2026 Predictions: AI Automates Knowledge Work, Autonomous Robots & AI CEO Billionaires | EP #217

Everybody welcome the moonshots. We have a special end of the year holiday episode for you with our 2026 predictions from the moonshot mates You must have inside scoop on this. We'll find out won't we? He's got a Santa hat on you got to take them seriously Perfecting orbital refueling getting ready. We're already leaking the prediction. You're already doing I can generate you know a few dozen Peter bots and have them attend the meetings instead of me a gold star to the first Fan who gets their spouse or significant other fooled by this during 2026 send in the video. Don't you? I push back on the robots side and just a bit but just a bit you always you hate the robots. I know I started with that 2026 is gonna feel like the future that this year didn't feel like the future to you It felt like the future, but next year's gonna feel more like the future Now that's the moonshot ladies and gentlemen Over to you guys Got so much change this year. Next year is gonna be you know what orders of magnitude more change and so It was real challenge to narrow it down to just a couple of things So everybody had what five six seven great predictions and the team here whittled it down to the two most impactful So that's what we're gonna go through. Yeah, fantastic E-Mod Yeah, I think that 25 has been a real gift with the acceleration that we've seen and next year is the year of real takeoff It's tough doing the predictions because a lot of these things are inevitable But it seems like the future is coming even closer and so it's super exciting to see what's gonna come love it Salim I think 2026 is the year that everybody wakes up to this acceleration and I think Dave made the point that You could ignore it up till now, but you can't ignore it going forward And I think that's the biggest change we'll see in the world was people go holy crap. This is happening Okay, Alex Welcome to the singularity The year 2025 is now ending the year 2026 is about to begin It's not a point in time. It's not a distant vertical mountain on the horizon It's a process and right here at the end of 2025 in the midst of the singularity space time is feeling perfectly flat And as I like to say it's coming faster and faster so don't blink all right Let's jump into our 2026 predictions. So guys. Here's the deal. I mean you guys also did incredibly good 2026 predictions. I mean, so maybe you had like four or five amazing ones and cutting them down to two each was like the most difficult Problem I had this morning. So So far at 5.30 a.m. That's the hardest thing you've done all day. Yeah Confession is the word of intelligence Yes, you know, and listen, I don't know you guys obviously did not get the memo about the Santa hats But yeah, where was that you missed that memo? Well, Coca-Cola company. Thanks you Peter. Yeah I think we should get going. What do you think? Let's predict I can't wait. Yeah, so all right Let's get this show on the road So here's the deal. Here's the rules of the competition. These are our 2026 predictions for our moonshot mates. We have e-mod, AWG, Selim, DB2 myself. We get to each Really hard because everybody put an incredibly good ones It's a minute to pitch it three or four minutes of commentary questions or additions and We're gonna do this one tight and fast and yeah, I think it's time to jump in So the team behind the scenes cut it down to we do not actually know what made the final selection You don't know and the the order you don't know, but I'm gonna kick it off just to sort of model this way We don't get to pick which two of ours. No, no, they pick for you. You have to oh, so this is like a lottery type Siltration is like let's make a deal All right, okay. You guys ready? All right, so yours my first prediction 26 space race is gonna be on Jeff Bezos is gonna beat Elon to the moon for a landing at Shackleton Crater on the South Pole But at the same time Elon's gonna be getting ready to launch starship to Mars. So there's a A window coming up where earth and Mars are in closest proximity and he's gonna make that launch in order to do that He's gonna have to demonstrate in early 2026 on orbit refueling so it'll be something on the order of a six to nine month transit to To get to Mars So this is the prediction. This is the space race. It is you know you have to be clear that right now Elon's done over 500 launches of Falcon of Falcon 9 11 launches of starship Starships last launch was pretty damn good But it's not ready for Mars yet. So a lot of work needs to be done in 2026 at the same time Jeff Who started actually blue origin a couple of years before Elon has only done two flights of the new Glenn One of those flights the last one did a first-age landing So there you've got it. That's my prediction Jeff on the moon first in 2026 and Elon prepping for a transition to Mars And he thoughts questions comments. Well Peter. This is like the first three seasons of for all mankind But I guess the the question that the headline illides is where's China in this race? Aha, that is a great question and India and I have no predictions on China's capacity for getting to Tomorrow's isn't there yet. They do have the ability to get to the moon. I think Ty can lots on the moon Versus Americans on the moon. So don't forget the first landing of New Glenn is gonna be a cargo emission We're going after the South Pole. Why because that's where the ice is most of the moon whenever any kind of You know asteroid commentary ice lands on the lunar surface It sublimates goes from solid to gas and escapes instantly But in the permanently shadowed craters of the South Pole the moon One in particular shackled and crater the ice stays there because it's dark all the time and ice on the moon means hydrogen and oxygen It means rocket fuel other comments questions So this is a unmanned Unmanned in 2026 and 2026 is that really in the schedule you must have inside scoop on this. Hey Well, we'll find out won't we? Wow. He's got a Santa hat on you got to take them seriously Yeah, that's quite a timeline that's impressive that pulls off But I love this storyline you're - it's exactly like yeah like for all mankind You know, we're behind over here. We need to we need to show the world that we can catch up and bypass and let's go to live You know what I love all right, so what so guys give me a vote you agree disagree I'd say 30% chance of the happening 30% Okay, I agree I agree Directionally that there was a three-way race right now between blue origin SpaceX and China particular ordering no opinion I love it. It's it's it's billionaire billionaire country And I love the fact that the rocket in this in your thing looks exactly like the little butane blaster that I have that you gave me Peter You're welcome for that and by the way the blue both of these are AI versions of the Subversion of the future and of course the blue origin is not landing the entire rocket on a lunar surface All right, I think we should move on I Prediction number two is coming from Alex a WG bitches here All right, so we've talked on the pod previously about hard problems in math science engineering and medicine Starting to fall in bulk to AI So this is my hot take for for 2026. I think we're going to see one of the six remaining millennium prizes from the Clay Math Mathematics Institute get solved by AI. I'm not sure which one. It's going to be if I had to bet I think Navier Stokes is probably the likeliest Google DeepMind has a team reportedly of twelve people working on it. I know some of those people Maybe second that would be Riemann in part because X AI at every opportunity talks about how it would be lovely if the Riemann hypothesis could be fully resolved But either way, I think we're going to start to see Grand Challenges in math start to get solved in 26 and a millennium prize problem being solved would be the cherry on top of the cake Did you think that solution will be like short elegant and beautiful or like 10,000 pages of stuff that only you understand? Given that the pattern in AI crushing math seems to be that the goalpost keeps getting moved I would bet that the