Jacob Coxon says the labs are gambling with our lives, three warnings land in five days, and Dave Blundin is on the call with Emad Mostaque as the mates stay on the race.
Chapters
- 0:00 Jacob Coxon says the labs are gambling with our lives.
- 1:19 Peter opens, and the quintet is in the room.
- 4:28 Dave on the Vestmark acquisition.
- 8:34 Data pipelines, not published architectures, are the moat.
- 19:27 Three warnings from inside the labs in five days.
- 29:17 Minority Report, and whether the doom case is overstated.
- 36:48 Texas, data centers, and a regulatory shove.
- 47:21 The AI 2027 paper, and two endings.
- 1:10:47 Three-year-old H100s are getting more expensive to rent.
- 1:17:59 Who actually has the best video model.
- 1:47:54 Cupertino, a foldable iPhone, and what they skip past.
- 1:50:30 Moonshots Live in downtown LA, September 25.
- 1:54:51 Anthropic as a systematically important company.
- 2:12:10 The first longevity drug designed by AI.
- 2:15:40 Google DeepMind’s AlphaGenome atlas.
- 2:25:57 Fountain Life, and cancer found before you feel it.
- 2:42:01 Close. Today’s episode was epic.
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People
On this episode
Peter Diamandis
Host. Opens the show, names the quintet, and sets the week: lab warnings, a slowdown call, and an AI-designed longevity drug. He is on the call from the welcome through the close. 1:19
Dave Blundin
Host. On the call. Peter introduces him as the impresario of AI investing, and Dave answers. He tells the Vestmark sale, the company he founded in 2001, still as executive chairman. 4:28
Salim Ismail
Host. On the call. Peter brings him back from customs, and Salim says good morning. He is in the argument on reinvention, regulation, and where founders still have a window. 2:41
Alex Wissner-Gross
Host. Introduced as the in-house ASI, then on the call. He answers Peter on data versus algorithms and stays in the science and safety stretches. 9:00
Emad Mostaque
Guest. On the call. Peter introduces him as CEO of Intelligent Internet, across the pond, and later hands him the floor. He is in the coding, video, and economics stretches. 52:17
People mentioned
Elon Musk
Named on foundation-lab models and again on the Heinlein award. Not on the call. 14:16
Sam Altman
Named in the cold open on Navier-Stokes, and later as the voice calling that result a reason to slow down. Not on the call. 0:21
Jacob Coxon
Named from the open. The researcher who left OpenAI and Anthropic pre-training and called the race gambling with our lives. Not on the call. 0:00
Tom Hanks
Named as the moment a threat became real to everyone else, then again when Emad picks up the same comparison. Not on the call. 22:30
David Sinclair
Named as coming back on the pod with the longevity and genome work. Not on this call. 2:19:15
Robert A. Heinlein
Named when Peter says he loves Heinlein and won the first Heinlein award, the Lady Vivamus sword from one of the books. Not on the call. 1:49:23
Jensen Huang
Named on the H100 rental price, a three-year-old chip getting more expensive. Not on the call. 1:11:30
Jeff Bezos
Sergey Brin
Named as someone who had been off for a while and would want back in, in the same breath as Jeff Bezos. Not on the call. 1:18:43
Named with Sergey as people who had stepped back and would want back in now. Not on the call. 1:18:45
Alex Karp
Named for the Palantir comments they have been tracking. Not the host Alex, and not on the call. 1:34:27
Tom Cruise
Named for a scene in Minority Report. Not on the call. 29:17
Xi Jinping
Named on the Capitol Hill calendar, about twelve days before he arrives in America. Not on the call. 27:53
Donald Trump
Named when the mates notice September 25 collides with a Xi-Trump date and Moonshots Live. Not on the call. 2:03:28
William Shatner
Named for the red-carpet rollout of his 2026 Star Trek anniversary premiere, tied to the live show. Not on this call. 1:50:58
Arthur C. Clarke
Named for the short story The Nine Billion Names of God, set next to the genome’s variant list. Not on the call. 2:18:53
Dario Amodei
Named as the person Anthropic is built around. Not on the call. 22:13
Bernie Sanders
Named as someone who will jump on the data-center fight. Not on the call. 37:05
Dwarkesh Patel
Named for the blog the data paper comes from. He and Jerry Han are not core AI researchers, and not on the call. 7:41
Jerry Han
Named as the Princeton senior who wrote the paper with Dwarkesh Patel. Not on the call. 7:41
Daniel Lewin
Named as Danny Lewin, founder of Akamai, a friend from MIT who died on one of the planes. Not on the call. 5:58
