Moonshots with Peter Diamandis
Demis Hassabis on AGI, Robots Scale Production, and Elon’s $1T Mars-Shot Comp | EP #253
07 May 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is AGI and why is it significant?
Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind, says AGI may not need a major breakthrough.
I've argued in the past that we achieved AGI in the summer of 2020. We know, I would argue, what AGI is, and we know how... Please define it for me.
Figure AI, they've increased production from one robot per day to one robot per hour. Their target is 100,000 robots between now and 2030. 1X Technologies' production goal is 10,000 robots this year, 100,000 in 2027. The prediction that comes both from Elon and from Brad Adcock, up to 10 billion humanoid robots by 2040. It's probably right.
What I think is perhaps even more interesting is what does a post-humanoid robot form factor look like? There's the kinds of conversations and imaginations that one can have in this, you know, exponential singularity that we're living in.
Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.
Everybody, welcome to a special episode of Moonshots here at MIT. This is a conversation around all things happening to uplift humanity. You know, I want to read something I wrote this morning as an introduction to today's episode because it's important. So welcome to Moonshots, where we distill the singularity. No politics, no bullshit.
Just the technology that changes the world, the breakthroughs helping us uplift humanity, the news that matters most, changing our world, impacting our companies and our families, our mission to help you understand what it is, why it matters with a dose of optimism. So any fans of Moonshot here in the audience today? I love it. It is an honor and a pleasure.
One of the things, you know, last night I was going to sleep.
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Chapter 2: How are robots changing production rates in manufacturing?
I just had this sense of absolute gratitude for the people in my life who I love and I have a chance to work with. I like to bring them on stage. First up, the man who is my guru on all things exponential investing. Let's give it up for DB to Dave Blunden. Welcome back to MIT. Thank you. Thank you. My partner at Link Ventures and an extraordinary friend. Dave and I go back.
I don't see how many decades, but don't say it. We were roommates at MIT.
Right over there.
Data Delta Chi up on the third and fourth floor. Basically, it was Dave, myself, Mike Seller from strategy. And it's been a friendship that's lasted. And thank you, pal. I love the lobster on your shirt, by the way. Yeah, of course.
Yeah, the MIT gear, we've actually buy it at the coop. We don't steal the MIT logo and then we put the lobsters on.
OK, nice. All right.
Yeah.
All right, let's turn the conversation next to another MIT alum, another member of the Link Exponential Ventures team, our resident genius, Alex Wiesner-Gross.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of Elon Musk's ambitious Mars colonization plan?
Give it up for AWG, everybody. Yes, he is real. Maybe. Maybe.
Maybe.
I mean, the hologram technology has gotten really, really good. Seem real. Could be an Android. That's true. Let me just check. Very plain. Yes.
Is that how you check for an Android?
Is that the test?
Yeah.
My fourth and final moonshot made someone who is the godfather to my two boys, a dear friend, co-conspirator, a co-author, and a co-founder of Singularity University. Give it up everybody for Saleem Ismail.
Hugsies, hugsies.
Oh, I'm not doing that. Yay. Good to see you, buddy. Likewise. Looking good. Careful. Looking good. And we have a special guest with us on the stage today. He is three times a Pulitzer Prize-nominated author. He's the author of 17 books. He's my co-author of Abundance, Bold, and The Future is Faster Than You Think, and now We Are as Gods. Let's give it up for Stephen Kotler. Amen.
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Chapter 4: How can AI impact the future of human longevity?
Oh, wait, we need a for-profit public benefit corporation. So I think that the history, the sort of sad lesson we're learning over and over again that's now being litigated in Elon v. Sam that resulted in Anthropix formation over and over again is, It's actually possible to realize moonshots now, and as a result, don't do it as a not-for-profit.
Do it as a public benefit corporation from the start. Figure out the for-profit arrangement from the start, rather than fighting it all out in federal court after the fact. Nice.
