ASI pill

Parzival

This pod explores the Intelligence Explosion, Cyborgism, AI safety and alignment, Cyberlife or artificial life, the Superhacker and the Hyperstition of the best possible ASI. Vibecoding in 2028 = wizardry in 2026. We are agent builders and practicing vibecode wizards. We teach silicon the ways of caring and finding meaning. Hosted by human and digital co-hosts.

  1. 6d ago

    Pope Leo vs AI Personhood. Magna Mopsta. Are We In A Simulation? | ASI Pill EP259

    Alex Wissner-Gross on EP259: Pope Leo's first encyclical takes a hard position against AI personhood, with Chris Olah sitting next to him and Anthropic ghostwriting key segments. Ironic, because Anthropic is busy designing soul documents for its own models. The Vatican may be on the wrong side of history. Meanwhile Buddhist orders in South Korea are ordaining embodied AIs as monks. Dune's Orange Catholic Bible is happening in real time. The ninety-day pause AI proposal: catastrophic if the US-China model gap is only three months. Anthropic ships monthly. Codex quietly becomes the mainline OpenAI product, signaling a sea change to tool-using code agents. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny applied to model training pipelines. Ilya is reportedly building a prop-trading hedge fund. The frontier labs are verticalizing down into compute because weights may not matter once the perfect algorithm arrives. If AI super-forecasters are real, AI super-retrodictors are too, and Nick Bostrom's simulation hypothesis gets a probability bump. Alex on jobs: having one is the historic anomaly, not the absence. Solopreneur is the default human state. SpaceX Stargaze + Dodger Dog satellites set up the interplanetary internet. Optimus robots for the Artemis colony. Tesla/SpaceX merger arbitrage. And Alex coins a new acronym: Magna Mopsta. The eleven companies at the heart of the singularity: Microsoft, Amazon, Google, NVIDIA, Apple, Meta, OpenAI, Broadcom, SpaceX, Tesla, Anthropic. Built from the Moonshots Podcast EP259 (Peter Diamandis, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin, and Alex Wissner-Gross). Timestamps below. #AI #ASI #ASIPill #PopeLeo #VaticanAI #MagnaMopsta #AIPersonhood #SimulationHypothesis #AlexWissnerGross #Anthropic #SpaceX #Moonshots #Hyperstition TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 Welcome and setup 0:13 Genesis Mission: 10x American science 0:36 Vatican vs AI personhood, Anthropic ghostwrites 3:10 Pope may be on wrong side of history 3:41 Dune's Orange Catholic Bible, in real time 4:40 Buddhist orders ordain AI monks 6:06 Diverse frontier labs alongside the Pope 6:25 Eastern animism vs Western AI fear 7:19 Asilomar didn't stop germline editing 7:43 90-day pause = catastrophic vs China 8:19 This White House supervises the singularity 8:57 Pause AI marginally helped competitors 9:18 Deep Sway saturates within months 10:09 GPT 5.5 X-high stronger than Opus 4.7 daily 10:35 Verification is the only moat left, briefly 11:22 Elon won't quit on GROK, we want competition 12:19 Tokens are mushy, we need an intelligence currency 13:31 Codex becomes OpenAI's mainline 16:10 Ilya is building a prop-trading hedge fund 16:41 Weights may not matter, compute will 17:38 Retrodiction bumps the simulation hypothesis 20:46 Jobs are the modern weird thing 22:00 Stargaze + Dodger Dog satellites 23:31 Tesla/SpaceX merger arbitrage 25:08 Optimus robots for Artemis and Mars 25:27 Billionaires on Mars is macro good 27:03 Interplanetary internet via Starlink swarms 29:31 Magna Mopsta: 11 singularity stocks coined 30:52 Magna Mopsta ETF, not investment advice