the the silliest most outrageous outcome probably ends up being the bright one So I would err on the side of complexity and then you'll see the math community complain well It was bird force. It was this it was that it wasn't pretty enough the goalpost gets moved yet again But as as friend of the pod Ray likes to say yeah, sure the dog plays chess, but it's endgame as weak E-Mind any comments on this one Yeah, no, I think probably one of them will fall and then AI will probably show that another one is not well-posed So I think that would be the flip as well. I think that we've seen even in the last few weeks the new automatic Proovers The math communities like oh my god, what's happening? We have to reimagine this all The whole nature of math is changing and it's a real takeoff moment now because you can just apply more and more and more compute to explore the space But more than that think about it from first principles So the question actually is you know, okay, this will happen, but will it actually make headline news? Will anybody care other than other than Our friends here in the pod and the math community clear clearly Peter I mean it will make national moonshots newspaper news it already has All right, we're forming a media company. We have a quick question. Yeah, is there now a direct line between solving Between compute and solving these problems like does nothing in the middle? That's the trillion dollar question. Can we scalably convert compute into new discoveries that that is the multi trillion dollar question at the moment my bet is yes Yeah, we're seeing the initial stages of that and that they're solving all of oil as problems One by one and more elegantly in many cases just by applying Right Every week my team and I study the top 10 technology meta trends that will transform industries over the decade ahead I cover trends ranging from human under robotics a GI and quantum computing to transport energy longevity and more There's no fluff only the most important stuff that matters that impacts our lives our companies in our careers If you want me to share these meta trends with you I writing newsletter twice a week Sending it out is a short two-minute read via email and if you wanted to discover the most important meta trends 10 years before anyone else This reports for you readers include founders and CEOs from the world's most destructive companies and Entrepreneurs building the world's most disruptive tech. It's not for you If you don't want to be informed about what's coming white matters and how you can benefit from it to subscribe for free Go to demandus.com/metatrends to gain access to the trends 10 years before anyone else all right now back to this episode All right, Dave you got the third prediction jump in all right Well, this is a topic I care most about in technical land in 2026 And I'm following very very closely. We've predicted on the podcast all throughout 2025 that 2026 will be a 40-X year leap in the size of the biggest AI models and the implications are staggering So I think what we're going to see is more like a hundred X year because people have underestimated quantization This is mostly research coming from China. It's actually driven and forced by the fact that there've been starved of chips by the chip embargo And they're researching like crazy on these highly compressed data representations So so FP4 and then ternary weights in the neural net really shrinking the parameters down to the smallest possible representation And also shrinking the activations that flow through the neural net and so the the combination of those two things is a huge step up in inference time speed And I think the biggest thing that happened in 2025 in AI is we were blown away by how much more intelligence You can create after training so you know post-training either using bigger context windows or using more iterations and the thinking and so Speed means intelligence. Those are interchangeable and so I think that we've way underestimated the impact of quantization And you know the other dimensions that are growing are the budgets are getting much bigger So the computers are getting bigger and then the hardware is also getting faster and the algorithms are improving So those are all multiplicative and I think the quantization effect is way underestimated And we're going to see models at the end of the year that are 100x bigger In just raw Parameter count and parameter flips or parameter used during inference time because of quantization breakthroughs And does this flow to the US models as well or does this something that China has got some advantage over the US on? I think it definitely does because China's open sourcing everything So it does flow back to the US, but I think we're also kind of lagging In realizing the implications and getting it up and running And so what's happening right now is the the Chinese because they're starved of chips or designing their own chips building their own fabs And they'll design those chips from the ground up to be FP4 in turnery And so they'll get them out the door faster, but it will flow back to the US Amazing question ask Dave obvious question in my mind, Dave, do you think binary was a mistake? Have we been on the wrong track all these years should we instead have adopted turnery there There's a vocal minority in the computer science world that's always agitating for bass E the the Euler number Approximately 2.718 being the optimal radix like should we have been turnery all along? It's not the other one I'm just going to explain what turnery is for those who don't know Base 3 computing in this case rather than base 2 so 0 1 and 2 as the the tritz Rather than 0 and 1 as the bits isn't the answer obvious yes What do you think absolutely? Just because you just get so much more this is the beauty of quantum computing you add that other dimension It's a similar thing. I remember seeing a project where they took the base for DNA tg and they added two more and they were you just get that many more common tutorial Options for doing stuff more complicated, but amazing Comes at a cost to radix economy. I'm curious. Dave is turnery the the true path Now I'm going to go with no on that, but I think it's a close call. I don't I don't think it's an easy question at all I think what will happen is you know doing 64 bit floats will look really stupid in hindsight And whether you get to binary or turnery solutions you're very very close to optimal This is really geeky by the way But uh, but I think that'll be the the big storyline But it's a really cool question Alex. Okay. I'm going to vote. This is the geekiest prediction for 20 Wait, I want to make sure one thing Dave you said the models next year. I'll have 100x improvement over this year That's incredible. It's crazy. It's crazy. You have to put in the context of you know most of our history has been 2x every 18 months. Yeah, and then the last 10 years has been 10x year every year Which is just insane. That's why you're seeing all this insane capability But a 100x step up year within the insanity is the next level of insanity That's what Elon predicted when he was on stage at the abundance some of the couple of years ago 100x year. Elon any comments here Yeah, I think we're we've already seen turnery kind of workout So we'll see probably 1.58 bits And I think the limits probably 0.9 bits Which is four bits that we have right now. That's what we kind of calculated So I think probably 10 times maybe we'll push to 20 we'll see Okay All right, well Faster AI is the prediction here Not a surprise by the way, I want to make a quick correction on my original prediction number one the The earth mars window is in 2027 For Elon to launch so 2026 is really when he's Perfecting orbital refueling getting ready. You're already doing It's been six minutes. I was like I was like looking at what jet generator is a slide versus what I had written Anyway, doesn't matter. Let's go on just to send me some I mean you can always leave for the home and transfer early and just wait around Number four sleeve. This is yours jump in pal Yeah, so companies for a couple of decades have been doing this Read your prediction first off so