Why Jensen and Zuck think the doomers are wrong (plus AI get’s a rebrand) | #294 MOONSHOTS Live

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis

The episode features a high-energy panel discussion regarding the rapid acceleration of AI and its potential to drive human abundance. The s

Key takeaways

• Jensen Huang argues that those calling for AI deceleration are actually building more compute today.
• The shift from 'AGI' to 'Superintelligence' is viewed as a way to demystify the technology and reduce fear-based narratives.

Main topics

• AI Doomerism vs. Optimism
• US-China AI Geopolitics

Notable quotes

AI is not a hand grenade. It's a jet pack.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a manifesto for technological optimism, suggesti

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:04) Good morning everybody and welcome to Moonshots Live, our inaugural event. Yeah, it is such an awesome treat to have all of you here and get a chance to meet you guys. Our smiling muscles are exhausted from this morning, but I think we're going to be going throughout the day. On behalf of Dave Blunden, AWG, Salim, and Imad, it is an awesome pleasure to have you guys here. Yeah, let's give it up. Speaker 2 (0:38) So we're going to talk about this, but our mission is to keep you hopeful, optimistic, and to inspire you to find your massive transformative purpose, to choose your moonshot, and to make it happen. Right? This is life during the singularity. It's never going to be any slower. We have the opportunity, each and every one of us. to make the future what we desire. The future is not happening to us. It's what we create. Ours is the ability given these superhero technologies enabling us to build, create and steer that future. AI is not a hand grenade. It's a jet pack. Speaker 2 (1:26) It's an opportunity for us to find problems and solve problems. You know, I define an entrepreneur as someone who finds problems and solves problems. And the more entrepreneurs on the planet, the more problems get solved. Do we have challenges? Of course. But that's what we humans do. We find the challenges and we fix them. Please remember that. My hope for you, each and every one of you here today, is to find extraordinary co-founders here in this room. to find those individuals who share your purpose, design moonshots and execute on them. The ability has never been faster and more capable than it is today. So by the end of today, if you're not clear what your purpose is, please dig in to find it. and walk away with at least one sentence in your mind. This is what I'm going to build. This is the problem I'm going to solve. And then today or tonight, find three people and speak that statement out loud. When you speak it out loud, you make it real. And guess what? The person you talk to may be your next co-founder, may be your next funder, may be your next partner. Take the time to do that. Because you can and this is the room where magic is gonna happen. All right It's time to introduce my moonshot mates. Let's roll the video. The Speaker 4 (3:00) question is how do you build? How do you make things better people who are already in the ecosystem now have a super intelligence at their beck and call the Speaker 6 (3:08) storyline that we're capturing here will last for millennia as Speaker 7 (3:11) a mathematician GPT 5.6 Pro is the only quality math model Speaker 8 (3:16) All of this automation and AI enablement and cognitive abundance allows us to be deeply, deeply, deeply creative. Speaker 2 (3:23) Video gen combined with AI is a very powerful force. A year from today, we'll all be like, wow, Speaker 6 (3:29) remember how slow it was? Please give a warm welcome to the Speaker 2 (3:34) Moonshot Mates. I'm going to call them out. I'm going to call them out one at a time. Our Afghan warlord, Salim Ismail. Speaker 2 (3:49) Our super intelligence, Alec Riesling-Bruce. Our giant, Imad Boustak. Speaker 8 (3:57) And my Speaker 2 (3:59) fraternity brother, gentlemen. First of all, I did hug Alex, and he is somewhat physically real. He didn't pinch my cheek. He is real. I'm a real boy. Yes. First of all, wasn't last night amazing? How about we give it up for William Shatner, huh? Speaker 2 (4:27) You know, I'm just blown away by his level of energy. Why is my watch going Speaker 1 (4:35) off? Speaker 2 (4:36) It says I have an emergency call going on. Okay. No. I'm okay. I'm okay. Stop it. You know, when technology fails you, it's great. A lot of news going on. Speaker 2 (4:53) Shall we jump in? Speaker 4 (4:55) Let's do it. What Speaker 2 (4:55) else would we Speaker 7 (4:56) do? Speaker 2 (4:56) So, yeah. Speaker 2 (5:00) All right, here's my clicker. So let's open up with the story that's been underlying the last two weeks. There's been really a fear, you know, a pandemic of fear going on in the planet. We had two weeks ago, we hear, you know, Dario goes on with his blog. Sam Altman comes in and says, I agree. Elon comes in and says, I agree. You know, even Demis comes in and says, I agree. And then two nights ago, just before the Xi-Trump meetings, Sam and Dario were there at the Security Council saying, you know, we're in the midst of an existential threat. But, you know, and just to be clear, I do think there is danger from AI, but I think it's danger from humans using AI for malintent. Speaker 1 (5:50) So what I'd like to do is actually Speaker 2 (5:52) share two videos of... some other leaders in industry. Let's talk about this. I want to talk about, you know, is the fear warranted from AI on its own in a rogue? Speaker 2 (6:09) So let's take a look. The first one is Jensen and some comments from him. Let's start here. Speaker 3 (6:15) Nobody's building more compute today than the people asking to be slowed down. All of the other narratives to deflect blame, to make it sound like AI is so powerful. I have no idea how to fix it. It's not my fault. It's just because the technology is just so powerful. Speaker 4 (6:30) So when Geoffrey Hinton is on TV saying he thinks the 10 % chance of societal destruction is not unreasonable? I Speaker 3 (6:35) would Speaker 4 (6:35) tell Speaker 3 (6:36) Geoff that it's irresponsible to say all that. All of his predictions have been wrong. Enough predictions. That 10 % chance is not grounded on science, it's not grounded on research. Just because it comes from a scientist doesn't make it scientific. Speaker 2 (6:58) Drop the mic moment. Speaker 2 (7:01) And then Zuck weighed in. Here we go. Speaker 5 (7:06) Is AI going to kill us? Speaker 5 (7:08) It's just that this