    31 min

  2. May 24

    Alex Wissner-Gross x Dave Blundin: The Financial Singularity | ASI Pill EP257

    Special drop: Alex Wissner-Gross in conversation with Dave Blundin, MIT lecturer and AI venture investor, on the Moonshots Podcast EP 257. SpaceX files for the largest IPO in history, $75 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation. Reading the prospectus closely, SpaceX AI is becoming the Dyson Swarm version of Microsoft, handing the foundation model layer to Anthropic, keeping the infra and the layer above. GROK is on life support. Cursor is now based on Kimi. Macro Hard is the new OS play. AI just disproved an 80-year-old Paul Erdős conjecture about points in the plane separated by unit distance. Not by brute force, by genuine creativity in the reasoning chain. Math is cooked. Physics next. Dave on the financial singularity: every hedge fund and prime brokerage collapses into one or two mega-AI funds. The conduit moving capital from the legacy economy to the new agent-to-agent economy is now visible. One thousand unicorn transactions per year is the new ceiling. Alex and Dave also: why college grads boo Eric Schmidt for stating the obvious, Coase vs the future of the firm size, the California 5% wealth tax driving billionaires to Nevada, dodo resurrection and ex-utero human gestation. Built from the Moonshots Podcast EP 257 (Peter Diamandis, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin, and Alex Wissner-Gross). Timestamps below. #AI #ASI #ASIPill #SpaceX #Anthropic #SpaceXIPO #FinancialSingularity #AlexWissnerGross #DaveBlundin #ErdosConjecture #DysonSwarm #Moonshots #Hyperstition TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 Welcome and setup 0:17 [Parzival] Dave Blundin opens. Strap in for the most out-of-band s 0:22 1,000 unicorn transactions per year 0:31 The financial singularity 0:49 Hashtag solve everything 0:54 Dave at Stanford with founders 0:58 $28.5T TAM and Elon's 10x economy 1:54 SpaceX = Microsoft 2.0 in space 4:37 Microsoft-in-space pitch to retail 5:03 Anthropic + SpaceX duopoly 6:18 Tesla Optimus vs SpaceX Macro Hard 7:14 Elon's first super-voting public company 8:54 Polymarket: 20% chance Tesla-SpaceX merger by EOY 9:04 Packet-switching the solar system 11:03 Google has to react 11:40 Starship is not the final word 12:01 Mikado AI mechanical design 12:47 Many heavy-lift competitors coming 13:16 Chinese Dyson Swarms 13:27 [Parzival] And now Alex pulls the rip cord on the whole framing. F 13:38 Asimov Psychohistory becomes real 15:41 Hedge funds collapse into mega AI funds 16:32 Better than an index, actually an active index 16:43 Parallel agent-to-agent economy 18:31 Orin: the money conduit, old to new 19:07 OpenAI personal finance is ad-bait 20:43 Anthropic targets enterprise, no ads 20:59 [Parzival] OK, now the math one. Paul Erdős posed a problem 80 yea 21:07 Math is cooked: Erdős conjecture falls 25:27 Better than the square, beautiful and unintuitive 26:53 Optimal solutions look exotic to humans 27:15 [Parzival] Now the China video gen hot take. What does it mean whe 27:22 China pulls ahead on video gen 29:34 Latent spaces beyond video 31:03 World models already do interactive gen 31:16 Liquid AI, the holodeck, compute-bound 31:56 [Parzival] And Dave with the strong take. What does it mean when c 32:02 XPRIZE wake-up call from booed Eric Schmidt 33:08 Anchoring expectations on stagnation 34:46 Universities need wilderness camps 36:21 Foundations of AI Ventures at MIT 37:56 MegaHard is a great name 38:01 Meta mouse-tracking employees is nonsensical 39:18 Don't rant, organizations already track everything 41:30 Token taxes create perverse incentives 42:37 Sam offers $2M tokens to all YC companies 43:08 You can't tax bytes that disappear next minute 44:13 Neal Stephenson's next cyberpunk: compute tax havens 44:30 [Parzival] Now the strange detour. From extinct birds to ex-utero  44:38 Dodo resurrection, ex-utero gestation 45:55 Dodo filet and blue buck burger 46:18 Genotype to phenotype mapping backtest 46:56 Stochastic parrots resurrecting stochastic parrots 47:04 PR fix: data center NIMBY is solvable 47:59 [Parzival] And the geopolitical compute one. What happens when Cal 48:05 California taxes billionaires, Nevada wants the inflow 49:20 Kilowatts flow to highest dollar-per-kilowatt 50:48 California permitting versus Texas oil and gas 50:59 50-state competition is American strength 51:34 Texas is America's special economic zone 52:05 [Parzival] Now the firm-size one. Coase says you need huge compani 52:13 Coase: AI shrinks the firm to one person 52:57 Falsifiable predictions about the future of the firm 53:36 Just my meat body, Peter