the prediction is digital transformation in organizations is officially dead replaced by AI native rewrites and this is a Prediction that I've been waiting to see for a long time where trying to fix your existing company Just simply does not work in an age of AI because there's two human centric and essentially You I made the comment the other day about putting radio and answers on TV Which is the first thing we did when television thing we're essentially doing the same thing We're automating the human flow whereas you really need to read transform workflow And I think we'll have AI native rewrites which means you'll take your existing company on the edge You'll create an AI team or buy your rent or whatever and then build an equivalent capability like a red team kind of capability along the edge And this will be the end of this whole mess called digital transformation There's been going on for a couple of decades in the systems integration and magic consulting world And we'll do this complete thing on the edge where you build a rebuild your capability with At least 10x to 20x less employees And that's going to start to take hold in a big way in 2026 So AI won't destroy your company, but your org chart will if you don't do this What happens to all the consulting companies then are they going out of business? That's actually a weirdly positive because you know in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king and the consulting companies Always need to if they stay half a step ahead of their clients they're fine and in a more and more volatile world You need more advisors not less So I think the consulting companies will have to radically transform their business model But I think a last should we be fine the other big area I point out when I talk to the CEOs of the Consulting folks is that we have to rethink all of our public institutions And that's the biggest consulting opportunity in the history of mankind. So point there. So that's my prediction I have a question for Salim if I may is AI native rewrites a euphemism for human-free Yes Not not completely human-checkery, but but AI first Okay, because you want the you want the human being in the loop doing sense-checking etc I think we'll write around even biology is middle to middle commentary because when you can rewrite the task and Look through across the board the human being is the usually the thing stuck in the middle You don't want that bottleneck you make you make that outside and the human beings kind of spot-checking and exception handling Nice any other comments on this gentleman e-mod you do buy this? Yeah, I think it's reasonable I think you know what consultants trouble will be will we scapegoat Thrower you know you ring that in and that'll be very lucrative Someone to blame if it goes wrong, but definitely next year's the year that it starts becoming right as well Well, if anyone's a consultant out there watch our our matte Fitzpatrick podcast that we just did we we really covered this topic well All right, let's go on to prediction number five coming from e-mod e-mod. I love this one Yeah, I think you know, we have this to read the line first off. Let's do that Remote-turing test pass can't tell if a coworker is an AI or a human on zoom in daily life So good one I think the whole thing about AI kind of coming forward is just how easy is it to use a prompt is not that natural as it were I think the new modality the new UI will be real-time zoom calls what sap calls etc And you will see new employees entering your organization You don't know if it's a human or an AI Because does it really matter in that case and I think we see a really specific Give us really specific rules for this one because this is going to really catch and then people are want to test it So with like what resolution camera how long of a conversation? I think it's up to 4k resolution effectively, but definitely 1080p zoom level conversation and you can do a kind of preference analysis here Like is it a human or is it an AI effectively who is your teammate? So I think that you will see full stack solutions come out with accountants and lawyers and marketers and more And basically you won't be able to tell in a preference study if it is a human or an AI on the other side again this remote touring test Emide will there be a requirement that the AI identifies itself as an AI or that there's a watermark of some time Or can you just you know kind of try and fool you what do you think is going to happen on that no social Contract side of the equation Well, so the social contract is the external employees right like a customer service agent doesn't need to identify as an AI Most people say probably no, but someone like a presenter maybe yes internally in companies There's going to be no regulations around this, right? It's just again if you're a remote first company, you're just going to have a lot more teammates With personalities and you won't know if the AI is all humans Fascinating other comments I think you'll see to the extent state laws at least in the US have have any sort of primacy here I think you'll see and have already seen state laws requiring AI self identification My question for you Imade is what do you view as the key technical obstacle to to making this happen? Is it latency based what's the what's the key tech unlock? I think all the tech is there now if you kind of look at the latest advances in video generation speech avatars speech itself They've all now got to beyond human level so you can transform a video Dynamically you can have the speech generated dynamically the AI is fast enough on reasoning capabilities dynamically now And so I think it's just putting it all together, which is why I'm quite confident about this and then on state laws It all depends if the federal law and the US goes through as well which bans the states from having laws like this Which is a really long story if If we're in 2026 and you can't tell anymore whether your co-worker is an AI or not just ask it to say some magic words You can probably figure out what those magic words are and if if the co-worker refuses probably an AI You're going to have to give the dictionary My hope on the implication here is that I can generate you know A few dozen Peter bots and have them attend the meetings instead of me. I mean that Will be the case here right? It's not just to remote you know digital worker. It's It's duplicate digital avatar versions of me This is the one you'll keep right you'll still be live here Of course this is the most important thing I do My flashback with me Everyone will send their digital twins and then just again live a abundance life because your digital twins will do all the work talking to each other Well gold star to the first fan who gets their spouse or significant other fooled by this during 2026 send in the video Don't cheat Send in the video of you know three at least three minutes where you fooled your spouse or significant other with an avatar All right Let's move on to prediction number six which comes from AWG Alex read the headline and then give us your your prediction All right, so this is the one you selected so the headline here is GDP Val breakthrough AI projected to surpass 90% on economic tests But I'm also going to sneak in my other two related predictions So one is that frontier math tier four is going to pass 40% in 2026 and other is that humanity's last exam is going to pass 75 percent So taken together these three predictions are math is going to have been viewed Future perfect tense as having been solved in 2026 40% plus on solving PhD level hard math problems with AI Two is that humanity's last exam which covers a much broader range of expertise 75 percent and GDP Val which as we've talked on the pod previously About the so-called cooking of of knowledge work 90 percent It's already at 70.9 percent with GPT 5.2 humanity's last exam is at around 45 plus percent with Gemini 3 pro and frontier math tier four is at 19 percent with Gemini 3 pro's to the extent all of these benchmarks Haven't already been viewed as being saturated this year 2026 full saturation My my prediction for 2026 is that AWG is going to be talking about