Emad Mostaque: The Plan to Save Humanity From AI | EP #184

Emad Mostaque (0:00)

Is there any way that you'll be able to out-compete a fully AI version of Peter or Dave or Salim launching companies?

Peter Diamandis (0:08)

No.

Emad Mostaque (0:09)

No. Labor isn't the key driver of productivity anymore. We need to have a new equation for that. The systems are about to get incredibly complicated.

Peter Diamandis (0:18)

Nations need to have a plan. The thing that we were worried about was, I think what you're proposing here is actually viable, executable fairly rapidly.

Emad Mostaque (0:27)

The AI I'm trying to build is not the AI that Elon is trying to build. The AI that I care about is the AI that teaches my kid, the AI that helps with my mental health, the AI that organizes our collective knowledge. I think this governance thing needs to happen now, and we need to have serious discussions about it, and we need to think about what is the world of AIs that I'm working with.

Peter Diamandis (0:47)

Do you trust the current large language models?

Emad Mostaque (0:51)

Of course not.

Dave Blundin (0:55)

Now that's the Moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

Peter Diamandis (1:00)

Everybody, welcome to Moonshots. I'm here with my Moonshot mates, David Blundin, Salim Ismail, and a friend of the pod, back again for I think the third or fourth time, Emad Mostaque. Emad, good to see you, buddy.

Emad Mostaque (1:14)

Pleasure as always. Thanks for having me.

Peter Diamandis (1:16)

Those of you who know Emad was the founder and past CEO of Stability AI. He has gone off on a quest. I remember after he left Stability, we had a number of conversations and I said, so what are you up to? He goes, I am going to work on a plan to create the Intelligent Internet, sort of a vision of the future, which is pro-humanity, pro-safe, pro-sovereign AI, and today we're here to talk about that. So Emad, what was your motivation for first considering the Intelligent Internet, and you've just published a sort of a white paper, your master plan, if you would, like Elon published his master plan, you've got your master plan, and what does it say?

So define for us this vision of the future and why did you kick it off?

Emad Mostaque (2:09)

Yeah, thanks. So when I kicked off Stability AI, we ended up with 300 million model downloads and most famous stable diffusion, but top-notch models of every type. It was because I saw a future where open source AI would not be available because you would see it being outstripped, but it would be a part of our very lives. You'd have these really giant models, and I think we're peaking now, and then you have the models that teach your kids and that manage your healthcare and other things like that. And I was like, what goes into those models? It's what Dave was saying about the data, you know? And then how are they coordinated? And then I was like, oh my God, how do we compete against these models?

You know, because if you think about it again, like we created something that's a complement to us in figuring out these patterns, but it's coming like a wave now. And I think we're seeing that literally now. GROK4 is one of these AGI likes, we can discuss that in a bit, that will displace our economy because you can't compete against AI agents that you don't know are AI agents. And I was like, what does the infrastructure of the future look like? What does money look like? What does the AI that teach our kids looks like? What does alignment look like against all of that? And then what is the meaning that we have ourselves? Because so many of us are like, I'm an accountant, but GROK4 is definitely a better accountant than you are today. So I quit just, I think I remember during Abundance 360, we were having the discussion, I decided to quit then because I was like, the world is so much bigger last year. And I was like, let's think about the basis of how society works, how humans work, how economics works, and then realize that labor isn't the key driver of productivity anymore. We need to have a new equation for that. We need to have a new equation for what it means to be someone, which is the connections that you have with each other and things like that. And then we need an infrastructure for that, that's resilient, verifiable and coordinated because we need to get an aligned intelligence to everyone because we don't want ChatGPT to determine tariffs, you know? We don't want misaligned things to teach our kids, so we need an element of open source. And so the Intelligent Internet is an infrastructure for that, from a distributed ledger through to fully open source AI stacks, and a new vision of what the economy might be like. Because the economy that we have today is from the days of Adam Smith and Rawls. It's a pre-industrial age economy that's based on extraction. Whereas, we're moving into this universe of abundance, where the cost of knowledge and skills is going towards zero. So we have to question, who are we, what are we doing, and what do we want to optimize our system for? Because otherwise, we're going to end up in some very unpleasant sci-fi futures.