Solving the AI energy crisis (Interview)

Well, friends, it's your favorite podcast that changed all. Yes, we feature the hackers, the leaders and those building and powering the future of AI. They were joined by Greg Osuri, founder and CEO of the Cash Network and Overclock Labs. And Greg takes us deep into what it takes to power, literally power AI from the energy consumption to the data centers required or not required. The centralization versus decentralization, deep details and testimony before Congress about the energy crisis and potential solutions.

how we as a society will evolve around artificial intelligence. Some really cool personal projects Greg has going on, what his plans are for a fully sufficient home using advanced AI and even some drones. It's a big show. A massive thank you to our friends and our partners at fly.io. That is the home of changelaw.com and also pipely, pipely.tech. You can learn more at fly.io. Okay, let's do this.

Well, friends, I'm here with Damien Schengelman, VP of R&D at Auth0, where he leads the team exploring the future of AI and identity. So cool. So Damien, everyone is building for the direction of Gen AI, artificial intelligence, agents, agentic. What is Auth0 doing to make that future possible? So everyone's building Gen AI apps, Gen AI agents. That's a fact. It's not something that might happen. It's going to happen. And when it does happen, when you are building these things and you need to get them into production, you need security. You need the right guardrails. And identity, essentially authentication, authorization, is a big part of those guardrails. What we're doing at Auth0...

is using our 10 plus years of identity developer tooling to make it simple for developers, whether they're working at a Fortune 500 company or they're working just at a startup that right now came out like Combinator, to build these things with SDKs, great documentation, API-first types of products, and our typical Auth0 DNA. Friends, it's not if, it's when. It's coming soon. If you're already building for this stuff, then you know. Go to Auth0.com slash AI. Get started and learn more about Auth4GenAI at Auth0.com slash AI. Again, that's Auth0.com slash AI.

So we are here with Greg. Oh, sorry, I want to trigger the other thing near me. So I'm going to say it more than that, Greg. We had a fantastic conversation a few months back to sort of prime the pumps to this conversation, really about powering the future of AI data centers, megawatts, waterfalls, all the crazy stuff that goes into building data centers and all that good stuff of the future of what we're doing. But recently you testified in front of Congress around this. What is the burgeoning topic here? What is the concern? Yeah, so, I mean, AI is taking an incredible, I guess, place in all our lives.

You know, while there's a amount of progress that's been made from, let's say, solving cancer to securing the homeland, all that progress comes with an enormous cost, and that's in energy, right? So the amount of energy we need is reaching a point of what we call crisis. And President Trump declared energy as a national emergency recently. So I was invited to testify before Congress on this particular subject as to how much energy is being consumed by AI and what are possible scenarios in the future if we don't do something about it, and what are some of the solutions we think we can try out nationally as well as internationally to solve this crisis. So yeah, it's a great opportunity.

My testimony covered pretty wide breadth. I went into the report from Department of Energy, the official sanctioned report by U.S. Congress, which was conducted by Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and happy to get into it if you want. Well, I'm interested in just how much energy we're going to need or how short we're going to come up. Did we have a 40% figure, I think, in your testimony? So Department of Energy, you know, it's a government organization. It's known for its conservative estimates, not real actual estimates, we call them. The conservative estimates amount to about...

500 plus 508 10 watt hours by 2028. For context, that's about 12% of US energy consumption for AI. The problem is, and that's a huge jump from 2026, I believe, and we consumed about 4.4% of energy. So it's an incredible jump in terms of percentage consumption. And number two is, the problem is the US grid grew about 1.2% in the last 20 years.

So the challenge is the grid is not growing fast enough to service AI workloads. Gartner, which is an analyst, predicts by 2026, that's next year, we will consume about 40% of AI data centers will be out of power. because we will be forced to a position where we have to make a decision as to who gets the energy. Is it the homes or is it going to be data centers? Obviously, we've got to prioritize homes over data centers. The challenge is, in the West, our grid is extremely hard to upgrade, and it's also extremely hard to produce energy.

considering we exhausted all the natural resources for the most part and we don't have enough hydro, we don't have enough dams, we don't have enough sort of like naturally generating energy. So we have to either build, you know, nuclear plants or we have to look for alternatives, right? Nuclear plants give about a gigawatt of energy per plant. The only problem is it took about 14 years to build the last one. So we can't build them fast enough to address the immediate need. And if you do build, you know, nuclear plants, we can't transmit them because the transmission infrastructure in the States is extremely hard to upgrade.

you know, we had energy, electricity, one of the first countries, in fact, the first country to have electricity. So when we designed the grid, it was designed to be, they didn't quite have the scale in mind when they designed the grid. So if you want to upgrade the lines, there are two ways to do it. Number one is, well, you know, put an additional line, you know, power line, and no one wants additional power line running through the backyards because that's real estate values. It's going to plummet.

or you got to do interruptive. That means stop energy, upgrade the lines. These are literally copper wires, right? Like you have thick copper wires, replace them by interruption, and nobody wants the power to be interrupted. So you can't put new lines, you can't upgrade existing lines. So how do you upgrade the grid? China is a communist country. You can just basically say you have no option.

America and the West in general, or Western democracies, it's very, very hard to upgrade lines because it has to do with property rights. So the third option is to underground, right? And that seems to be a feasible option, but the cost is so high that you have to literally justify how you're going to dig a line under the ground and upgrade infrastructure there. So either way, it's extremely challenging to upgrade infrastructure in the US. So you can say, oh, maybe we can do renewables. Well, renewables, we think about it. Solar is terrible at utility scale.

And if you do utility solar, you end up with the challenge of transmitting energy. So you can't have large swaps of solar panels and the expense of storage, which is batteries, super expensive. And you need more energy to cool the batteries. So the efficiency goes down. So solar is not really an option right now at utility scale. Solar is good at residential scale. And you really don't have, you know, wind is not practical because it's very location specific. And if you do have wind, you know, you're not able to transmit. So now we're in a limbo as to what to do with the energy problem. So there's no...

easy solutions, let's put it that way, and it's not stopping. So right now, the only solution... is burning fossil, right? So if you look at the XAI data center that trained GROC for, has about 150 megawatts of capacity in Memphis, Tennessee. They consume about seven megawatts from the grid. The rest, they're burning gas, LNG, to power data centers. Well, the effects of that is increasing respiratory conditions in the Southern Memphis area. There's a new lawsuit. That's, I guess, I'm not sure what the status of it is. I think Southern Poverty Law Center is sued XAI.

about health issues that are coming out of these data centers. We just heard yesterday, Simon Altman tweeted out saying that they have acquired 4.5 gigawatts of capacity in Adeline, Texas, in partnership, I believe, with Oracle. For context, 4.5 gigawatts is about five nuclear facilities. equivalent. There's no way in hell they're getting that from nuclear because, you know, we don't have free nuclear plants in America. I mean, we have about 96 reactors that are consumed 93% of the time, you know, fully consumed 93% of the time. There's no nuclear reactors, energy. So where do you think they're getting the energy from? But in fossil, that much amount of LNG will produce about two point, anywhere between 2.5 to 2.7 million tons of carbon, net new carbon into the environment. And that's equivalent to about two thirds of all the CO2 emissions from Vermont.

So we can shout out Vermont. Two-thirds? Two-thirds. On 2023. That's more than half, right? It's more than half. Over, yeah. So over 66%. So you're going to pick Vermont or OpenAI, right? I'll choose chat. So I mean, we're talking about Vermont being a very agricultural, heavy...

in a state with a lot of methane. Just to give you context, this is one data center we're talking, one company, right? So put that with the heavy competition between, what's his name, Mark Zuckerberg tweeted out saying, or Facebooked out saying that they're going to build a data center bigger than Manhattan, right? I mean, I don't know if you saw that tweet. I did not see that. Everybody is competing. Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg, I mean, Elon Musk said they're going to, in fact, they're going to get about 5 million GPUs by 2028, I believe he said, or next five years, maybe 2030.

5 million GPUs, he said 5 million H100 equal, and says 5 times 1 kilowatt, right? 1.2 kilowatt per GPU. Just to give you a brief idea as to how much computer, how much energy we're looking at. Oh, sorry, 50 million. Sorry, I've taken a 50 million. These numbers are so big. 5-0. 50 million, so 10x what you originally said. Yes, apologies. I mean, these numbers are so large that it's hard for me. 50 million GPUs. For context, NVIDIA made about 2.5 million H100s in 2024. So, not financial advice, but NVIDIA, I believe, is going to be extremely beneficial. You think the stock is high now?

and wait till you see the GPU demand that's like, and you need that. GPU are coming from XAI. And you asked me why you need that is because the, historically speaking, we looked at data all the way from 2013, you know, and looked at the amount of energy we need to train state-of-the-art models, right? The amount of energy we need, the install capacity required to train state-of-the-art models, all the way from CharGP3s to CharGP2 to Grok, I believe, 4, is doubling every two years. So right now, the open AI data center that's operational in Texas draws about 300 megawatts of capacity. So doubling that means by 2030, we'll need a nuclear reactor at the minimum to train the state-of-the-art model. So be it at GPT-6 or 7 is going to be a nuclear power data center. When you say the one in Abilene, are you talking about the Stargate megafactory that's being built? Correct. So that's not online yet, right? That's going to come online, I think.

I think in like the next 18 months, like it's literally dirt and being built 24-7. It's an intense scenario there. Yeah. Soon. I mean, they're working their butts off. They're literally working around the clock. It's a 24-7 operation to build this thing. The XAI data center, they brought it online in 20 days. Okay. Elon Musk's speed, right? So that's a new precedent in terms of speed. And Jensen Wong was just, you know, on stage. He was like unbelievable at the rate Elon moves in terms of building this stuff. He just...

There's a rumor that I heard that since they don't have generators in America that can produce that much amount of energy, he's literally buying a generator from God knows which country and shipping it to America to produce energy. I mean, because Elon thinks from first principle. So there's all kinds of crazy things. The development is so rapid in the last one month or so, it's really hard to keep up. I haven't quite sat down and looked at all these numbers people are claiming that they want to reach and really do an analysis because these are brand new numbers that came out yesterday.

So you have competition between Meta, Google, XAI, OpenAI, Anthropics of the world, and these are just early players, right? And these are just American players. I mean, forget the Chinese and the rest of the world. So it's not slowing down, the demand for GPUs and the demand for energy. Now, if we don't do something about it, we will start seeing rolling blackouts by next year. We will start seeing energy crisis that's similar to the oil crisis in the 1970s, or even large, much larger scale right now. And so there's all kinds of concerns, and that's my testimony. Yeah.

Sorry, but I do have some hope. What I think is interesting, though, is that one of the things you mentioned in your testimony, and I just glossed through some of the details from that was that, you know, while you said all those things and while you mentioned all those human nature feats, we must somehow navigate because there's no putting this genie back in that bottle. It's just not going to go back there, right? You're arguing that this isn't just another tool. This is becoming foundational, like electricity or Internet. Like this is a foundational thing. So we can't not solve this problem.

