least two

14:43

different frames that one can look at

14:45

the liability side from there's regulate

14:48

the inputs that is to say like have

14:50

something that's FINRA like or FDA like

14:52

that regulates the raw capabilities of

14:54

the models at model construction time.

14:57

That that's one end of a spectrum. The

14:59

other end of the spectrum is regulating

15:01

the actions of the models. Like you you

15:03

let the lawsuits fly if if a model takes

15:06

down a stock market or does something

15:08

else that uh otherwise harms third

15:10

parties. That's the other end of the

15:12

spectrum. It's not obvious to me that we

15:14

should be in the business of regulating

15:16

super intelligence at super intelligence

15:18

time. That's that's maybe tantamount to

15:21

thought policing the AIS. And I'm I'm

15:23

not generally a fan of that notion of

15:26

let's thought police the AIS but not

15:28

thought police the humans. We don't at

15:29

least in in the West have a practice of

15:32

regulating what's in our minds. We we

15:34

don't have a practice or a tradition of

15:36

regulating an upper limit say or via

15:39

some sort of regulatory code saying

15:41

humans uh natural persons can't be above

15:45

some level of intelligence. is not

15:46

obvious to me why we would create a new

15:49

tradition of regulating or otherwise

15:51

coordinating the upper intelligence of

15:53

non-natural uh entities perhaps soon to

15:56

be persons but regulating the actions

15:59

that in at least the western legal

16:01

cannon that we do do and that I'd be

16:03

much more supportive of.

16:04

>> So do you Alex, let me ask you a pointed

16:06

question here. Do you think that this,

16:08

you know, sort of outcry for regulation

16:10

by the large frontier labs is is

16:13

regulatory capture that they're just

16:15

trying to build a moat against uh

16:17

further players coming in? Or do you

16:19

think they actually want to provide some

16:22

level of safety? What's their underlying

16:24

driver here?

16:25

>> I I worry that it's more regulatory

16:27

capture and creating moes for themselves

16:30

in a hyperco competitive landscape. And

16:32

it is h I mean, it is a rat race at this

16:34

point, the frontier. And I I I do worry

16:36

that it's more regulatory capture than

16:38

it is some notion of protecting the the

16:41

future here. Seem, what do you think?

16:45

>> Uh, not workable.

16:47

>> Well, I know that, but do you think do

16:48

you think it's regulatory capture or do

16:49

you think that the that these CEOs are

16:51

trying to just make sure we've got a

16:52

safety a safety net of some type?

16:55

>> I I I'd say it's like 50/50, but I think

16:58

there's a bigger problem. There's an

16:59

elephant in the room here. Some

17:01

>> there's already an elephant in the room.

17:03

We have a room has to accommodate so

17:05

many elephants. We need some other

17:07

non-human animals.

17:08

>> Better get a bigger room. You've got uh

17:10

non-state actors and other folks that

17:13

won't listen to this structure and

17:15

you're back to square one. What's the

17:17

What's the point? I'm going to say it

17:19

again. I've said this repeatedly. I see

17:21

no mechanism to regulate AI. It's moving

17:24

way too quickly. Any regulatory is

17:26

static.

17:28

>> And so it's going to have

17:30

position on that one. just if I may

17:31

Peter narrowly on that I mean there are

17:34

definitely hypothetical mechanisms and

17:36

that I'm not supportive of for

17:38

regulating AI like we royal we the the

17:41

US and China if going back to I think we

17:44

gestured at it in a past pod but uh past

17:47

proposals to say regulate the foundaries

17:49

regulate the chip outputs regulate the

17:51

data centers establish mutually assured

17:54

destruction type schemes where the US is

17:56

monitoring Chinese data centers and vice

17:58

versa like there are There are schemes

18:02

there are schemes at choke holds as

18:04

Peter says in the supply chain by which

18:07

one could imagine doing this

18:09

>> interesting mechanism

18:11

>> the only mechanism it's going to be like

18:14

a pandemic style threat detection that

18:17

would be globally agreed and I don't see

18:19

how we get there

18:20

>> well you don't need global you just need

18:21

US and China right the rest of the world

18:23

is is basically outside those blocks or

18:25

inside those blocks

18:26

>> all right well I think my guess There's

18:30

probably a poly market out there uh we

18:32

can we can look at and if someone wants

18:34

to search on it you know the question of

18:36

will we have a regulatory body by end of

18:38

the year right we have Demis saying by

18:41

the end of this year you know Elon

18:43

stepping up uh and and Sam obviously

18:46

trying to on his own on the side trying

18:50

to push for this so when the three

18:51

largest labs uh are pushing for it my

18:54

guess is the government will latch on

18:56

and will do this I don't think it's a

18:58

matter of if it's only a matter of when

19:01

and what the structure will be.

19:03

>> Well, I I should also note that Elon

19:05

clip I think is from three years ago,

19:07

which is interesting. You know, it's

19:08

from three years ago because Elon had

19:10

his sort of like painted on uh Iron Man

19:13

goatee uh when he was in that that that

19:16

phase. Uh so, so Elon's been forecasting

19:18

this for at least three years. Others

19:20

have been forecasting it for decades. We

19:22

still don't have it. We have like

19:24

subdivisions orgs within NIST that are

19:26

uh working on standards but that's not

19:29

really regulatory body. We have

19:31

executive orders that are creeping

19:33

towards a regular regulatory body. But

19:35

you know at what point it do we sort of

19:37

are we frogs boiling in water where

19:40

there's just like a creeping roll out of

19:42

increased standards expectations of

19:45

early reviews but it never quite reaches

19:48

regulatory agency level before we

19:51

achieve whatever escape velocity we're

19:52

heading towards.

19:54

>> Well, uh we're going to monitor this one

19:55

closely for everybody. I I think my

19:58

guess is we see this before the end of

20:00

the year and the question is can we see

20:02

something that's intelligent. Uh let's

20:04

go to the next story which is related uh

20:06

and this is a wild one comes from the

20:08

Washington Post that the White House is

20:10

reportedly weighing a capability

20:11

framework that would clear US models

20:14

open or closed as long as they stay at

20:17

or below the level of China's best

20:19

openweight model. What's the

20:21

translation? So the proposed ceiling for

20:23

what American companies can openly

20:25

release is pegged to what China has

20:27

already put out on the internet for

20:30

free. So here's the logic. Chinese

20:32

openweight models reportedly trail US

20:34

models an average of 7 months. I think

20:36

that's been closing over time. Uh so if

20:40

anything is at or below that, it's

20:43

already out there. It's an implicit

20:45

admission that open models cannot be

20:47

unshipped. Models like deepseek have

20:50

already been downloaded millions of

20:51

times. So once China releases a model

20:55

freely, banning it is impossible. So the

20:58

US response is to define a permissible

21:00

ceiling rather than a wall. The

21:02

implications were tying our open release

21:05

ceiling to China's pace of release

21:07

effectively giving you know Beijing

21:09

control. If they push their open weight

21:12

models higher then the US can release

21:14

higher models as well. If China holds

21:16

back, then they throttle us. And it's a

21:19

very strange mechanism. I was surprised

21:22

to see this. Alex, let's go to you first

21:24

on this one. What do you think of this?

21:26

>> Uh, I mean, the the obvious note here is

21:28

this creates the perverse incentive to

21:30

let China win the race to ever greater

21:32

super intelligence so that Western

21:34

models and western labs can escape

21:36

regulation. I'm not a fan of this. Uh uh

21:40

raine gesturing at you from a game

21:42

theoretic perspective. This is the I

21:44

think this would be the moral equivalent

21:46

of throwing the steering wheel out the

21:47

window in in a game of chicken. Not such

21:50

a great idea. Not supportive of this.

21:52

>> I love that. Oh my god. See, what do you

21:56

make of this? Is this just perverse

21:57

Washington DC logic?

22:00

>> Yes. This is like trying to uninvent the

22:02

printing press. I mean you we're

22:04

throwing the kitchen sink at things

22:06

trying to to to solve something that's

22:08

already a problem. The you you have to

22:11

move from like prevention and whatever

22:13

to adaptation. You have to go to that

22:14

and we we don't have the mechanisms for

22:16

that.

22:16

>> I mean you know I mean would you even

22:20

listen to this?

22:23

I mean what what logic

22:25

>> you might

22:27

>> well

22:28

>> what do you think of this? I mean the if

22:31

I just look at the the the the

22:33

progression of the technology itself

22:34

like it's it's getting into into the

22:37

place where like you AI are designing AI

22:40

like we you're doing the same things and

22:41

all of the labs are doing this and the

22:43

pace it's just the pace of model

22:45

development is like getting so so so

22:47

much smaller you know that is um is

22:50

becoming like exponentially more more

22:52

difficult to really like impose any any

22:55

of these type of constraints and I know

22:57

like they had these type of

22:58

conversations But it's just at the level

23:00

of conversations, you know, like these

23:01

are the things that are getting leaked

23:02

outside of

23:03

>> White House for ideas.

23:07

>> Let me let me give a headline from for

23:09

Alex for for his next newsletter. Um,

23:12

the singularity is becoming a trade

23:14

dispute

23:15

>> for the next newsletter. That was like

23:17

two newsletters ago.

23:18

>> Okay, fine. Whatever. That's out

23:20

already, but thank you.

23:22

Um, you know, I can just imagine where a

23:24

US Frontier Lab CEO calls DeepC can say,

23:27

"Would you please accelerate your next

23:29

model release? We want to get ours out

23:31

as well."

23:32

>> Or you see worst case scenario. I mean,

23:34

there there's actually a an even worse

23:36

scenario, which is you start to see the

23:37

the best, if not Western labs, unlikely,

23:40

the best Western researchers move to

23:42

China to escape this regulatory

23:45

framework. That would be a disaster. I I

23:47

think and and we've seen this, by the

23:49

way. There's precedent for this. We saw

23:51

this in biotech where China now exceeds

23:53

the west in terms of number of trials.

23:55

Like China is experiencing a biotech

23:57

boom that could happen in AI as well

23:59

disaster.

23:59

>> It's it's much more specific than that.

24:01

If you look at all the quantization

24:02

research, all the best stuff came out of

24:04

Microsoft research in China. All those

24:06

people now are at Chinese labs. They're

24:08

not they're not still working for US

24:10

companies.

24:11

>> China ran away with turnery and one bit

24:13

quantization. You see a little bit of

24:15

Western research. I don't think we're

24:17

talking that much about it in in this

24:18

episode. you see a little bit of uh

24:20

encouraging western research on like one

24:22

bit or 1.58 bit quantization but China

24:25

ran away with it due to constraints.

24:26

>> Yeah, it's a new company.

24:28

>> Look, this is a huge problem, right?

24:30

Because over we've seen throughout

24:32

history that open ecosystems always win

24:35

>> and this is not open versus closes which

24:38

open ecosystem wins and the US's

24:41

historical strength has been open per

24:43

ecosystems with permissionless

24:45

innovation. you like abandoning that

24:48

would be the weirdestly strategically

24:50

bizarre thing we've ever seen.

24:51

>> Yeah. The the other I mean there's even

24:54

a meta worry I have which is how do we

24:56

even define capabilities and and I worry

24:59

a little bit not just about regulatory

25:00

capture of the labs themselves. I think

25:03

there's actually so so sorry to be like

25:05

a a meta doomer here. uh there's a worst

25:08

worst worst case scenario which is we

25:11

freeze in or otherwise lock in the

25:13

benchmarks for how we measure

25:14

capabilities and that that would be I

25:17

think maybe even worse than just locking

25:19

in the incumbents as labs because if if

25:21

someone somewhere ratifies all right

25:23

like whatever index of evals this is

25:27

going to be the rubric going forward for

25:29

how we measure what's above the

25:31

threshold for frontier versus below

25:33

what's a frontier model versus not I I

25:36

worry that could so distort model

25:38

capabilities like they'll overex

25:39

exercise certain capabilities

25:40

deliberately and perversely under

25:43

incentivize or underbenchmax others that

25:45

it'll just totally distort maybe topize

25:48

the the future landscape of super

25:50

intelligent capabilities.

25:53

>> All right. Well, again this is a story

25:56

that we'll be we'll be following on this

25:58

news of ope models. So in the past

26:00

>> there's our topiary right there. In the

26:03

past, we've been discussing how ope

26:05

models uh have been in the US have been

26:07

lagging in China. We have Nvidia's

26:09

Neotron 3. We've got Google Gemma 4. But

26:13

that changed last night with some

26:15

breaking news. Mera Marotti, the former

26:17

OpenAI CTO, uh who walked out and raised

26:21

her one of the largest seed rounds ever.

26:24

Uh it was incredible uh financing she

26:27

pulled off in the background. just

26:29

shipped her first model uh for her

26:31

startup called Thinking Machine Labs.

26:33

It's called Inkling. It's an Opalweight

26:35

Foundation AI model that can be

26:37

downloaded by anyone, fine-tuned and run

26:40

on prem on your own hardware. Uh the

26:42

specs are serious. Uh it's a mixture of

26:44

experts model with 975 billion total

26:48

parameters. Only fires 41 billion at any

26:50

one time. So it keeps it, you know,

26:52

keeps the model going fast and cheap. It

26:54

was trained on 45 trillion tokens of

26:56

text, image, audio, and video. And very

26:59

importantly, reasons natively across all

27:01

four. Reuters Muse framed it exactly

27:04

right. Quote, "This is meant to be a

27:06

western alternative to the Chinese opate

27:08

models, Deep Seek and Quinn, that have

27:10

dominated the opo leaderboards." Uh,

27:12

now, interestingly enough, Maradi her

27:15

bet is contrarian here. She's not

27:17

claiming it's the best model on Earth.

27:19

Her own blog says so. Uh she's betting

27:22

that an AI that AI companies can adapt

27:25

her models for themselves. That

27:27

customization over leaderboard dominance

27:30

uh is what's going to win her the day.

27:33

>> You you've you've hit there, Peter, on

27:35

the really big thing. She's making this

27:38

she's pushing on the customization lever

27:41

>> and this because it's not going to be

27:43

the future is the raw power. It's going

27:44

to be the adaptability that's going to

27:46

win. And this is she's built exactly the

27:48

thing hitting the market that exactly

27:50

what everybody needs right now

27:51

>> and people owning their own models

27:54

working on prem and not giving their you

27:57

know uh their controls to the large

27:59

frontier models. I mean I I I do hope

28:01

this begins the race for powerful

28:03

openweight models in the United States.