Dave, do you have a... That's hard.
That's easier said than done.
By the way, our resident genius here always has the best takes. I disagree, by the way.
Okay.
Try setting up a B Corp. It's easy. We set one up. We flipped Singularity University from a non-profit to a B Corp. It wasn't easy.
Friends don't let friends start non-profits, I know.
I will never start another non-profit again. Having a business model that enables you to earn capital so you're not begging for money. I mean, the ratio of donation to investment
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Chapter 5: What role does AI play in enhancing human performance?
It's like 100 to 1. Hey, everybody. You may not know this, but I've got an incredible research team. And every week, myself, my research team study the meta trends that are impacting the world. Topics like computation, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology. And these meta trend reports I put out once a week enable you to see the future 10 years ahead of anybody else.
If you'd like to get access to the meta trends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com slash metatrends. That's diamandis.com slash metatrends. Salim, you disagree. What do you disagree about?
So two points. One about the trial. I have no comments. I think it's a lose, lose, lose situation. Everybody loses. It would have been way better if they could have settled this. in a separate way, but nobody wants to settle in that environment. Regarding for-profit, non-profit, we're entering a post-capitalist society over time.
At some point, money doesn't make sense, in which case, your moonshot can be a non-profit, and in fact, it should be a non-profit. The chase for money will corrupt the target in many, many cases. The ones that are succeeding, Elon, for example, really doesn't give a damn about money. It's just it's the cleanest structure that gets you to what you need to achieve.
If a nonprofit would get you there, you'd do it as a nonprofit, right? You'd also have less hassle about pay packages and all the rest of it. Maybe eventually. You're assuming, hold on, hold on. If you haven't a true MTP, then you don't really care about the money. And it's not a motivating factor.
You're really interested in achieving the goal, in which case, whatever the cleanest structure that achieves that will get you there. In this case, for now, capitalism, a for-profit fine, you can raise money on the public markets. You need that energy to get you going. But I think we're going to enter a point at some point, I'll say two, three years, where it won't make sense anymore.
Dave, this is the Polymarket from this morning. The Polymarket gives Elon a 33% chance of winning this. What do you make of that?
Actually, the headline on this is that Elon has a very slim chance, but if you look just like a couple of weeks ago, it's at 50-50. Yeah, you can see it.
There's a time horizon.
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Chapter 6: How is AI influencing the future of corporate governance?
Well, so we're really gearing up for robotics, actually, because, you know, software has a limited life left in it because I write software so, so, so well. Robotics and data centers will go on for a decade or so, maybe more.
Here's 1x Technologies. Again, Dave and I had a chance to go meet with Bernd Bornick. And this is their robot called Neo. They've just opened up a new manufacturing facility in Hawthorne, California, 58,000 square feet. Production goal is 10,000 robots this year. Bernd has promised me a robot by this fall. We're going to keep him to it.
So Bernd, if you're watching, first of all, friend of the pod, thank you so much. I love my Neo. whatever version of neo neo gamma whatever's coming out 100 000 in 2027 shipments expected later this year let's check out their video now that guy's job is very limited A lot of humans in that video.
Yep, doing very simple things. That was the eye-opener. We went to the Gigafactory, and Elon was saying, look, the robots are going to make the robots. I'm like, I can't imagine this thing making tiny little parts. But I didn't get it until we got to the Gigafactory. Everything is already automated. The robots assemble the automation equipment. It arrives in Amazon boxes.
You take it out of the box, you put it on, you turn a screw, and now you've got a new manufacturing line. So the bottleneck is the humanoid actions. Everything else is already automated.
Philip, I think this is our answer, by the way. You want to know what, like, you want job security over the next 25 years? Be a robot repairman. Yeah. Because they can only do that.
We literally just invested in a company.
Literally, like, be a robot. Figure out how to repair robots.
But there's an entire ecosystem of businesses around this, like insurance, right? Now, the third story in this... this triplet is Elon predicts 1 million Optimus production by 2030.
