GPT 5.2 Release, Corporate Collapse in 2026, and $1.1M Job Loss w/ Alexander Wissner-Gross, Salim Ismail & Dave Blundin | EP #215

Peter Diamandis (0:00)

OpenAI releases GPT 5.2.

Dave Blundin (0:02)

The capabilities are just shockingly different than they were a few weeks prior.

SPEAKER_3 (0:07)

OpenAI has just unveiled GPT 5.2, which it's billing as its most advanced frontier model yet.

SPEAKER_4 (0:13)

The value that we see people get in from this technology and thus their willingness to pay makes us confident that we will be able to significantly ramp revenue.

Salim Ismail (0:21)

The fastest scaling consumer platform in history, we're almost at a billion users, that just blows my mind.

Peter Diamandis (0:27)

A lot of change is coming rapidly. I think the biggest challenge is people are not projecting properly on how rapidly this is going to tip.

Salim Ismail (0:36)

I think 2026 is going to see the biggest collapse of the corporate world in the history of business.

Peter Diamandis (0:42)

In 2025, we had 1.1 million layoffs, which is the most since the 2020 pandemic.

Alexander Wissner-Gross (0:48)

71% of comparisons between a human performing this knowledge work and the machine resulted in the machine doing a better job at more than 11 times the speed of the human and at less than 1% of the cost of the human professional. So knowledge work is cooked.

Dave Blundin (1:08)

Now, that's the Moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

Peter Diamandis (1:14)

Speaking of alien creatures, I was touring with Colossal yesterday, Ben Lamb, I'm an advisor, an early investor in this company, and Colossal is amazing. They've got something like 12 different species at different stages of de-extinction, right? They brought back the dire wolf. They're going to be bringing back the saber-toothed tiger. I can't wait for that. And of course, the wooly mammoth. They created the wooly mouse, right? So, they've been able to identify the genes that the particular are different phenotypes, right? Like length of hair, length of snout. And it's fascinating what they're doing and their ability to actually find the closest living relative and then snippets of DNA. So, they have DNA going back as far as 1.2 million years. They haven't been able to get DNA older than that. But that's still pretty incredible. But being able to actually like…

Salim Ismail (2:17)

Didn't Ben say that we couldn't restore animals if the DNA was older than like 10,000 years?

Peter Diamandis (2:23)

Well, for example, the woolly mammoth DNA that they've gotten ranges from like 10,000 years to 1.2 million years, right?

And they've got to identify… That's not a single species. That's a whole spectrum of a species. Yeah. Because there's evolution going on all that time. And so they're trying to figure out, okay, what part of the phenotypes, like the tusk and the woolly mammoth hair and its cold tolerance and all of those things, and they're reconstructing a single lacrym, you know, an approximation of woolly mammoth. Anyway, the programs are amazing. And Ben is such an incredibly good CEO. I'm excited. He's going to be one of our Moonshot closing speakers at the Abundance Summit this year. So we're going to go deep with how do you go from zero to $10 billion valuation in four years? And how do you do something? And no bio background at all for Ben, right? He was the CEO of Hypergiant, the software company. Incredible.

Dave Blundin (3:22)

So, Salim, your multi-armed robot can shear the woolly mouse. And then we can make sweaters in time for the holidays out of it. And we can all wear them on the pod.

Salim Ismail (3:31)

By non-humanoid robots.

Dave Blundin (3:34)

All right.

Peter Diamandis (3:34)

All right.

I think it's time to jump in with enthusiasm. Yes. All right. Welcome to Moonshots. Another episode of WTF Just Happened in Tech. This is the news that hopefully impacts you, inspires you, gives you Moonshot thoughts and gets you ready for the future because that is one of our primary goals. How do we prepare you for what's coming next? A lot of AI news. Today is a special episode that we pulled together in order to celebrate the release of GPT 5.2, but we'll get to that in just a moment. I wanted to hit on some of the top sort of like top level hyperscaler updates and battles. So just a few headlines here. We'll be discussing them through the pod here today. ChatGPT was the most downloaded app in the iOS app store in 2025 Congratulations to them. They're nearing 900 million active users. Gemini is catching up. Anthropic jumps to 40% enterprise share. Amazing. Accenture is going to be training 30,000 people on Claude. Elon has let us know that Grok 4.2 is coming very shortly in the next few weeks and Grok 5 in the next few months. We said in the moment ago OpenAI has released GPT 5.2. That's going to be coming up in a moment. And interestingly enough, Google launched its deepest AI research agent the same day that OpenAI dropped GPT 5.2. A little bit of PR battle is going on between them all. All right. One other piece of data on the downloads here to give people a look at the scoreboard. ChattGPT received 902 million downloads. Gemini is at 103.7 million downloads and Claude has received 50 million downloads. Any comments on these opening headlines before we jump into GPT 5.2?