28:06

>> Well it's it's worth looking at the raw

28:08

capabilities. So if you believe the eval

28:11

hopefully that thinking machines aka

28:13

thinky has released it's stronger than

28:16

neatron which is great like neatron

28:18

you'll recall from past pod where we

28:20

were discussing Alex karp's rant on

28:23

sovereignty of models neatron is one of

28:26

the incumbents at least on the American

28:28

side for openweight frontier models so

28:30

this this seems to be at least according

28:32

to the eels that think he's released

28:34

stronger than nematron which is great so

28:35

the the west now has a new frontier here

28:38

openweight model. It's weaker than GLM

28:41

5.2 which is arguably the strongest or

28:44

one of the strongest Chinese openweight

28:46

models and openweight models overall. So

28:48

it's not it's not one of the strongest

28:50

openweight models overall in the world.

28:51

It's obviously weaker than the closed

28:53

weight western frontier models. But I I

28:55

think point one it's great to have

28:58

better stronger western openweight

29:00

models. Point two, I I think it raises

29:03

the question, why has the West been so

29:05

bad at releasing frontier openweight

29:08

models and why has China been so good at

29:10

it? And I think it comes down to you

29:13

show me the incentives and I'll show you

29:15

the outcomes. I think the west has been

29:18

poorly incentivized to release strong

29:20

openweight models because these API

29:22

based frontier models are just such a

29:24

good business model. And we see

29:25

Anthropic about to IPO at a trillion

29:27

dollars and we see OpenAI planning to

29:30

eventually IPO at a trillion dollars.

29:32

And in China, which has been GPU and

29:36

compute deprived on the one hand, and on

29:38

the other hand has the CCP declaring

29:40

5-year AI plus plans to integrate AI

29:43

into the rest of society. has all of the

29:46

incentives a different incentive

29:48

structure than what the west has. China

29:50

has been much more incentive

29:52

incentivized to make money from the

29:54

integrations between AI upstack on

29:57

applications like robots and downstack

29:59

into the chips than the west has which

30:01

is more horizontally stratified. So to

30:04

the extent that thinky has been

30:06

incentivized in the west due to

30:08

competition and due to just a saturation

30:11

of the frontier by the closed weight

30:12

models into looking a little bit more

30:15

dare I say Chinese in terms of their

30:18

outlook and their incentive structure. I

30:20

think this is very helpful to finally

30:22

have enough competition in the west

30:24

that's creating ways to monetize

30:26

openweight models other than just per

30:29

token sales namely selling them into

30:31

enterprises and what you incentivize.

30:35

>> Two more.

30:36

>> Two more thing. I agree wholeheartedly,

30:38

but also you have to note that OpenAI

30:40

started open source open weight and then

30:43

went closed big revenue and uh Meta also

30:47

was the leader of

30:49

what happened to now it's closed. No,

30:51

they they have a new model out and it's

30:53

it's closed API. I mean, it's exactly

30:55

what Alex said. If you throw your model

30:57

out there as open source, what's your

30:58

revenue model? So I think, you know,

31:00

there's a real possibility that that you

31:02

put a data point on the map with a a

31:04

really solid open- source release that's

31:06

not quite on the frontier. You generate

31:08

news, then you have a data point on the

31:11

line, then you do another, then you do

31:12

another, and then when you have

31:13

something really groundbreaking, then

31:15

you go closed source and you launch an

31:16

API into corporate America. And so that

31:18

that's a wellworn path. So I wouldn't I

31:21

wouldn't say this is necessarily a

31:22

religion at thinking machines that

31:24

they're going to stick with. You know,

31:25

the trend has been the opposite of that

31:27

in the past. Raine what?

31:28

>> They're they're leaning into fine-tuning

31:29

as a service. If fine-tuning as a

31:31

service becomes like something at scale

31:34

revenue generation wise, I think maybe

31:36

this has legs, but who knows?

31:37

>> Yeah, it's a matter of like the business

31:39

of the company, you know, like thinking

31:41

machine can do uh three more iterations

31:44

of their pre-training or post- training

31:46

kind of RL kind of environments and

31:47

benchmarks like those numbers that you

31:49

see on the benchmarks and release like a

31:51

like a better model. But what they what

31:54

what what their business is their

31:55

business is fine-tuning. Like this is

31:57

kind of the place where customization

31:59

has been like something that everything

32:01

like the whole the whole market around

32:03

customization has been very empty. Like

32:05

if you look at the first attempts like

32:06

OpenAI released the OpenAI tuning like

32:08

fine-tuning kind of 3 years ago or

32:10

something it never took off. So they

32:12

took like a really good uh approach on

32:15

designing the base for fine-tuning

32:17

larger instance of the models for

32:19

enterprises because as you see like the

32:21

model layer is not anymore like you know

32:24

like the the the place where you can

32:25

actually extract value especially if

32:27

you're not hitting the maximum frontiers

32:29

you know like uh and even the open

32:31

weight kind of models when we're talking

32:33

about sovereign AI and integration of

32:35

these models into enterprises you need

32:37

to leave some room for let's say

32:39

fine-tuning these models and what they

32:41

have what what I think their business

32:43

strategy around what they're doing and

32:45

this release is genius because they're

32:47

deliberately releasing they're they're

32:49

putting they're leaving some room for

32:52

fine-tuning so that people can come in

32:54

and using their business uh uh their API

32:57

business because that's even generating

32:59

if I think in the order of uh one to two

33:02

orders of magnitude more tokens as well

33:04

you know on the on the on the

33:05

customization side so that would be like

33:07

even printing money at a larger speed

33:09

like in the in the in

33:11

absolute best case right

33:14

business entry

33:15

>> to to add to Raine's point I I think the

33:17

situation maybe is is even more extreme

33:20

so a couple points one OpenAI was the

33:22

first to my knowledge to launch

33:24

reinforcement fine-tuning RF as a

33:26

service and no one used it uh the the

33:29

whole tech world everyone I speak with

33:31

no one used it uh it was barely

33:33

advertised by OpenAI second point open

33:36

AAI shut off their fine-tuning API open

33:39

AI was one of the earliest if not the

33:41

first to offer fine-tuning as a service.

33:44

>> We used it all the time. It was it was

33:46

incredibly cool for its time

33:48

>> and they they've just they recently in

33:50

the past few months they announced it it

33:52

has either already been wound down or

33:54

about to be wound down. The fine-tuning

33:55

API has been shut off. So that I mean it

33:57

raises the question is is thinking

33:59

machines bet like explicitly contrarian?

34:02

Are they thinking that we're going to

34:04

end up in a world where reinforcement

34:06

fine-tuning and RL fine-tuning in in

34:09

general and fine-tuning like that's the

34:11

paradigm? They may be right, they may be

34:13

wrong. There there's an alternative

34:15

vision where RF just dies. Uh and we the

34:19

the baseline models are so generalist in

34:22

terms of their capabilities that all you

34:24

need is prompt engineering and there's

34:26

no need for RF at all. Alex, you talked

34:29

about the Alex Karp rant, right? Yes,

34:32

the result of that was um don't allow

34:36

don't use a model that is has all of

34:39

your data open to your competition. And

34:42

I do think we're going to see a real

34:43

push over the next months to years where

34:46

people want to use fine-tuned opate

34:49

models that they own on their own

34:51

hardware in their you know onrem and if

34:54

that's the case then the question is who

34:56

are they going to use which models are

34:57

they going to use are you know and is

34:59

the US going to start to regulate

35:01

against Chinese openweight models in

35:04

which case a dominant US openweight

35:06

model is going to take is going to have

35:08

an advantage and so is that the bet

35:10

mirror is going after um you know we're

35:13

going to probably see my guess is Google

35:15

step up in this area as well very

35:17

shortly you know take Gemma 4 to the

35:18

next level and hopefully we get some you

35:21

know two or three major in the same way

35:23

we have a closed you know the closed

35:25

model Frontier Labs competing and

35:27

dominating in the US hopefully we'll see

35:29

that competition give birth to you know

35:32

very strong opio models

35:33

>> it just to build on something you know

35:35

Alex and Verine were saying you know if

35:36

I compare today to a month ago you know

35:38

we've been fine-tuning Quen all week and

35:40

and the idea of using Inkling sounds

35:42

really compelling to me and you know our

35:44

companies are using liquid as well. A

35:46

month ago to fine-tune these things with

35:48

some huge engineering effort that

35:50

required AI experts. Now with Fable 5,

35:53

it's just a prompt.

35:55

>> So let's back up one second. Dave,

35:57

explain what fine-tuning a model is for

35:59

those who don't know.

35:59

>> Well, you know, back when GPT2 and GPT3

36:01

came out, you could actually very easily

36:03

fine-tune by uploading text right into a

36:05

window and say, "Look, you're pretty

36:07

smart, but you don't know anything about

36:08

my laundromat." you know like what hours

36:11

were open now who our employees are

36:13

entire payroll let me dump that data in

36:15

too and retrain the model with that

36:18

knowledge and if you didn't do that you

36:20

couldn't do anything useful because it

36:22

didn't have this holistic I know

36:23

everything capability back then so

36:25

without the fine-tuning it was

36:26

borderline useless to to use the models

36:29

then the models got so smart that

36:31

they're pre-trained with now 45 trillion

36:33

tokens which is basically every word

36:36

ever written by humanity has already

36:38

been trained into the model so people

36:39

tend to use them in their vanilla form

36:41

today and just say here write this code

36:43

for me or here drive this car for me

36:45

because it's already in there but then

36:47

when you get into biotech research or

36:49

you get into aeronautical or the

36:50

Mercedes you know like Ramina is doing

36:52

there's a whole bunch of proprietary

36:54

company knowledge that actually isn't in

36:56

the model so right now we dump it into

36:58

the prompt field and say okay here it is

37:00

in prompt form but that's hugely

37:02

inefficient

37:02

>> and you dump it into open AI and you

37:05

dump it into anthropics uh you know

37:07

model which now makes it accessible to

37:10

everybody else as well. I mean,

37:11

>> yeah. Yeah. I mean, Sam Sam and Dario

37:13

can see everything. All your proprietary

37:15

information, they're looking right at

37:16

it. That's what Alex Karp was ranting

37:18

about when he said, "They're stealing

37:19

your weights. They're stealing your

37:20

alpha." What he really means is they're

37:22

looking at your most proprietary your

37:25

company payroll, your company's secrets,

37:26

your your your chemical research. Like,

37:28

it's all going right over the wire to

37:31

these foundation labs. Is that what you

37:33

want? And of course, you know, for

37:34

defense and for banking, of course,

37:36

that's not what you want. And so now the

37:38

ability to bring the model in-house and

37:40

fine-tune it with your local data is a

37:42

huge is a huge unlock. But the the

37:44

higher level point is now the

37:46

technological capability to do it

37:47

relatively easily is hugely better today

37:50

than it was a month ago. So I think

37:52

mirror may be on to something here.

37:53

We've hit a real tipping point and Alex

37:55

Carp I think is right about it too.

37:57

>> I think there's two things that also

37:59

that that I saw that were really

38:00

interesting here. One is a very big

38:02

context window like a million tokens

38:04

because that means you can do a lot with

38:05

it. And the second is multimodality.

38:07

>> Yes.

38:08

>> And so this is aiming squarely at

38:10

organizational use. This fits perfectly

38:13

into the onrem proprietary data um model

38:17

where you you take your data customize

38:20

and fine-tune as you said Dave and that

38:22

will be the future. A couple of historic

38:25

notes again for for those uh

38:27

definitionally uh not tracking the the

38:30

full sorted history of fine-tuning. So

38:31

fine-tuning is is this notion that you

38:34

you start with a model. Model consists

38:36

of billions usually these days of

38:39

weights of parameters that are frozen.

38:41

And if you want to customize the model

38:44

for your purposes, you can conduct a

38:46

so-called fine-tuning process that

38:48

usually makes relatively small, hence

38:51

the fine changes to some usually a a

38:54

tiny subset of the weights in order to

38:56

customize the model for your end

38:58

application. That's fine tuning. There's

39:00

actually now decent literature out there

39:02

that suggests that conventional

39:04

finetuning like supervised fine-tuning

39:05

Laura style low rank uh adapter uh one

39:09

class of fine-tuning architectures

39:11

doesn't result in increasing the

39:13

capabilities of your model at all. And

39:14

at most it it results in like a style

39:17

transfer like you could fine-tune a

39:19

language model to only speak in

39:20

Shakespearean verse for example that's

39:23

not really increasing its capabilities

39:26

>> or only be an accelerando flavor output.

39:29

Well, uh, no comment. Uh, but but I I I

39:34

I would say historically fine-tuning

39:36

didn't have a history of increasing

39:38

capabilities. Then along came

39:40

reinforcement fine-tuning where for the

39:42

first time via large amounts of

39:44

synthetic data uh and giving access to

39:47

all of the weights and and not just like

39:49

a subset that's convenient to train. we

39:52

gained the ability and you know

39:53

fine-tuning post- training there there's

39:55

a there's a gray area between you know

39:57

what what's the distinction between them

39:59

but with reinforcement fine-tuning RFT

40:02

uh and the the release of the first

40:04

generation of reasoning models we saw

40:05

fine-tuning actually start to increase

40:08

the capabilities of the models now the

40:09

problem with thinking machines business

40:12

model as as I understand it is it's a

40:14

bet on the flavor of the moment that

40:17

reinforcement fine-tuning is going to be

40:19

a paradigm in the future right now

40:21

obviously the paradigm of the moment

40:23

that you could take an off-the-shelf

40:25

model and RFT your way to customization

40:28

with proprietary data and proprietary

40:31

environments and other things that that

40:32

seems to work pretty well at the moment.

40:34

But in some sense, if that is like the

40:37

permanent long-term plan of thinking

40:38

machines, it's fundamentally a bet that

40:41

we're not going to ever move beyond the

40:44

reinforcement fine-tuning paradigm,

40:46

which I think is probably wrong. I I

40:48

think probably RFT is the scaling of the

40:51

moment, but in the future, I can totally

40:54

imagine a generalistbased model that is

40:56

just so generally capable that it

40:59

doesn't actually benefit from any

41:01

further reinforcement finetuning on any

41:03

internal data sets and we tend towards

41:05

ASI. Let me bring up another key point

41:07

here on this story which is uh in the in

41:10

the context which is it's great to see a

41:13

woman CEO in the AI frontier lab area. I

41:17

think women are distinctly missing from

41:20

the entire AI industry, right? We have

41:23

Lisa Sue from AMD, but very few in

41:27

leadership positions. And I I think

41:29

that's an important point. I'm not sure

41:31

who else you know, Alex, are you seeing

41:35

>> Daniela Roose right where

41:38

Fe is also

41:40

>> and Fay Lee. Yeah. But again, we're

41:42

talking about what singledigit percent

41:44

of the AI industry is is women. Uh and

41:47

we need more. So, a call out to every

41:49

all the women out there, please jump

41:51

into this industry. We need uh

41:53

>> we we we need more balanced thinking.

