EPISODE 161: The Robotics GPT-3 Moment @JTLonsdale sits down with @peteflorence Pete and @GeneralistAI are changing everything we know about robotics: -- robots trained on new tasks in seconds (seconds!) -- self-taught ambidexterity & other breakthroughs -- 10X more science and how the world will change (00:00) Episode intro (01:30) Bay Area to MIT and DeepMind (03:55) Pete's epiphany: robots sitting still (08:30) Why intelligence, not hardware, is the next frontier (13:20) The GPT-3 era of robotics (14:55) Why leave DeepMind? (16:50) How to train robot brains (18:30) Emergent ambidexterity (20:40) LLMs vs robot world models (23:50) GEN-0, GEN-1 & scaling laws in robotics (27:28) 10x more science per year (32:50)  Skilled trades, reindustrialization & future of robots

🚨NEW: @JTLonsdale & @SquawkCNBC clash on AI and wealth inequality. Joe Lonsdale: 2030s is the disinflation decade... we're all going to be really wealthy if we don't break this. Joe Kernen: Everybody's going to get wealthier? Because only the wealthy have been getting wealthier... Joe Lonsdale: That's not true. Let's go back: 1870 to 1900, the Second Industrial Revolution, the last time productivity shot up a lot, the average American, the average working class American, was twice as wealthy in real terms within one generation... Andrew Ross Sorkin: Tell me where you land on "We've got to slow everything down, because if we don't, we could end up dying... Joe Kernen: or worse... Joe Lonsdale: or worse, the companies go bankrupt  Andrew: versus we've got to go full steam ahead. No matter what. No matter what the case. Joe Lonsdale: I love the meme where it's Dario and Sam saying, please regulate us. And Trump says, keep building, nerds.  These companies have a lot of liabilities. These companies need to slow down if they see themselves causing damage. I'm not worried about any existential risks in the near term. I 100% could see these companies accidentally causing some problems with hacking with cyber, for example. They have a responsibility to slow down themselves, and we should be holding them liable if they cause any damage. And so it makes sense that they would be very careful about that. But we were just talking... 2030s is disinflation decade. We're going to all be really wealthy if we don't break this. So don't slow down too much is my view. Joe Kernen: Go back to this again. You told me that 2030s are going to be the decade of disinflation. We're going to all get rich, and we're not going to need to raise taxes, and we're going to start growing faster. The deficit will come under control. This is going to happen? Joe Lonsdale: The AI is really good for rooting out fraud and grift in the government. It's really going to bring down health care costs dramatically. It's amazing for bringing back manufacturing. We have companies already bringing back lots of manufacturing here. That's only about to accelerate. We're at what's called a GPT-3 moment right now for robotics, right. World models, which are a new type of AI -- how do things move and interact in the real world in general terms... Joe Kernen: So this will help one of our most daunting fears of the $40 trillion and the out of control deficits we're running now, this will come under control from AI?  Joe Lonsdale: If you get productivity up to 3, 4 or 5%, what you 100% should be able to do with these things, if not significantly higher, that solves the deficit problem. This is an amazing thing for a civilization; this is the answer is to get growth higher, and it's how everyone gets wealthier, it's doing more with less. It's going to do it. Joe Kernen: Everybody's going to get wealthier? Because only the wealthy have been getting wealthier... Joe Lonsdale: That's not true. Let's go back: 1870 to1900, the Second Industrial Revolution, the last time productivity shot up a lot, the average American, the average working class American, was twice as wealthy in real terms within one generation. And that's what happens when productivity goes up. Everyone gets wealthier. We we teach economics very poorly in this country.

🚨NEW FOOTAGE: They used a blue light boat to stop the cameras Two men on a small boat off Eastney. RNLI on the beach with the arrivals. Official boat moves in to push them back so they can’t film it. You pay for the landing. You pay for the coaches. You pay for the boat that hides it.

Two important essays were published this week on the theme that the climate movement is now a serious national security risk for the US and Europe. This one in Tablet magazine: is by 2 authors, one from the Hudson Inst in DC and the other a professor at the Naval Postgrad Academy in CA. They trace the links between China and the western Net Zero movement, which is partly financial, but works mostly through influence operations by which the CCP gains exemption from criticism by western green groups despite its own coal-intensive and slave labor-dependent growth strategy. This one: is by Richard Dearlove, former head of MI5, explaining how China's influence ops in the UK led to deindustrialization and a precarious dependence on China; to the extent that the UK could not now reindustrialize or stabilize its electricity grid without seeking assistance from Beijing. Dearlove's paper raises the possibility that a security agency like MI5 saw a threat building but was unable to address it because of a perception that climate science forbids criticizing Net Zero and related measures. A question I think worth asking is whether western intelligence agencies have internalized the green Net Zero mindset thereby preventing them from challenging the climate alarmism so effectively weaponized by the CCP. And if they now want to start doing so, would they know how, or have the capacity to do so.

Boring Company is working on a simple, precursor Hyperloop tunnel between Austin and San Antonio (>200 mph). Due to traffic congestion, that journey can currently take up to 2.5 hours. @BoringCompany can reduce that to a consistent <30 mins.

Anthropic is spending $750k to raise our property and sales taxes and give more money to our poorly run transit systems. $500k for higher property taxes $250k for a 1% SF sales tax hike Love public transit but hate how poorly ours is run, I don’t think money solves it.