And I know we have politics and countries and political powers and stuff like that. And I just wonder, like, how do we unite humanity around this movement? Is it possible? Is it is the geopolitical power is too strong and too. to enable to share the information and think humanistically versus China versus U.S. or Europe versus U.S. or whatever the comparisons may be. How do we get to a place where it's like humanity needs to solve this problem because everyone across the entire globe uses electricity? No one argues about that. We figured it out. We're still figuring it out every day or every year iterating towards how we do better electrical grids. As you mentioned, the challenge to even upgrade. How do we unite around this as a human race versus a country or geopolitical? There are two challenges to overcome the way I say it. The first challenge is people are fatigued with the climate.

activist agenda. So anything that's related to climate or carbon emissions, like I'm, you know, I'm a pragmatist, seen my testimony, I was like, well, this is the situation, you know, we gotta, we can't sacrifice progress for other things. But I don't, it doesn't matter what side of the political angle you are, we don't like dirty air, because it's literally dirty air. Like if you're burning coal or if you're burning fossil, the air gets polluted and nobody likes dirty air. That's my concern, right? Others, you know.

Carbon emissions, you know, questionable and whatnot. So that's a challenge. How do you rally politically a crowd that's fatigued with this agenda, the climate agenda over the last decade or so? That's one, right? And second is we have right now a very challenging national security posture when it comes to AI, right? China is outbuilding and they're doing a phenomenal job with renewables and whatnot. I mean, don't quote me on these numbers, but somebody I saw a stat where they're building more solar every year than the entire US grid.

or they will be in a few years. So they're building incredibly well. And they had this vision about a few, I mean, 10 years ago to build this infrastructure in the U.S. fumbled because of the climate agenda. So, and we have this like national security hawks to convince, right? So U.S. needs to have a leg up. The only way to do that is through getting more energy in whatever ways we can get more energy. So how do we unite people? Spread the message. I mean, I'm doing my part. Yeah. But also like show hope, right? So, I mean, it's not all dark days ahead. I mean, we do have some hope.

If you look at, I was in ICML conference last week, which is the most prestigious conference. And for the first time, I've noticed people were a lot more cognizant towards the energy crisis. And I was fortunate to give a talk there. It's very, I mean, usually you only give a talk if your paper gets accepted and the papers have to be like, you know, peer reviewed academically, like rigorous papers, right? I was the only one that gave a talk without a paper. But the general feeling is...

The reason why you need so much energy is because training is very co-location specific. And that means you need large swaps of GPUs located as close as possible, connected with the highest possible connectivity to do training, right? And that's just getting bigger and bigger and bigger, the bigger data sets we get. That makes sense, right? So you need very, very large quantities of energy in a concentrated manner. So you can't do distributed AI. You can't train half the AI in one data center, another half in another data center. That was about a year ago. Now, over the last year,

we saw incredible progress in distributed training. It's not quite as good as the non-distributed co-located training, but the results are very, very promising. The three main areas that we see progress in, the first is low communication algorithms, we call it. What that means is But reducing the amount of communication required by different layers of AI when you train, you can reduce the need for connectivity. So you can have multiple GPUs in different data islands, we call them, and somehow train them. So this method was proposed by Google DeepMind, which is the most advanced AI lab in the world, arguably. They created transformers, which is a GPT thing. DeepMind proposed a framework called Dialico, which another company called Prime Intellect implemented that and actually was able to train a 32 billion parameter model. For context, LAMA, which is the first open-source model, was about 15 billion parameters. So it's a little bigger than...

the first open source model. Still not the state of the art. Another context is the GPT-3 was 150 billion parameter model. So it's like far behind GPT-3. GPT-3 was the first model we used for chat GPT, which was in a head turner, right? So we are far behind, but 32 billion parameter fully distributed is a great, great outcome. Another company called DISTRO News Research, which also has another algorithm called DISTRO, similar. They were able to train a 50 billion parameter model. Now they're training a 45 billion parameter model, fully distributed. Another promising company called Pluralis. This is very, very excited about this company. They figured out how to do

The second level of optimization, which is fault tolerance and asynchronous training. I don't want to get too deep in the weeds as to why this is important, or how it works rather. Why it's important is using what they've figured out, which has been a very challenging problem to do asynchronous machine learning training. Asynchronous means it lets no... So machine learning training or training right now is heavily homogenous. That means if you're using H100s, you have to use H100s across the board. If you use any less powerful GPUs, that one GPU will hold up the entire training run. It's called straggler nodes.

These guys figured out how to do asynchronous training where you can have slower GPUs mixed with faster GPUs distributed across the world using something called a swarm training mechanism that can all somehow come together and train a model with 1% or less loss in accuracy, which is very, very good in terms of results. So it's very promising. Now, that's not in code yet. And another company called Jensen, which is also, you know, they've raised quite a bit, they figured out how to do another fault tolerance mechanism similar to pluralistic. And there's other companies that are doing like...

zero knowledge proofs of gradient synchronization so what that means you don't have to verify all the gradients so the gradients can come from and you can verify all the gradients without without using zero knowledge proofs and whatnot so the point being there is a lot of work that indicates distributed training will become a reality by end of the year by end of the year we will produce a model as good as gpt3 by end of next year or maybe going into 2027 there's a good chance that we'll be able to produce a state-of-the-art model fully trained distributed And decentralization on top of distributed models give you incentives.

If you all know, Bitcoin is the largest supercomputer in the world, right? Why? Because there's an incentive structure to contribute to Bitcoin. Similarly, if there's an incentive structure to contribute your compute to train a model, there is a possibility we may actually outcompete OpenAI's of the world because now you have the public, right? And there's lots of GPUs around. Maybe I have a 4090 here, you know, a gaming machine. I have a Sony, a PlayStation that I barely use. This has got powerful new GPUs. And I've got, you know, there's so many GPUs out there that were discarded by OpenAI's because they're not the latest and the greatest. There's older GPUs that are

functional, they're still around, and the best part is we can distribute GPUs, now we tap into energy when available. It's not like we don't have enough energy, we just don't have enough concentrated energy. What that means is, during the day in California, I mean, California, I think roughly takes about 60 gigawatts of energy, right, then start capacity. It is the largest consumer of energy in the US. During the day, California produces, or captures rather, significantly higher amount of energy than we can use from solar. A lot of solar in California. In fact,

The energy is so much that it cannot transmit back to the grid or else it'll break the grid. Because our grid can't handle it. It can't handle load, right? So they had to literally waste energy or pay you to use energy during the day, right? That's right. I like that. However, the moment the sun sets, right? You don't think of these things like actual...

actual electrons moving, right? They have to turn on all the non-renewable sources during the night, be it nuclear, be it coal, be it LNG, be it whatever source, to power homes within a matter of seconds. If they don't do that, you will have a rolling blackout and it will destroy the grid. Our energy grid or grid in general is so fragile if you think about the actual operations that happen. And if you study the grid as much as I've studied, you would want to go full sovereign. Like I'm building a house in Texas that is completely off grid.

Because it's so fragile. I mean, I can't like emphasize how delicate this world works. Everything just set a little balance, a little extra thing will destroy the grid. So there's also a lot of money to be made if you can actually supply energy right when the cutoff happens from like renewables to non-renewables in the evening. There are companies like Daylight Energy, which is a deep end company. And there's another company called Base Energy, Base Power, based in Austin, started by Zach Dell, Michael Dell's kid. There's a lot of really cool companies that are coming out now that can do arbitrage for energy. So there's lots of stuff that we're working on with Akash as well.

but happy to get into it to solve this crisis. Such a big topic, man. So that's what I was telling you, Jerry. Like when I sat down with him, I was like, oh my gosh, he almost made my head explode. I think we talked for like two hours. Didn't we? It was a deep conversation. I feel like I took a ton of notes that I can not wait to talk to in this podcast. Do you recall? Tell me if you probably read this book from Thomas Friedman. It was back in, I think, 2008.

And at the time, I thought this has never happened. I can see the world flattening. So Thomas, before that, I believe, had a book called The World is Flat. And then this is the second book as a follow up to this idea of the world flattening. I was talking about the employment structure globally, how offshore, I think they call it offshore, hiring folks from India or different places throughout the world. If you're in like the US to hire a team from India, the world was flattening from an employment standpoint. You could work from India or China or Europe and anywhere you want in the whole world, you can work. And it was a flattening of the employment structure.

And then it was this book that followed up with that was hot, flat and crowded. And in there, he talked about all this different stuff with this energy. And I was just like, this is never gonna happen in our age. At least I knew it was going to progress, but I never thought that would accelerate. But does that book ring a bell to you? Have you read that book? I think I heard about the book, but I think I have an idea where they're going to the book. I mean, it's kind of going there though. I mean, if you go back and listen to this, like this is 2008 and it's so pertinent now. It's like.

hot in terms of obviously like it's pretty hot air conditionings can't have uh the power to to be consumed ai wasn't discussed in this book at all but it did talk about the fragility of the energy network which if we're trying to build the next evolution or the next major innovation for humanity as you've said it's going to take all this energy but there were so many precursors mentioned that book that i just i just never thought i would be alive to see to see this day essentially to see it really be hot flat and crowded and the water problem too that's another big problem i think we're not talking about too much too uh this water and energy i mean these both are like the essence of life right you have these both that you can do a lot And then some of the problems that I look at, the more I study the grid, I look at California, for example, I love California, but I think the state of California, the government is one of the dumbest people alive. It just breaks my brain as to the dumb decisions they made over the last 20 years in the name of climate agenda, in the name of whatever, that destroyed the state's ability to be...

reliable in the next 10 years right it's just my god okay i mean what are some examples like what what do you mean what decisions have they made water yeah well the water i mean they've diverted water right didn't they have like a lot of water diversion that like totally changed ecosystems they mess with things to a degree where it was like playing god with you know landscape and geography to the point that it's done major major change that's one thing i'm aware of at least yeah it was a human uh catastrophe what happened with the la fires recently that should have not happened at all if if they didn't divert water the way they diverted for reasons that are just Dumb, you know. And also, like California, I mean, Earth is 70% water. If you think about it, why are we not using the water? Well, it's salt water. Well, how do you use salt water so you can desalinate? Well, what does it take to desalinate? About 8 to 12 watts of energy per gallon to desalinate on average. Well, don't we have excess energy? We do have excess energy that produces during the day. Why are we not building desalination plants?

Oh, there was a proposal about environmental concerns that desalination will produce too much salt. We don't know where to store the salt. How about digging a hole or throwing it and putting the salt there? Or how about putting the salt out to throw it back in the salt? That will destroy the reef. Okay, sorry. But there's so much.