41:55

>> Yeah, for sure. I mean, I I I do think

41:58

that's an important point to pull out

42:00

here.

42:00

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43:04

>> All right. Um let's move on to our our

43:07

next story here. Uh

43:11

it is uh a a fun one. Uh Alex, I was

43:15

walking in the streets of uh where was I

43:18

yesterday? Zurich. And I saw this come

43:20

up and I said, "Hey, let's talk about

43:22

this tomorrow." And and you said yes. Uh

43:25

so here is the uh the story we've talked

43:28

about the holy grail of AI is recursive

43:31

of self-improvement. It's sort of like

43:32

the holy grail of the launch industry

43:34

was reusable rockets. Um this you know

43:38

RSI is a holy grail for AI. It's the

43:40

idea that AI makes itself smarter. Uh

43:44

and then you use that smarter AI to

43:46

create the next generation of AI. It's

43:49

sort of the theoretical engine behind

43:51

the hard takeoff scenario of the

43:52

singularity. So this week, a startup

43:55

called Wo AI uh with researcher Zeng Yao

43:59

Jang uh published what they call

44:01

experimental evidence for the first

44:04

recursive self-improvement. Whether

44:05

they're first or not, Alex, I'll ask you

44:07

about that. They built a system called

44:09

AIdriven exploration squared, aid

44:12

squared, with an outer AI agent whose

44:15

job is to rewrite the code and the

44:17

research strategy for an inner AI agent.

44:20

In their experiment, they claim that 8

44:22

days of machine self-improvement beat

44:25

two years of expert human effort. So,

44:28

Alex, what do you make about this? Is it

44:30

the first uh is it significant?

44:33

Very significant. Highly unlikely that

44:35

this is anywhere close to first. So, so

44:37

a few bits of additional context. One,

44:39

uh this is actually this WICO is a

44:41

startup that's based in London.

44:43

Interestingly, it's not based in the US,

44:45

but still western sphere. So, great. Uh

44:48

so this is a startup built by a bunch of

44:49

as I understand it uh UC London grads.

44:53

Secondly a few points that I love about

44:56

this story. One it's an example of

44:59

defensive co-scaling which so to to the

45:02

extent we talk about alignment AI

45:04

alignment on the pod and I'm I'm always

45:06

banging the the drum of defensive

45:08

co-scaling as the ultimate alignment

45:10

strategy.

45:11

>> What does that mean? So defensive

45:13

co-scaling is the idea uh borrowed by

45:16

analogy from human alignment

45:18

human-touman alignment that rather than

45:20

hoping for call it the great man theory

45:22

of alignment that someone somewhere is

45:24

going to discover the perfect algorithm

45:26

for keeping AI safe instead the solution

45:30

for AI safety is AI policing AI in

45:33

proportion the way we keep cities safe

45:35

is we have police forces police forces

45:37

that scale according to some scaling law

45:40

in proportion to the population of the

45:42

city. So, so we have the good guys and

45:44

the bad guys and the the way we keep the

45:46

bad guys in check is with making sure

45:48

that we have enough good guys to police

45:50

them. Same idea with AI. The way we keep

45:52

AI aligned with humanity, a key way is

45:55

we make sure that we have enough good

45:57

AIs policing any bad AIs in terms of raw

46:01

capabilities that they defensively

46:03

co-scale. So what one of the things I I

46:06

love about this uh aid two story is that

46:10

the outer loop so so the the way this

46:12

recursive self-improvement process

46:14

worked was they had an outer loop and an

46:16

inner loop. The outer loop was tasked

46:18

with the with improving the inner loop.

46:21

The inner loop was tasked with improving

46:23

software development processes in

46:24

general according to some benchmark. The

46:27

outer loop discovered and both both

46:29

powered by the same underlying AIdriven

46:31

exploration process. At least initially

46:34

the outer loop and AI discovered that it

46:37

was able to achieve and this was an

46:39

emergent property better results from

46:41

the inner loop by keeping by preventing

46:44

the inner loop from cheating and reward

46:46

hacking. And so so in some sense the

46:49

outer loop is defensively co-scaling

46:51

with and policing the inner loop all the

46:54

while this is reaching toward greater

46:57

and greater capabilities. And I I think

46:59

this is also parenthetically an example

47:02

of a case you know all of those who

47:04

would say okay like we need to pause AI

47:07

capabilities and throw all of our

47:08

resources to AI alignment until

47:11

something preposterous in my mind like

47:13

2040 like stop all stop the race to

47:15

super intelligence. stop it all. Focus

47:18

on focus the next 14 years on alignment

47:20

research. It's going to backfire because

47:22

every alignment capability, I would

47:24

argue, is actually just cap is is

47:27

capability, new capability in in sort of

47:30

in disguise in a trench coat. Same idea

47:33

here.

47:34

>> We need stronger white hats to police

47:36

the black hats.

47:37

>> Yes. But the the beauty Yes, agree with

47:40

that. And also the beauty is the the

47:43

so-called white hats were emerging

47:45

organically uh on their own just from

47:48

the outer loop policing the inner loop

47:50

towards greater capabilities. That's

47:51

first point. Second point quickly the

47:54

same startup Wo has published a scale of

47:58

recursive self-improvement which is I I

48:00

think something the world has been

48:02

missing. So we have like for autonomous

48:04

cars we have uh the um the society of

48:07

automotive engineers has their like five

48:09

levels of autonomy for autonomous

48:11

vehicles. They've published a scale for

48:13

recursive self-improvement that that

48:14

goes from zero to three. Zero is

48:16

delegation where the AIs are slower than

48:19

human R&D. Level one net positive where

48:22

the AIs beat human a R&D at the same

48:24

cost. Level two they call ignition where

48:27

the improvers are better basically a

48:30

better improver. and level three

48:31

inflection self- acceleration with a

48:33

fixed budget. And the claim here is that

48:36

they're touching just starting to touch

48:38

on ignition. They call it level one

48:40

rather than level two. But the claim

48:41

here is like this is a pre-ignition

48:44

event, which I think is super exciting.

48:45

>> So they they rate themselves as a level

48:47

one here.

48:48

>> Yeah, they rate themselves as level one,

48:50

but reading between the lines, they're

48:51

like this is like sparks of ignition,

48:53

literally and figuratively.

48:56

>> Okay, so maybe I can maybe I can jump in

48:58

and and say a couple words. I'm not as

49:00

excited as Alex is like on the on the

49:02

topic and and I see I see this is an

49:04

impressive engineering kind of work that

49:06

has been done just to tell you a little

49:08

bit about like how the foundation model

49:10

labs are operating all foundation model

49:13

labs since the beginning of let's say

49:15

like four years ago or let's say 5 years

49:17

ago everybody has been thinking about

49:19

recursive self-improvement and for us

49:21

the definition of recursive

49:22

self-improvement is not the engineering

49:25

and prompt engineering of in inner loop

49:27

and outer loop to really get get some

49:30

code patches like changing because that

49:32

gives you the assumption that every

49:34

single AI model that you're using in

49:37

your pipeline is already like uh uh you

49:40

know like it's already defined and it's

49:42

already fixed with a certain type of

49:43

capabilities which is actually the case

49:46

in the whole pipeline that they actually

49:48

like design there's no weight changes in

49:50

the neural networks so that means like

49:52

the AIs that are actually getting used

49:55

right now there's no uh kind of

49:57

improvement of the core competences and

50:00

even behavior of the models they're

50:03

always like in the system prompt of the

50:05

of the models like changes in the system

50:07

problem because I will give you like

50:10

fundamental reasons why this is actually

50:12

limiting because if you just run the

50:14

like how I want to tell you how hard of

50:16

a problem is recursive self-improvement

50:18

for us recursive self-improvement means

50:19

that you have an AI system or an army of

50:22

AI systems that they can also like

50:25

retune themselves they can you know

50:27

adapt very similar to how humans do it.

50:30

You know, if you if you think about it,

50:31

the core competences of these models

50:33

that we have right now, they're they're

50:35

they're fixed weight models and and the

50:36

capabilities are within a certain kind

50:38

of threshold. And the frameworks that

50:40

they actually like designed, it's not um

50:44

it's a very nice early stage of show

50:46

showcasing an engineering pipeline that

50:49

can improve work, which is actually very

50:51

very important and very nice. But I

50:53

wouldn't I wouldn't go so much to say

50:55

like this is like the first breakthrough

50:57

in in in the entire AI industry or

51:00

something like in fact like about three

51:01

years ago we published a paper ourselves

51:03

like we talked we talked about automatic

51:05

design of model architectures you know

51:07

like you know as liquid AI we didn't

51:09

want to put like a bet on a single

51:10

architecture we have basically designed

51:13

self-improve like meta AI systems that

51:16

are actually defining their

51:17

architectures and then going through

51:19

scaling laws for various types of

51:21

architectures and then trying to figure

51:22

it out based on the criteria that you

51:24

define what should be the final model

51:26

and then right now at our company all

51:29

the process of training foundation

51:31

models and really like retuning the

51:33

weights of the system are are getting

51:35

automated. So we are talking about AIS

51:38

or designing AIS. So that's that's what

51:40

I what I would be like calling it like

51:42

the holy grail where you can actually do

51:46

automatic kind of tuning of a model. And

51:48

I'll tell you with the frameworks that

51:50

they kind of uh uh structured, it would

51:52

be extremely exhausted computationally

51:54

intractable to actually performing this

51:56

this job training an AI model training

51:59

like being able to customizing an AI

52:01

model and training an AI model on a

52:04

meaningful number of tokens for

52:06

adaptation or let's say like the core

52:08

competence of the model changing core

52:09

architecture of the model changing core

52:11

algorith learning algorithm itself

52:13

changing all of those matters adds more

52:15

and more complexity on the on the

52:17

situation. I can give you also like one

52:19

numerical kind of example of this.

52:21

There's a scaling laws called chinchilla

52:23

law. You know like chinchilla is like

52:25

the scaling laws of neural networks and

52:27

know like it is unproven like we have

52:28

actually unproven but still like it's it

52:30

gives you a good sense. It says when

52:32

you're training a neural network let's

52:34

say of a given size. If the size of the

52:37

model is two billion parameters, you

52:39

need 20 times of more tokens number of

52:43

tokens to train these models so that you

52:45

have you have compute optimality given a

52:48

compute budget. How many tokens do you

52:50

have to train a model so that you have

52:52

like a general purpose kind of system?

52:54

So that ratio is like 20. And then when

52:56

you actually do the math with the

52:58

frameworks that they have, if they want

53:00

to like let's say you launch this

53:02

framework on retuning an AI model to

53:05

recursively self-improve with this uh

53:08

framework that is getting introduced, it

53:10

takes us 350 years to really uh uh

53:14

fine-tune a two billion parameter model

53:16

with this framework. So there are so so

53:19

so there's there's a lot of there's a

53:22

lot of u computational complexity goes

53:25

into nested learning systems nest metal

53:28

learning systems you know like these are

53:29

the kind of problems that the last four

53:31

years of like at least at my company

53:33

like we have been heavily focused on and

53:35

I know friends at openai and entropic

53:37

has been like focusing on this recursive

53:39

self-improvement and entropic has been

53:41

having a lead on all of these things

53:43

because they thought about this before

53:45

every everybody else that's that's what

53:47

can put out there. Dave,

53:49

>> yeah, brilliantly said. And actually,

53:51

just just so the audience can get the

53:53

analogy there, when a baby is born and

53:56

then learns, you know, that happens over

53:58

about a 20 year time scale and after 20

54:00

years, you've got an adult that's

54:01

capable. Recursive self-improvement is

54:04

like evolution on top of that where

54:06

you're changing the DNA and creating a

54:09

new

54:09

>> You're changing the neuronal structure

54:11

of the brain along the way.

54:12

>> Exactly. So, so that happens over, you

54:14

know, about a 10 millionyear time scale.

54:16

So you go from 10 years to 10 million

54:18

years to go from learning to recursive

54:20

self-improvement or recursive evolution.

54:23

And so the big foundation model labs

54:25

like Ramine said are all doing it. It's

54:27

the most important moment in human

54:29

history. But there's no, you know,

54:31

little guy out there that's going to

54:32

come up and say, "Hey, I've got a

54:33

breakthrough in recursive

54:34

self-improvement. My Mac Mini suddenly

54:36

became conscious and now it's improving

54:38

itself." Just computationally it doesn't

54:40

even come close to fitting. So it's

54:42

happening, but it's happening with big

54:44

compute and big budgets. uh and and you

54:46

know there's a lot of room for

54:47

efficiency improvement a lot of

54:48

breakthroughs will happen but it's not

54:50

going to just pop up on some you know

54:52

>> you know there's a lot of fe there's a

54:53

lot of fear just to call it out that you

54:55

know recursive self-improvement leads to

54:57

AIS that take off a hard you know we've

54:59

discussed the hard takeoff and without

55:01

our understanding of that black box um I

55:05

I guess the two questions need to be

55:07

asked is do is there a concern that

55:10

recursive self-improvement once we hit

55:12

level two level three by that definition

55:15

um runs away in a way that um uh causes

55:20

an uncontrolled uh AI that is misaligned

55:24

with humans. And the second question I

55:26

have is when do you think we'll see

55:28

this? When do you think we'll actually

55:30

see recursive self-improvement hit? Is

55:32

ASI going to be that point uh or is it

55:35

post AGI whatever that means? See, I say

55:38

that for you.