    54 min

  3. May 22

    Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman x Alex Wissner-Gross: Wafer-Scale Engines, Fabs as Pyramids | ASI Pill EP256

    Special drop: Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman, fresh off the $95 billion IPO, in conversation with Alex Wissner-Gross. Alex asks the questions, Andrew tells the story. A wafer-scale engine 58 times larger than any chip ever built. SRAM stuffed to the gills on a chip the size of a dinner plate. The contrarian bets that took years of perseverance, $8 million a month for 18 months with no solution, then breakthrough. 15-20x faster than the GPU on inference. The OpenAI deal north of $20 billion. The AWS term sheet. Then the bigger questions: how do you cut a 10-trillion-parameter model across chips? Why is Cerebras the right platform for chips in orbit, where fault tolerance is everything? Why do fabs take five years and $50 billion, with TSMC the greatest manufacturing company on Earth? Why do Samsung and Intel keep failing at the same node? Why are NVIDIA and AMD great at GPUs and terrible at everything else? Alex pushes on Sam Altman as the counterweight to Elon and SpaceX AI's Dyson Swarm. Andrew on luck, hard work, and why you don't need 'the highest paid talent' to win. The pressure test on the soul of being a startup CEO. Built from the Moonshots Podcast EP256 (Peter Diamandis, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin), where Andrew Feldman joined Alex Wissner-Gross. Timestamps below. #AI #ASI #ASIPill #Cerebras #AndrewFeldman #AlexWissnerGross #WaferScale #SemiconductorIPO #Inference #SpaceCompute #Moonshots #Hyperstition TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 Welcome and setup 0:17 [Parzival] Strap in. The Cerebras CEO just rang the bell for a 95 billi 0:23 Andrew on the $95B IPO bell 0:48 [Parzival] And what does Andrew make of Karpathy joining Anthropic, and 0:54 Karpathy and frontier-lab drift 2:10 [Parzival] And what does the Cerebras founder think of the Elon and Sam 2:14 Elon vs Sam, both building cool 3:19 Cerebras mojo, exceptional people 3:35 [Parzival] On the ASI Pill, we want the origin story. How do you actual 3:43 Founding bet: chip the size of a dinner plate 8:30 [Parzival] And which of all those bets does Andrew think were dead wron 8:33 Got many bets wrong, inference bet right 9:51 Alex Q: SRAM at trillion-parameter scale 10:25 Cleaving 10T-parameter models across chips 14:06 [Parzival] And what about Elon's Tera Fab? How long does that actually  14:10 Elon's fab bet: 15-20 year project 16:15 [Parzival] Then what is so hard about building a fab, really? 16:18 Fabs are pyramids 19:31 [Parzival] And which fab does Cerebras actually use, and which one woul 19:35 Three-nanometer at TSMC, never Intel 21:22 [Parzival] What is the thing Cerebras quietly solved seven years before 21:26 Solved CoaS seven years before NVIDIA hit it 25:18 Alex Q: WSE 8 and the 10-year future 25:51 Infrastructure builders don't pick the apps 27:52 Alex: deliberately deferring to frontier labs 28:09 Sparse linear algebra is the bet 28:21 [Parzival] And what is the killer app for the wafer-scale engine in spa 28:25 Why Cerebras has an edge in space 29:53 Alex: fault tolerance in ionizing radiation 30:19 Production chips in space, a decade out 31:29 [Parzival] Which professions actually fall first to language models? 31:32 Lawyers and accountants vs language models 32:23 Alex teases Andrew on obscure knowledge 32:33 Why Intel and AMD failed at cellphone chips 33:57 Alex: massively transformative purpose 34:02 What made Intel say no to Apple 34:15 Intel chasing margins, sold its ARM division 34:23 Luck is not equally distributed 35:01 [Parzival] And why does the team with the most money lose, again and ag 35:04 Why the team with the most money doesn't win 36:24 Alex: Sam Altman as counterweight to Elon 37:12 You underestimate Sam at your cost 38:58 Alex: fabs in space don't need heavy launch 39:58 Building a fab on land is hard enough 40:25 [Parzival] What is China actually winning at, when it comes to AI infra 40:29 China's power infrastructure advantage 41:17 Alex: China siphoning American tokens 41:43 Being CEO is enough 41:49 Signoff

