Humanoid Robots, the Job Market & Mass Automation - The Current State of AI w/ Emad Mostaque | EP #114

Peter Diamandis (0:00)

AI's capabilities will soon accelerate at an unfathomable rate, making today's tech look like stone age tools.

Emad Mostaque (0:08)

AI is complicated and hard and scary. Intelligence is like electricity, it's like clean water. It becomes available to everyone.

Peter Diamandis (0:16)

How do you quell the fears or should we have fears about jobs?

Emad Mostaque (0:19)

Are you embracing that technology to do more and create more value or not?

Peter Diamandis (0:24)

What's it going to feel like when you're seeing humanoid robots walking around the streets all around you all the time?

Emad Mostaque (0:30)

Actually, this is the real existential threat to humanity. 10 billion robots and a bad firmware upgrade. You know?

Peter Diamandis (0:41)

Everybody, welcome to Moonshots. Today, my guest is Emad Mostaque, the previous CEO of Stability AI AI, the founder of Schelling Point and the author of a recent white paper called How to Think About AI. This is a paper I found extraordinarily compelling, concise, and really something that I encourage you to read. We're going to dive into it. We're going to talk about investing in AI, talk about international cooperation, talk about something called Centaurs, which is AI human collaboration. Talk about the growth and the speed. Are we getting to AGI and when? One of my favorite conversations, it runs two hours because it was just an incredible master class in thinking about AI. If you love conversations like this, please subscribe. By the way, at the time of this recording, my blood glucose level is 97, which is exactly where I want it. I like keeping it low and flat below 105 if I can. I use the levels app to help me measure that, to understand what food causes my blood glucose and my insulin to spike and what doesn't. If you're interested, my team is going to link to levels in the description below. All right, onwards to the episode. Hey, Emad, good to have you back on Moonshots. It's been some time.

Are you in London today?

Emad Mostaque (1:55)

Yeah, I'm in London. Thanks for having me back. It's always a pleasure.

Peter Diamandis (1:58)

Yeah, last time we spoke, you had just stepped down as the CEO of Stability AI. And I know that you've been busy. And in particular, the paper you just put out on How to Think About AI, I think, is an incredibly cogent and beautifully written paper. I'd like to discuss that today. And I want to start by quoting some of the elements in the paper here for folks who have not yet gotten to it. You say, let's be clear, humanity is standing at the edge of the most transformative events in history. It's a wake up call, a roadmap, a vision of our imminent future rolled into one.

You said, there will be an AI explosion, 100 billion AI agents and a billion robots. The current models, they're just the appetizer. AI's capabilities will soon accelerate at an unfathomable rate, making today's tech look like stone age tools. No industry is safe. I love this last one here. The cost of intelligence is plummeting. The value of human ingenuity in applying these new resources will skyrocket. It will shortly become one of the most important skills you can have. It's time for urgent, decisive action to harness the benefits and mitigate the risks of this AI tsunami. So, that's what your paper is about. And anyone who hasn't read it yet, I highly commend it to you. We're going to dive into all of these elements. Let's begin. Emad, why did you write this paper?

Emad Mostaque (3:27)

I wrote this paper because AI is complicated and hard and scary. And I thought it would be great to have a framing that the average person could understand and how it applies to them and their lives and their part within it. Because I think one of the things I mentioned in the paper is that there's a lot of talk about AI agents and all this, but not our own agency within this. It can be far and remote where everyone's talking about supercomputers and national state things and super geniuses running it. Whereas this is a technology that's coming into every one of our lives every single day. And there seems to be a disconnect there, so I wanted to create this piece as an initial framing to try and bridge that.

Peter Diamandis (4:05)

I love that. And I know this is the prelude to a much deeper paper that you're working on that you'll release sometime this fall, which I'm excited about talking about on our next conversation we get together. I think the subject of AI is pervasive. I mean, it's the topic of dinner tables and boardrooms and executive suites in the financial markets. And I think you're right, people really have very little context on how to think about it other than OpenAI and Google and Anthropic and just the names NVIDIA. But how it affects them, you know, Ray Kurzweil talks about this idea of the singularity, which he puts out into the 2040s, but there really isn't AI singularity coming to, right? It's a point at which the tech is moving so fast, it's super hard to understand what's going to happen, what life will be like on the back end of that. Do you agree with that?