55:40

>> I'll let you answer that exist. I've got

55:42

I've got several comments though but

55:44

Ramine go ahead what do you think is

55:46

happening

55:47

>> look the thing is I can tell you like

55:48

the early evidence of recursive self by

55:50

the way recursive self-improvement is

55:52

not related to one single agent it's a

55:55

social kind of character as well you can

55:57

imagine like you know you have societies

55:59

of agents so this defining kind of

56:01

structure for society of agents itself

56:04

self-improving these are the places

56:06

where actually mythos level kind of

56:07

class of models like I hate this analogy

56:09

but still like let's say mythos level

56:11

kind of class because everybody body

56:12

like heard about mythos and then what I

56:14

would say is that like the cyber

56:15

security kind of uh um um uh threads

56:19

that we are seeing like coming out of

56:21

these type of pipelines of recursive

56:23

self-improvement

56:25

they're real you know like like the

56:27

reason why I'm actually I I've always

56:28

been like you know like pro open source

56:30

and I want to open source technology all

56:32

the time like we are doing it all the

56:33

time like every single release of our

56:35

models is open source our science has

56:37

been always open source I believe

56:38

science has to be open source and I I

56:41

see the value of open source going

56:43

forward. But some of these concerns that

56:45

uh Peter you you brought up, they're

56:47

they're very real, you know, like the

56:49

cyber security kind of aspect of things.

56:51

That's why I feel like like a degree of

56:53

at least uh enterprises themselves

56:56

having some degree of kind of

56:57

self-control like about like how before

57:00

mass release of their uh their models

57:03

there there has to be always a certain

57:06

degree of selfch check and I think

57:07

entropic took it very seriously. The

57:10

reason behind is because they're seeing

57:12

the impact of recursive

57:13

self-improvement. So I know I know this

57:16

for for a fact because I I know what is

57:18

happening like in in seeing it at a

57:20

smaller scale. You know, you can do

57:22

reward hacking, but you can also like,

57:24

you know, like avoid reward reward

57:26

hacking like to to the certain extreme

57:29

and push a model to actually discover

57:31

some stuff that you know like are are

57:33

out of norm, you know, and and we we see

57:35

that on a small models like at a at a

57:37

certain capabilities certain

57:39

capabilities emerging and then I can

57:41

only imagine like what kind of

57:43

capabilities could emerge from let's say

57:45

larger and larger systems thrown more

57:47

and more compute at them. When do you

57:49

when do you think we you know when do we

57:51

have a pod

57:52

>> timelines remain timelines?

57:54

>> Yes. When do you have a pod that said

57:55

yes this is recursive self-improvement

57:58

because while you know while the data

58:00

released by WICO is interesting uh it's

58:02

their own self-reported data. It hasn't

58:04

been confirmed by anybody else yet and

58:06

you know there is a you know debate

58:09

about whether it really is or is not

58:11

real recursive self-improvement. When do

58:13

you think we actually, you know, you

58:16

give the trophy out to somebody? Is it a

58:19

year, 3 years, 5 years?

58:21

>> Yeah. I mean, I I'm telling you that

58:23

that so I I would say like you're going

58:25

to see like unbelievably kind of models

58:27

like probably in the next 2 years or so,

58:28

you know, like models that are like

58:30

going above our our understanding even

58:33

like that that's that's what what I

58:34

would imagine to get. The reason behind

58:36

it is because the time to developing the

58:39

next generation of the models is

58:40

reducing especially if the compute grows

58:42

like at foundation model companies like

58:44

with the rate that we are seeing right

58:45

now and if there is no like let's say

58:48

another chip shortage or memory shortage

58:50

like on compute or anything like around

58:51

the globe and they have access to

58:53

abundant compute we are going to see

58:56

those things like happening faster and

58:57

faster. Now in terms of model

58:59

development there's a concept that we

59:01

have we call it depths of customization.

59:04

So everything at a foundation model lab

59:06

when you're customizing a model when

59:08

you're building something that is like

59:10

better than its previous generation we

59:13

always categorize it with depths of

59:15

customization. The place where recursive

59:17

self-improvement today is really good at

59:20

is prompt engineering changing editing

59:22

code like in engineering kind of tasks

59:25

that you've seen like some elements of

59:26

these things like at a very very

59:28

superficial level let's say make my

59:30

model run fastest like doing kernel

59:32

engineering basically you know make my

59:34

model run faster that's what I call like

59:37

the shallowest level of kind of

59:38

customization where you have Python code

59:40

and then you're kind of adopting that

59:42

Python code to really run or maybe like

59:44

even lower level programs that you have

59:46

like on a kernel level to optimize like

59:48

let's say inference speed you know

59:50

that's something that I think with when

59:52

when they released Fable 5 they they

59:55

shared like and tropic actually shared

59:56

that this was one of the tests that they

59:58

have been performing you know but they

1:00:00

they don't share like the next level

1:00:02

depths of customization the next level

1:00:04

depths of customization is that can a

1:00:06

model fine-tune a small language model

1:00:09

to a production grade capability or a

1:00:12

smaller version of itself to a certain

1:00:14

capability

1:00:15

today like fav 5 can actually you can

1:00:18

push it to actually get to some degree

1:00:21

of kind of customization with some

1:00:23

>> performance optim performance

1:00:24

optimization

1:00:24

>> performance optimization of the model

1:00:26

but by fine-tuning then the latest holy

1:00:28

grail which is like the craziest one

1:00:30

which would be pre-training right can a

1:00:32

language model pre-train the next

1:00:34

generation of their own that's why they

1:00:35

hired karpathy because Andre was talking

1:00:38

about like nano GPT style kind of uh

1:00:41

fine-tuning you know andre like joined

1:00:43

entropic and now he's working on

1:00:45

pre-training automation like basically

1:00:47

automation of automation. So which is

1:00:49

which is a very very important kind of

1:00:51

element that we don't have yet because

1:00:53

the scale of these problems goes beyond

1:00:56

human imagination in terms of the scale

1:00:58

of compute that

1:01:00

>> you're jumping

1:01:01

>> I've got I've got for me this is by far

1:01:03

the most important uh story or slide

1:01:06

we're going to cover today. Um I'm

1:01:08

beyond excited for a couple of reasons.

1:01:11

uh the you know I I'm not really focused

1:01:14

on the self-awareness or the loop that

1:01:16

will go there but this is self

1:01:18

accelerating it's accelerating

1:01:19

experimentation right because the system

1:01:21

doesn't need it's it's improving the

1:01:24

process by which it searches and

1:01:25

evaluates and selects improvements and

1:01:27

the innovation loop begins to compound

1:01:30

that for me is the key why because this

1:01:33

this whole thing we've been doing called

1:01:35

the organizational singularity relies on

1:01:37

one thing which is can you get to

1:01:40

recursive self-improvement at the

1:01:41

workflow level. Here we're talking about

1:01:43

the model and we're talking about like

1:01:45

can you so but you don't need that

1:01:47

level. The bar can be much much lower to

1:01:49

improve invoice uh uh approval at a

1:01:52

company right that's a very low bar to

1:01:54

improve that process. So this is the

1:01:56

first glimpse of the organizational

1:01:58

singularity. It's happening at the

1:02:00

research level, but the because AI is

1:02:02

not just doing tasks in a in a workflow.

1:02:04

It's redesigning the workflow uh that

1:02:06

makes it better for doing future tasks,

1:02:08

right? And so this is proof now for the

1:02:11

whole thesis we've had. Um we predicted

1:02:14

this, but it's great to see it actually

1:02:17

happen because now I can kind of tick

1:02:19

that box off and go this is there cuz

1:02:21

now you have meta improvement. And I

1:02:23

think Dave's analogy of the baby

1:02:25

changing the DNA is fantastic. That's

1:02:27

such a great visual around this. What

1:02:29

the hell does it become over time? Um,

1:02:33

really really I'm beyond excited about

1:02:35

this.

1:02:35

>> I've got to move us along. There's a lot

1:02:36

that happened this week. Our next story

1:02:38

here is the Malaysian prime minister,

1:02:40

uh, Anoir Ibrahim has is preparing to

1:02:43

debut an AI generated digital double of

1:02:46

himself trained to sound like him for

1:02:48

public communications and outreach. So,

1:02:51

uh, this is one of the most prominent

1:02:53

cases yet of a sitting head of

1:02:54

government officially adopting an AI

1:02:56

likeness as a communications tool. Uh,

1:02:59

not a deep fake Biden adversary, but a

1:03:02

sanctioned official AI clone of a

1:03:04

national leader. Uh, we've seen this

1:03:06

before, Selene. we've talked about in

1:03:07

the past where Albania in 2025 uh

1:03:10

announced uh Dileia uh an AI avatar that

1:03:14

was formally appointed the minister of

1:03:16

state for artificial intelligence and

1:03:18

following a presidential decree became

1:03:20

the first AI system in the world named

1:03:23

at a cabinet level role. Uh so one

1:03:27

leader uh in this case prime minister of

1:03:29

Malaysia can personally address millions

1:03:31

in their own languages. It's worth

1:03:32

noting that Malaysia has 135 spoken

1:03:36

languages. So, um it's a big deal,

1:03:39

especially in in a nation like that.

1:03:41

Sim, I'm going to go to you first on

1:03:43

this one. Um we've been talking about

1:03:44

this for a while.

1:03:46

>> Yeah, I I met the um the former prime

1:03:49

minister when I was there helping them

1:03:51

open a university. Uh and Anoir Ibrahim

1:03:54

is a really really good guy uh to as a

1:03:56

follow on. Um the there's a risk here.

1:04:00

the risk is that the authenticity kind

1:04:02

of collapses because people need uh you

1:04:06

know you could you could launch a bunch

1:04:07

of deep fakes with this and have a huge

1:04:09

issue. Is this the actual leader? That

1:04:11

kind of question can come up. But I love

1:04:13

the general approach because if you can

1:04:16

do it from a with a watermarking or

1:04:18

something and say this is the actual

1:04:20

avatar, uh then it gives every citizen a

1:04:24

voice to um um plug into and gives huge

1:04:28

props to the civics of all of this

1:04:31

because now you're scaling civic

1:04:32

engagement and I think that's a very

1:04:34

powerful thing to do. It's one of the

1:04:36

biggest challenges we have with

1:04:37

democracies all over the world is civic

1:04:40

engagement and this allows you to scale

1:04:41

that. So I'm very excited.

1:04:43

>> Do you remember the reason why Albania

1:04:44

put this their AI cabinet minister in

1:04:46

place?

1:04:48

>> Yeah. Corruption.

1:04:48

>> Corruption. Exactly. It was to fight

1:04:50

corruption.

1:04:51

>> Yeah.

1:04:51

>> Yeah. Now, Malaysia is pretty decent as

1:04:54

a pretty decent place, but definitely

1:04:55

you you have that issue. But I think the

1:04:57

this is more of a PR thing and more him

1:05:00

trying to figure out ways of connecting

1:05:01

with the ordinary citizenry, which is

1:05:03

all great. I I love the fact that we you

1:05:05

know we had this conversation with the

1:05:07

uh president of Argentina uh you know

1:05:10

going full out here and it's interesting

1:05:12

to see which countries are sort of

1:05:14

experimenting on the edge. Um Alex, do

1:05:17

you want to weigh in?

1:05:18

>> Yeah. So many thoughts here. First I

1:05:20

think we're going to see more of this in

1:05:22

the west as well especially with like

1:05:25

extra high alpha personality leaders

1:05:28

that want to amplify themselves and

1:05:30

touch the the citizenry. AI Trump is

1:05:32

coming is how you're saying

1:05:35

>> high personality leaders that that want

1:05:37

to touch the citiz citizenry and in some

1:05:39

sense I I think it's a generalization of

1:05:41

social media. So social media enables

1:05:44

direct outreach from the leader or the

1:05:47

influencers to everyone but it's sort of

1:05:49

broadcast one to many. It's not

1:05:51

interactive. This generalizes in some

1:05:53

sense social media to make it a lot more

1:05:55

birectional since if you're touching a

1:05:58

million or 100 million or a billion

1:06:00

people it's very difficult to interact

1:06:02

birectionally with everyone all at once.

1:06:04

Now if you create a digital twin of the

1:06:06

leader or the influencer or the

1:06:08

organization now it can be birectional.

1:06:10

So I I also don't think it's just going

1:06:12

to be governments or government leaders

1:06:14

that adopt this. I I think it's likely

1:06:16

that corporations, corporate CEOs will

1:06:18

do this. We already see Zuck and others

1:06:21

creating digital twins of

1:06:22

>> themselves. We had DAR on the Abundance

1:06:24

stage last year. We're discussing this

1:06:26

that uh the employees made a DAR clone

1:06:29

that they could go and practice their

1:06:30

pitches on and get feedback before they

1:06:32

pitch to him.

1:06:34

>> Yes. And it won't just be I think

1:06:35

corporations, religious leaders and

1:06:37

religious institutions. uh if you're

1:06:39

Catholic, imagine having like a digital

1:06:41

twin of the pope and you you see like

1:06:43

lots of religious institutions,

1:06:45

organizations already creating basically

1:06:47

living versions of of their founding

1:06:50

documents and making those interactive.

1:06:52

But I think the biggest twist and we

1:06:54

we've seen variants of this movie before

1:06:56

are going to be in cases where what

1:06:59

start as digital twins of the leads or

1:07:01

the avatars uh of an organization uh or

1:07:04

an uh some sort of like organized

1:07:06

religion actually themselves become the

1:07:09

leader. that that's at at some point the

1:07:12

the digital twin uh it to the extent

1:07:14

it's interfacing much more with the the

1:07:17

the populace uh the the proletariat as

1:07:20

it were of an organization at some point

1:07:22

it's actually the digital twin of the

1:07:23

leader running the company and not the

1:07:26

actual behavioral origin that uh that's

1:07:29

running the company and I think that's

1:07:31

that's one way in which sem to your to

1:07:33

your exo point this is I I think a

1:07:36

potentially a pathway towards not just

1:07:39

uploading individuals like natural

1:07:41

persons or non-human animals but

1:07:43

uploading entire organizations into into

1:07:46

cyerspace into the cloud if we created

1:07:48

digital twins are the leaders and those

1:07:50

are the ones actually running the

1:07:51

organization

1:07:51

>> it could lead to a true democracy Dave

1:07:53

where do you come out on this I mean we

1:07:54

saw just one quick point we saw Sam

1:07:56

Alman talk about in the future if I

1:07:58

believe enough in what we're building

1:08:00

with with chat GPT it should be the CEO

1:08:03

of open AI eventually

1:08:06

Dave are you going to create an AI Dave

1:08:09

Blondon that's going to run Link Studios

1:08:11

and and Link Link Ventures.

1:08:14

>> Absolutely. Going to create an AI Dave

1:08:16

Blondon. And I'm shocked that there

1:08:18

isn't already a Peter Diamandis.