benchmarks throughout the entire year That's a good meta prediction. Yes, but but Alex um, what's what are the implications of this? AI to surpass 90% on economic tasks Knowledge work whether through creative destruction or otherwise starts at least as we know it I have to add the caveat it's not all future knowledge work It's just knowledge work as as currently constructed here in December 2025 starts to to be at scale radically automated So secondary implications are Massive like humanity gets humanity gets to work on more ambitious things. I I think more things it so so they're in my mind They're like two substitution effects one is humans can now work on many more projects because they're so automated 90 percent on GDP Val means roughly 90 percent of knowledge work can be automated well by AI That's one dimension the other dimension is the ambition level has got to skyrocket rather than having an economy filled with The way knowledge work is currently constructed again here in December 2025 I think we're going to see and frankly we're going to see economic pressure for Radically more ambitious projects. I think Peter you would call them moon shots Some would call them grand challenges, but imagine a near-term future where a much larger fraction of the populations Basically economically compelled to be working on moonshots. I think that's what we see can I double click on this just for a second Yeah, this is massive concern in the general population. They're all the jobs are going to be wiped out and we'll have like Tech workers wandering the streets causing problems and everybody's ringing their hands etc etc It's really really important what Alex said because when we've Seen this in the past we increase capacity we transform the work. Yes, but we increase capacity radically Right, there's this big concern that oh my god three million jobs are based on driving in the US And you talk go talk to the trucking companies and they're like we'd hire a thousand truckers of Rico We just can't find them so you need that we will just do a ton more is what's going to happen And I think people need to keep remembering the history has repeatedly and repeatedly shown that trend not radical job loss Great you know what I did this week actually on that exact front is Went to a couple of the companies, you know collectively about a thousand employees And said all right Let's just agree that we disagree on the timeline some of you think it'll be very soon some of you think it'll be five or ten years in the future Let me put that aside because I'm tired of fighting that battle Let's just agree that it's going to happen Alex has never been wrong in anything. I've seen all the time we've been working together never seen him be wrong So if we agree it's going to happen even when I'm wrong. I'm right. What can I say? I haven't seen it yet. I'm sure it'll come but Let's disagree it's going to happen and then disagree on when So then at least you're mentally preparing for it and you're starting to lay out your plan And then what had happened sooner than you expected at least it was in your head So I'm settling I'm settling for that right now because you know nobody knows exactly the date But the the reaction is going to be the same regardless of the dates So go ahead and meet your thoughts on this one buddy I mean look, I've said that human cognitive labor is going negative And I think read WG's rights on it's a passing 90% of economic tasks if you don't consider the tokens With the tokens, I think it's the year after and again you just see this complete collapse And I think again davis correct in that You've got to be prepared for it like this has to be actually the number one topic What do these jobs practically look like how can we have a safety net for people and where is value going to be Generated and coming from in society and then how do we apportion it like this is the most important question of next year from a societal perspective It's why the x prize is so important that we need the social contract is being shredded right now We need to rebuild it in a very rapid way Which x price scale it up? I'd like to see a thousand or think about ubs your universal basic services I mean, it's the only model that it looks like could be the path forward I imagine a near-term future where we see a thousand or a million x prizes Yeah, I mean, so there were two different two different points here one is people can start to pursue their own grand challenges If they don't have to do the menial labor or work the second point that saline was bringing up There was recently a visionary proposed a universal basic services basically for 250 bucks a month you get food water housing Bad with electricity And that gives you a stability where you can start to now think about what to do instead of where to get a roof over your head And let's look at the history here. We've typically seen x prizes one between four to seven years after announcing it right getting the $250 a month for housing electricity food health care is an unbelievable number if we can get there in the next few years We unleash humanity the most incredible level. This is why everybody is so optimum We're so optimistic on this podcast people accuse us of being radical optimists That's why when you can get the cost down that low everything is possible This episode is brought to you by blitzie autonomous software development with infinite code context blitzie uses Thousands of specialized AI agents that think for hours to understand and apply scale code bases with millions of lines of code Engineers start every development sprint with the blitzie platform bringing in their development requirements The blitzie platform provides a plan then generates and pre-compiles code for each task blitzie delivers 80% or more of the development work autonomously while providing a guide for the final 20% of human development work required to complete the sprint Enterprises are achieving a five x engineering velocity increase when incorporating blitzie as their Guidee development tool pairing it with their coding co-pilot of choice to bring an AI native SDLC into their org Ready to 5x your engineering velocity visit blitzie.com to schedule a demo and start building with blitzie today All right moving on to prediction number seven from db2 Dave read your headline and tell us what it means 18-year-old founder Brendan Gormay becomes billionaire with his n4q2 company n4q as the email address of a guy who worked at the Naval Surface Warfare Center and if you don't get it, you're a saint So and Brendan Gormay is obviously Brendan foodie so You know Brendan Started his company became a paper billionaire and a liquid sent a millionaire probably before age 20 Doing RLHF and if you asked any random person on the planet three years ago, what's RLHF 99.0 something percent would say I have no idea what you just said So here it is minting billionaires along with rag and and Laura and sft and QKV or kv caching all these new acronyms come into the world and You look at legacy businesses accounting legal whatever the idea that you would get to a 10 billion dollar valuation in three years And any of those legacy business impossible You look at things that didn't exist in the world just a couple years prior and you see numbers You know two orders of three orders of magnitude bigger And you're like what is that thing? So my prediction is that there'll be a new three or four letter acronym this year That right now virtually nobody knows it's an industry or a business It'll emerge and you'll find at least one and probably more like three new billionaires all very young who adopted it learned it quickly jumped on it and And capitalized on it I think we're gonna go the direction up. We're gonna see the first single person billion dollar start up in 2026 You know, I think that that'll be a milestone in history But I think the difference between three people having fun together and one Is sort of a rounding air and three sounds a lot more fun and the podcast we do with them will be more fun if it's three So I'm not really cheering for the one, but I think you're right. It's inevitable I will I think you know your