If you go down like four levels deep and you ask questions, it's just almost almost embroiled in someone doesn't like because they think it's going to be bad for environment. So, you know, well, is dying and fires OK for the environment? I mean, even the water there, you got the challenges in California with that. And I don't know. I know you're in Austin like I am. And if you're here in Texas, at least close to Austin, you know what happened in Hill Country with this major flood just happened. Like the whole world's aware of it now. I mean, in moments like overnight, we have like I'll come close to crying. Like we have friends who died in this flood, really close friends whose kids are not coming back.

And it's a shame because you got, I don't know how much of this is about water diversion or being stupid or making poor political decisions with different choices you have to make. But these are things that don't have to happen. Like that water amount was just insane. It was a major flash flood. Was it because of water diversion or things over time? I don't know. But what I can tell you, and you know this, is that we are constantly, I don't know how much in Austin you are, but over here in Dripping Springs, like west of Austin, we're constantly in a state of drought up until this flood, basically. It reinvigorated the aquifers like they're, it's not back to normal, but Lake Travis is actually a lake again. It's not very little water, a few islands and boats in the land out there. Like it was.

laughably not a lake you know yeah and now it's a lake again so i don't know how this plays into it but that's a pretty big deal to yeah the power i've looked into the actual like flash floods and the reason there's a few speculations out there but it's very sad what happened when we lost someone from our neighborhood as well a little girl eight years old at a camp it was so sad because they were little girls camp and i have a daughter and it's just like they hit me i live in west lake right now so it's You know, then in West, like, you know how close we are to the water challenges here. I mean, so you mentioned water challenges in California, but they're also happening here. I mean, even our own expansion is. We can claim that Texas doesn't have too much ocean next to Houston. I mean, so you can make a claim that, well, we don't, our sources of water is just rainwater capture. That's what I'm doing in my home, right? But California has an entire coast, so it's like the dumbest problem. Yeah, I do know that. And most of the population lives in the coast, you know, in California.

So you have most of the energy production, you know, happening at the coast. And we just, instead of burning energy, why don't we just design it? That's what Israel does. I mean, that's what Middle East, the whole, I mean, they're building oasis in the middle of deserts in Saudi Arabia. So excuse my French, but it just makes me so mad looking at the things people could do with energy, like in the desert versus California is one of the most fertile places on planet Earth, the most beautiful places, right? So either way, there's a lot of problems, I think, with enough motivation can be solved. I hope California state will take...

energy more seriously. And one of the worst things they did was to ban all fossil vehicles from 2030 without thinking about how they're going to upgrade the grid. Along with the AI challenge now, the EV challenge is catching up. So states that have EV mandates in terms of production mandates are going to suffer the most with AI. And I think it's just going to get worse and worse, the energy problem. So I read a couple of weeks ago about micro reactors.

Is this something on your radar? Micro reactors. Oh yeah, I invested in a bunch. So this seems like, you know, okay. It doesn't seem like there's one big solution to all these problems. It seems like perhaps there's this litany of smaller solutions that all work together. Even your description of the companies trying to do swarming, trying to do this other stuff. What if we could decentralize and incentivize your average Joe or your small business that has some GPUs to make them available to the network so you can use them and draw energy when it's not a peak time, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Like all these things together might.

like approximate a solution and i'm curious if micro reactors or there's also small nuclear reactors which i think are bigger than micro reactors i'm not an expert here greg these things might be additionally like on site like we got a new plant we got a new reactor for that plant and maybe they're small enough these are like semi-truck size i believe yeah to actually solve you know a little slice of the problem yeah i mean i'm very pro next generation energy generators right so i've looked into quite a few i've invested in quite a few i'm not i wouldn't consider myself an expert i mean i don't know how nuclear physics is my my subject expertise but i've looked at it from a from a from you know progress standpoint. Progress has been extremely slow on these things. There are very few companies. There's NewScale, there's GE, there's Westington, I believe. There are a bunch of them. And the progress has been extremely slow. There's enormous regulation for nuclear. I mean, right now, so there's something called interconnect network in America, right? So interconnect network is the network maintained by Department of Energy. Whenever there's a new energy source, you have to register that with the interconnect and get interconnect approval. It doesn't matter if you're using that energy locally or whatnot. So the interconnect queues for nuclear is about 10 years.

Now you can deregulate, but nobody wants to deregulate nuclear. Even though the first nuclear reactor built in America took about 14 days, the last one took about 14 years. Most of them is just being regulated because it's a very dangerous way. challenging uh it seems like the the sentiment around nuclear now i'm in the midwest so maybe i'm you know i have that that color of sentiment versus elsewhere in the country it seems like the sentiment towards nuclear is changing because i definitely grew up in the 90s and early aughts where it was like nuclear bad scary big mushroom cloud in the sky and that's definitely not what your average joe and jane think today about nuclear so you think maybe the what do they say politics is downstream culture you think that that some of that stuff would start to move the needle absolutely i mean nuclear is a lot safer now i mean nuclear is my favorite source of energy It's very clean. It's very safe. We figured out a lot of uses even with the nuclear waste disposal. Another company that does isotope fuels. But the challenge of nuclear is...

It's great in every way. I mean, if we can solve the regulation problem and if we can solve the public perception problem, I think we have a winner there. But the fuel enrichment is very, very hard. It's very hard to get fuel. Africa has, there are parts of the world that has fuel, but all that fuel is controlled by China. So China's done a phenomenal job over the last 20 years in controlling the rate of minerals, including nuclear fuel. They control the entire supply chain. They bought companies that do this. They bought the mines. They bought the ports in Africa. They bought the whole nine yards of nuclear because U.S. and the West fumbled on nuclear.

producers, the supply chain, went towards the buyer, which is China. So there's a geopolitical, look at Trump talking about rare earth minerals, talking about making deals with or liberating Greenland or deals with Ukraine, all that mostly is for rare earth minerals, right? So including nuclear. Even if you have a nuclear reactor, getting fuel is next to impossible in America. We don't have enrichment facilities in America no more. We used to. So we had to rebuild the nuclear capabilities, like energy capabilities. So I don't know how long that's going to take. But with the latest advancements, we have isotope reactors.

which one reactor is based on uranium-233, not U-235. So it's basically thorium. So thorium is a side product of waste and nuclear waste that has a half-life of 400 years. It's still a very, very good source of energy. So if you can put them in a battery, a company I know is doing that, you can effectively create nuclear batteries that last 400 years. They can be placed anywhere in the world without worrying about waste. So there's all kinds of new things that are coming up in the nuclear space. Fortunately, there's more investment from DOE that's going into nuclear space now.

with this current administration has been very pro-nuclear as well. So there could be good news in the next four years, depending on how the market goes. I've seen increased amount of investment. And I know my friends are investing quite a bit in energy and SoftBank alone. I mean, we had SoftBank, Javier, who's one of the key persons in the Stargate program at Akash Accelerator Conference in New York. And he had a lot to say about nuclear and nuclear-related energy sources. So all in all, I'm very pro-nuclear, but I'm not very bullish on the regulatory landscape being...

to move fast enough to address the need. Right, to avoid the impending doom, the crisis, which we'll hit here soon. Very quickly. Two years, you said a year or two years? 2028, that's what the DOE talks about. 2028 is when, 26 is when we'll start seeing, we've got to make choices. But 2028, you're going to see bigger crisis. 2030, I think, is going to be even hard. I'm more hopeful on the offshore wind. Wind is the cheapest form of energy, hands down, right? If you can get your wind, proper wind, I mean, it depends on how windy an area. Right now, we look at Des Moines, Iowa.

which hosts the largest wind-based data center, which is owned by Google. It has about 500 megawatts. It's almost half a nuclear reactor, all from wind. And it's a marvel, and we don't know whether we can do that again. We have that location good enough to be able to replicate what Google did in Iowa. How many mills does that require? I haven't looked into it, but it's quite a lot. I mean, 500 megawatts is a lot, right? So offshore wind is very promising, actually. There's a lot of wind on the ocean. If we can tap into it, it's very challenging. I don't think we're going to see an offshore windmill come to...

come alive by at least by 2030. So there's a lot of promise, right? There's quite a lot of using waves as energy form as well because the ocean waves are very, very good in terms of capturing energy. All kinds of cool things we were working on, right? So I'm hopeful that we may be able to find a solution, but I'm not hopeful that we'll do that fast enough. In the meantime. I think decentralized AI is the only way. I don't see, I mean, I've looked at every possibility, right? Look at every possibility, lay it out. And there is no magic solution to get more energy in America in the next four years. Let's say that you decentralized. I'm not saying you, Greg, but you, the royal you. People working on decentralization.

get that working don't you think they're still going to be massive centralized players that just say nah we're just going to keep buying up as much energy as we can and rolling blackout you know citizens be damned i don't know yeah there will be i mean there will be there will be a lot of players that'll go after there will be a lot of protests energy protests they're going to be like after this i think there's going to be a political when people start getting sick and dying like in albany texas i'm really concerned about the amount of i mean we're talking about the 4.5 gigawatts facility will produce as much exhaust equivalent to exhaust coming from 2 million cars in one place in one place crazy idea okay this is stupid it won't work but stupid reptilian brain says this says can't we just build this massive flex pipe i don't know that goes up into space and exhausts it all into space because space is just forever I mean, it's a dumb question, but is there possibly like to exhaust out of the atmosphere? Well, you can... There's easier solutions you can do carbon scrubbing. Like, you can recapture scrub. There are possible solutions, right? I don't know. That's a dumb idea for sure. Okay. Science fiction. I mean, it's possible. I mean, think the first principles, right? Like, there's something Elon would think, right? Like, I've removed all the, what do you call...

limitations and think as big as possible. Carbon recapture could be a solution. I don't know how effective and how it would work at 4.5 gigawatt scale, but there's a lot of carbon. I don't even know the carbon footprint of producing the carbon capture device. But no one is talking about them. No one is even doing it because I would imagine the cost is so prohibitively expensive to do these things. That is going to outweigh the $500 billion that you have for building your data centers, right? Well, if you spent $1 billion on the pipe. $1 billion is nothing. I'm saying, yeah, like $1 billion is nothing. I mean, it used to be. We spent $1 billion on this pipe, this tidally locked aircraft that orbits Earth that keeps the thing connected. I don't know. Somebody can do that. Exhausted out there.

Yeah, but I think it's going to be a real problem. I don't think it's going to be a solution by the time they're done finishing, they're done building it. And when people get two million, especially they're building that thing in two weeks or three weeks, you know, however long they take to build these things. Two million worth cars exhaust in Albany, Texas is not going to make any friends in the area. It's already just trying to think about the water, water for cooling. That big of a facility needs a lot of water because you dump it somewhere. Where are they dumping their water? Exactly. We don't know. So I saw, I tweeted out recently talking about this is one community in Texas, I think it's in Albany. They're talking about how their water, their drinking is so toxic now.