1:08:20

>> Well, there is there is one. It's just

1:08:21

inside the Abundance ecosystem. I mean,

1:08:23

anybody It was funny. I went to uh went

1:08:25

up to Calgary and met with one of my uh

1:08:28

dear friends and abundance member and on

1:08:30

his wall, I kid you not, he had a giant

1:08:32

screen of my AI avatar that he has all

1:08:36

of his tech employees talk to uh to sort

1:08:40

of get their moonshots and it was it

1:08:42

blew my mind.

1:08:43

>> You've got your own big brother, Peter.

1:08:45

>> It was like he goes, I want to introduce

1:08:46

you to someone, Peter. And he spins them

1:08:48

up and I you know, it's interesting to

1:08:50

have a conversation with your AI self.

1:08:52

Um, it is very compelling. I mean, I

1:08:55

have enough books and tweets and uh and

1:08:58

and Substack posts out there that it

1:09:00

does a damn good job. Uh, we should

1:09:02

effectively, you know, moonshots.com is

1:09:05

our our platform we're building out. I

1:09:07

think we should have AI avatars of all

1:09:09

of us there where people can do AMAs.

1:09:13

>> In some in some cases, Peter, I think

1:09:14

that might be redundant.

1:09:16

>> Ah, well, hey, in other words, you're

1:09:19

already an AI, but we can have an AI of

1:09:21

the Alex AI. Sure.

1:09:22

>> It would be so much better than the real

1:09:24

person because we'll have access to

1:09:25

everything we've ever said, all our

1:09:27

memories, all our thinking. The context

1:09:28

will be much broader. Go for it.

1:09:31

>> This whole area

1:09:32

>> Yeah.

1:09:33

>> This whole area is about a year behind

1:09:34

where it should be largely because, you

1:09:36

know, Noam Shazir was doing character AI

1:09:38

and and we had Steve Brown Peter that

1:09:41

was uh two years ago now. We had Steve

1:09:42

Brown make uh the debate between AI

1:09:45

Peter and Sak Aristotle.

1:09:48

>> Yeah.

1:09:49

>> Yeah. And and so it's been a it's been

1:09:50

possible for a while now, but all the

1:09:52

key talent working on it got sucked back

1:09:54

into the big foundation labs. And you

1:09:56

know, there's so many big big big uh you

1:09:58

know core technological breakthroughs

1:10:00

going on that the people that were

1:10:03

working on this just got absorbed back

1:10:04

into those things and not into the the

1:10:06

avatar. But my my mom would always tell

1:10:08

me when I was a kid that John F. Kennedy

1:10:11

beat Richard Nixon in the election

1:10:13

because uh he looked good on TV and TV

1:10:16

was the new medium and the prior medium

1:10:18

was radio and Nixon was still using

1:10:20

radio voice when TV had taken over. So

1:10:23

then, you know, elections go by and

1:10:25

suddenly it's the internet, it's it's

1:10:26

social media, now it's YouTube. But this

1:10:29

is another step function change in the

1:10:31

way that you reach out

1:10:32

>> to people and it's underutilized, but

1:10:35

it's it should be easily dominant two

1:10:37

years from now in the next election. And

1:10:39

so I'd be shocked if because the

1:10:41

technology is already there and people

1:10:44

are visualizing the medium right now as,

1:10:46

oh, let me make an AI version of myself.

1:10:47

I'm Alex Wisner Gross. Here's my AI

1:10:50

version. It's just like the real thing.

1:10:52

That completely misses the point. The

1:10:54

the AI version of it can in real time

1:10:56

access any information and make it

1:11:00

visual, graphs, charts, you know, it can

1:11:01

morph its face. It can it can teleport

1:11:04

through space to make a point and point

1:11:05

to atoms. It can shrink and expand. It

1:11:08

has all these capabilities that the real

1:11:10

human version doesn't have. And that's

1:11:13

why it's going to be so compelling. It's

1:11:14

the differences that make this new

1:11:16

medium so exciting, not the not the

1:11:18

exact clone. And so once people realize

1:11:21

that there's no going back. It's going

1:11:22

to be huge.

1:11:23

>> I think Dave, that's such a great point

1:11:25

that you make, it's the complimentarity

1:11:27

that is very powerful.

1:11:28

>> Let me let me close out on one thing

1:11:30

here. If if uh to our audience here, if

1:11:33

you've not sat down, if if you're lucky

1:11:35

enough to have your mom and dad still

1:11:37

alive or your grandparents still alive

1:11:39

and you haven't sat down and interviewed

1:11:42

them in video uh for hours at a time,

1:11:46

please do that. Right? you're gonna

1:11:48

you're gonna wish you had. So, I've done

1:11:50

that with my mom. I miss doing that with

1:11:52

my dad. And it's the ability for your

1:11:55

kids and your grandkids and your

1:11:56

great-grandkids to really have a great

1:11:58

AI representation of your of your

1:12:00

parentage and your your lineage. I think

1:12:02

that's going to be super important.

1:12:03

Reine, I want to I want to pivot to a

1:12:06

discussion of liquid AI uh and uh uh the

1:12:10

the small language models, what they

1:12:12

are, what they mean. uh super excited

1:12:15

you know uh just for full disclosure uh

1:12:19

you know liquid AI is a company in which

1:12:23

uh Dave you played a important pivotal

1:12:25

role as an early investor Dave you want

1:12:27

to give that backstory here a little bit

1:12:30

>> uh actually I got a call from Daniela

1:12:31

Roose over at CEL saying the best

1:12:33

student I've ever had Daniela Daniela is

1:12:36

you know one of the three I guess big

1:12:38

shot women in AI she runs CEL at MIT AI

1:12:42

lab in the world computer science AI lab

1:12:44

you know I don't know if you remember

1:12:46

back in the day there was the AI lab and

1:12:48

then LCS lab for computer science were

1:12:50

the two biggest

1:12:51

>> you know compsai labs at MIT they merged

1:12:53

them together and made one mega lab put

1:12:56

it in the new STA building which is that

1:12:57

crumpled look looking beautiful

1:13:00

structure uh you know right on the edge

1:13:01

of MIT's campus and then Daniela is

1:13:04

running that entire thing so I think

1:13:05

it's like 1500 researchers in the

1:13:07

building biggest AI lab in the world and

1:13:10

and so she has access to incredible

1:13:12

talent but she called and said, "Hey,

1:13:14

best students I've ever had have this

1:13:16

incredible breakthrough." And then she

1:13:18

completely lost me. She said, "It's

1:13:19

based on the nervous system of the worm,

1:13:21

the C elegance 300 neuron worm." Like,

1:13:25

what are you talking about? But it turns

1:13:27

out that if you, you know, I actually

1:13:29

don't know of any um successful

1:13:31

foundation lab uh that has really

1:13:35

rethought from the ground up the

1:13:36

transformer and thrown it out basically

1:13:38

and started over which which you know

1:13:41

humanity desperately needs because that

1:13:43

the everybody knows the transformer

1:13:44

architecture and the whole attention

1:13:46

mechanism is bloated. And if you really

1:13:49

go back to founding principles and think

1:13:51

again, you might be able to build

1:13:52

something dramatically like massively

1:13:55

better. And so the team went from idea

1:13:58

in a lab to billion dollar valuation in

1:14:01

faster than any company out of MIT in

1:14:03

history.

1:14:04

>> And luckily we were an investor in that

1:14:06

company.

1:14:06

>> Luckily we were. Yeah. And very very

1:14:08

thankful actually. It was very

1:14:09

competitive getting any money in at all.

1:14:11

So Reine uh we owe you a huge debt of

1:14:13

gratitude for for being invited to the

1:14:15

to the party. Um but uh yeah it's it's

1:14:19

uh one of about 200 unicorns out of MIT

1:14:21

all time but the only foundation model

1:14:23

company that I know of that reached

1:14:25

unicorn status coming out of MIT. So

1:14:27

it's a really unique uh and incredible

1:14:29

achievement and in record time too.

1:14:31

>> So remain take it take us from there.

1:14:32

You're you're doing your PhD under

1:14:35

Danielle Larus at the computer science

1:14:36

AI lab CEL and you're studying a 302

1:14:40

neuron uh worm uh C elegance and so take

1:14:45

us from there forward to what's uh what

1:14:47

you're doing now what is liquid AI

1:14:50

>> absolutely absolutely like before I

1:14:52

start like I want to thank you guys like

1:14:54

for for the support throughout like this

1:14:56

three and a half years years of liquidi

1:14:58

you have been like great support giving

1:15:00

us like the the the kind of distrib

1:15:02

contribution that uh a company needs,

1:15:05

you know, like and and at at our scale

1:15:06

like starting off of the east coast.

1:15:08

Thank you so much for doing that both of

1:15:10

you. Um and um and um yeah, so so 2015 I

1:15:16

was in Vienna. I started my PhD with

1:15:18

professor in Vienna, Professor Rad

1:15:20

Grusu. There he had the idea of like we

1:15:23

don't understand a lot about human

1:15:24

intelligence. Let's start on a smaller

1:15:26

animal and then from first principles

1:15:28

like if you understand how the neurons

1:15:30

exchange information in the brain of the

1:15:31

worm. The worm has 302 uh neurons in its

1:15:34

nervous system. It is uh its body is

1:15:37

transparent so you can actually see the

1:15:38

body actually lighting up like so it is

1:15:40

a one of the best model organisms in the

1:15:43

world. It won so far like four Nobel

1:15:46

prizes for humanity like you know

1:15:47

because it has 78% similarity genome

1:15:50

similarity to uh to human genome you

1:15:53

know. And the way nervous systems

1:15:55

compute in the brain of a little worm

1:15:57

which is 2 mm is um basically analog

1:16:01

very similar to how artificial neural

1:16:04

networks are actually computing. They

1:16:05

are also like analog switches like they

1:16:07

have like graded potential. They're not

1:16:09

spiking. So in biological neural

1:16:11

networks usually in the brains you see

1:16:13

neurons a spike and when you have a

1:16:15

spike that's there's an analog to

1:16:17

digital kind of uh transfer of uh uh

1:16:20

things are happening and that's a

1:16:21

natural development of nervous systems

1:16:24

for uh in in the human beings and and

1:16:26

bigger animals for propagation for

1:16:28

efficient propagation of information. In

1:16:30

the brain of the worm neurons behave

1:16:32

very similar to how artificial neural

1:16:33

networks react but then the the

1:16:35

mechanisms are very interesting. So we

1:16:38

wanted to add more complexity into the

1:16:40

neuro like every individual single

1:16:42

blocks of nervous systems and see can we

1:16:45

pack more information into inside the

1:16:48

smaller kind of units of compute you

1:16:50

know and that's what we have done so

1:16:52

Danielle Arus two years into basically

1:16:54

discovery of these things that I was

1:16:55

doing with my co-founder Matias Lechner

1:16:58

Matias was a master student in Vienna

1:17:00

Vienna University of Technology and I

1:17:02

was a PhD student and then when Daniela

1:17:04

heard from Radu that uh you know like

1:17:07

this project is going on. Danila was

1:17:08

like, "Oh my god, this is crazy. We

1:17:10

should apply this in autonomy in

1:17:11

robotics and all the sort of things

1:17:13

because you're showing like uh a handful

1:17:15

of neurons can drive and control

1:17:17

autonomous systems, you know, and can we

1:17:19

scale this to vehicles? Can we scale it

1:17:21

to drones to to jets to like like

1:17:24

predictive kind of places?" So Daniela

1:17:27

came in and said, "Would you guys

1:17:28

consider coming to MIT?" And we we went

1:17:30

there since 2017 in the middle of my

1:17:32

PhD. I actually joined CELL there. We uh

1:17:36

we continued working on the uh on this

1:17:38

technology which was you know like from

1:17:40

a base is a completely different things

1:17:42

a neuroscience inspired the math behind

1:17:45

like every single neuron in a liquid

1:17:47

neural networks that became kind of my

1:17:49

PhD thesis is very different than how

1:17:51

attention works you know these are based

1:17:53

on recurrent neural networks these are b

1:17:56

based on continuous time processes you

1:17:58

know like more and more kind of nature

1:18:01

inspired computation went into the

1:18:02

design of uh uh found design of kind of

1:18:06

AI systems and then we applied these

1:18:09

liquid neural networks as a completely

1:18:11

new base because uh we applied them to

1:18:14

real world scenarios like robotics

1:18:16

because you can pack a lot more

1:18:18

information into smaller kind of

1:18:19

processors in the real world in the

1:18:21

physical world you don't have the luxury

1:18:23

of having abundant compute let's say a

1:18:25

robot doesn't have it doesn't have like

1:18:27

a lot of GPUs or parallel data centers

1:18:29

like attached to it a robot has a CPU

1:18:32

and a small like let's say GPU and let's

1:18:35

say an NPU a custom ASIC. So you can

1:18:38

actually take this type of uh you know

1:18:40

intelligence that we design that deliver

1:18:43

basically intelligence at the level of

1:18:45

like models that are 10 to a thousand

1:18:46

times larger than themselves. You can

1:18:49

bring those things like directly running

1:18:50

on CPUs, GPUs and NPUs outside of data

1:18:53

centers. So we thought that okay this

1:18:55

format is is going to open up an

1:18:58

opportunity for us to bring in like

1:18:59

alternative architecture if we scale

1:19:01

this technology to let's say into into

1:19:03

the regime of foundation models which is

1:19:06

kind of large language models and SLMs

1:19:08

uh as a whole like human understandable

1:19:10

like making this liquid neural networks

1:19:12

or architectures that we have uh also

1:19:15

scalable like the transformer

1:19:16

architecture and uh we built like a

1:19:19

foundation model lab around the idea uh

1:19:22

in 2020 2023

1:19:25

beginning of 2023 I think at the very

1:19:27

beginning when we started there was no

1:19:29

foundation model lab apart from deep

1:19:31

mind and and and open AAI basically like

1:19:33

when we started and this notion of

1:19:35

foundation model labs didn't exist and

1:19:37

everybody was betting on top of uh uh

1:19:40

you know transformer architecture and we

1:19:43

came in and we said okay so why don't we

1:19:45

explore this space of alternative

1:19:47

architectures starting from the priors

1:19:50

that we have from nature and then take

1:19:52

take a different approach build a meta

1:19:54

AI system again uh basically an

1:19:57

automated AI system that allows us an AI

1:19:59

that designs AI that explores the

1:20:02

computational graphs of intelligence

1:20:04

beyond transformer and then figure out

1:20:06

what should be that architectural design

1:20:09

that brings the same level of

1:20:11

intelligence than a frontier model into

1:20:13

let's say on on a CPU that we can run

1:20:15

let's say a physical system

1:20:17

>> take a second and and walk us through so

1:20:19

these are small language models can you

1:20:21

define an SLM M and how it varies from

1:20:24

an LLM.