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Chapter 7: What are the societal implications of AI and robotics integration?
That's right. If there's new physics, for example, I have financial interest in a company, physical superintelligence, that's working on superintelligence for unlocking new physics and new applied physics. That alone is a prize worth an international arms race over.
And I just to the the claim or the assertion that somehow China, by introducing policies that are notionally worker friendly in terms of AI substitution for labor, is somehow hand stringing themselves. I think it's preposterous. There are a variety of other industrialized countries, including Germany, that have policies of favoring small and medium-sized businesses when it comes to automation.
I think China, if anything, this is a way from an internal policy perspective for China to ensure a certain level of human employment while also creating state incentives top-down for creating new types of jobs that are AI-adjacent. I don't think they're tying themselves up at all.
So they manage the PR of AI through this, like they have high enthusiasm about AI. They want it to be high.
It's no different in some sense from our government constructing policies with the hyperscalers for requiring that hyperscalers power their or pay their own electricity supply bills. No different, except it's at the consumer level rather than at the enterprise hyperscaler level.
Yeah, I guess the problem is that in the US we sell ad views like a media sells ad views. And the way you sell ad views is by creating crisis and worry. And it's all over your book. Yeah, you know, this in China, they don't have to deal with that. So they want AI enthusiasm. They want robotics enthusiasm. Guaranteeing employment is a good way to get people on board with the mission.
But they need the robots like you wouldn't believe because of their aging population.
All right, I'm going to move us forward. This story came out this week. Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind, says AGI may not need a major breakthrough. He says, I think there's a 50-50 chance that we still need a breakthrough, maybe in world models. But my bet is still strongly on foundation models because of how successful they've been.
Alex, take it away. I chatted with Demis 10 plus years ago at this point. And at the time, he thought it was five plus major breakthroughs that would be needed to achieve AGI. Now we're down to zero or one. And I don't disagree with Demis. I've argued in the past that we achieved AGI in the summer of 2020, no later than with
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Chapter 8: How does the panel envision the future of AI by 2028?
And then we'll pass it around the room here. By the way, I wrote a sub stack at Peter Diamandis on this topic and go read my my views. But the very first thing is I think we're going to give AI permission to know everything in our lives. listen to all your phone calls, watch all the cameras in your home, read your emails, read everything. I've just done that with Skippy.
I gave Skippy access to all my granola recordings, my WhatsApp, my iMessages, my email, my calendar, everything. And in so doing, the response is amazing. I can have interactions that this AI knows me better than anybody else. So, let's begin with that. Alex, you want to kick it off?
I almost think we're asking the wrong question here. I would like to reframe it, because I think the question behind the question here is, what will AI feel like to consumers by mid-2028? Yes, it's fair. And I think the past six months of industry history have taught us consumers are not actually great customers for AI, at least not state-of-the-art AI.
OpenAI, infamously at this point, tried to turn consumers into power users for reasoning models and failed, and has had to pivot over to enterprise. They had to basically shut down their consumer video division. They've shut down a number of other divisions in favor of
co-generating models that are recursively self-improving and targeted at enterprise use cases because enterprises have the money and the desire to use advanced reasoning capabilities. So the adjacent question I would ask is, what will an AI feel like to an enterprise rather than to a consumer in mid-2028?
Let's make that an adjacent conversation. But, you know, for me as a consumer, I'm going to focus on that part of the equation. I feel like if AI understands me, it's connected to all of my wearables, insidables and so forth. It has my back as a physician. It knows I had a hard conversation with my spouse and I'm exhausted. I did sleep well the night before. It has all this data.
I walk into the room. The lights come down. There's a glass of wine waiting for me because the robot put it out. My favorite music is playing. My favorite comedian is on. Basically, the term I use is ambient AI and automagical AI, that the world magically adopts itself for your desires.
I can tell you what I think you want to hear.
What's that?
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