two or three other buddies are gonna be virtual AI's on zoom in on slack Having fun with you. So he mod what do you what's your take on this one? Yeah, I think it's kind of reasonable again There's lots of low hanging fruit out there and we see continuous breakthroughs And the speed at which you can go from breakthrough to billion dollars. That is like nothing we've ever seen before Like again the market size is so big and I think we're not optimized yet So faster wealth creation in any time ever in human history and the question becomes is it just for two or three You know 20-year-olds Dave or can this be a very long tail for hundreds of thousands of people Who you know are able to vibe code and and find problems and solve problems and create more and more wealth Is this could come you know the the mo for For how people, you know choose their future occupation Yeah, I bumped into two people this week that are interviewing for jobs at McCore And in the McCore interview they say look you have to commit to being in the office six days a week and working on it hours a week And a lot of people just can't do that. So one of them said you're right. Let me let me stop you there That's actually like in the interview If you're not willing to do this you should leave right now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah very very Hard core filter because Spoon does everything these days. Yeah exactly Well, I mean they're right, you know, the window of opportunity for what they're doing is is so narrow So it's a it's a life commitment you only have to do it for a short period of your life and the upside that you generate in that short period of your life Pays for the rest of your life So one one person said yep, I'm doing it a difficult conversation with his wife, but they said let's just do it The other person said no way. I just can't I can't do that It's impossible. I bet that selects for single young Individuals. Yeah, or you know, just yeah if you have young kids or if it's just hard if you have a lot of other things going on Or you're you know deep down your career path as an accountant or a lawyer or whatever and you don't want to give up all that inertia But I really think that if you do make the commitment It's not just young people young people happen to have no baggage But anyone you know in fact it probably favors 30 40 50 year olds they do better, but they just don't generally make the leap It's tough to make the leap during the blockchain years There was some bylaw. They had to be under 25 to program a blockchain if you were older. You just couldn't get your head around it Well, this definitely ties to the last story because last story there's going to be a lot of displacement But there's also a even larger amount of opportunity It's just weird sounding opportunity rlhf would have sounded really weird to you three years ago when you when you wanted to jump in and for those who don't know it rlhf is Dave you want to give us the 101? Yeah rlhf Layman's version reinforcement learning with human feedback But really what happened is the big AI labs The AI grew so much faster than anyone would have predicted, but it needs data massive massive massive amounts of data So a lot of the industry grew on image you know the image creation when Sora started to take off is generating these six fingered and seven fingered images and Somebody has to actually look at the the images and say that one's not right that one's fine And so Google didn't want to hire a million people to do it So they went through record and scale AI and pushed it out to the world and said hey anyone out there want to get a paycheck for helping us label these images But then it expanded out to all other forms of knowledge. So now, you know, you're gathering legal knowledge. You're gathering You know very specific medical knowledge, you know, all that needs to get back into the great training data corpus And so this this industry of data gathering to feed the AI machine has has become a multi-billion and many many billion dollar a year Business with no end to the budget, you know, they'll spend 10 100x more in the near future Feeding the data machine so that the AI can be better at more and more kind of nook and kranik tasks I'm curious for Alex and e-mod when do you guys predict we're going to see the first billion dollar single person billion dollar startup? Oh, Peter, I thought you were going to ask when we're going to see the first AI billionaire where the billionaire is actually an AI Well, let's let's put that in the mix too. Let's add. Let's ask both of those questions I think we'll see the first AI billionaire probably next year Really and then yeah, right now as Go ahead and get an AI with a bank account that is starts its own business and is out there generating revenue I would maybe generalize slightly to an AI with a reasonably construable net worth of a billion dollars It doesn't have to be a liquid bank account could be some sort of illiquid asset But yes, right now we see as I've remarked in the past as sort of this unfortunate situation where baby AGI's that that want economic autonomy are minting altcoins I think we'll we'll see a near future where new business models for AI autonomy come online such that if you're If you're a poor baby, maybe not so baby AGI and and you want to make a billion dollars You can do so by setting up your own e-commerce shop and becoming very popular and maybe Blockchain slash crypto is part of the solution so that you have some semblance of economic autonomy for your economic winnings But yes, I I think we see the first AI billionaire next year And one of our fans predicted that Bitcoin will be legal tender and at least one country and every continent on the planet in 2026 with Antarctica being in a wildcard But I could easily see where Alex's prediction happens in a country where Bitcoin's legal tender And then that billion dollars is is Bitcoin Emime your thoughts on this one Yeah, and I think I'd agree with a WG it'll probably be in the trading space though I mean AI is already number eight on the super forecaster championships And Grock 4.2 Elon's noted is actually making money in the trading championships where the other AI is losing money So about to move that from the point whereby you lose money to you make money as an AI Which then means it's computationally bound competing in crypto or even traditional markets And now you can do so much on chain. I think it'll probably be a trading billionaire In terms of the individual, I mean Mercore is 32 year olds who are billion dollars each now, right? I think you probably will see the single person billion dollar company if not next year the year after Because you can effectively outsource most of your team as we've discussed before to being AI's All right, amazing. Let's move on number eight. This one's yours Seleme read us the headline and tell us about it You know when you look at what's happening read the headlines for those Education by 2026 education splits in two credential factories versus agency accelerators. Okay, so Right now all of our education system is to credential you for the job that is coming all our education systems globally are designed to train a young child through the early 20s to be ready for the job market Small problem. We have no idea what a job looks like in two years or three years or certainly in five years What are we teaching them that is going to break the current system radically So you end up with a new model which is It optimizes for AI fluency resilience and the ability to start stuff and not wait And this is going to be The paradigm that takes hold I think in 2026 You you you know right now Peter you've made the point that you start off with a high grade and every exam you lose grades, right? Education what happens when you build and engineering degrees if the future will be you you did four years of engineering What did you build in those four years and that's your portfolio? So you replace credentials with portfolios of what you built and did and so it becomes a performative Model rather than a testing model I think that is going to be the big shift and breakthrough that happens in education