Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299

Peter Diamandis (0:00)

Richard, I'm curious, where are we at the moment with RSI?

Richard Socher (0:05)

In various weak forms, we already have RSI. We're not quite there yet, but we're very close.

Peter Diamandis (0:10)

When do you believe we reach ASI?

Richard Socher (0:14)

I think it will take us probably several decades.

Peter Diamandis (0:18)

On Terminal Bench 4.0, Sonnet 5.5 jumped from 10 percent to 70 percent, pretty extraordinary.

Dave Blundin (0:24)

My theory would be that they're trying to compete with China, which is about three months behind, and fill that gap before a lot of enterprises go to open-source models.

Alexander Wissner-Gross (0:34)

It's not at all obvious to me why anyone should be using Sonnet 5.5 over Opus 5.5, unless you have some token or latency or other consideration. I do not plan to use Sonnet 5.5.

Peter Diamandis (0:45)

The Defense Secretary announced Project Meridian. It's a new Pentagon effort on the future of warfare. It's co-led by Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey.

Alexander Wissner-Gross (0:54)

This, I think, is a transformative moment. This is a major, major step forward.

Salim Ismail (0:59)

But the big question is going to be...

SPEAKER_6 (1:03)

Now, that's the Moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. This episode is brought to you by the Abundance Summit and Link Ventures.

Peter Diamandis (1:14)

Welcome to Moonshots, everyone. Your number one podcast in helping you understand the Singularity. What's going on? What does it mean to you and your family? And what the breaking news is? We publish this twice a week to help you keep up with the extraordinary rate of change with me today is the Fantastic Four, Alex Wissner-Gross, our in-house ASI, Dave Blundin, our impresario of AI investing, Salim Ismail, our Globetrotter, who's home today. Amazing, Salim. And the father of the Organizational Singularity, Peter Diamandis, your host and data-driven optimist. Our mission here, keep you optimistic about the future.

And here's the numbers from this week. In seven days, Google shipped Gemini 4, Argon, Anthropic shipped Sonnet 5.5, OpenAI shipped GPT 6.1, Sol, and the Frontier Intelligence has gotten cheaper by threefold. SpaceX launched the next batch of astronauts, the ISS, and also launched Google's TPUs into orbit for Project Suncatcher. If you're new to the Moonshots podcast, please hit subscribe. We publish twice a week, and you don't want to miss any of this news during this hypersonic tsunami. Our Moonshot here is to 20X our subscriber base to get to 10 million, to help spread the word of optimism and the extraordinary future that we're building. Today on Moonshots, we're joined by one of the architects of modern AI, Richard Socher.

Born in Germany and trained at Stanford, Richard is among the world's most cited natural language processing researchers, a pioneer in deep learning and prompt engineering, and a serial founder who's repeatedly turned frontier research into category-defining companies. First, he founded MetaMind, which was acquired by Salesforce, where he then became the chief scientist leading AI research for a friend of the pod, Mark Benioff. Next, Richard founded u.com, recognized by Time in the World Economic Forum, and now valued at north of 1.5 billion as well as his fund AIX Ventures. Today, Richard is co-founder and CEO of Recursive, perhaps the biggest moonshot he's ever taken, focused on recursively self-improving super intelligence. Richard, congrats on a $670 million fundraise from Google Ventures, Greycroft, NVIDIA and AMD, and 410 million in compute from AWS. Personal disclosure, I'm very proud to be a seed investor in Recursive.

Of course, Richard, important to mention, your new book just got released, The Eureka Machine, Why AI is the Key to Unlocking a New Era of Scientific Discoveries. Welcome to the pod, Richard.

Richard Socher (3:59)

It's so great to be back.

Dave Blundin (4:00)

Let me just add a truly, truly awesome guy. A lot of people who listen to the pod are worried about the ethics and the risks and everything. But boy, if you want a person to conquer recursive self-improvement that you can like and trust, Richard is the man.

Peter Diamandis (4:16)

Yeah.

Richard Socher (4:16)

Thank you so much. It's so great to be back here. I love your guys' constructive optimism.

Salim Ismail (4:21)

I have a bold prediction for this episode.

Peter Diamandis (4:24)

What's that?

Salim Ismail (4:25)

This one episode will prove our thesis for this whole podcast more than any other episode we ever record.

Peter Diamandis (4:32)

Awesome.

Salim Ismail (4:33)

Let's go.

Peter Diamandis (4:35)

Alex, do you know Richard?

Alexander Wissner-Gross (4:37)

Yeah, Richard, you and I have chatted quite a bit. I don't think we've actually ever met in person though.

Dave Blundin (4:43)

Really?

Richard Socher (4:43)

We have not and it's the first time on a podcast together. It's going to be awesome.