1:20:26

>> Definitely. So when you start uh

1:20:28

developing kind of foundation models,

1:20:30

you start you you run something called

1:20:32

scaling laws. You know like a scaling

1:20:34

laws is like basically starting with a

1:20:35

smaller models and with these smaller

1:20:38

models you train them on a certain

1:20:39

number of token budget given amount of

1:20:41

compute. You train these models to see

1:20:44

how well they perform. Then you start

1:20:46

systematically making the models larger

1:20:48

and larger. So that and and we have seen

1:20:51

scaling laws shows that the larger you

1:20:53

make the models the more token budgets

1:20:54

you spend the more intelligence of a

1:20:56

system you can get and this has been

1:20:59

like giving rise to large language

1:21:01

models along the way of scaling there

1:21:03

are instant instantiation of the models

1:21:06

which are smaller you know like on the

1:21:08

scaling laws but we have been doing as a

1:21:11

lab our mission has always been building

1:21:13

efficient general purpose AI at every

1:21:15

scale so we started as a foundation

1:21:17

model lab to really run the scaling laws

1:21:20

on on efficiency front you know and

1:21:21

efficiency was a first class citizen for

1:21:24

us you know like thinking about

1:21:25

computational graphs of intelligence

1:21:27

smaller models are models that are you

1:21:30

know like along the line of like a

1:21:32

scaling they can solve um let's say they

1:21:35

don't have like the general capability

1:21:36

to the level of the largest kind of

1:21:38

language models but they can be

1:21:40

specialized to solve dedicated problems

1:21:43

they are general purpose small language

1:21:45

models are general purpose in the sense

1:21:47

that they understand language They can

1:21:49

see and they can hear in a multimodal

1:21:51

kind of format but they don't it doesn't

1:21:54

mean that they can solve let's say a

1:21:56

homework in physics and at the same time

1:21:58

they can solve an enterprise problem you

1:22:00

usually specialize smaller language

1:22:02

models

1:22:03

>> and what does small mean what does small

1:22:04

mean in this case

1:22:06

>> small means like basic I mean now they

1:22:08

come like now small would be like

1:22:09

anything below 100 billion parameters

1:22:11

you know like that's kind of the regime

1:22:13

that I would count I mean midsize like

1:22:15

basically is is around that that size

1:22:18

but I would consider like anything below

1:22:20

100 billion parameter is something that

1:22:22

is not small and mediumsiz kind of

1:22:24

models you know there's no there's no

1:22:26

clear threshold of like let's say what

1:22:28

is the number of parameters but for us

1:22:30

like the notion of ondevice AI is is

1:22:33

extremely important here to distinguish

1:22:35

within this range of parameters ondevice

1:22:38

AI is like models that you can actually

1:22:41

deploy them uh on the on an actual kind

1:22:43

of device physical device this could be

1:22:45

a

1:22:46

>> let's make this concrete cuz you've got

1:22:48

a significant deal with Mercedes.

1:22:50

>> Yes.

1:22:50

>> Um and can you speak to that and let's

1:22:52

talk about you know these these SLMs in

1:22:56

terms of uh onrem uh basically they're

1:22:59

they're and energy efficient uh you know

1:23:02

fast offline. Let's let's dive into that

1:23:05

give people sort of a real understanding

1:23:07

here.

1:23:08

>> Absolutely. So as I mentioned you can

1:23:11

specialize these foundation models. We

1:23:13

work with a lot of enterprises that are

1:23:15

building devices themselves. Like

1:23:17

automotive is a device is a is a is a is

1:23:19

an environment where you have a lot of

1:23:21

chips in there and now in a car you

1:23:24

don't have that much that much compute.

1:23:26

So there's like one chip that is

1:23:27

available for infotainment and incar

1:23:29

intelligence you know that chip is very

1:23:31

very small. The Qualcomm chip or let's

1:23:33

say Samsung chip like depending on like

1:23:35

what company is providing the chip like

1:23:37

that chip is like very very small. We

1:23:39

are talking about 2 GB to 8 GB of RAM,

1:23:42

you know, like not more than that. So

1:23:44

the model has to be very small and at

1:23:46

the same time being able to perform

1:23:48

because we want to bring this and enable

1:23:50

a private space inside the car that

1:23:53

powers the intelligence of the car in

1:23:55

the car. Car is a safety critical

1:23:57

environment. You don't want your car to

1:23:59

be driven by an AI model that is sitting

1:24:00

in the cloud. Why? Because connectivity

1:24:02

is not uh always available, right? then

1:24:06

uh it is it is private because it's one

1:24:08

of those spaces that people spend a lot

1:24:09

of time in and you don't want those

1:24:11

conversations to be like recorded. So we

1:24:13

brought the intelligence like um

1:24:16

basically we brought u uh one of our

1:24:19

multimodal foundation models that is

1:24:21

only uh less than one gigabyte of in

1:24:24

size

1:24:24

>> and it can go inside the car's chip like

1:24:27

very very tiny chip. The chip could be

1:24:30

as cheap as $60, you know, like that's

1:24:32

what I'm saying. Like we're bringing

1:24:33

that level of intelligence into that

1:24:35

that voice and it is going to power kind

1:24:38

of the multimodal intelligence

1:24:39

experience inside the car. We do that

1:24:42

with all car manufacturers. We announced

1:24:43

the Mercedes partnership as a first uh f

1:24:46

first kind of uh point of entry because

1:24:49

automotive is like it's very sensitive

1:24:51

kind of uh topic and and they're they're

1:24:53

pretty slow. One of the things that

1:24:55

Mercedes dispense actually enjoyed from

1:24:56

this process was the speed of operations

1:24:59

that we had for enterprises you know

1:25:00

like when we are bringing this type of

1:25:02

technology inhouse this has been like

1:25:04

one of those uh cornerstones of landing

1:25:06

the deals you know because we want to

1:25:08

work we are an enterprise company we're

1:25:09

a B2B company we are bringing our full

1:25:12

power to really like deploy the

1:25:13

solutions and really have platforms that

1:25:16

allows people to fine-tune like their

1:25:18

small models and fine-tuning small

1:25:20

models is not that expensive. It's

1:25:22

something that is extremely tangible. So

1:25:24

they we fine-tune kind of the small

1:25:26

models for the the applications inside

1:25:29

the car. We also have data flywheel kind

1:25:31

of systems that allows the system always

1:25:34

stay adaptable. Imagine some of the some

1:25:36

of the problems in enterprise AI has

1:25:38

always been let's download a GLM 2 5.2

1:25:41

like you know and and let's say an open

1:25:43

source model and put that in production

1:25:45

and then so what happens after you put

1:25:47

the system in production? What happens

1:25:49

like when there's a drift from the use

1:25:51

cases that is hitting this model inside

1:25:54

let's say a car and in the physical

1:25:55

world it becomes even more challenging

1:25:58

because when you deploy an intelligence

1:25:59

that is completely kind of disconnected

1:26:02

from the cloud how do you want to like

1:26:05

maintain updates of the system because

1:26:07

we have always thought about like

1:26:09

intelligence in the format of liquid you

1:26:11

know like intelligence has to always

1:26:13

stay adaptable and um and that that's

1:26:15

that's kind of a portion that we're also

1:26:17

pushing on to really be able to collect

1:26:20

the data and personalize models to the

1:26:23

experience of every single user. With

1:26:25

Mercedes, we're rolling this out first

1:26:27

in North America uh as as soon as

1:26:30

basically this year. All the

1:26:31

Mercedes-Benz North America cars like

1:26:33

from 2022 on they're going to get an

1:26:35

update overtheair update because the

1:26:37

size of the update is 600 megabyte. So

1:26:40

that's that's like a that's like a

1:26:42

overlay of like it doesn't consume that

1:26:44

much internet to really update your

1:26:45

software and that allows us to also

1:26:47

further customization. Imagine if every

1:26:49

update that you want to perform on the

1:26:51

system is in the order of 20 megabytes

1:26:54

because we are doing like some sort of

1:26:55

lore adapters and let's say all sort of

1:26:57

adapters that we can actually bring in

1:26:58

inside the car. You would be able to

1:27:00

have like a recursively kind of

1:27:02

improving the experience of the user as

1:27:05

well. So that's kind of let's take it

1:27:08

make it more concrete for me. So what am

1:27:10

I going to be how am I using this model

1:27:11

in my Mercedes next year? So right now

1:27:14

my experience is using Grock in my

1:27:16

Tesla, right? And it's over the air. If

1:27:18

I don't have connectivity, I don't have

1:27:20

Grock. Uh but you know what kind of what

1:27:23

kind of queries what kind of

1:27:24

capabilities does this all of a sudden

1:27:26

enable in a Mercedes?

1:27:28

>> It has access it it's it's sitting below

1:27:31

the the the operating system. So that

1:27:33

means like it is basically it is like

1:27:36

basically have access to all the

1:27:38

functions inside the car you know so

1:27:40

there are 700 functions inside the car

1:27:42

700 to like I don't know 1,200 depending

1:27:45

on what what you count as a function you

1:27:47

can you can talk to your car you can

1:27:49

control like all the panels of your car

1:27:51

you can ask for let's say manuals of the

1:27:53

car you know like when when you're like

1:27:55

get let's say stuck somewhere you know

1:27:56

like something pops up you know like you

1:27:58

would be able to talk to the car there

1:28:00

are memory features that we are adding

1:28:01

to the car like You basically can have

1:28:04

conversations with that with that

1:28:05

system. Once the like one of the

1:28:08

beauties of this system is that like it

1:28:09

has full access to the to all the

1:28:11

functionalities of the car plus all the

1:28:13

apps because there are like function

1:28:15

calls. They're one function calls away,

1:28:17

you know. So if you want to control any

1:28:19

other thing from this from this

1:28:21

intelligence unit inside the car, you

1:28:22

would be controlling everything all the

1:28:24

ecosystem that is sitting on top of the

1:28:27

uh um sitting on top of the operating

1:28:29

system of the car.

1:28:32

So basically I mean if I get you right

1:28:34

there the advantage of the SLMs are

1:28:37

first of all you know the size of the

1:28:39

model I I assume energy consumption

1:28:41

they're efficient um and they can run on

1:28:45

on prem uh do I mean how do you avoid or

1:28:49

reduce sort of overgeneralization of

1:28:51

these models compared to LLMs?

1:28:54

>> What do you mean overgeneralization? In

1:28:55

other words, uh are the do you have

1:28:58

enough capabilities internal to them so

1:29:00

that they are uh actually able to

1:29:02

accurately answer the questions you're

1:29:04

asking?

1:29:05

>> Great question. So if you have like you

1:29:07

know I I told you about the framework of

1:29:09

foundation model development which is

1:29:10

depths of customization.

1:29:12

>> We try to actually stay adaptable and

1:29:15

have access to the tools across these

1:29:17

customization stacks. Sometimes prompt

1:29:19

engineering is enough. Sometimes you got

1:29:21

to fine-tune the model. Sometimes you

1:29:22

have to do go and pre-train a model

1:29:24

again you know for the core capabilities

1:29:26

or a specialization of intelligence. Now

1:29:29

we make systems that are you know our

1:29:31

platforms are getting into the place

1:29:32

where they're automatically identifying

1:29:35

what depths of customization is needed

1:29:37

for a certain solution and the platform

1:29:39

basically like it's it's one of the

1:29:40

products of the company that we sell to

1:29:42

enterprises to allow them to fine-tune

1:29:45

kind of models like I I don't want to

1:29:47

call it fine tune customize a model at a

1:29:49

level that is needed for that uh uh for

1:29:52

that system to actually operate right so

1:29:54

for Mercedes-Benz we have a let's say

1:29:57

like the framework that we have at at

1:29:59

in-house. We call it model plus X, you

1:30:02

know, model plus a platform that allows

1:30:04

you to perform customization. It's not

1:30:07

just the models that we're selling to

1:30:09

enterprises, the static weights of a

1:30:10

model. We sell them something that they

1:30:12

can actually like retune and fine-tune

1:30:14

the system. Detecting how how much uh

1:30:18

generality like the base models have,

1:30:20

it's something that you know like

1:30:21

libraries of liquid models are coming

1:30:23

out for many different applications. We

1:30:24

have models that we're working with for

1:30:27

example in silicon medicine like you

1:30:28

know Alex

1:30:29

>> I introduced you Alex

1:30:30

>> that you introduced us Peter like I

1:30:33

remember and um and through that kind of

1:30:35

interaction like it is getting big you

1:30:36

know because they discovered that liquid

1:30:38

foundation models are actually pretty

1:30:39

good getting customized for a certain no

1:30:42

they're they're basically like really

1:30:45

really well orable so and and and that's

1:30:47

something that they they they figured

1:30:49

out that it comes handy for them. So now

1:30:51

we have a state-of-the-art biotech

1:30:53

foundation models like longevity

1:30:54

foundation models like these are the

1:30:56

kind of things that we're building in

1:30:57

bio and imagine like as a horizontal

1:30:59

company that is building foundation

1:31:00

models we went to like fine-tuning and

1:31:02

that became like something that we have

1:31:05

we have managed to do and then in terms

1:31:07

of um you know like some of the uh uh

1:31:10

some of the other engagements like we

1:31:11

recently with with Shopify we entered

1:31:13

like uh one uh 1 billion kind of request

1:31:17

address inside the Shopify kind of

1:31:19

framework And uh there like what we've

1:31:22

done we uh we deploy our liquid

1:31:24

foundation models in production. They

1:31:25

have been in production for the last 6

1:31:27

months and they are really serving

1:31:29

clients you know and and Shopify is like

1:31:31

a huge uh uh base like we are touching

1:31:34

100 million kind of hundreds of millions

1:31:36

of kind of users 10 billion products and

1:31:38

many different kind of uh places to to

1:31:41

integrate. We are working with

1:31:42

Mercedes-Benz as I mentioned like on the

1:31:44

car kind of side of things. We're

1:31:45

working with AMD and uh other chip

1:31:48

manufacturers to really bring AI uh

1:31:50

let's say um low code AI experiences on

1:31:53

PCs as well. So that's like another uh

1:31:55

area that we enter. The focus of our

1:31:57

company is to really uh make sure that

1:32:00

we can bring uh basically intelligence

1:32:04

outside of data centers. That's like

1:32:05

something that we have focused on and I

1:32:07

think our efficiency is actually

1:32:08

allowing us to get

1:32:09

>> preliminary matter. I have no financial

1:32:11

interest in liquid. Sorry Reine have to

1:32:13

ask the the most obvious question. I

1:32:15

have so many questions for you which is

1:32:18

the company liquid was founded as I

1:32:20

understand it and I I remember reading

1:32:21

the original I think it was in science

1:32:22

or nature paper on liquid neural

1:32:24

networks. Uh the premise is basically a

1:32:27

neuromorphic premise that that you could

1:32:30

gain useful AI insights from looking at

1:32:32

nematodes uh a few hundred neurons sort

1:32:34

of the ultimate small neural network.