It's getting bad. It's getting really bad. To a point, we'll start experiencing these things, you know, every day, right? They should train these things in Antarctica, you know? No one's living there, and you don't have to cool. Well, you have a bandwidth problem in Antarctica, right? So you can't get latency. Solve the bandwidth problem. It's just one pipe, you know? Satellites, I'm very, very bullish on the satellites. I have a Starlink here at home that I use as my backup internet. It gives me about 500 megabytes, which is not bad. I put more satellites, more density of satellites that covers pretty much the entire Earth. Then we can have good enough energy, or good enough, what do you call it, bandwidth to source from Antarctica. That could be a problem.

could be solution, but I don't know. It's looking bad. The unintended consequences of having so many satellites in the sky that we have a new ozone layer around us. We saw WALL-E, right? We saw when the camera zoomed into the Earth on the movie WALL-E. Yeah. The sky was little with satellites. Especially space junk at that point. Right. They're going there. And these are low Earth orbit, LEO satellites. They're not in the geostationary orbit. So you need a lot of them very close because of the latency, right? You do have geostationary internet. Super expensive. I mean, they're used for Antarctica, basically. Antarctica doesn't have LEO coverage. So you can't put a starling in Antarctica.

It doesn't work. You have to put another company forgot video geostation much, much higher. So you can get some internet, but you get some internet. So, you know, possible, but it's just, it's a lot of this stuff. It's just a lot, very, very complicated. Yeah. So if you add it up back to the decentralization concept, if you took all of the wasted energy, I'm thinking mostly of this, these solar panels in California during the daytime situation, and you just like extrapolate that around the world and say, how much energy do we have capture that goes unused?

and you add all that up and you put gpus you plug gpus right into those suckers and you hook them up to the grid the electrical grid and the internet grid and allow people to lease them or rent them or whatever does that solve the problem i mean i know for sure we produce a lot more energy in the us than we consume during the day. I know for sure. In solar. Solar wind, a whole lot of things. We have a lot of sources in the U.S. and there's been enormous investment that went into renewables over the last few years, over the last 20 years. And that is a phenomenal solution. That's what we're going towards, right? So why burn energy, but instead use that energy to train AI? When it's windy in Kansas, move the AI workload there. When it's sunny in California, move the AI workload. The AI workloads will be elastic and has to be asynchronous. It has to be these things. So that's why I'm particularly excited about the progress with distributed training because now we can have elastic workloads that can move.

There's energy-aware schedulers. So Akash, we're developing one of those. I'm sorry. I forgot to tell you what we're doing here at Akash. We are developing an energy-aware schedulers that will pick the lowest energy. So we'll start advertising the cost per energy now. There are lots of data centers in the U.S. that can give you one cent. I mean, economics-wise, right? Yeah, give me the cheapest thing I can get. Right, it's the cheapest thing. It's actually beneficial not only for the environment, but for your pocket. So that's where capital is coming to play. Wind will give you one cent per kilowatt hour, which is the cheapest possible energy you can get. Solar, depending on the setup, right? Depending on the battery cost and a whole lot of things.

Solar can get very, very cheap. And if you can arbitrage, you can get almost zero. LNG, the gas, natural gas, will give you 10 cents a kilowatt hour, 10 times more than what you would pay for it for wind. Diesel will give you 32 cents a kilowatt hour. It's the most expensive option. That's used diesel as a backup generator. The grid, depending on where you want, California, I believe, is 20 cents a kilowatt hour. The grid, right? If you just plug in from the grid, which is diverse sources. Texas is significantly cheaper. I think it's like 10 cents or below a kilowatt hour. So just from pure economic standpoint, I mean, it's the cheapest thing is to go where the energy is cheap.

Well, friends, I'm here with a brand new friend of mine, Kyle Galbraith, co-founder and CEO of depot.dev. Your builds don't have to be slow, you know that, right? Build faster, waste less time, accelerate Docker image builds, get up action builds, and so much more. So Kyle, we're in the hallway at our favorite tech conference, and we're talking. How do you describe depot to me? Depot is a build acceleration platform.

The reason we went and built it is because we got so fed up and annoyed with slow builds for Docker image builds, GitHub action runners. And so we're relentlessly focused on accelerating builds. Today, we can make a container image build up to 40 times faster. We can make a GitHub action runner up to 10 times faster. We just rolled out Depot cache. We essentially bring all of the cache architecture that backs both GitHub actions and our container image build product. And we open it up to other build tools like Bazel, Turbo Repo, SC Cache, Radle, things like that. So now we're starting to accelerate more generic types of builds and make those three to five times faster as well. And so in simple terms, the way you can think about Depot is it's a build acceleration platform.

to save you hundreds of hours of build time per week, no matter whether that's build time that happens locally, that's build time that happens in a CI environment. We fundamentally believe that the future we want to build is a future where builds are effectively near instant, no matter what the build is. We want to get there by effectively rethinking what a build is and turn this paradigm on its head and say, hey, a build can actually be fast and consistently fast all the time if we build out the compute and the services around that build to actually make it fast and prioritize performance as a top-level entity rather than an afterthought. Yes. Okay, friends. Save your time. Get faster builds with Depot, Docker builds, faster get-up action runners, and distributed remote caching for Bazel, Go, Gradle, Turbo Repo, and more. Depot is on a mission to give you back your dev time and help you get faster build times with a one-line code change. Learn more at Depot.dev. Get started with a seven-day free trial. No credit card required. Again, Depot.dev. I like the idea of the workload moving, where the energy is prominent at the time it's prominent, versus co-locating and destroying, because that seems just terribly bad.

You know, natural structures. And obviously these are the sun. Thankfully, in our lifetime, it's not going to go anywhere unless there's astrophage, which is science fiction from the book Hail Mary that's coming out as a movie soon. It's going to be amazing. I love that book. Astrophage essentially ate the sun and we had to combat it when that happens. Yes, it's a terrible thing. But so in our lifetime and barring the science fiction from Andy Weir, we don't have to deal with astrophage. The sun is going to be there, meaning that it's producing energy constantly. And it's the biggest energy. So leverage that. It's not going to go anywhere. And it's natural. If I remember correctly, I think every I mean, the sun produces the energy that hits Earth.

is about 177 terawatts of capacity just from sun. I mean, that's the current capacity. U.S. entire grid is about 1.9 terawatts. So we have literally over hundreds of times more energy that we produce from sun. I think it could be more. I could be wrong. The point is, there is this civilization scale, the type 1, type 2, type 3, by Kardashev levels, we call them. I don't know if you're aware of this, but there's a Soviet astrophysicist from the 60s who defined what civilizations in terms of advancements they are compared to extraterrestrials and whatnot. So Kardashev level 1 civilization, or type 1 civilization, is a civilization that...

figured out how to capture all sources of energy on the home planet. Like from planets. So anything that hits the earth, we should be able to capture. We're currently at 0.7 level. So we're not one yet. So to reach one, that means we are an advanced species. We need to capture all the energy that we got and figure out how to use it. Because even though we capture now, we don't know how to use it. But with the AI, we can know how to use energy. Level two, Kardashev level two is when we get Dyson spheres, right? Dyson sphere is like when the civilization expands from its home planet and captures all the energy from its home solar system, right? There's always a sun. So the best way to do that is to build a sphere around the sun and capture the energy.

So that's why I don't know how much deep into exercise. Only through science fiction, really. Dyson Sphere. Dennis E. Taylor, he's been on this podcast. He talked about Dyson Sphere in his We Are Legion, We Are Bob, the Bobaverse series. Covers the whole entire, there's a book four, I believe. I don't know. Anyways, they talk about it there pretty plausibly when it comes to the science. Like he's grounded. He's a software developer. He's grounded in science. I think while it's science fiction, it may give you some, you know, insight to a Dyson Sphere. Yeah, so there was some study. I mean, astronomers, they found a star nearly a slight years away from Earth that looked like it was, there was strobes around the star.

So there was some indication this could be attack to civilization. No way. Right. So the star was pulsating. It was not a dying star. So only time a star pulsates is when you have...

like being distracted. So they say Dyson Sphere. Anyway, so like type two is the entire solar system. Type three is a civilization that they can leverage or harness all the energy for its home galaxy, right? So we're like type 0.7. So, I mean, in my lifetime, I'd like to see us go towards a type one, type one at least. That would be my dream. That's something I want to work towards. I think that, well, I mean, the Dyson Sphere thing would be, gosh, I could, I cannot imagine that in my lifetime. Like my kids, kids, kids will probably do that. For now, we're trying to.

harness the existing energy we can capture through solar do you feel like i know you just said that's the most cheapest way is there's a lot of pushback to nuclear is there any positive ground being made towards like adopting nuclear here in the us is it oh yeah so if you look at if you look at the pushback to nuclear it's on safety and if you look at all the safety all the incidents that happened over the last since the beginning of nuclear almost not 100 all those issues were due to negligence by the staff staff forgot to check something or put something because they, you know, whatever, right? It was all negligence. And there are very few incidents that were caused due to natural disasters. And Fukushima was the only one that we can point to that was, you know, that melted because of a tsunami, right? Historically, there hasn't been any natural disasters leading to nuclear meltdowns. And Fukushima, nobody died. Zero deaths, zero fatalities. And you can actually drink water now from Fukushima. It's pretty safe, right? So from a safety standpoint with AI now, and we have a lot of other automated systems that are phenomenally good.

You can make a case saying that if you remove the human out of the equation to maintain nuclear facility, safety levels are significantly higher. Right now, nuclear, for example, nuclear like Gen 3, we currently have Gen 2, right? So Gen 3's are the new ones that are coming out. Their cost per kilowatt is significantly higher than Gen 2. because there's so much of investment or so much of capital that needs to go towards safety protocols, the recovery of capital is significantly longer for Gen 3. So if you put Gen 3 reactors, you're not going to see cheaper energy for a while on these reactors, right? And I mean, I remember doing the math, I think it was at least 50% higher than Gen 2s, because most of Gen 2s are like actually now paid off, right? So, you know, nuclear is like very, very good, but you had to make a case on like, safety is one case and economics is the second case. Like why would someone choose nuclear over, let's say wind, unless there's no option?

or nuclear is more expensive than LNG right now, right? Like from the Gen 3 at least. So you had to make a case, like why would someone choose nuclear over drill baby drill, right? Like it's kind of sad, yeah. So essentially it sounds like the most plausible best solution long-term for all.

we've thought through really is solar or capturing natural energy sources, water, wind, primarily solar, and then finding a way to decentralize and allow the workload to move elastically throughout the world to train, to inference, to whatever, to handle this. this push that's the best where you're at at least is that what your argument is this is the best that is that is my argument that is my argument and we're not waiting for people we are executing on the strategy i've testified before congress about a potential solution and also we announced this program called start cluster program at akash accelerate the start cluster program is a effort by overclock labs to prove out a distributed infrastructure can train ai with the least amount of uh loss right and we're executing on it uh we're going to be deploying we're partnering with a few telecoms I don't want to name anyone out, but we have access to energy across America. We have access to about 2 million homes through our partners that we can go into potentially. I mean, we are currently selecting ideal houses with cheap solar, with solar and bandwidth that are two big variables. And also when you go into a home, you quite don't have the same level of energy. There's another policy side of things. It's very, very, very frustrating. Like U.S. homes on average have 15 amps at 120 volts, right? That's your U.S. standard. That's a scam. Like I don't understand why we have such low energy.

