Opus 4.8 Beats GPT 5.5, the $220B OpenAI Foundation, and Hassabis’s 2029 AGI Prediction | EP #260

**Peter H. Diamandis** (0:00)
Anthropic just dropped Opus 4.8, reclaimed the coding crown from GPT 5.5.

**Dave Blundin** (0:06)
This feels like it's significantly better at managing many, many parallel threads. I did have some trouble with the...

**Peter H. Diamandis** (0:14)
OpenAI now has the largest nonprofit philanthropic war chest in the world. They're funding research on public wealth funds, worker ownership models, and AI dividends.

**Dave Blundin** (0:26)
The mandate and the mission of all that money is global, calm, peace, prosperity. It matters tremendously to Sam.

**Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross** (0:34)
This is a really bizarre story in my mind because...

**Peter H. Diamandis** (0:37)
Demis Hassabis just tightened up his timeline for AGI, agreeing with Ray Kurzweil for 2029

**Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross** (0:43)
Right now, they're certainly not winning. Gemini is not winning the rates. I think we've arguably had some form of artificial general intelligence since 2020

**Salim Ismail** (0:53)
We're spending a lot of time on AGI and whether we achieve it or not. I think it's just noise. I will make a prediction here.

**Dave Blundin** (1:02)
Now that's a Moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

**Peter H. Diamandis** (1:07)
Welcome, everybody, to Moonshots, another episode of WTF Just Happened in Tech. I'm here with my extraordinary Moonshot mates. Alex, our in-house polymath. Alex, good morning to you. Where are you today?

**Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross** (1:17)
Morning, Peter.
Still in Chicago. Excited to be here, heading back soon.

**Peter H. Diamandis** (1:22)
All right. DB2, our Emperor of Exponential Investing.
Dave, good morning to you.

**Dave Blundin** (1:27)
Good morning, good morning.

**Peter H. Diamandis** (1:28)
And Salim, our father of exponential singularities, the man who just gave away his book and his Claude skill for free.
I'm Peter Diamandis, your host and your abundance whisperer. And there's a puppy out there that wants to get in on that. That's me. Yeah.

**Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross** (1:44)
What wants to be uplifted? Inter-species communication in action.

**Peter H. Diamandis** (1:49)
It looks like you're back home, Salim.

**Salim Ismail** (1:51)
I am back home resting after a crazy week. I've got another crazy week ahead of me, and then it should settle down after that.

**Peter H. Diamandis** (1:58)
You are a probability function on the planet. We've got a fun episode for you today. No gloom, no doom, just the science and tech accelerating us towards the singularity. Here's a quick preview of what we're going to be covering. Anthropic just dropped Opus 4.8, reclaimed the coding crown from GPT 5.5. Demis Hassabis just tightened up his timeline for AGI, agreeing with Ray Kurzweil for 2029 Amazon just launched a new AI shopping assistant. We'll cover a biotech breakthrough out of China, a pocket-sized cancer detector that can spot tumors with a single drop of blood at 95% accuracy. And then we're back in the quantum computing game.
The US government, IBM, just dropped $2 billion to build a chip foundry.
As always, we'll end with your questions. Our mission here at Moonshots is to keep optimistic, informed, and ready for the supersonic tsunami heading our way. Gentlemen, are you ready? Ready. All right. Fantastic. All right.

**Salim Ismail** (3:00)
I have a word definition.

**Peter H. Diamandis** (3:02)
Yeah. What's that?

**Salim Ismail** (3:03)
You know, Alex threw out a bunch of words that nobody understood, but at least I didn't last time. I got one, which is pro noia.

**Peter H. Diamandis** (3:11)
Okay. Give us a definition, please.

**Salim Ismail** (3:13)
So paranoia is like an unreasonable fear and suspicion of others.
Pro noia turns out to be exactly the opposite, that things are just going to work out. And I think that summarizes our podcast very well. And I thought that was worth getting into.

**Peter H. Diamandis** (3:27)
We should change the name.
Pro noia. All right.

**Salim Ismail** (3:32)
You can't even pronounce it and it's horrible. It's an ugly, ugly word.

**Peter H. Diamandis** (3:35)
Make up a new neo-logism. All right.
All right. Let's open up with our first story. Anthropic just dropped its new model, Opus 4.8, just six weeks after Opus 4.7. If you remember last episode, we talked about GPT 5.5 running away with the coding benchmark. Well, Anthropic just fired back. Opus 4.8 now leads the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 61.4, 1.2 points ahead of GPT 5.5. And on Sway Bench Pro, the hard coding benchmark, it scored 69.2 compared to 58.6. You know, all these numbers blur. They're just up and to the right. And it's the only model to complete every case end to end on Anthropic's Super Agent benchmark. Here's the kicker. It's four times less likely to overlook bugs of its own code.
It feels like we're in a two-horse race here between Anthropic and OpenAI, you know, really saving every four to six weeks. Alex, why don't you dive in on this one, pal?