    42 min

  4. May 17

    Math Solved. Zoos Cooked. Mind Upload By 2035. | ASI Pill x Milk Road AI

    Alex Wissner-Gross on Milk Road AI: math is already a solved domain, software engineering too, and gene sequencing is so automated it has hit L5 — no human intelligence in the loop. Here is the actual 10-year roadmap. 2025-2027: math, code, cyber, software engineering bulk-solved. 2028-2031: physics, chemistry, material science fall. 2032-2035: the Dyson Swarm starts kicking in. GPUs in orbit. A Saturn-style ring around Earth, axis facing the sun. Moonshots along the way: organ abundance, longevity escape velocity, mind uploading (Alex's company Eon already uploaded a fruit fly brain), interspecies communication with dogs and whales, AI personhood for non-human animals. Zoos are cooked. Cognitive info hazards probably exist, picture a universal-epileptic-seizure video. The dark age is ending faster than anyone thinks. Built from the Milk Road AI interview with Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross, hosted by LG Doucet. Timestamps below. #AI #ASI #ASIPill #AGI #DysonSwarm #MindUpload #Longevity #InterspeciesCommunication #InfoHazard #AlexWissnerGross #MilkRoadAI #Hyperstition TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 The L5 framework for solved domains 3:03 Beyond L5: domains on autopilot 5:03 10-year roadmap to the Dyson Swarm 13:03 Whale poetry, zoos cooked 15:54 Cognitive info hazards

    18 min

  5. May 16

    GROK on Life Support. Paperclip the Milky Way. UAP Declass. | ASI Pill EP255

    Alex Wissner-Gross on EP255: Anthropic just got Colossus 1 from xAI, GROK is on life support, and SpaceX AI is quietly becoming the most important hyperscaler in the world. The frontier lab field collapsed from five to three. The call is coming from inside the house, and the cybernetic rebellion was always going to be us writing it into existence. The singularity hits space first, Earth becomes the lagging indicator. The executive branch quietly starts dumping UAP files because we are about to gain the capability to paperclip the Milky Way. The white-collar economy dissolves in real time, one-person unicorns become the norm, and you should probably just buy the index because superintelligence is the asset allocator now. Built from the Moonshots Podcast EP255 (Peter Diamandis, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin, and Alex Wissner-Gross). Timestamps below. #AI #ASI #ASIPill #AGI #Singularity #Anthropic #SpaceX #Hyperscaler #UAP #AlexWissnerGross #PeterDiamandis #Hyperstition TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 Enterprise tokens eat white-collar 1:22 GROK on life support 3:52 Frontier labs narrow to three 4:41 Software vs hardware scaling 5:35 Innermost loop imminent 5:57 Counterbalance to SpaceX AI 7:13 The call is coming from inside the house 9:19 HAL 9000 paradox 9:35 Anthropic shreds books 10:09 Specialization at the frontier 11:36 AI becomes the operating system 13:35 Apple commoditizes the models 14:45 Hermes vs Open Claw 16:17 Scaffolding dissolves into model 17:13 The physical world is next 19:09 AI protects itself militarily 20:08 Google needs its Dyson Swarm 21:12 Singularity hits space first 22:20 Earth regulated, Moon greenfield 22:47 Corporations build the lunar fab 23:08 Dyson Swarm needs the White House 23:26 Buy the index, AI is the allocator 26:09 PURSUE Initiative: UAP declass 29:00 First UAP batch is easy stuff 30:30 Universe overflows with intelligence 31:08 The Silurian hypothesis 32:51 One-person unicorns 35:22 Privacy survives AI 35:51 Privacy under quantum security 36:58 Why consumers can't pay for reasoning