It was, you know, I looked into it, I think it was Edison, GE, they had a lot of things to do with the standard. Like why, because think about it, right? Like 120 volts or 15 amps gives you 1800 watts. 1800 watts is, you can't even power, I mean, if you power a heater, a home heater, it's not, that's 1800 watts right there, right? You can put two 5090s, which is the most powerful GPU from NVIDIA, or maybe you could put three 4090s max in a home because of the limitation. If you were to go higher, it'll break all the residential limits per se about how much energy. So you don't get, you'd upgrade to a commercial facility if you put over 1200 watts, I mean 800 watts, and you lose all kinds of discounts and all kinds of regulatory, you know.

benefits that you have as a home so you have usually there though right like it's you're talking about the grid on the inside of the home if i understand correctly so you can have up to 100 to 200 amps of service coming to the residence what we're talking about i think is the the grid within right like we're operating on 15 amp circuit breakers and maybe even 20 if you paid for the upgrade is that what you mean by that yeah so what i meant is the interconnect speed or interconnect like uh limits when you have even if you're making solar or producing solar locally, you still have to sell it back to the grid by law, right? So you still have to connect to the grid. So when you connect to the grid, you got to say how much energy you're using and that will break or make your discounts. It's complicated when you have to deal with energy companies and there's a lot of legal implications, safety implications and all kinds of things when you have a home. It's different when you have a commercial facility. It's possible to go higher, you just don't get the same benefits. It's not common. Yeah, like one in 10 homes will do that now. But it may become a steady, our future with homes being part of the grid. My home, a new home in Texas is 100 kW, right? No doubt. Like I'm going. I'm not going after residential discounts, right?

I don't care because I'm going to produce so much energy and I'm going to have a much bigger cluster. But an average home in the US, if I were to come to your house and be like, hey, I want to put like a GPU and I cannot exceed over 800 watts. If I do, you're going to make some investments. So much investments in your home, the economics won't even work out for you. Like it doesn't make sense. Yeah. My home can handle it. We made those investments. We kind of planned ahead a little bit, but maybe not as aggressive as we probably should have. We did plan ahead, but not that much. So you're trying to go into homes. I mean, that's what you're saying, right? Like your goal is to put GPUs in people's homes through their telecom relationship, or like that's how you're going to actually reach those homes? That's one way to do that. Yeah, we have several ways, but telecoms are the best way. Sure, that's just one way you're going about it. And you're going to connect those up to your network. Yeah. Right? A cache network. And they're going to become resources available. So now consider me as your potential homeowner.

and you're pitching me on the idea of putting a gpu in my house well why you get the package that we're going after is you get free bandwidth you get free energy i get free bandwidth so you're providing my internet connection yeah and my bandwidth is now free and i get free energy yeah we put solar in your home we put a battery in your home you don't have a thing uh we will charge a battery during the day we'll sell it back to the grid when we make the most money we'll use excess energy to put to or we'll produce enough energy to power the gpu so you get free energy you got free bandwidth maybe some money on top of it yeah okay And how many GPUs can you put in my house? You said one or two? Depending on the GPU. So if you were to go with a 5090, which most likely will, which is the latest consumer GPU from NVIDIA, we can put two GPUs in a home. Okay. So to fulfill XAI's desires, you only need 25 million homes to get that done, right? Two GPUs per house. They're going to do 50 million GPUs. We have access to 22 million homes right now through our partners in the US. So that's it. You have the number.

and roll them out not to sell them but actually deploy that's a big job i think the way we live may change don't you think i'm just thinking of like a as an end of one like as a person who owns a house like do i want that of course i want free internet and free energy so yes do i want a gpu running in my house they're pretty loud is that a concern yeah so we have all that worked out so the 40 50 90s liquor cold will give you over 30 decibels it's not that crazy loud you know put in the attic or something 30 or less i'm trying to get 15 decibels right like my child when she cries is about 90 decibels like a Vacuum cleaner at max produces 60 decibels, right, of sound. So 30 is, I don't know. It's not quiet, but it's definitely not too loud, right? We're trying to get it to. It's a concern. I mean, if you don't consider that and you say, sure, come on in and do it, then they do it. And you're like, I didn't think about how loud this was going to be. You're going to be calling them back and say, yeah, pull this thing out of my house. Yeah, yeah. So we get all those considerations as well. So we're trying to get it to as quiet as possible. Getting it quiet is very challenging. Yeah, totally. Because the fans, you know, like cooling is a big challenge, right? Like so you need fans going off. Right. Only way to avoid fans is liquid coating. Liquid means you need the coolant.

also not cheese and i experimented with uh the like i explored this because we do audio and i've explored really crazy ways to make my room more better like my previous house had a really issue my ac unit was like right outside my office and every time it turned on i would just hear the hum you know just hear it was terrible so i was thinking about ways to isolate the sound from out to in and there's a lot of sound isolate like if you could put it in a sound isolation chamber essentially designed to minimize outsound, but still have exhaust? Could that solve it? Did you explore that? Oh, you can solve a lot of things, but the typical home will not have a sound optimized setup. You are an audiophile. No, but if you deliver a solution, it's already in that sort of, it's engineered in the package. Like a mini rack that's engineered to be cool. Yeah, it has to be self-continued in it, right? It has to look beautiful. For a home, it has to look pretty, right? It has to, it's a consumer device, and it has to incorporate everything, you know, single, single. So it's not the easiest thing to design, but we're on it. So we have a home, you know, aspiration. I would call it aspiration because we haven't announced a home product yet. We're still in design.

But we are going more aggressively with the data center products first. One of the cool things we discovered was we have access to telco edges, edge networks, because telcos have data centers pretty much in every urban area. Even in small towns, you have data centers for telcos. That's how Comcast and all these guys deliver the internet, right? So there's quite a lot of connected energy. A lot of them are coming from renewables. So these guys have done quite a bit, which is very fascinating. They have large networks built out all over the West. So we'll probably tap into that in the early days, in the first phase, in the next couple months, actually, to prove out that we can do distributed and then optimize and optimize, come to the consumer model.

A consumer is going to take at least a year for us to put. I'm going to have a box right here. I can't move the camera, but a box right here is like, you can't hear nothing, right? It's just pretty good. It's running right now? It's running not at max, but at max it probably will. It's not running anything heavy, but when those GPUs go and the fans start kicking in, when the heat goes up, that's a big problem. Well, for all this to be feasible, those two things have to come together first, right? The ability to train distributed in a way that's competitive. Right now it's not quite competitive yet. It's getting there. We don't have...

So in order for the home solution to work, you need distributed training, which I think is solved for the most part. At least nobody has put a token on it yet to get in there. Why I say a token is because the business model for distributed training, almost of all the models I've looked at, the common thing they have is you contribute compute, you get some representation of that contribution in form of a token, and that token will guarantee you future revenues from the model from inference. Like, for example, you say, say you train ChatGPT, right? You're part of ChatGPT training, your machine is. And if I, as a user of ChatGPT, pay $200 a month, you get a cut in that revenue. I see. So it's not, you're not getting cash back out. You're not getting... Oh, it's cash. No, it's future cash, right? Yeah. But if I were to sell you my internet or my energy, you'd give me $10 and I'd give you some energy. I mean, there are ways to give you instant liquidity and all that good stuff, but just give you an idea. No one's done that, though. We're getting there. So Akash is another way to look at it, right? So for example, a $50.90 on Akash will get you $0.92 an hour, like right now.

provided if it works from your home and it's still technical work that needs to happen. And Akash or some company on top of Akash will do the training and say I am betting on, say, Les Jensen, for example, I think. Jensen or Pluralis is a company that I have this ability into. And I'm like, I know for sure that this token is going to be worth some money because, you know, they train this amazing model and this demand for the model. Again, you get into that nuances. I will take the risk and I'll be like, hey, you home computer, give me your energy for cheap or compute for cheap. I will, you know, do a pass through training to you. I'll keep the token from Pluralis. I'll take the risk and, you know, and I win. I benefit. Like when that becomes more mature, maybe consumers can take on the risk themselves. But there's always going to be opportunity players like me that's going to take advantage. I mean, I think there's enormous money to be made in the next.

one year to two years. If you look into these protocols deep enough, you'll understand. And the best part is the zero hype on these protocols. And, you know, and I think it's an amazing time to, and they're getting so much like traction to like Jensen alone is right now training about 10,000 models concurrently, 10,000 models, name a single AI lab that can do that. So like, so people are like, have no idea how these things work, which is great. No idea what the progress has been made right now. Because again, to use Jensen is not the easiest thing. You need to understand. Yeah. So Jensen is a company, is a network, is a... Jensen is a decentralized machine learning training network. It's founded by a bunch of researchers out of Oxford, funded by... What's the URL for that, Bonnie Chance? Do you know that? G-E-N-S-Y-N, Jensen. So it's a handful of these decentralized compute networks that are currently being adopted by...

model training organizations. And basically they're all flying on the radar because all of the, all of the focus is on open AI, Anthropic. Google, demine. Yeah, and Meta and a whole lot of other players now. Every company, Oracle, and every company. Yeah. What was that contract that OpenAI just signed with Oracle for like $30 billion or something like that? You see that? That's nothing. I mean, they're working with the data center in Texas. That's the same thing, right? That's the same $500 million they promised, right? $500 billion. Sorry, $500 billion? My gosh. Oops. Not million. That's a big discount. $500 billion was promised. They're $100 billion in, I believe, and with plans to do more once this facility's there, right? Funded by SoftBank. SoftBank is being very aggressive in the data center space. They're like...

Oh, 30 billion a year. That's the one I just read yesterday. A year, maybe. OpenAI to Oracle, 30 billion a year. This is in addition to or next to the Stargate project. It's like a different thing that they just announced. Anyways, just it's hard to pay attention to anything when that kind of stuff is flying at your face every day. And that's where we are. We're like under the radar, which I really like. I love this time because I think we're like about to blow up very soon in this decentralized AI space. People that know, know kind of thing. And I'm getting as much exposure as possible personally as well as corporate wise too.

you know to this feature right so uh i wanted to do a small experiment in the home a bit soon my home will be the first home uh but i think we're going to have a few homes by the next six months uh using the star cluster program star cluster that you call it fascinating stuff fascinating stuff it seems like uh the bitcoin miners have been on to this stuff for a while haven't they i mean they're all jumping ship now a lot of them i mean like these guys i mean corby was right corby was a bitcoin miner yeah yeah we sure did yeah we didn't know who they were this was last year at kukon and we just walked up to them and we're We like at their booth. They were kind of off to the side by the food. So we were over there talking to them and we're trying to tell them they should advertise on our podcast. He's like, we don't need advertising. I was like, what are you talking about? He's like, we have so much business. We can't even keep up with it. I'm like, who are you guys? What are you doing? Yes. A bunch of GPUs. We're just leasing them out. We can't keep up. I'm like, interesting. Then the next day I knew they're IPOing. So that was crazy. CoreView used to be a provider in Akash. They were, the CEO was on a Slack DMing, you know, selling his business. This was in 2018, 2019, 2020 until, and just 21, 22, I mean, not 22, 23 is when they started.