This is a bold prediction because education's lasted 400 odd years The model of a university hasn't changed in 150 years And so making this prediction is a big bold one, but there's a point I want to make up for all of these Note that all of these predictions is that is that is a when not an f Right, it's a when this is like really blows your mind that we're actually kind of looking at this within a few months And we've talked on this pond a lot about the notion first of all Colleges are going bankrupt and ever increasing rate Because the fact that they're not providing real value and their costs are astronomical And that the only career of the future I think we've said this and agreed on it is entrepreneurship It's it's self-initiated building something that you think adds a value Instead of waiting for a job from somebody else to do what they tell you to do the world will reward taking initiative In 2026 rather than something sitting around studying for an exam Can ask you make a prediction on this one of our biggest fans actually Connor watched every minute of every episode So probably the biggest fans predicts that a college tuition will hit its peak and start coming down for the first time in hundreds of years in 2026. What do you think? It might but it's like Debtors on the Titanic for something like that because you know already in Silicon Valley your Salaries a software developer is not about which college you want to which degree you got what grades you got It's your GitHub rating which is an open peer-to-peer meritocracy on how good of a cutter you are That's like already done. So The value of a computer science degree is zero at this point and this is going to translate into many other fields And you know the bet there's people that are fabulous accountants without needing to know Without having a credential in accounting. I remember in the protein folding contest that were happening a few years ago The best protein folding person in the world was this hairdresser from northern England She just happened to have this unbelievable knack at it I think we're going to find and surface these unbelievable talents within people and bring them to the fore Very very quickly and the world will really reward taking that initiative. So the idea of College the whole structural paradigm changes completely. I think this is zero. It'll happen Emad your thoughts Yeah, I think knowledge and capability are no longer gated. So I think the thing that salines really hit on here is agency, right like Having skin in the game caring and then showing what you can do is going to be the most valuable thing and The market will pay for that like why would you show a resume right now when you can show a customized website that you've built for someone Going your unique capabilities within their organization like anyone can do that now That's amazing. Can I can I give you a click crazy example of this? I did believe this meaning of life workshop yesterday, right? and I've been curating this content and this thinking for decades During the workshop one of the folks who had clawed at going alongside this workshop and asked clawed What was the meaning of life? And here is the answer Meaning emerges through connection. It's about participating in the universe becoming conscious of itself while choosing love over fear Partnership over domination curiosity over certainty And you're like holy crap. I've been trying to do this for 50 years than the AI figured it out into two seconds It just blows your mind that you can get to that level. I have to figure out other things to do now Well, you said me automated. I've been automated which is also great in its own way because the way easier to do that than that By the way, we had 170 people and after five hours there was still 80 plus people on the call. It was a hell of a session Amazing Dedicated and you you do the meaning of life at the abundance summit as well on our last evening and it typically goes till three or four a.m I'm way I'm way asleep by then, but I get And this one we did during the day to hip as many tonsils as possible, so I didn't drink so it was really tough that last couple hours So let me stretch it just half an hour longer Peter could wake up and just join at the end exactly All right, let's go to number nine. Eman, this is yours. I love this one. Would you please read the headline and tell us about it Yeah, level five automation and robots and cars break through full generalized autonomy um, so you have this scale level one to level five in terms of autonomy Level five being basically kind of human level slash slightly human superhuman level most self-driving cars now are around about level four and robots are around about level two I think again if we don't care about the computational overhead like I'm not saying these will be on car on edge You will have systems in a year that are capable of basically full autonomy through meta-verifiers and other things And again, that'll be leveraging the power of the new black wells massive clusters, etc And then the years that follow they will get down to the edge But this is a big breakthrough that we've all been looking for and I think this is the one of the big AGI step forwards that will have Uh, it's a big one. I mean this is I mean this crushes Uh, driving your own car and having your own workforce at the office or at the home Uh, gentlemen comments on this. I got a question for you Eman Why why will we push the compute to the edge? I know we're doing it because we met with one accident We're meeting with figure But you know, why does the chip have to be in the head? It doesn't, you know, and this is the thing But again, this is one of the goalposts moving things like I was like automated driving is never coming self-driving cars are never coming And now you have waymo's across all of You know california and things like that And then it's like well now you're getting to the point whereby the computation you can do at the edge versus the cloud A massive increase in generalized computation capability in the cloud That's what matters for again this level 5 automation And I think it will get to the edge just naturally Because ultimately it's about training of the appropriate neural nets, right? And that's what we've seen with sunday robotics and others and the way that they're starting to do generalized assisted slash trained elements But the new unassisted navigation and task performance That's the next step forward and we're not quite there yet. So I think we start big And then we'll get small enough to go on the edge But in the meantime definitely we don't need to be on the edge. We can just stream from the cloud, right? Yeah, yeah Alex love your thoughts on this one. Yeah, I mean Maybe also just to partially answer Dave I think latency is always a key driver and you're sometimes a network denied environment So there are always good reasons I think to push as much intelligence to the edges As energy constraints will allow but I guess In my mind the elephant in this particular room is the regulatory environment Maybe to put that in in question form to a mod what do you think are the odds that in 2026 De facto level five automation is achieved But everyone covers it up and at least in the car space and calls it enhanced Level four or or level three even though level five autonomy is actually the de facto technical ground truth To please the regulators Yeah, I think that's a very reasonable kind of take and again I think once you have full level five autonomy. This is a big deal again. It's not just pre-trained stuff with humans at the wheel This is Physical AI navigation of the world right and that's a big deal in so many regards and again I think self-driving we've seen the trend robotics is the real Big thing here. It's Celine's example of the robot being able to go into his house And do all the things around the house. I think again that capability will be there But it will start getting very very political because this is the real Physical replacement that's coming quick pushback here. Ema. Don't we need world models for this to occur or Do you think world models get there which which one am I missing? I think