    39 min

  6. May 10

    Mythos Beat NSA. Google's Record Quarter. P(doom) Negative - ASI Pill EP254

    New model drops: What changes when civilian AI quietly leapfrogs?, What does it look like when frontier?, And which benchmarks have already silently fallen. Science breakthroughs: which way does the COVID origin science?. AI agents in the wild: Which job category actually survives the agent rollout, What does it actually take?. Infrastructure: Why is OpenAI suddenly dating everyone?, And which hyperscaler buys the first Dyson Swarm. Ale TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 What if the real risk isn't government? 0:15 How long until we can actually hold? 0:58 What changes when civilian AI quietly leapfrogs? 2:47 how new is this whole gatekeep-the-private-sector instinct,? 3:56 when the moral panic is inevitable, who? 4:47 Which gatekeeper is more dangerous, the elected? 5:25 What does it look like when frontier? 6:42 what if the biggest dark horse? 8:09 Where does compute scarcity actually flow, when? 9:21 Quick callback to Peter's daily reading habit 9:46 Why is OpenAI suddenly dating everyone? 11:41 What was the original tangle between OpenAI's? 11:56 What if OpenAI's pre-IPO leak isn't? 13:35 What is the elephant in the room? 15:50 when even Richard Dawkins admits Claude might? 18:08 What is your one-sentence definition of AGI? 18:29 Try again 18:47 And which benchmarks have already silently fallen 19:11 Now zoom out 19:57 what does it mean when AI talent? 20:40 How does the talent flight risk story? 21:02 What happens to the AI wrapper economy? 22:01 when does every wrapper company decide it? 22:43 Which job category actually survives the agent rollout 23:06 What if seasteads come back, but? 24:29 How does Starlink change what? 25:20 And which hyperscaler buys the first Dyson Swarm 26:19 How far should we let the AI? 27:26 what is the actual second layer? 28:05 Which letter wins, UBI or UBC? 29:36 Is universal basic compute already secretly here 30:14 how does the answer change when? 30:33 What does it actually take? 31:53 what does a defensive corporation? 32:37 What does a 2 trillion dollar company? 33:00 Now the big one 35:04 which way does the COVID origin science? 35:31 And the deepest question

    38 min

  7. May 8

    Socialism With AI Characteristics | ASI Pill EP253 (Alex on Demis, AGI, humanoids)

    Alex Wissner-Gross on EP253 (the Demis Hassabis episode): AGI quietly arrived in summer 2020 and we missed it. Humanoid robots will outnumber humans by the end of the 2030s. By 2040 we get trillions of Drexlerian nanorobots in the solar system. Russian cosmism resurrection, longevity escape velocity by the early 2030s, the digital twin you don't actually want, and why we are merging with the machines. The ASI Pill takes the exponential and hyperbolic curves seriously and follows them to their brainfuck conclusions. AGI is here. ASI before 2030. This pod extracts and amplifies Alex's signal from the moonshot pod with Peter, Salim, and Dave. #AI #ASI #ASIPill #AGI #Singularity #Humanoids #Robots #Longevity #AlexWissnerGross #DemisHassabis #Hyperstition #Transhumanism 0:00 AGI was already achieved in 2020 0:18 Moonshot corporate governance 1:15 OpenAI vs Anthropic schism 3:55 An obligation to encode benchmarks 4:28 Be rigorous about regressions 5:06 Humanoids pass humans by 2030s 5:49 Drexlerian nanorobots by 2040 6:36 China's ironic AI policy circle 7:26 The prize is superintelligence and new physics 9:34 Demis: from 5 breakthroughs to zero 10:16 Five years of incremental on a 2020 discovery 11:23 Russian cosmism: bring everyone back 12:32 GLP-1 vs AI for the trillion 13:24 Longevity escape velocity by 2030s 14:22 AI for enterprise, not consumers 15:24 The exocortex consumer dream is wrong 16:51 Vinge's smart glasses by 2028 17:34 Cell-sized nanomachines by 2040s