My God, taking off like crazy. I almost thought it was a scam because we know the people really well. But then like, I mean, the scam was they were, or at least like what seemed to be a scam was they were buying GPUs. They got a sweet deal from NVIDIA. They were buying GPUs left and right. These are called the Neo Clouds, right? So they're hyperscalers, which are Amazon, Google, Microsoft, the world. And the Neo Clouds are these new companies that maybe around for a little bit or just popped out in the last few years are much smaller facilities with maybe like 10 megawatts to maybe, you know, or under 50 megawatt access to energy. They can build data centers and understand finance.

So a lot of them, like Corby, what they did was they bought compute from NVIDIA, used that compute as a collateral to get more debt, used that debt to buy more compute, and so on and so on. So they over-leveraged, they leveraged very well, betting on the fact there's going to be demand for compute. If that didn't happen, they would have an incredible downfall. So they did take risks quite a bit in terms of leverage, and they levered up all the way to billions of dollars. And they were right about demand. They were right about demand in one year. So it seemed like these guys were unstoppable, and they were selling like,

I think I remember they were selling secondaries for like $12 billion valuations for like all the employees. So employees were getting out. So I mean, all these things look like a scam, but ultimately I don't think it was actually kind of crazy. And it's very similar to what MicroStrategy does, similar to what New York real estate developers do, leverage, leverage, leverage. So it's not a bad thing if the demand goes up. Right. If the prediction goes the right way, the bottom falls out, and as you fall, you crash pretty hard.

especially if you're, in the case of MicroStrategy with Bitcoin, it's like they themselves are also driving the demand. Whereas with CoreWeave, I guess they, were they kind of also driving demand? It seems like they weren't. Yeah, there's a difference there. The demand is external. Not that MicroStrategy is the only one driving demand, but they certainly are driving some of it. And so. They're a big player. I mean, yeah, so again, oh, Bitcoin has real demand. But yeah, definitely, AI chips and energy have real demand. It's very, very clear now. I mean, I would even, like, I spend a lot more time now on AI and energy and below. That sort of like area, it's a very small area. There's a lot of stuff happening in Texas because Texas is.

the energy capital of the world, especially Houston. So I'm spending time in like, and a lot of VCs that used to be crypto are also spending time on the space. I mean, Meltem Demorse is a good friend of mine. She does quite a lot of energy now. She's doing exclusive energy now. What's her name? Meltem Demorse. She was a co-founder of Grayscale with Barry, with DCG. She was either the founding member or co-founder. I don't remember, but the early person there, Meltem Demorse now does coin shares thing. And she started a new company called Crucible ABC. So they are very, very good in terms of, I mean, she's very active in the space, looking at energy, looking at...

below data center sort of like stuff. And I was also pretty fascinated with the amount of disruption that's happening in the space and not too many people are looking at the new companies that are focusing on data center management software, which nobody touched for like last four years. The data centers were not that thing. It was a write-off. Right, they were boring. Boring, it was real estate businesses. They're write-offs, you know, they're like depreciation, depreciation write-offs for the most part, you know, because that's what real estate is. And now, oh my God, if you have a data center, you're the hottest kid on the block. Everybody wants to talk to you. Like we work with like, so we obviously like do site, you know, hunting for data centers.

We look at everything possible, right? We need to put our workloads. And the demand is so high. There's all these middlemen that let you, like, get to data centers. There's a whole ecosystem around, like, data center world. And they're just talking to these folks. The business is so crazy for these guys. And even people that build out the power infrastructure, you know, a few companies, because once you put, like, anything about a megawatt, you need a transformer. You need a whole lot of energy infrastructure, right? The companies are specialized in building energy infrastructure for AI, for data centers, and you cannot even get on a call with them these days. They're so hard to get by other companies. So it's a very, very profitable, like...

space and i think i mean people need to look at it a little bit more if you really want exposure to the real ai which is the energy underneath and the infrastructure and the picks and shovels you know like the energy uh designers the consultants the there are very few electricians in america and there's a crisis for electricians we don't know that like there's a lot of sociology majors uh not too many electricians so sure so being electrician now is very very profitable yeah it's hard to get one to even to call you back i know personally so if we go back to foundational things and first principles thinking like what could change foundationally that would somehow invert this demand curve? Like what are the black swan events? Are there changes to technology where all of a sudden it's like, well, data centers are not the hot kid on the block anymore. Like, have you looked at all that? Yeah, I mean, I think fundamentally it has to be technology. It has to be a breakthrough of distributed training. It's a major area of research. People thought distributed training was impossible a few years ago. Now you look at ICML conference, we had six papers that got approved in ICML and getting a paper approved in ICML is a big feat. It's something people work towards.

their entire postdoc. They work on these papers for like 10 years to get published, you know? So it's a big deal to get a paper published and presented at ICML. Pluralis, Jensen, Bagel, all these companies presented. And that is an indication for me that this NPReview, right, is a very, very amazing, like, milestone, I would call, for distributing. I mean, that's going to be fundamentally different.

driver. But data centers are not going to go away. I mean, I don't think, you can't distribute everything. Well, what if, for instance, what if a plateau in advancement? Like, what if Grok5 isn't any better than Grok4 despite them putting out 500 million or, you know, just astronomical compute? Like, what if we just stop getting better? Would that then... There's no limit to how better we can get. I mean, ESI, AGI, a lot of breakthroughs you still need to achieve, like, very, very early with AI, right?

There's another sort of architectural pattern that is emerging in AI called Mixture of Experts. Mixture of Experts is, instead of having one gigantic large model, how about having a lot of small models that can work together? How do humans work? We don't have an expert in everything. We have experts in areas, and we all work together as a team to achieve a task. So there's that improvement that's happening. Or rather, it's taking more center stage. If you look at the new HGPT agent mode in your HGPT, it's not using the biggest model. It's actually using smaller models to do agentic work. Grog4 agent mode is also the Grog4 heavy.

It's also using agents, right? So the agent stuff I think is very, very interesting when it comes to like, when it comes to inferencing or getting results or getting tasks done. So there's quite a lot of like, I don't know, I think there's... There's still economies of scale that could work for hyperscalers, and they did work for hyperscalers over the last 20 years. It's just this new energy shock is not working out so well for now. But if you saw the energy shock, I see no reason why the economies of scale won't return for hyperscalers. So there's always going to be a balance, I believe. So if a hyperscaler, let's say, goes to El Salvador and say, well, there's volcanoes that are giving basically free energy, and I can tap into that to build a final megawatt capacity.

beat that, right? So there's always going to be economies of scale that are going to work out better if there's not too much rush in getting to those. Right. Just the gold rush right now is causing the demand bubble. It's a crisis. I would call it a mid-term, short-term to mid-term crisis. It will be long-term if you don't do anything about it, but I don't think people are sitting around not doing anything about it. So that's why I'm very, very like...

I have high conviction over the next three to five years, decentralized AI has a best shot to make a mark in the world. Like we got the best shot right now. If we don't make progress in the next two years, I don't think decentralized AI will take off. People are not going to use decentralized AI because it's the right thing to do. People are going to use a solution because there's no other option. That's really the best way to sell a product. You know, people don't care about privacy as much as you think people care about privacy. People are willing to give up comfort and people are willing to give up privacy for comfort, right? Or cost.

So humans are irrational beings, right? So you just see what's easy to use and cheap to use and you tend to use that. So decentralization, I feel like, like if you look at the decentralized finance and all kinds of things, DeFi would only took off because it's easy to use than your centralized stuff, right? You know, it's obviously significantly easier to use. Once you have it set up, then Binance. And it's private. So are we going to be easier to use than ChatGPT? I don't know. I mean, ChatGPT has done a phenomenal job with the product, right? Like, they may not have the best models, but they still have a great product and it's getting better. Like, so I don't know. So you gotta, you gotta really think through, like, why would DAI take a central stage?

If you look at all the benefits DII provides, those will not be the ones that people will care about. It has to be a product. It has to be a good product. It's easy to use. It has to compete with opening eyes of the world. Historically, we haven't been great. That's the reality. But if it helps you solve the energy crisis or your linchpin. And that's why I said, next two years are going to be...

Two to five years are going to be very, very crucial for decentralized AI to take off. Plug us into the scene. Like, where do you follow the progress? How do you know the movers and shakers in the decentralized AI scene? How do you participate? Is there a Discord? Is there a particular... Well, you can follow me, Greg Osuri. I'm very loud on decentralized AI. My Twitter handle is Greg Osuri, G-R-E-G-O-S-U-R-I. Okay. Is there a single place you go? Unfortunately, the information is so...

dispersed right now, the best place to learn about AI is to actually hang out at AI conferences, not crypto conferences. Because crypto is so terrible at like claiming everything is decentralized AI because 99% of the decentralized AI is junk, like 99%. It's not the agents, it's not XPTs, it's not all these people that got millions of dollars of funding. I mean, people raised 70 million, 80, 100 million even, they don't do jack, decentralized, they don't matter. Like seriously, only ones that matter are the ones that got their papers accepted and presented ICML. That's the first bar that I consider to be high quality.

Because there's so much noise and you've got to find the signal. Well, one way to find signal is through peer reviews. What do the actual AI people that are doing mainstream AI, they're working at OpenAI for the world and anthropic, what do they think of decentralized? So see, they take, right? And the way to get their take is by looking at actual peer-reviewed papers that are deeply technical. I mean, if you try to read one of these papers, you need to be expert level in derivatives, calculus. You need this extremely, you know, arithmetic, a lot of these papers, right? Extremely arithmetic, way above anything crypto has to offer in terms of like, you know, technicality on the papers. Fortunately, I have an AI to help you read those papers. And I take, I mean, me, I mean, I don't consider, I mean,

I've done differentials quite a bit. It's very challenging with newspapers. But if you can use AI to read them, I highly recommend you do so. Some of the investors that are making good investments in AI, and usually Anderson Horowitz, has done a phenomenal job, I think, with investing in AI, decentralized AI, because they understand the space better. They have other things. CoinFund, I think, is remarkably good with decentralized AI. Their portfolio, I would say like...