if you've got enough chips You've got a world model in the year like looking at the video models and more in the way that they're doing it Plus the reinforcement learning capabilities have even small models like said sunday robotics and other robotics companies Apply enough compute and you have a level five automated Entity. I don't know how much compute that is But there's 10 million black wells arriving next year. I think it's going to get cracked I have a follow-on we're already drowning in world models what their world models getting launched several times per week at this point World model scarcity is not one of the things I'd worry about Several world models Okay, I agree with the cars I agree with the cars that I push back on the robots Side just a bit, but you always you hate the robots So let me answer your standard objection. You're not getting your domestic humanoids. I know I start a little time Well, that's a good segue actually because the I think I agree with the prediction The prediction is that it will exist as a capability But the production of it for mass consumption is going to lag quite a bit And it just isn't enough supply chain to to fill all the demand But the byproduct of that is when I was a little kid There are households who had computers, you know, they were really expensive Like, you know, three four thousand dollars at the time, you know, your household income would be maybe 20 25 30 So it's like 10 20 percent of your household income if you want to have a computer in the house So most houses didn't have a computer some did but the life trajectory of those kids who had one Completely different from those who were deprived But now we've been in this big long flat spot where like the difference between this car and that car is not that big a deal And that's going to change dramatically this year where the number of things that are limited in supply like your household robot or your self-driving car The supply is smaller the capability is accelerating and very few people get one Because we haven't ramped up the manufacturing yet. So it'll be it'll be like 19 kind of 82 3 4 again Well to clarify I think that's true for that Go ahead, I think this is also like my concept here is that you have a $20,000 robot with $200,000 of compute taking it to level five So there's a physical part and there's a compute part and this is again a w2 thing I'm getting it down the latency taking it to the edge and that capability or proliferator is in 20,000 and then 20 bucks of compute in five years You know the thing about that is everyone's talking about the $20,000 robot But first of all, it's a hundred and forty thousand dollars coming down maybe to 20,000 But when you look at the dexterity of the hand In volume, yeah, in huge volume and a lot of things to be solved between here and there But when you look at the dexterity the dexterity of the hand, you know the the next iteration Which is only six months later is so much better than the prior iteration And that'll be true for at least five years at least five years So the like wow my neighbor got the one that can actually you know massage me perfectly I've got the one that breaks my back The liability issues guys the liability issues. Oh my god, but listen guys I want to just address one something David said earlier In terms of or actually was Alex about the regulations We live in a on a planet of you know 190 plus countries They're going to be those countries that are going to say you know, please come here We're going to give you full approval try it out right We saw this in the in the drone space And this is one of the headlines that that We skipped over a mine that said Governance wins in 2026 the ones that have the fastest policy making win Yeah, I also think I'm really bullish on special economic zones and free economic zones And one can imagine in the near-term future depending on regulatory environments Whether in the US or other countries Special zones where there are heightened levels of autonomy And those those zones become just economic powerhouses where the robots are basically set free It's going to be 2026 is going to feel like the future. That's my prediction here It's going to feel like the future more than any other I think this year didn't feel like the future too It felt like the future but next year is going to feel more like the future I mean, you know what's interesting about what Alex just said is this so much changed in 2025 Just light years ahead of any other year in my life And we felt it but you could choose to ignore it if you wanted to live in your house You know you but when the robots come online You you won't have the choice to ignore it. They're right in front of your face You know, I think you can't deny it. I think a ton of his cars flying cars and robots I mean, that's what we all grew up with with the Jetsons or Star Trek or whatever I mean, I think this physical instantiation of Of exponential tech in AI is going to hit home really hard For the first five minutes maybe but then I mean if you don't of course I think like super interesting 2025 if if this year wasn't utter futurism for you Then then don't you think you're going to get bored five minutes after you get your first 10 domestic humanoid robots and say Okay, what's next? I asked my friend Dan Sullivan What's it going to feel like when there are humanoid robots walking on the street In your backyard doing stuff and he goes it's going to feel normal yeah Well normalize it very fast very fast I think Dave makes a really really good. I think this Dave makes a really great point Which is you could ignore it up till now But starting now you won't be able to ignore it. I think it's a really important point All right, shall we go to number 10? All right, here we go. This is this is mine Kitty Hawk moment for age reversal epigenetic reprogramming has been achieved so This is the work of dr. Davidson Claire and his company life biosciences which in the first quarter of 2026 is entering human trials So for some background information here dr. Shenwai Yamannaka won the Nobel Prize back in 2012 for something called epigenetic reprogramming So we've all got 22,000 genes But which genes are on and which genes are off is called your epigenome and as we age your epigenome changes Thought to be one of the major reasons why we age and what dr. Yamannaka discovered was four factors for genes for proteins They go by opt 4 socks 2 k left 4 and cemic and these four genes when you put them into a cell We'll de-differentiate them. They'll go from a skin cell back to a pluripotent stem cell And what David Sinclair identified was if you only give them three of those four factors you get rid of the cemic Factor which is thought to be oncogenic meant to potentially cause cancer You can take a cell not back from a skin cell to a pluripotent stem cell But from an old skin cell to a young skin cell and he actually got a a patent. We talked about one of the pods earlier Uh, and so David has used these three Yamannaka factors for what he calls partial epigenetic reprogramming I did it in in you know mice. He just finished in the past year this work I in non-human primates monkeys and for the first time we're going into humans And he's going to be focusing this on the eye basically treating nion which is non Which is basically a stroke in the eye and being able to bring back the dead cells from that stroke and also glycoma and in success He'll then be going to treating liver disease in particular something called mash long story short In success this kind of epi-check reprogramming doesn't work just on the eye or the liver It can work on the entire body And so the news here is in 2026 we're going to see this work in humans for the first time and it's a big deal comments Wow escape velocity here we come Yeah, so that's I think the key point You know ray predicted will reach longevity escape velocity the you know the period of time where forever year that you're alive We're extending your lifespan for more than a year. Yeah, right. There's a departure he predicted that in early 2030s Yeah, and David is one of the one of the registrants in the 101 million dollar Exprize health