Greg Brockman
Named as OpenAI’s co-founder who dropped out. Not on the call. 1:10:20
Andy Jassy
Named as the Amazon CEO founders assume will still call to sell them compute. Not on the call. 1:13:26
Noam Brown
Named as the bar a new PhD would be late for, the Noam Brown and Mark Chen world. Not on the call. 1:08:26
Mark Chen
Named with Noam Brown. Not on the call. Left unlinked. 1:08:28
Jakub Pachocki
Named for the Saturday essay they put in sequence with Coxon and the slowdown call. Not on the call. 20:03
Evan Hubinger
Named as Anthropic’s alignment science lead, the reply that Jacob is correct and the risk is above 10 percent. Not on the call. Left unlinked. 20:25
Alexander Wang
Named with Eric Schmidt and Dan Hendrycks on a superintelligence strategy they call mutual assured AI malfunction. Not on the call. 1:45:55
Eric Schmidt
Named in that same strategy conversation. Not on the call. 1:45:55
Dan Hendrycks
Named with Wang and Schmidt on that strategy. Not on the call. 1:45:57
Rod Roddenberry
Named as Gene’s son, expected at Moonshots Live. Not on this call. 1:53:02
Gene Roddenberry
Named as Star Trek’s creator, Rod’s father. Not on the call. 1:53:02
Neal Stephenson
Named among the Moonshots Live guests. Captions hear Neil Stevenson. Not on this call. 1:53:04
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Named as a Moonshots Live guest. Not on this call. 1:53:06
Palmer Luckey
Named as a Moonshots Live guest. Not on this call. 1:53:06
Astro Teller
Named as a Moonshots Live guest. Not on this call. 1:53:11
Ben Lamm
Named as a Moonshots Live guest. Captions hear Ben Lamb. Not on this call. 1:53:11
Cathie Wood
Named as a Moonshots Live guest. Captions hear Kathy Wood. Not on this call. 1:53:13
Aubrey de Grey
Named as a key person in the longevity field. Not on the call. 2:14:46
James Cameron
Named against Roddenberry, the less-Cameron future Elon wanted. Not on the call. 2:25:17
Kush
Named as the person who sketched the original business plan on Dave’s whiteboard. Left unlinked. 1:12:13
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Products
Exponential Organizations 2.0 — the book they say they wrote together on the exponential organization. Salim Ismail and Peter Diamandis co-wrote the 2.0 edition. Amazon 18:50
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Overview
Jacob Coxon, who spent three years on pre-training at OpenAI and Anthropic, resigns and calls the race toward self-improving superintelligence gambling with our lives. Peter puts that next to Jakub Pachocki’s essay and Sam Altman’s Navier-Stokes slowdown note, then Evan Hubinger’s reply that the people inside the labs believe the risk is real. Three signals in five days, and the mates do not treat it as a side story.
Dave Blundin is on the call. He walks through Vestmark, the company he founded after 9/11, and the acquisition announced the day before. Alex argues the next gains sit in data pipelines, not papers anyone can copy. They stay on proprietary data, founder windows, H100 rents that rise on a three-year-old chip, and Chinese video models that Hollywood is already feeling.
The back half is the live show in downtown LA, Anthropic’s scale, an economic model Emad says his best-selling book already took on, then the first longevity drug designed by AI and DeepMind’s AlphaGenome atlas. Fountain Life closes the hour with Dawn Mussallem on cancers members did not know they had. Peter’s frame holds: the machines are starting to solve science, and alignment is the argument they cannot skip.
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Places
America 5:49
MIT 6:00
New York 6:06
Princeton 13:18
San Francisco 13:21
China 33:15
Texas 36:48
India 51:56
Silicon Valley 54:27
White House 55:05
Hollywood 1:18:03
Britain 1:39:13
London 1:39:36
Washington 1:40:15
Cupertino 1:47:54
Downtown LA 1:50:30
United States 2:06:59
Harvard 2:13:06
Stanford 2:13:08
Cambridge 2:22:54
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Ads
- Abundance Summit and Link Ventures (1:14) — opening “brought to you by” read. No URL is spoken.
- Google for Startups (19:01) — sponsor read for the generative-media guide. The read points to a link in the show notes. No URL is spoken.
- Blitzy (1:46:49) — spoken ad for autonomous software development. Destination spoken at 1:47:47: blitzy.com.
- Moonshots Live (1:53:26) — last hundred tickets, downtown LA, September 25. Destination: moonshots.com.
- Fountain Life (2:25:57) — health section. Destination spoken at 2:27:38: fountainlife.com/peter.
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