In their portfolio, in their AI portfolio, I would say 80% is good. Legit. 70 to 80% is legit. And a lot of the companies that I talk about are, almost all of them are coin fund funded. It's funny, or at least they have their hand in, right? I don't want to name other VC names because, you know, they're not good. Name the bad ones, we can avoid them. No, no. I don't want to do that, but I think coin fund is good. Anderson Horowitz is a good signal. Let's see. One of the companies that are doing phenomenal AI. And a lot of the traditional funds, like VC funds, that are heavy in AI,

are not writing any small checks too. They're not writing anything less than $50 million these days. The AI checks are so large. It's nuts, right? Like, so yeah, I don't know. The space is so early right now. Getting the signal is very challenging. The way to do that is just follow the smart people, I suppose, you know? Yeah. I think the question Jared's asking is the kind of question I'm going to ask too, which is like, you said there's a ton of money to be made in the next two years. We dramatically, is that the right word to use? We talked to a lot of software developers, or I guess the ones that used to be software developers in the traditional sense, now we become something different. Architects, thinkers, babysitters, pick your...

Pick your adjective to describe what you are. We're. And we're talking about D-A-I, which I believe is D-E-A-I, right? That'd be. It's not DeFi, it's D-A-I. Yeah. Where are the, this is one of the areas where specifically if we had to give marching orders to a hungry, changing audience that knows there's something changing, knows they have to change their position in the value chain, knows they have to either become more resilient, become more dependent or change just fundamentally how they thought they would ever navigate their software developer career. What can they do to capitalize on this change, this massive money-making possibility? And also just.

you know, changing humanity in the positive way, fundamentally in the next couple of years, where can they apply their talents to capture some of these dollars and also innovate? If you are an engineer that has experience in distributed systems, go to AI. Have you seen how much meta is paying to poach AI researchers? I've seen offers for up to a billion dollars for an engineer, one engineer for four years. And they're still rejected. But I've seen offers all the way from, I know, the space. So I'm like, what am I doing? That's not enough. So they're offering engineers 300 million, 500 million offers for four years. If you're an engineer, that is good with AI. That's the ceiling, right? Now.

You can make a million if you're good enough. I think if you're a decent researcher now in the space, it's about a million dollar cost on average per year. So as an engineer, you have a lot more offers. I would just drop everything. You need to do really deep into differential equations and you need to brush up on your math skills. But if you break it down, I mean, it's just multiplication. I bet if you spend enough time, you want that hard to regain confidence. There are lots of opportunities in AI. Lots of opportunities if you're an engineer. You can solve.

or distributed training, for example, right? If you can, I bet, if you can figure out how to distribute GPUs in centralized, you know, across two data centers, really well, right? You have a winner. I mean, centralized companies, when they, there's a good chance they may go distributed, because Anthropic CEO, our co-founder, talked about distributed training in their newsletter. I wrote an op-ed recently, and by the way, I wrote an op-ed in CoinDesk last week, and I mentioned about all this stuff that you can actually go, it's a good starting point if you're looking into getting understanding. So there are frontier labs that are actually looking at distributed training as a solution, right?

Not decentralized yet. I will get there because decentralization is about adding incentives on top of distributed training, right? That's what decentralization is. But distributed training, I think is a great area. We need a lot of people to focus on this stuff, right? As an engineer. Now, if you're an investor, savvy investor, if you're looking for that edge, the niche energy, like look at this space. Like now, I mean, there's so many people you can talk to. That's better than me with energy investing. I'm not, you know, I come from a usage standpoint. I obviously don't understand the intricacies of the ecosystem, but all the way from nuclear, like there are public companies that are.

that do nuclear enrichment. I think nuclear stocks already kind of went like off the hook like last few months, right, because of this energy demand. I don't know, that's just, it's not financial advice, I'm just like looking at areas. I'm looking at personal nuclear, I'm looking at rare minerals, I'm looking at data center companies, Cruise Energy, so all the world, I'm looking at chip companies, rather, I invested in, I mean, I have exposure to NVIDIA and AMD's in the world, but also new chip companies that are innovating. There's a 99% chance this will fail, but that 1% is what I'm looking for. There's this new company that's doing quantum chips for AI.

the guy, the founder used to work, used to hire up at the quantum lab in Google. And they're literally coming up with a chip. And I know, and they send this, the cast to TSMC, which is the producer of all the chips, by the way, the fab. So they'll have a chip out in 18 months. I look at deals like that, right? Like, you know, make or break, high risk, high return investment. Look at data center management companies. There's a whole lot of them. Not a whole, but there's a few companies that are doing really well, innovating because that space hasn't been touched in a long time. So there are disruptors that are popping up. If you want a more niche-like area to focus on.

There's energy arbitrage coming, Enrons of the world that could, imagine Enron existing in 2025 without crooks leading it. Phenomenal business model, they actually executed on them. They messed up on the other things, but their new emergence of Enrons of the world, they're coming up, looking to those areas, right? There's lots of opportunities, I think, you know, if you spend enough time, you get excited. And ChatGPT, deep research is very, very good at some of this stuff. Like, you know, give it what you're looking for, ask it to give you an overview. Grok4 is pretty good at getting you the information as well. You know, the deep research stuff they have. I would start looking at them.

I bet if you put the Department of Energy report, it's publicly available, into like ChatGPT and put like DP search, you'd be like, what companies are involved in all different layers of this energy? And it'll give you tons to just start your journey and start looking at them. But I highly, highly recommend, yeah, I mean, highly recommend you looking at the space deeply. There's a, I'm going back a little bit to one thing that you told Jared, I guess me too by proxy, but you guys really, I was listening on that part where it was about the free internet, free energy stuff. And I'm thinking about like this idea of UBI becoming resurfaced as a true plausible need or some sort of like baseline because of the mass unemployment.

I mean, you're talking about, we've got lots of developers out there that are fearful of losing their jobs or, you know, they're building a thing that takes their job kind of thing. That's been the, you know, the concern, I suppose, to some degree. But then the way you described it was like, okay, well, if you're in distributed engineering or you're doing Kubernetes, you've got lots of change that you can move up the value chain around. So it seems like there's the job, traditional software developer job of I write code is a changing, I wouldn't say dying, but just changing. You're still involved in the code writing. You're just not literally writing it yourself. You're directing it through teamwork, through yourself, whatever.

And this idea of UBI is this, I don't want to get political with it necessarily, but the plausibility of the way people are making their money or being incentivized, it sounds like that's a version of UBI where you get your internet and you get your energy for free because you provide a value service back to the DEI infrastructure that will be future built. What are your thoughts on, I guess, UBI and concerns for folks like having to have some sort of base level income? That seems like a version of UBI where, hey, if I give you a little of my computer, I take on this device, maybe I spend a little bit of money, but long term, I never have to pay for internet again or energy. That's kind of a version of UBI because you probably cut off. 500 bucks of my personal bill to my household. Yeah. So when I'm giving you something, it's always something in exchange, right? So you're not getting free. There's a way to augment the need for, for earning as an income. Yeah. I had to earn to maintain energy and internet. And now I can, you know, repurpose that same earning if I have it or if I don't. In my model, you're leasing, you're giving your real estate and a room in your house and the position on planet earth to capture energy in exchange for a free bank. You're not literally.

getting free, but there's always an exchange of value. That's fine. No one will put something in your home unless there's something to get out of it. About when it comes to UBI and the future of AI taking jobs, there are two things to look at. Number one is, so far, the society has rewarded intelligence.

human time has value, right? So whatever value that may be, because you're providing some time and you're giving intelligence during the time, you have some value that's called value of labor, right? Now, value of labor, you get some price back. Question you should be asking is, will the value of labor be diminished to a point is no longer valuable? Number one. Number two.

What happens when a world shifts to that mode where the only mode we knew so far in existence of all civilization is the value of time? So question number one, will AI replace human beings fully autonomously? Now, I am a practitioner of AI. I use AI much more than most people do. And I'm also an engineer. I guarantee you the state at which AI right now is, you cannot replace a human being, not even close. Because of one main reason. That happens to be learning capability.

AI, once trained, cannot learn continuously. Whereas a human, if you do something, if you work for me, if you're doing a bad job, if you do something that I don't want you to do, I'll tell you what to do, next time you're going to not repeat that, right? You can't tell that to AI. AI is not self-learning. You can talk about reinforcement learning and all these techniques, but it's not self-learning yet. So you cannot replace a human being in any way. But a human being will be replaced by someone that knows how to use AI, for sure. Now, is it a replacement or is augmentation? Now, there are two ways to look at it.

As a CEO of a company, I was not coding as much as I used to code back in the day. But now with AI, I'm coding a lot more than I used to code, even back then. Why? Because the speed at which I can deliver stuff has gotten significantly lower compared to pre-AI world. So I'm able to do a lot more than I couldn't do. Now, as a CEO, do I want to do more things? Absolutely. There's no limit as to what kinds of things I want to do. Like I told you, I wipe code today.

Siri replacement because Siri sucks. Now, would I do that without AI? Probably not because I don't know how to do Swift. I don't know how to do Mac apps. I don't know any other stuff. I mean, I could learn, but is it valuable for me to do that? Probably not. But I was able to replace this whole thing in, I don't know, afternoon because it was fun. I reconfigured my entire network on 4th of July because I wanted to protect against Chinese IP device, IoT device, right? Would I do that without AI? It has a motivation, but probably not as quick as what I could do. So I could do a lot more as a human being.

That I would rather need a network engineer. Probably I need to hire to do this. Or I need a developer. I need to hire to do this, right? Am I hiring more developers? I am. And we're equipping them with AI to do a lot more like I do. So our production capability is just going to be higher. We're not going to use less developers. We're just going to use more developers to do more things. That's the human nature. There's never a list of things that you're going to run out of doing. I mean, imagine if you have all the time in the world to ask you, what would you do?

Always going to be things. Like, you know, always going to be things. I want to build a spaceship at the time and the energy and the resources. I want to build so many things. As a builder, I always want to build things. Only limitation right now is time. That time, imagine taking that away.