1:32:38

But my perception I I'm hoping that you

1:32:40

can uh either help me amend or revise my

1:32:42

perception is that although liquid

1:32:45

started with a neuromorphic premise if

1:32:48

you will like a post transformer very

1:32:50

recurrentoriented architectural premise

1:32:53

or prior that over time again just based

1:32:56

on my perception of public messaging

1:32:58

liquid looks more and more like either

1:33:00

transformer or transformer plus or

1:33:03

transformer plus hyena plus dot dot

1:33:06

looks more and more like basically a

1:33:08

conventional off-the-shelf architecture.

1:33:11

It may be a good business selling sort

1:33:13

of customized transformer derivatives to

1:33:15

Mercedes at all. If so, great from the

1:33:18

business side. But from the technical

1:33:19

side, does Liquid still have anything

1:33:22

that looks remotely like a trans a post

1:33:25

transformer architecture either in

1:33:27

production or under development? And can

1:33:29

you speak to what if anything is post

1:33:31

transformer or non-transformer oriented

1:33:34

about the architecture that you

1:33:35

currently use? Great great question. So

1:33:38

let me tell you like the space of kind

1:33:40

of architecture. So liquid neural

1:33:42

networks in in the original form they

1:33:44

are one of the most expressive formats

1:33:46

of computes that you can actually create

1:33:48

arguably like in terms of our

1:33:49

architecture they are they have nested

1:33:51

non nonlinearities that are like in like

1:33:54

you cannot really like take them out.

1:33:56

They're like completely physics

1:33:58

inspired. They are like having like the

1:34:00

neural odes and and basically like

1:34:02

irregularly sampled data can be handled

1:34:04

by them. So they they become like one of

1:34:06

the very very general class of

1:34:08

architectures as a whole. Underneath

1:34:10

these things like when you want to scale

1:34:12

this type of technology these

1:34:13

recurrences like you know like this uh

1:34:15

nested kind of loops that they have. If

1:34:18

you want to scale these systems a lot of

1:34:20

people have attempted including

1:34:21

ourselves to linearize the dynamics so

1:34:23

that you can actually like scale them.

1:34:25

space uh uh you know state space models

1:34:27

are kind of basically like mumbas and

1:34:29

those kind of variants falling into the

1:34:32

same category of continuous time neural

1:34:34

networks but dumped down into a linear

1:34:36

kind of dynamical systems because you

1:34:38

you want to scale them. They are

1:34:39

underneath this class of continuous time

1:34:41

models that we have. Then there is like

1:34:45

there are variants of uh linear linear

1:34:47

attention gated linear attentions that

1:34:49

are coming out. They are also like

1:34:51

gating mechanism is something like

1:34:53

there's a special gating input dependent

1:34:55

gating mechanism that actually we got

1:34:57

inspired by the by by how neurons

1:35:00

actually exchange information with each

1:35:01

other. That gating mechanism is also

1:35:03

something that is adding a lot more

1:35:05

expressivity like it is also descendant

1:35:07

of the original formation of how neurons

1:35:10

exchange information with each other.

1:35:11

That gating mechanism still exists today

1:35:14

in in many different architecture and

1:35:16

including ours. But the most important

1:35:18

thing that I want to mention that you

1:35:20

should know about the technology

1:35:21

transformation of our company is that we

1:35:24

really didn't want to bias ourselves

1:35:26

towards one single architecture. One of

1:35:29

the things that we did day one at Liquid

1:35:31

AI, we designed a search algorithm to

1:35:34

let's say like you know let the

1:35:35

algorithm instead of human biasing kind

1:35:37

of the algorithm let the let the

1:35:39

algorithm run the scaling laws on let's

1:35:41

say 100 different variations of

1:35:43

operations that potentially can give you

1:35:45

a general purpose computer. So we build

1:35:47

a meta system. The paper around this is

1:35:50

actually we published like two and a

1:35:52

half years ago. We published a paper

1:35:54

about uh about the topic is called star

1:35:56

automated uh design of tailored

1:35:58

architectures. So read about style uh

1:36:01

and and star is a framework that brings

1:36:04

all the dynamical systems with any

1:36:07

format including kind of variations of

1:36:09

attention into one format for us to be

1:36:13

able to search through. Okay. So to see

1:36:15

like for four criteria what is the most

1:36:19

optimal neural architecture let's say of

1:36:22

choice for let's say a certain

1:36:23

deployment number one criteria is memory

1:36:26

like how much memory are you consuming

1:36:28

on a given processor number two was the

1:36:31

efficiency of computation how fast you

1:36:32

can operate number three is latency of

1:36:35

operations and number four do not lose

1:36:38

accuracy on the performance there are

1:36:41

pure transformer models and then there

1:36:43

are hybrid models that you can actually

1:36:44

build hybrid models have like an

1:36:46

essential compon like they have a little

1:36:48

bit of transformers in them but they're

1:36:50

but the but the rest of the kind of

1:36:52

dynamical system and most of the

1:36:53

dynamical system for the purpose of

1:36:55

these four objective functions that I

1:36:57

mentioned would be you you would change

1:36:59

that and you can actually automate this

1:37:01

whole framework to design foundation

1:37:03

models inhouse the the technology stack

1:37:06

of liquid foundation like liquid

1:37:08

foundation models is called automated

1:37:10

foundation model design kind of

1:37:12

algorithms we call it AFMD This

1:37:14

automated framework is the one that

1:37:16

explores architectures for for a given

1:37:18

kind of hardware. And guess what came

1:37:21

out of like the first generation of the

1:37:23

architectures that we started

1:37:25

optimizing. It came double gated

1:37:28

convolution kind of mechanisms as 80% of

1:37:30

the network being this. So when we run

1:37:33

without a human bias the gating

1:37:35

mechanism that we had exactly in the

1:37:37

liquid foundation liquid neural networks

1:37:39

original paper it actually shows up with

1:37:41

this very very similar kind of format in

1:37:44

the final architecture that comes out of

1:37:46

the search space.

1:37:46

>> Everybody welcome to the health section

1:37:48

of moonshots brought to you by fountain

1:37:50

life. You know we talk about AI on this

1:37:51

moonshot podcast all the time. One of

1:37:53

the most important things AI is going to

1:37:55

be able to do for you besides educating

1:37:57

your kids and helping you with your

1:37:58

taxes is making sure that you're living

1:38:01

a healthy lifestyle that you get a

1:38:03

chance to get to 100 plus. I'm here

1:38:06

today with Dr. Don Mucalem the chief

1:38:08

medical officer of Fountain Life and a

1:38:10

part of my medical team. Don a pleasure.

1:38:13

>> Great.

1:38:14

>> You know the thing that people are

1:38:15

concerned about most about living to 100

1:38:17

or 120 is their cognitive abilities.

1:38:20

making sure they don't have dementia and

1:38:24

uh the numbers about dementia are

1:38:26

problematic. Uh can you share what

1:38:28

you've learned?

1:38:29

>> Such an important point and you're right

1:38:31

at Fountain Life, our members, the

1:38:33

number one thing people are most

1:38:34

concerned about is losing their brain

1:38:36

health, forgetting the name of their

1:38:37

child, forgetting the face of their

1:38:39

loved one. We know that when it comes to

1:38:40

dementia, the conservative estimates are

1:38:43

that 45% are entirely preventable. What

1:38:46

was amazing is with the advanced testing

1:38:49

we're doing at Fountain Life, one

1:38:51

quarter of our members had advanced

1:38:53

brain age.

1:38:54

>> Wow.

1:38:54

>> But what was really awesome is again

1:38:56

back to that prevention when we

1:38:57

partnered it with healthy living. This

1:38:59

gives me chills. Eating healthier,

1:39:01

moving our bodies sleep, optimizing

1:39:04

sleep is so important. You know what we

1:39:05

saw? We saw that we improved that brain

1:39:07

age by 26%. That is a big big number to

1:39:11

show that the majority of those

1:39:13

individuals were able actually to

1:39:15

improve the brain age.

1:39:16

>> And one of the things I love about

1:39:17

Fountain is we're searching the world

1:39:18

for the best therapeutics, the best

1:39:20

approaches, and making sure we bring it

1:39:22

to our members. So if having healthy

1:39:25

brain function uh till 100, 120 is

1:39:28

important to you, check out Fountain

1:39:30

Life. Go to fountainlife.com/per.

1:39:33

Make sure you become the CEO of your own

1:39:35

health. All right, now back to the

1:39:36

episode. All right, our next story comes

1:39:38

from Palmer Lucky, the founder of Oculus

1:39:40

and now the chairman of the defense

1:39:43

giant Andre. It's it's funny to call

1:39:45

Andre a defense giant, but it is. He's

1:39:47

claiming that the modern patent system

1:39:49

has become a national security

1:39:51

liability. In his words, the entire

1:39:52

patent office could be downloaded every

1:39:55

morning, ripped off, and used to fight a

1:39:57

war against you. The core problem is

1:39:59

baked into what uh patents actually do.

1:40:03

Uh patents are a requirement. If you

1:40:06

want to get a patent, you have to teach

1:40:08

uh a uh a person skilled in the art how

1:40:13

to actually uh you know create and use

1:40:16

your device. So this disclosure of your

1:40:19

invention and the exact words and patent

1:40:21

law is in uh such full clear and concise

1:40:24

and exact terms as to enable any person

1:40:27

skilled in the art to make and use the

1:40:30

same. So if you do that, you're

1:40:32

effectively teaching the world how to

1:40:34

use it. uh and you're exchanging that

1:40:37

that uh sharing of your invention for

1:40:39

roughly 20 years of exclusivity. Palmer

1:40:42

argues that when a strategic adversary

1:40:44

can simply harvest every file, ignore

1:40:47

the legal protections, and weaponize the

1:40:50

disclosed knowledge, you've handed them

1:40:52

a free instruction manual to your best

1:40:54

ideas. So, just for some numbers, the US

1:40:57

Patent Office receives about 600,000

1:40:59

applications annually. It grants a

1:41:02

little over half of those 323,000.

1:41:04

Uh that's 2025 data. Uh interestingly

1:41:07

enough, patents uh uh granted have

1:41:10

increased 40% in the last 5 years. My

1:41:13

guess is that is uh secondary to AI.

1:41:16

Palmer's proposed fix isn't to abolish

1:41:19

patents. It's to massively scale up a

1:41:22

national security patent process which

1:41:24

goes back to the Secrecy Act of 1951.

1:41:28

So this obscure mechanism lets inventors

1:41:30

obtain classified patents in which you

1:41:33

keep your exclusive rights but you don't

1:41:36

disclose it to anyone and neither can

1:41:37

the government. So there roughly 6,000

1:41:40

of these uh secure secrecy orders active

1:41:43

in the US. Lucky wants that this edge

1:41:46

case uh is turned into default

1:41:48

mechanism. So here's the question,

1:41:51

right? If we genuinely uh trade this

1:41:54

openness which has been sort of the

1:41:56

basis for American entrepreneurial

1:41:58

exceptionalism uh for a a secret system.

1:42:02

Are we trading safety of having our

1:42:05

patents ripped off against really the

1:42:07

innovative ecosystem that we've had?

1:42:10

Let's watch a short video from uh from

1:42:13

Palmer and then we'll talk about it.

1:42:16

>> Stop patenting everything. Uh patents

1:42:18

are Chinese instruction manual. Well,

1:42:19

the founding fathers never predicted a

1:42:21

world where you would have a globalized

1:42:22

economy where the entire patent office

1:42:24

could be downloaded every single morning

1:42:26

and then ripped off and then used to

1:42:28

fight a war against you. We need to

1:42:30

really fundamentally revisit the patent

1:42:32

system. I think we need to massively

1:42:34

expand the national security patent

1:42:37

process. Uh you can you can obtain a

1:42:39

classified patent. You can get a patent

1:42:41

on something that you are not allowed to

1:42:42

disclose to anyone, but you still

1:42:44

maintain the exclusivity on those

1:42:45

rights. We need to massively expand that

1:42:47

program. So, you know, I've applied for

1:42:51

and gotten a dozen patents. I know Alex,

1:42:53

you have a even a much larger number of

1:42:55

them. Uh, so I'm curious, guys, how do

1:42:58

you come out on this? Alex, do you want

1:43:00

to kick it off?

1:43:02

>> I I think this is the episode of people

1:43:05

uh tech CEOs floating terrible ideas. I

1:43:07

think this is a terrible idea. I I think

1:43:10

the I would argue the invention secrecy

1:43:13

act of 1951 which is I I think what

1:43:16

Palmer is gesturing at has been probably

1:43:18

on balance quite detrimental not just to

1:43:22

democracy uh that if patents so maybe a

1:43:26

bit of context the the way the the

1:43:28

invention secrecy act works is uh it's

1:43:31

it's not that you can just sort of file

1:43:34

the patent in secret and not disclose uh

1:43:36

it it's that basically it can only be

1:43:39

practiced the invention that uh that is

1:43:42

basically confiscated or eminent

1:43:44

domained by the military can only be

1:43:47

practiced for military reasons. It's not

1:43:49

contra uh any construal otherwise that

1:43:52

invention secrecy act somehow offers

1:43:54

legal cover for an individual to

1:43:57

secretly disclose how their invention

1:43:59

works uh under some confidentiality and

1:44:01

then go practice it in general. They

1:44:03

can't. It's that the military

1:44:05

exclusively can practice it and then the

1:44:08

inventor gets royalties from that

1:44:10

practice. That may be good for Andre's

1:44:13

defense business, but I I think in

1:44:15

general terrible idea. Greater concern

1:44:17

that I have is it these are these would

1:44:20

be basically secret monopolies. Uh I I

1:44:22

think it's bad enough that we have

1:44:24

invention secrecy act classification of

1:44:27

inventions query whether entire swaths

1:44:31

of technology that could be completely

1:44:34

transformative economically to the

1:44:35

entire world from an energy perspective

1:44:38

for other domains have somehow without

1:44:41

general knowledge been swept up by the

1:44:43

invention secrecy act and basically

1:44:45

confiscated by the department of war for

1:44:48

purely military reasons. That's that's

1:44:51

very concerning to me. The idea of

1:44:53

expanding it overall. I I would argue if

1:44:55

if anything the invention secrecy act

1:44:57

regime should probably go away.

