Pope Leo vs. AI, GPT 5.5 Beats Claude, and Sam Altman Walks Back Job Apocalypse | EP #259

Peter Diamandis (0:00)

Pope Leo XIV warns of AI risks and just dropped a 42,000-word encyclical on AI.

Alexander Wissner-Gross (0:08)

The Vatican has seemingly staked out the first major religion position against AI personhood.

Salim Ismail (0:15)

This is the first technology that forces us to define humanity.

Peter Diamandis (0:18)

The broader problem is, there is a brand new coding benchmark, deep software engineering. GPT 5.5 scored 70 percent, Claude Opus 4.7 scored 54 percent.

Alexander Wissner-Gross (0:29)

This, too, will saturate.

Peter Diamandis (0:31)

Sam Altman, he admitted he was wrong. The CEO of OpenAI, who spent last year warning about the mass white collar displacement, now says, quote, I don't think we're going to have that kind of job apocalypse that some of the companies in our space are talking about.

Dave Blundin (0:45)

Yeah, so here's what's really happening under the covers. Now, that's the Moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

Peter Diamandis (0:56)

Everybody, welcome to another episode of Moonshots. I am here with my extraordinary Moonshot mates, Dave Blundin, our emperor of all things exponential investing. Alex, our in-house polymath, and of course, Salim, the father now of the Organizational Singularity.

Salim, we had an incredible episode that we recorded. It's done super well. So congrats on that.

Salim Ismail (1:22)

The comments in that episode are like off the hook, really, really deeply appreciative of everybody's comments there. We did one major thing.

Peter Diamandis (1:31)

What's that?

Salim Ismail (1:31)

As promised, we have released the book for free, and we've released a Claude Skill for free. So anybody can download the Claude Skill and run their entire business on this model, go to openexo.com. It's available.

Peter Diamandis (1:46)

Awesome. Alex, where are you today, buddy?

Alexander Wissner-Gross (1:49)

I'm in Chicago. I'm here to give a speech to the Genesis Mission, which recall is the US Department of Energy's initiative to double American scientific productivity in the next 10 years. I'm hoping we can 10x it or 100x it rather than just doubling it.

Salim Ismail (2:02)

Yeah, double seems like a low bar.

Alexander Wissner-Gross (2:04)

Double is a very low bar in my mind.

Peter Diamandis (2:08)

I'm Peter Diamandis, your host. We've got an incredible show today, stories that will make you want to hopefully go out there and create the future. The best way to predict the future is create it yourself. We are living in a time where we can create the future.

We've got the tools. They're completely democratized and demonetized. And guess what, guys? We just passed 500,000 subscribers. Thank you to all of you who have subscribed. I know it's a vanity metric, but it lets us know that you enjoy the program and we're investing more and more time. So if you haven't yet subscribed, please do.

All right. Let's get...

Salim Ismail (2:45)

That's amazing. Congrats. Congrats, gentlemen.

Alexander Wissner-Gross (2:48)

Tells us that we're very base 10 centric.

Peter Diamandis (2:51)

We are. Okay.

Salim Ismail (2:52)

And I've stretched the term gentlemen to include all of us.

Peter Diamandis (2:56)

Except my boys still think until I get to a million subscribers, I don't rate. So that's my next mission.

Let's open up with our first conversation here. Our first story is Pope Leo XIV warns of AI risks and just dropped a 42,000 word encyclical on AI.

In his very first encyclical letter, it's titled Magnifica Humanitas on Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. He's calling for governments to regulate AI. He's calling for worker protections and bans on autonomous weapons. You know, I'm definitely for some of them. He even coined a term, the Babel Syndrome. This idea that he put forward is analogizing the Tower of Babel of past to the Tower of Babel today, which is about data and profits. And here's the kicker. Google, Anthropic, Meta and OpenAI are all quietly lobbying the Vatican before this came out. That's fascinating. And there's kind of strong evidence that this anti-AI document was actually written in part using AI. So you can't make this stuff up.

You know, this is the head of the church for 1.4 billion Catholics. And it's a significant...

Dave Blundin (4:16)

Isn't that incredible, Peter, how, you know, during the time we've been doing this podcast, we went from random person on the street has no idea what AI even stands for, to a little bit of awareness, to now the leader of 1.4 billion people in a religious group is now writing a document about its impact. The amount of awareness that's escalated during the time we've been doing this pod is just probably like no other topic in history.

Peter Diamandis (4:44)

And for good reason. I mean, it's the most significant impact the human race will have ever had. And it's happening in a condensed time period. Salim, you called this out first beyond anybody. What are your thoughts on this?