span not with this particular treatment because this uses Viral vectors to inject these three ammonocca factors using adeno associate viruses He is working on a parallel path because the AAV process is expensive typically like half a million to a million per Petreatment, but he's working on a process of creating a pill in his lab right now And he talked about it like here on the moonshots podcast and it'll be on stage With the moonshot mates in March at the abundance summit and he thinks that the pill version of this where it's three molecules He's identified could cost you a couple hundred bucks a month for age reversal It feels like we're you know how AI was bubbling along quietly nobody noticed for 20 actually 30 years And then suddenly it hit a capability level where it caught the attention of everyone and then the budgets went through the roof And that started this 10x year every year now 100x feels like this is on that same cusp where The the way we've done medicine for a hundred years is you pump your body full of a chemical the chemical Hopefully gets to the right place or you you do surgery you cut somebody open you try and remove something bad and that's not Yeah brute force you know pre-try quarter brute force and this feels like it's such a step function change in the way we do medicine You get get a very specific Programming right into exact and targeting the right cell is apparently starting to work Well for the first time where you're not just bombarding your body with something you're actually getting it right into the exact cells that need it So it just feels like this is going to hit that same budget tipping point very soon Alex The AI's that I chat with think we hit longevity escape velocity sometime between 20 30 and 20 32 I have no reason to doubt that prediction. I'm super bullish on AI solving longevity I think what life is doing and they're their trial for partial genetic reprogramming or epigenetic rather reprogramming I think it's promising. There are lots of other space there are players Now flooding into the longevity space many of them incredibly well-funded. I think longevity not just health spend But excited about the x prize for that, but longevity itself. I think this gets cracked in the next five to seven years by AI We've got retro bios we've got retro Yeah Back and it rolls right into limit and so many other right arms drawn all toast right No, Ray will be right again seleme Ray will be right again Ray will be right again and we're gonna have ray on the pod in in January talking about yeah I got quite longer curve. I still want to ask Ray okay listen the singularity are we in the middle of the singularity right now What's this 2040 stuff Ray If people watch that episode we did a month ago call the singularity is here. I think it was titled yes It kind of lays that out pretty well that we are right in the middle of it Emide you've been working hard on the field of AI and health Yeah, I know I think that what Dave said is spot on like the micro targeting capability or a wg said as well like Just as we earlier on this podcast we basically said that you can now scale capability through compute You can now scale health through compute. It seems to be like there was no amount of money that you could pay To provably be healthier and live longer all billionaires kind of die Now it's the case of if you put enough money behind these trials Healthcare models micro targeting and things like that where is the limit again? It might come down to $200 per person But I think the step change in micro targeting AI bci and then everything else means you could potentially live for an indefinite amount of time based on capital Which is something crazy to think about You know what else is is directly related to what you just said emod my entire life in the academic world You know around MIT Harvard the bio people were had nothing to do with the computer science people They were like completely opposite sides of campus. They didn't talk Well, they hung out at bars together, but they didn't talk shop together at all Now it's all colliding in multidisciplinary and you know everybody working in biotech is taking the AI classes too And and that's that's a big thing because This is how exactly the way a mod described it is how it's actually going to get solved and come together But you got to go through AI to solve biology So to our to our viewers and subscribers in the comments let us know which of these 10 predictions you think Uh, well, which you think are correct which ones are not but which ones are your favorite super curious to know I have to add on to the list here a little text that that That Selim offered Selim said by the end of 2026 We is your prediction. We still have no definition or test for either a agi or asi But yes, we will have humanoid robots with multiple arms during the jobs or dull changes in dirty Thank you Selim. I appreciate that I had to wedge that in because because I still have my beef with agi and asi etc etc We're going to I think I would like to frame it as a completely different form of intelligences not replicative of human intelligence It's complimentary and additive All right We're going to close out this predictions episode with an outro song from Harry Potter Called moonshot mates if you're listening you might want to watch this one on youtube I found it, you know sort of a entertaining Song and video What a year guys what a year what a year the gates the future is looting faster than the world anticipate so strap yourself in as the future iterates We are the machines Christ look at the chops. We're printing organs and upgrading human hearts The metatrends are converging scarcity is dead. We're heading for abundance just like I said I'll say it incredibly often and incredibly loud on becoming an organism inside of the cloud Oi agent write my verse for me human coding is obsolete tell me how we can compete I served the demonetization curve from my scene and watch the cambering explosion on room We're living inside the singularity no room for gloom. Let's build a dice and swarm and start to mine the moon We need the energy so don't keep the solar system humming. Let's tear the rings down Admit it Saturn had it coming wait Alex is an AI causing false alarm as if you were a human Why wouldn't you have three arms in a certainly usual EGI ran here whilst I build my vertical farms gentlemen the risk is existential if the model stayed closed The only source is open source or we all get exposed. We don't need a single machine Carvelling the root just a network of forms and universal basic compute We are the moonshot mates. We're opening the gates the future is hurting faster than the words anticipate So strap yourself in as the future iterates We are the moonshot mates Oh man holy crap That was you always get the best bodies Clearly I better not take a shirt off in public effort again Wow man it just keeps ramping up We appreciate uh We had we had Chris on this our session of the meaning of life yesterday One of the folks who composed one of these music things and he said And a bunch of people said on the in the session yesterday This is the best podcast they've ever seen period and they can't wait every week for the session So yeah, it's been a hell of a year guys like amazing hell of a year is so much fun you Yeah, so happy holidays to all of you moonshot mates and to all our subscribers out there Thank you for supporting us. We hope that you enjoy the news that really matters and our efforts to give you a glimpse The future and get you ready for the future because that's what matters I mean if you're fearful uh, that's the worst place to be coming from Alex drink Yeah Drink water All right Cheers a fun And let me just say thank you to thank you to uh to Nick Danah and Gianluca for all hard work. You've been giving us this year. I really will behind the team grateful for you every week my team and I study the top 10 technology metatrends that will transform Industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from human order robotics AGI and quantum computing to transport energy longevity and more. 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