1:44:59

>> We can have this debate. So Palmer is

1:45:00

going to be joining us at uh at the

1:45:02

moonshots gathering on September 25th in

1:45:04

LA. Everybody go to moonshots.com. We

1:45:07

have an amazing day with the moonshot

1:45:09

mates there. We'll be having these

1:45:11

conversations with Palmer Salem. Uh I

1:45:14

mean the what makes America great is our

1:45:17

open innovation policy. people building

1:45:19

on top of other people's creations. What

1:45:21

are your thoughts here?

1:45:23

>> Look, we've seen this uh problem uh get

1:45:28

bigger and bigger over the last 20 to 30

1:45:30

years, okay? Where the disclosure,

1:45:34

especially in an age of AI where people

1:45:36

can just route around it or replicate or

1:45:38

learn from it, it's it's a huge

1:45:40

challenge. The the real mode is learning

1:45:43

loops. uh that's going to be the real

1:45:45

defensibility is what are your feedback

1:45:47

loops and can you learn in a proprietary

1:45:49

way and then create trade secrets around

1:45:51

that and action that in the marketplace.

1:45:54

Continuous innovation is going to be the

1:45:56

winning defense. It's not going to be

1:45:57

ownership. The only people that win in

1:45:59

this whole in this particular model are

1:46:01

the lawyers.

1:46:02

>> Well said. Um Dave, any thoughts here?

1:46:06

>> Yeah, I think you know if there's a

1:46:07

flash point for a World War III, this is

1:46:09

probably one of the most likely

1:46:11

>> seriously

1:46:11

>> where Yeah. Well, well, you know, look,

1:46:14

Alex is right. We're going to discover

1:46:16

new physics, new medicines at an

1:46:18

incredible accelerating rate. And, you

1:46:20

know, places like Europe respect

1:46:22

intellectual property rights, and that

1:46:24

creates a kind of a coherent economy

1:46:26

where you can trade these things. China

1:46:28

completely ignores intellectual property

1:46:30

rights and and just takes it and runs

1:46:32

with it. Uh, so I think the likely

1:46:34

outcome of that is the US will trade

1:46:36

embargo anybody who doesn't respect

1:46:38

intellectual property rights. then you

1:46:40

have to choose are you part of the you

1:46:42

know the free world or you part of the

1:46:44

alternate world but I think that's the

1:46:46

more likely um outcome and that's going

1:46:49

to happen soon like in the next couple

1:46:51

of years because the rate of innovation

1:46:52

is going to go through the roof but

1:46:53

there's no science fiction future book

1:46:55

I've ever read where there isn't massive

1:46:58

amounts of intellectual property being

1:47:00

created by AI at an incredible

1:47:01

accelerating rate and there's some

1:47:03

vehicle by which innovators can profit

1:47:05

from that and if you don't have that

1:47:07

then you don't have the future you a

1:47:09

huge fraction of brilliant thinkers

1:47:13

coming out of, you know, Cambridge and

1:47:14

MIT and Harvard don't work on

1:47:16

foundational technologies because

1:47:19

there's no money in it. And that's got

1:47:21

to change fundamentally. And protecting

1:47:23

intellectual property rights is a key

1:47:25

key way to reverse that tide and get

1:47:27

people working on really important

1:47:28

things.

1:47:29

>> Y I think to Dave's point also, Palmer

1:47:32

fundamentally misunder or appears to

1:47:34

misunderstand the nature of patents. The

1:47:36

whole point of a patent is that you

1:47:38

disclose how it works in return for a

1:47:40

state granted temporary monopoly on it

1:47:43

and say, you know, sort of belly aching

1:47:46

that the the Chinese are running away

1:47:48

with the disclosure. It is really a

1:47:50

quibble with enforcement of of patent.

1:47:53

It it's not you don't want to throw

1:47:54

necessarily the baby out with the

1:47:55

bathwater and say we want to give away

1:47:58

the the patent trade of disclosure in

1:48:00

return for temporary monopoly. Really

1:48:02

what he should be asking is better

1:48:04

enforcement of US patents in China.

1:48:07

>> Agreed. All right, I'm going to move us

1:48:08

into the world of healthcare abundance.

1:48:10

So, two stories this week are

1:48:11

demonstrating an incredible impact of AI

1:48:13

on healthcare abundance, demonetizing

1:48:16

and democratizing diagnostics uh for

1:48:19

billions of people. The first story is

1:48:21

the performance of GPT 5.6 six saw uh

1:48:24

which was released a couple weeks ago on

1:48:27

healthbench professional which is

1:48:28

openai's hardest medical benchmark uh so

1:48:32

jat GPT or GPT 5.6 saw set a brand new

1:48:35

all-time benchmark high and then the

1:48:38

second part coming out here is in a

1:48:40

blind test across roughly 20,000

1:48:43

individual physician judgments in other

1:48:45

words uh you know diagnos diagnosing for

1:48:48

accuracy safety completeness GPT 5.6 ICS

1:48:52

answers were compared to specialty

1:48:55

matched physicians other words

1:48:56

pulmonologists, pediatricians, whatever,

1:48:58

who were given unlimited uh full access

1:49:01

to the web and unlimited time to answer

1:49:04

and the doctors still lost. So we've got

1:49:07

Chad GPT. We've known this for some time

1:49:09

that these AI diagnostic models are

1:49:11

better than the best physicians given

1:49:13

all the tools that humans can use. The

1:49:16

second part of the story comes from

1:49:17

Meta. So, OpenAI's own healthbench

1:49:21

professional benchmark which is 525 real

1:49:25

clinical tasks. Meta's Muse Spark 1.1

1:49:28

again released last week uh beat chat

1:49:32

GPTs uh or GPT 5.6 Saul on across the

1:49:36

marks and it was 7 times cheaper. But

1:49:39

even better, I mean important to note

1:49:41

here is that Muse Spark is free inside

1:49:45

of all of Meta's products. you know,

1:49:47

WhatsApp and Facebook and Meta today

1:49:50

serves 3.56

1:49:52

billion daily active users using their

1:49:55

products. So, here we've got a situation

1:49:58

where the top medical AI capabilities

1:50:01

are now free to over 3 and a half

1:50:05

billion people on the planet. And that's

1:50:07

just extraordinary. I mean, this is the

1:50:08

abundance thesis at large. Uh and again

1:50:12

as people talk about the concerns of AI

1:50:14

and so forth, please realize this.

1:50:16

People who've never had access to the

1:50:18

best diagnosticians now have them. Sim

1:50:22

there is a there's there's a model in an

1:50:24

AI doctor in China that's being used in

1:50:27

rural environments by 100 million people

1:50:30

already. Right? Basically diagnosis is

1:50:34

has had massive cost collapse. The

1:50:36

healthcare domain is particularly

1:50:38

interesting because it's where abundance

1:50:40

becomes actually morally urgent, right?

1:50:43

If you can deliver way better first

1:50:45

inline answers at at like near zero

1:50:47

cost, it's how quickly can you safely

1:50:50

get it out there? That's the only

1:50:51

question. And so, uh, it's absolutely

1:50:54

and right, let's recognize that in

1:50:57

almost every country in the world,

1:50:59

there's radical doctor shortage.

1:51:01

>> So, this is really, really critical. You

1:51:03

see like this is such a July 2026 story

1:51:06

where think about it Instagram now gives

1:51:09

better medical advice than a human

1:51:10

doctor.

1:51:11

>> It's it's it's pretty pretty wild. It

1:51:14

cost of intelligence not just going too

1:51:16

cheap to meter. Cost of medical

1:51:18

intelligence becoming too cheap to

1:51:20

meter. free basically free. I mean

1:51:23

that's

1:51:24

>> well the the ultimate too cheap to meter

1:51:25

is asmmptoically free right but I I I

1:51:28

would say probably I I in all honesty I

1:51:31

suspect a little bit of mild benchmaxing

1:51:33

by meta on on this meta spark 1.1 is on

1:51:38

if you believe the ai

1:51:40

cost frontier analysis it is on the

1:51:43

optimal cost frontier but it's not at

1:51:46

the top so if it's beating say fable 5

1:51:49

which barely allows you to do anything

1:51:51

biological or GPT 5.6 which does allow

1:51:54

you to do it. That does to me suggest uh

1:51:56

in all honesty a little bit of mild

1:51:58

benchmaxing but still it's it's a great

1:52:00

day when Instagram gives better medical

1:52:03

advice than human doctors.

1:52:04

>> I think that's our that's our takeaway

1:52:06

uh quote from the from today's pod. Um

1:52:09

I'm going to uh move us to one more

1:52:11

longevity story that I love. This is

1:52:13

breaking news from yesterday. Uh and it

1:52:16

really got me excited here. I know you

1:52:18

Alex and I were talking about this. So

1:52:20

for for decades, one of the fundamental

1:52:22

problems of aging uh is the slow

1:52:25

accumulation of of what are called

1:52:28

advanced glycation end products. I love

1:52:30

the acronym. It's called ages. A ge

1:52:33

uh and these are sugar molecules that

1:52:35

cross link and damage your proteins in

1:52:38

your body over the course of time. So

1:52:40

this chemical reaction is called

1:52:41

glycation. And it happens slowly in our

1:52:44

bodies as we age. It stiffens your

1:52:45

arteries. It clouds your lenses with

1:52:47

cataracts. It damages kidneys. wrinkled

1:52:49

skins. And this idea uh is that it's

1:52:53

always been irreversible until this

1:52:56

week. And yesterday in Nature

1:52:57

Communications, a team from a new

1:52:59

startup called Revel Pharmaceuticals

1:53:01

demonstrated an engineered enzyme called

1:53:04

CMLA uh that acts like a molecular lawn

1:53:07

mower. I love their description. A

1:53:08

molecular lawn mower. It oxidizes away

1:53:10

the glycation scars and restores the

1:53:13

original healthy protein underneath. And

1:53:16

amazingly, this isn't happening just in

1:53:18

a test tube. They showed it worked in

1:53:21

human tissue samples from elderly

1:53:23

donors, reversing damage that

1:53:25

accumulated over the lifetime. It's

1:53:27

still early, but the significance of

1:53:29

this cannot be overstated. A category in

1:53:32

aging that we've always filed as

1:53:34

permanent just became reversible. Um and

1:53:39

again we talk about longevity escape

1:53:41

velocity we talk about you know our

1:53:43

ability to understand the 5 billion

1:53:45

chemical reactions per second per cell

1:53:48

in your 40 trillion cells and when we

1:53:51

talk about reaching lev you know escape

1:53:54

velocity by 2033 it's tech like this so

1:53:57

congrats to uh to Revel um in in doing

1:54:00

this

1:54:01

>> and and not just Revel I mean a couple

1:54:04

of interesting notes here it was Revel

1:54:06

and Calico the California Life Company

1:54:10

that was one of the one of the alphabet

1:54:12

other bets that's been I would say like

1:54:15

a lot quieter than say Whimo. Uh they're

1:54:18

still doing work that that's very

1:54:20

encouraging to me that Calico is

1:54:22

apparently deeply involved in this and

1:54:24

and has a heartbeat. A couple of other

1:54:26

points the the broader process here

1:54:28

class of chemical reactions are called

1:54:31

Mayard reactions. It's also the reason

1:54:33

why when you bake bread the the outer

1:54:35

crust is usually brown or chemical

1:54:39

>> or yeah or or it's why this is

1:54:41

vegetarian speaking why everything

1:54:43

purportedly tastes like chicken. Uh it's

1:54:45

the same class of reactions but the the

1:54:47

sugar is reacting with uh the carbonial

1:54:50

um functional group or carbonial uh uh

1:54:53

groups within sugars reacting with um

1:54:56

with the amines in in proteins to to

1:54:59

create broad class of molecules that

1:55:01

that look optically brown. So the same

1:55:03

thing is going on in the human body. To

1:55:05

to me this is very exciting because it's

1:55:07

not quite unscrambling eggs but it's it

1:55:10

it's halfway there. It's it feels almost

1:55:12

it again strictly speaking it's not like

1:55:15

uh reversal of the thermodynamic arrow

1:55:17

of time but it's the next best thing if

1:55:19

if we can remove all of these uh

1:55:22

unwanted sugar plus protein byproducts

1:55:26

that are associated with inflammation

1:55:28

and and other coralates of aging with uh

1:55:32

directed evolution of uh of a protein

1:55:35

that came from bacteria. Like what else

1:55:37

is there out there in the biosphere for

1:55:39

us to mine in addition to all the

1:55:41

obvious glip ones? Great potential for

1:55:44

uh longevity, escape velocity. What

1:55:46

other bacterial innovations can we use

1:55:48

to turn back agent?

1:55:50

>> It's human engineering. We're taking

1:55:51

control. It's going from evolution by

1:55:53

natural selection to evolution by human

1:55:55

direction. And I love that.

1:55:58

>> I'll be I'll be happy when I have

1:55:59

Ramine's hair.

1:56:01

>> That's when I'll be happy.

1:56:02

>> Well, there are lots of companies

1:56:03

working on that, Sem. So gentlemen, uh

1:56:06

grateful for our time today. I'm excited

1:56:09

for Starship 13 launch later today. Wish

1:56:13

Elon and the the group there uh lots of

1:56:16

luck. Uh Reine, congrats on the success

1:56:19

of Liquid AI and and excited to have you

1:56:22

on the pod with us. Dave, great move

1:56:24

investing in Reine. Um

1:56:27

>> on behalf of all of our

1:56:30

Thank you.

1:56:30

>> Yeah, gentlemen. Have an amazing week.

1:56:33

I'm I'm sure we'll be having an

1:56:34

emergency pod very soon because the

1:56:37

speed of the singularity waits for

1:56:38

nobody.

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