It's the Juwan's Paradox we call it. I'm pretty sure you heard this term. Juwan's Paradox is... Yeah, we have. Yeah, it's pretty popular, right? It's just like... Oh, gosh. I forgot. Go ahead, Greg. Juwan's Paradox is, you know, different from this age when people thought coal would just basically replace all forms of energy and, like, you know, we don't have... Humans won't have work to do because you don't need human physical strength anymore. Coal is going to replace the human thing. And we're just going to not have any value for human beings. But that turned out to be the opposite, right? I mean, with coal, we're able to industrialize. We're able to...

produce a lot more demand and that, in turn, needed more supply of humans that can actually operate the machine. So tellers, right? People thought when tellers came, when ATMs came, it's going to destroy the banks and all the tellers are going to go out of business. Like, no, we had a lot more banks and a lot more ATMs. So, same thing with iPhones, for example. Like, people think, like, oh, iPhones are getting faster and faster. I mean, the chips are getting faster and faster. Like, are we going to have less iPhones? No, we're just going to have more iPhones because, you know, the faster chips get, the more demanding the applications get. That's just the nature, right? So something gets more efficient, the usage is going to go up historically because of this paradox.

and not not the opposite right so yes what you're saying is dramatic inefficiency in producing code at scale and now we have a way to produce code at scale and so the inefficiency has been unlocked and it doesn't change our need to create more and produce more it's absolutely not exacerbates it it fuels it yeah it doesn't matter it just i think it's going to get we're going to accelerate beyond our imagination or at least a you know a great take on it because i think there's a lot of doom and gloom out there to some degree and i think we need to look at I almost thought like the traditional way to write software, like literally hand code something will become a hobby of a previously, you know, traditional software developer, but now they'll do it because they really love to write software, not because they have to write it. You know, it'll become a choice maybe, you know, not, and I'm thinking like really just maybe the.

I don't know how to describe it, but just the randos who really just want to keep writing the actual software, not for their jobs, but just for the fun. Just for the, I go ride a bike, I swing golf clubs kind of thing, you know? Yeah, I mean, it's going to be hobbyists that are going to do it for hobbies, and they're going to be people that I write using a pen. I'm going to have a fountain pen, literally. I produce content, but I haven't written content at that kind of scale. I use a fountain pen even today, even though I have more advanced pens. But why? Because I like using a fountain pen. I use an analog camera. Why? Because analog camera produces pictures that a digital camera can't. I use a lot of old things because they're just better in so many ways.

And people like me are going to exist, right? But it's going to be a small percentage of people like me. So, and I think most of the world is just going to use AI to accelerate augment, right? I'm particularly excited about removing the next efficiency in production of goods and services, which is the human computer interface. Like right now, we're so ancient. We use a mechanism to interact with a computer that was invented over 100 years ago. A typewriter basically became a keyboard, right? Like imagine being able to plugged in using Neuralink or something where your thoughts control the computer accelerated by AI. Imagine the possibilities, right?

One thing that will be most disruptive right now is people that know how to use AI is going to disrupt people that don't use AI. Hands down. Like, we have an active policy in the company. We give X amount of time to employees that haven't quite embraced AI that if you don't do it by X amount of time, you're going to be replaced. And we're very public about it. We're very open about it because, you know, you're required. And we give a lot of training to our staff. People that are not going to, I mean, fortunately, we don't have anyone that hasn't adopted to AI, but we have a standing policy. Another thing that's going to be standard across different companies. What's the time frame on that? I'll give you six months. Six months to your current employees? Yeah.

And what do they have to do exactly? They have to learn how to leverage AI to do everything they do. So first step is obviously like for engineer, go to ChatGPT and like, you know, that's a basic, yeah, basic. But if you're like, we have four levels, right, basically. So first level is, you know, how to use ChatGPT. Second level is, you know, how to customize ChatGPT or fine tune. Third level is, you know how to sort of like, for engineering, I think we have different persons, you know how to use different tools. Fourth level is, you have a pipeline that's so self-optimized, self-learning that you don't even teach action, just talk to it and do it for you. And most people on level one, how to use ChatGPT or Anthropic or Cloud, go to the web interface, but there's so many.

Things I'm probably at somewhere between like two and three where if I use chat GPT you wouldn't even know I use chat GPT it'll sound like I I speak and I write right and I can easily detect the I slop you can tell someone you study but you're not right are you speaking right now or I speak right now but sometimes I'll get different glasses like glasses like this which has a item it has a hard a sorry a heads-up display you can't see this but you may be able to see come on let's say what your new mask on be become Clark Kent this is a call even realities right now these are like a crazy person at first this is the early version of glasses I'm experimenting a bunch of these glasses right a lot a lot of companies working on different variations and not everything is ready for prime time I was sure but like okay that's me augmenting myself like it has a teleprompter when I'm on stage I'm giving like phenomenal like cute you know still probably actually on stage and you were that at your conference you wouldn't tell they wouldn't even notice they have no idea that I was just a speaker he's got all together Wow where you was reading your teleprompter on your glasses

Wow. Secrets out. Secrets out now. I mean, I got the idea from, uh, what's his name? Um, the guy who created a Oculus, uh, Palmer, Palmer lucky.

Right. Palmer Luckey uses these glasses when he gives keynotes. That's where I had the idea from. And it looks like you're just talking extemporaneously, but you just read it. Yeah, it also requires a certain level of... Make sure that script is right. You don't want to just read literally anything that's on there. It takes a while for you to get good at it, too. I sometimes use it just for like, I don't read, read, read, read. Like, I will use it to get some numbers. You know, I don't want to look at the screen. There's some numbers that you don't really remember, right? And the order of things, you know, the flow state. I still like use... You can use...

you know, there's so many amazing things that you can do. Incorporate that in your real life, like a new home building. In Texas, it's a large home and multiple stories, soundproofed. It has cameras where possible around the campus, about two acres, and inside and outside the house, it has sensors, infrared as well as ultrasound sensors for places where you can't have cameras, like bathrooms and bedrooms and whatnot. The goal is to detect any living form in the facility, within the walls or outside the walls, and particularly to detect any mishaps, like my mother-in-law, she's moving in with us. She's got her own very private unit inside the house. If she falls down, for example, I want to know. Or the AI should know.

So all the information, everything is recorded and analyzed and fine-tuned locally using a massive GPU cluster. Nothing leaves the boundary of my home, the network of my home. It's fully locked down, locked down network because a lot of the stuff is private, right? Every conversation. So this conversation would be recorded, would be transcribed, and so that I come back and talk to you next time, I'll remember what I talked about. Simple things of that nature, right? You read your name off your glasses. Hello. Security, right? Like, for security purposes, if someone is there on the campus that's not supposed to be there, there's going to be three drones that get dispatched, you know, triangulate the subject, or the target rather.

And if they still don't comply, they'll be like the robot dogs will go in. This is now? This is your house now? I'm building that. I'm actually building that. Is that the Westlake house or this is a different place? The drones aren't currently set up? I'm experimenting with a bunch of drones. The problem is a lot of these drones have Chinese drones and they just don't.

like the software I'm trying to keep it most most American locally DJ is the only DJ is the best drone right now and yeah the drones are awesome what are you using llama or what are you using locally deep seek deep seek okay r1 or if I be I mean Chinese have way better I mean nothing goes to China right obviously it's local yeah but deep seek is really good for agents llama is pretty good too llama 70 B is pretty good for agents too but I'm experimenting we don't know like I gotta load test the stuff right really like put through like chaos testing whatnot you documenting this somehow somewhere you got a blog you got a tick-tock I'm debating because it's a security posture again expose the security aspects of the system. You can choose what you're going to expose, though. Probably. Probably. I haven't thought about how all my friends that I talk to, they all want the system at their home. So I don't know. Is it a product opportunity there? It's a new business. This is definitely a new business, right? I mean, imagine a house where you can talk to the house, like, you know, that's local. It's responding to things. And particularly about health, right? Like, I want to see what I'm eating all the time. Like, what kind of food? I imagine you can see it going in your house. I want to know, like, continuously what I'm putting in my body.

and want to do better like things of that nature right i was thinking about that recently in particular like this whole idea of like what comes into my home from the grocery store there's a way to communicate that to intelligence to my to my home so all the attempts of like taking pictures of what i'm eating that's not gonna work because i'm never going to remember i'm gonna be like picking something i'm talking to somebody it has to be it has to be like out of your way that's the basic thing if it's in your way you're not gonna do it doesn't matter how much effort i mean i know how much more can we highly motivated so so simple you can use ai to automate your everyday life so much With the current tech, with the current tech, you don't need much, right? It's not going to be that expensive, too. I mean, maybe. Sorry, I take it back. It's going to be expensive. The GPU is going to be expensive.

drones are the cheaper aspects of it. That'll be cheap. The AI, the chips to run a real time AI that can respond with low latency to agents. That is expensive. The chips are expensive. Energy expensive. So, you know, that's why I think like I'm so pro like local AI of the future and leasing the unused computer back to the grid, like an AI grid with the cash, right? I'm very, I don't know. I'm very excited about the new future of like shared economy. Like, you know, everybody wants GPUs if you want AI locally, right? In your homes, you know, say we have like pass through the whole like.

uh you know limits for for whatever your grid imposes on you i'm particularly excited about like what you can do yeah and also the new home is very sovereign right has rain water collection about 70 000 gallons gallon rain water capture and it has a greenhouse uh on site that produces food local energy production with uh water for food 70 000 gallons you said yeah two massive rain capture tanks underneath the pool that they're hidden and uh it has great water filtering uh it has uh you know we filter through the plants produces food locally the more you learn about the grid this is your home in west like you're building i know The permitting is taking a little bit. I want to visit the site with you. I want to come and visit the site. Yeah, I have to show you. I mean, the permitting has been... They're like, what do you want to build? I'm like, wow. They were like blown away with my plans and they were a little challenging with permitting, but we're getting through this stuff. Yeah, nice. I even proposed a bunker, but the bunker is going to be challenging. Oh, boy. Let's make the house the bunker. Let's make the house the bunker. Wow. It turns out you cannot put a real nuclear fallout bunker in Westlake.

unfortunately it's kind of sad near the ranch for that stuff yeah it's terrible well just buy yourself a range to and say lots of land in Texas you know it depends on where the land is like so Westlake is livable right yeah you gotta get outside of town outside of the whole like I was down in yeah nobody wants to live then you real cheap land then you can put in whatever you want to get a range if you want to get there from your house as things are exploding around you you know so we look at that maybe helicopter helipad first principles thinking you know what what I gotta do here oh yeah you're fast like I would like that can Bulldoze through pretty much everything. There you go. In case of zombies. Yeah, zombies are next. My gosh. Listen, okay, we got AI. I never thought we would. I didn't think we'd ever have zombies, and I don't think we ever will. But, wow. I have a thesis for zombies. Oh my gosh, I bet you do. Let's save it for the next time we have you on, Greg. We have to leave something unplumbed. Let's throw the plus plus. Let's end this and throw a little zombies to the plus plus folks. All right, thanks, Greg. That's good stuff, man. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it.

So we do have a bonus on today's episode. I can't wait for you to hear it because it's kind of like unexpected. If you're a plus-plus subscriber, well, stick around. And if you're not a plus-plus subscriber, it's better. Check it out, changelog.com slash plus-plus. 10 bucks a month, 100 bucks a year. Drop the ads and get that sweet bonus content. Again, learn more at changelog.com slash plus-plus. Of course, a big thank you to our friends at Auth0. A massive thank you to our friends at Depot, Depot.dev. And of course, to Fly.io. Launch your app in five minutes at Fly.io. And to the Beat Freak in Residence, Break Master Cylinder for those awesome beats.

So cool. Well, that's it. The show's done. We'll see you soon.