Iran's AI Supply Chain Threat, Claude vs. SaaS, and Elon's $60B Cursor Bet | EP #249

Alexander Wissner-Gross (0:00)

Having this global geopolitical dependency on one narrow volatile geographic region is completely unacceptable.

Salim Ismail (0:08)

This Iran war is not really just an oil shock, it's a system shock.

Dave Blundin (0:12)

TBD, whether, you know, what direction the US goes on that.

Alexander Wissner-Gross (0:14)

It's almost easier to predict what happens after it ends, which is to say...

Peter Diamandis (0:20)

We're seeing all of a sudden the frontier labs beginning to compete with the vertical businesses built on top of large language models.

Salim Ismail (0:28)

We're going to get this horde of startups building in an AI-native mode, and the big companies will struggle to adopt.

Peter Diamandis (0:35)

SpaceX negotiates the right to buy Cursor for $60 billion. Is this just Elon's normal play?

Alexander Wissner-Gross (0:42)

This is actually what a Dyson swarm probably looks like. This is where it's all coming down to. This is like the final countdown of whatever stage of the singularity we're in.

Dave Blundin (0:56)

Now that's a Moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

Peter Diamandis (1:01)

Everybody welcome to another episode of Moonshots. WTF just happened in tech this week. Your opportunity to hear about what's going on in the world at a hypersonic speed. Here to help prepare you for the future with my incredible Moonshot mates, our resident genius AWG.

Alex, good to see you in your normal haunt.

Alexander Wissner-Gross (1:18)

It's good to be haunted.

Peter Diamandis (1:22)

And, of course, our exponential investor DB2, Dave, back at MITIC.

Dave Blundin (1:30)

Yes, back from San Fran for one day and then off to New York tonight. Yeah.

Peter Diamandis (1:34)

You know, it's funny. We talk about the three-day work week, the four-day work week. I think this has invented the nine- and ten-day work week for us.

Only I've ever worked hard in my life.

Dave Blundin (1:46)

You know what? Alex is constantly reminding us there's only going to be one singularity in our lifetimes, and you have to just savor and use every minute of it. So it's worth it. It's so worth it.

Alexander Wissner-Gross (1:57)

I also think, Peter, all these people who are absolutely convinced that human attention is a scarce resource, I think they're going to get proven wrong ultimately. I think we can manufacture more attention.

Peter Diamandis (2:06)

Now, I'm looking forward to that. You know, Peter, two of ten is going to be dedicated to this podcast all the time.

Alexander Wissner-Gross (2:13)

Or as they say, go fork yourself.

Peter Diamandis (2:15)

Oh, no. Salim, you are worse than all of us put together. Where are you on the planet today?

Salim Ismail (2:23)

I'm at The Breakers and Palm Beach doing a keynote to 700 CEOs, which I did this morning. They're pretty freaked out, as they should be, because the world is changing pretty radically.

Dave Blundin (2:34)

By AI or by you?

Salim Ismail (2:38)

About the content. Look, it's such a huge shock for people in the normal world to go, what is happening and how do I juxtapose with this? It's really a big topic. So it was a great conference, great questions. That's always the great, the best moderator of whether an event was good or not. The quality of the questions was excellent.

Peter Diamandis (3:00)

Yeah, and the number of people who are standing up and screaming, okay.

Alexander Wissner-Gross (3:06)

It's the usual Palm Beach dilemma of billionaires worrying that they might become millionaires again.

Salim Ismail (3:11)

Well, this is not Palm Beach residents. These are people coming in for this event from all over the country. So this was really Main Street USA in one place was really quite surreal.

Peter Diamandis (3:21)

I'm here in our Moonshots studio, Galore. Again, I still want to get you guys here.

Let's open up. I had an amazing, amazing Saturday night, and I want to just tell you guys about it. So I was at the annual Breakthrough Prize. It's put on every year by Yuri and Julia Milner.

It's an annual event. It began back in 2012 It was co-founded by Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg and Anne Wojcicki. And I don't know if you remember, Salim, but this used to take place in the giant airship hangar at Moffitt Field. Do you remember that giant structure? I very well. Right next to Singularity University. This year it took place at the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica Airport right near my home. And Yuri Milner, who's the principal sponsor of the prize, is an amazing guy.

A Russian-Israeli physicist turned VC billionaire, had some of the most prescient investments. He invested in Facebook and Twitter, Airbnb, WhatsApp. And he decided, along with Sergei and Anne and others, they wanted to put on sort of the Oscars of Science, sort of the new Nobel Prize and recognize the top researchers and breakthroughs. And they give out $3 million in cash to the researcher who did the breakthrough. So it's a big deal, bigger than the Nobel Prize. You know, past winners were Stephen Hawking for Hawking Radiation back in 2013, Jennifer Doudna for CRISPR, Demis Hisabas won it a couple of years ago in Life Sciences of course for his incredible work. And this Saturday night was like the best ever. I've been honored. I've been going since the beginning of this thing. It was all the Hollywood stars, all the tech CEOs were there, right? On the Hollywood side, it was like Ben Affleck and Anne Hathaway, Robert Downey Jr. On the tech side, it was Elon, Sundar, Demis were there. I spent time with Jensen and Sam Altman. Yeah, it really was extraordinary.