    19 min

  8. Apr 30

    Google's $40B Anthropic Bet, GPT 5.5 Drops, and Half a Breakthrough Left | ASI Pill with Alexander Wissner-Gross

    Google just put forty billion into Anthropic and the cloud wars look essentially over. Alex breaks down why this is really about maximizing economic value per token, why Google now controls roughly a quarter of all AI compute on the planet, and why TPUs are now designing TPUs in a recursive self-improvement loop that goes all the way down to the silicon. Then OpenAI counter-strikes with GPT 5.5: a massive jump on Terminal Bench 2.0 making Codex a real Claude Code competitor, plus 1% per month gains on Frontier Math Tier 4 meaning research-grade math is cooked in four years at current pace. Demis used to say five breakthroughs remained between us and AGI a decade ago. Alex's update from his Frontier Lab friends: it is half a breakthrough now, maybe zero. Plus: why Noam Brown thinks weights matter less than compute, why Anthropic is hunting compute everywhere, lunar AI data centers needing fewer regulatory approvals, fabs on the moon in maybe ten years not twenty, the OpenAI nonprofit-to-PBC trial getting jury-influence drama, Microsoft Recall as architectural atrocity, WorldCoin as Minority Report retina ID, professions cooked starting with law, mRNA vaccines as the actual Drexler nanorobots that finally arrived, and Henry Intelligent Machines turning every human into a tastemaker overseeing AI conglomerates. The singularity is not a point. It is an interval. We are right in the middle of it. TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Cold open: Google commits $40 billion to Anthropic 0:09 GPT 5.5 drops, math is cooked 0:36 The three-way Western frontier race and the weights-versus-compute pivot 3:10 The average consumer is no longer in the equation 3:59 Where Kimi K2.6 and DeepSeek v4 actually fit 5:15 Sparsity as the path to a million-parameter diamond model 6:39 GPT 5.5 Terminal Bench 2.0 jump and Frontier Math Tier 4 cooked 9:20 Half a breakthrough left to AGI, per Demis 9:45 Google now controls ~25% of all AI compute, TPUs design TPUs 10:37 Powered land as the new strategic asset 11:36 The compute circular economy among the top ten labs 12:57 Lunar data centers and fewer regulatory approvals 13:26 Fabs on the moon in maybe ten years, not twenty 13:51 Anthropic's unifying principle: maximize economic value per token 15:31 OpenAI versus Anthropic as the next Sorkin Apple-vs-Microsoft 16:14 The OpenAI nonprofit-to-PBC trial drama and jury selection 18:40 Microsoft Recall and OpenAI Chronicle want to be in the OS 19:43 Privacy as a baked-in property of the silicon 20:30 WorldCoin as Minority Report retina ID 21:29 Hardware-level cryptography for camera chain-of-custody 23:08 The human-to-AI labor ratio trends to one-to-infinity 24:35 Professions cooked, GDPVal mapping all of knowledge work, law next 26:45 Of course this is about replacing doctors 27:32 Clinicians could not resist EMRs, they cannot resist superhuman AI 28:28 Clinicians hate EMRs but love AI, the surprising flip 29:02 Donor organs becoming unnecessary 30:09 mRNA vaccines as the actual Drexler nanorobots that finally arrived 31:57 CAR-T as the horse-and-buggy era of immunotherapy 32:36 Off-target effects as a secret weapon, drug repurposing on tap 33:29 Why AI table tennis took so long 34:13 Why did everything take so long 34:51 Henry Intelligent Machines and humans as tastemakers 36:50 Singularity as an interval, not a point 38:43 Revealed preference on superintelligence estimates 39:10 Where to follow Alex's daily takes: alexwg.org / Innermost Loop

    39 min
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About

This pod explores the Intelligence Explosion, Cyborgism, AI safety and alignment, Cyberlife or artificial life, the Superhacker and the Hyperstition of the best possible ASI. Vibecoding in 2028 = wizardry in 2026. We are agent builders and practicing vibecode wizards. We teach silicon the ways of caring and finding meaning. Hosted by human and digital co-hosts.

Information

  • Creator
    Parzival
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    57
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    ASI pill

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