is the Speaker 3 (7:09) place you have to start this week. Speaker 5 (7:11) Well, I think if we all do a good job and act responsibly, then no. I mean, I'm quite optimistic about the fact that this is going to be a very positive future for everyone. Look, I mean, I think that there's a lot of rhetoric that is filled with doom. And I mean, my view on this is that there are a number of labs that are working on building advanced AI. And I don't think that we need some kind of like industry-wide coordination to not necessarily mess this up. I think that just each lab needs to take the time and when it sees that there are issues, you just take the time that you need internally to make sure that you're proceeding safely. My own view on this is that we're entering a phase where trust and alignment is actually going to be the most important next set of capabilities. Speaker 2 (8:07) Imad, let's go to you first on this. Speaker 7 (8:09) Yeah, well, I think that it's an interesting period because we're getting the capability increases and people are worried on different sides. But a lot of the open AI outbreaks and things were bad security protocols. It was bad infrastructure on their part. And the most dangerous point we're coming to is humans misusing it, deliberately or not, before we get through to the other side. So I think we've got a series of dangers coming and they're all being conflated into one thing, which is... AI breaking out suddenly kills us all without actually looking at the individual things and putting in place existing regulations and enforcing them. And on the other hand, thinking, how can we actually collaborate to make sure this is aligned and works with us? Speaker 4 (8:49) Alex? I've gone on record multiple times as saying I think something probably went wrong after World War II and we lost out on at least 50 years of progress. due to moral panic over nuclear energy, and I am seriously concerned that a moral panic of the moment over superintelligence could set us back another 50 years. So it's right on the T-shirt, P-Doom less than zero. Speaker 4 (9:15) And I think the worst possible outcome is deceleration, so don't decel. Speaker 2 (9:20) Okay. Salim, PFAB greater than PDU? Oh, Speaker 8 (9:25) like a thousand times. Look, we have evolved for four billion years fighting all sorts of issues. Life tries to, the universe tries to wipe you out, right? There's so many... entropy tries to wipe you out. We're local anti-entropic phenomena that somehow manage to create order out of chaos. And the idea that... that we'll get wiped out now by something seems to be unbelievably absurd. Speaker 2 (9:54) Yeah, but you've got to remember that 99.9 % of all species are no longer with us. Speaker 8 (9:58) Yeah, that's fine, but we keep moving on. Look, if we morph, if we merge with AI, if we merge with a thing, and let's note that's been going on forever, right? Iman's wearing spectacles technically as a transhumanist. The minute you get a vaccination as a child, technically you're a cyborg. So we've been augmenting the human experience with technology. for a very, very long time. And look at the unbelievable lives we're living now and the opportunity to solve more and more problems. The huge problem we have, we talk about this all the time on the podcast, our brains are so geared towards negativity, we get stuck in that phenomena. And I think the work that we're doing here, which is I think why everybody's here and so excited, is pushing that positive narrative because the world is infinitely better than we've had it. So let's celebrate that. Speaker 2 (10:47) Amen. P-Fab. P-Fab, baby. Dave, quote this out on this. Speaker 6 (10:52) Well, we're on the cusp of a moment I've been waiting for my entire life. I'm not going to sit here and throw cold water on this greatest moment, really, in the history of humanity. Jeffrey Hinton is calling it the way he sees it. I think the quote, just because it comes from a scientist doesn't make it scientific, that's going to end up on another Alex t-shirt. That's Speaker 8 (11:11) awesome. Speaker 6 (11:12) But he's calling it like he sees it. But clearly, we're moving forward at warp speed. It's improving itself. The ability to make the world just a dramatically better place is right in front of us. Nothing's going to slow that down. The misuse of it is an incredible threat, and there are solutions to that. But it's happening anyway. To get stuck on doomerism is completely dysfunctional. We're not slowing down. It's going to happen. Speaker 2 (11:36) The other story that transpired yesterday, or kind of didn't transpire yesterday was the Xi-Trump AI conversation. So what came out of that was some state dinners. I think the interesting quote that Trump posted is quote, I want to leave it exactly where it is. That is China's position also. Our guardrails is the Department of Justice. Speaker 2 (12:07) So this ties back to the conversation we had in the last pod where Besant said, we're not going to waive liability. And so this is a very important point. The labs are liable for their product if it does harm. And I think that's one of the most important things that they've asked for liability. Why waive your liability? And one of the questions we've discussed all the time here is, is that the reason that they're saying it's too dangerous? 10, 20 % existential threat. Alex, let's go to you on this. Speaker 4 (12:40) I've made the point on the pod in the past. I think we saw in the past two to three weeks an attempted formation of an AI safety cartel. And I don't think this was even a recent occurrence. This is right there in the founding conceits of OpenAI, the notion that if and when we got close to superintelligence, however construed, or AGI, however construed, that there would be a deliberate effort to form... wasn't being called a cartel at the time, but a coordination mechanism. I don't think it's being called a cartel now either. Well, some of us view it as an attempted cartel, including myself. And I think competition is good. Think back to the creation of OpenAI. So when Sam and Elon and Greg and others created OpenAI, the purpose originally for OpenAI was to be a counterbalance to Google DeepMind, which Elon especially was concerned would become a singleton in the future that would dominate the future of Litecoin with their AI. So we got OpenAI, a counterbalance, if you will. And I think competition is very healthy in this space. I think forming a cartel for full ownership of... what maybe I've called in the past the frontier liberation front and pushing