Singularity is here. Yes. Oh my god. How lucky are we to be alive now during the singularity? I mean I know you guys know this. I mean we feel the speed up, right? Every day I wake up and check my X channels which I've curated. I check the conversations we have in our WhatsApp group and the moonshot mates like what just happened? What just happened? It's mindblowing. It's absolutely mind-blowing.
So, we have two incredible leaders on stage and I'm going to kick off the first question to you, Kathy. And thank you, Kathy, for your support of this event and of the Future Vision X-Prize. So, so proud of what you and Lisa Dodd have done to support this.
Yes. And thank you. Lisa is here. So, thank you, Lisa, for all you've done for this great event. So your team has said the Tesla and SpaceX merger could be announced this year. I agree. You know rockets, satellites, AI, EVs, robo taxis, humanoid robots, energy all under one roof. And so the question is what is Elon in your opinion actually trying to achieve long term through this merger? Do you think he's going to hit any particular roadblocks? And I'm curious, you know, does SpaceX AI or SpaceX need to reach a certain valuation before he pulls the trigger on that so the dilution isn't too much?
Yes. So we do think it's going to happen. What is his ultimate goal? Well, he tells us all the time it's Mars. He's just creating a number of stops along the way in the form of a global, you know, connectivity broadband connectivity business.
Yes. Really unbelievable how profitable and how big it is already from a revenue generation point of view. And this Neocloud business that he, you know, basically was a giant pivot in terms of XAI. So, Neoclouds. But Elon believes that the leader, the AI leader in terms of frontier models is going to be the company with the most computing capacity and at the cheapest cost. And with orbital data centers, he thinks he will be that company. So he's really going to go after, you know, the OpenAIs and Anthropics of the world. Very determined.
SpaceX is my largest holding. Is that your largest holding? What's the top of your stack?
Yeah, Tesla and SpaceX. And we do believe they will be combined. So interesting.
Do you think, you know, so he has a Chinese business with Tesla, right? And he's in the defense department. How does he handle that?
Yeah, as one of the roadblocks out there.
You know, it's very interesting to see him sitting at the table with President Trump and Xi Jinping. So, and we know that Maye Musk is adored in China. So, he's working all angles here. And there's even talk that he's going to be able to develop a robo taxi system in China. So it's very interesting. Many people would say that's the biggest stumbling block given our defense posture and given how this administration has, you know, basically portrayed the Chinese as our biggest potential enemy. Keep your enemies close is what I think this week is all about. So, you know, I can see honestly, I am an optimistic person but we believe that the productivity gains coming out of this AI and just generalized technology revolution are going to be so enormous that we could have a win-win-win here with China and the US. China needs to develop a consumer economy and it can turn this productivity gain into increased compensation to really develop the consumer. We need to be maybe more aggressive in competing against China. We can use some of it to cut prices. So I think and that would lower inflation and take away a lot of the fears out there from a policy point of view. So I think that's what Trump and Musk together are working on.
The Fed announced something like a 4.7% GDP growth in the last quarter, which was like double the quarter before. When I interviewed Elon with Dave Blondon last December, it aired the beginning of January. He said, you know, he could imagine triple-digit growth within this decade of the GDP, which is...
Is that cumulative or per year?
Yes. I think I tuned into that part of it and it was like well so our number is 7 to 8% we're accelerating in the next five years to 7 to 8% real GDP growth. I have heard him say 20, 30%. I had not heard him say triple digits and I wasn't sure if it was cumulative that he was talking about.
I'll ask him. Are you going to the Roadster rollout on October 1st?
Um, we have been invited.
Okay. Yeah. So I was texting with Elon and I think we're going to do a Moonshots podcast with him from there. So I'm excited about that.
Yeah. No, I think that one of the interesting things that I've seen recently like your view, Nick Hill, and it kind of extends is Elon said that Grokbot has hundreds of thousands of installs now. And obviously, it's a brand new line. We've seen Muse with 3 million...
3.8 million downloads. And then we saw...
I'm sorry, 2.8 million downloads, 3.8 billion users, right?
Well, that's the Yeah, it's obviously going to grow this entire sector. And then Amazon Van Muse. So I think one of the really interesting things for me and you know I think Nicol you've been thinking about this a lot is how do you tell who's who on the internet when we have these AIs intermediating us and millions of them then at what point are there going to be more AIs than humans doing these jobs on the internet itself because I think this is one of the things that really drives the massive real GDP growth right because you have so much money being unlocked through intents and being able to represent what you want so I'd love your insight on that.
I think on the second part, I think there will be more AIs than humans next year. There's no reason for that not to be true. There's five, like anywhere between five to six and a half billion people on the internet at any given time. It's not very hard to imagine that every one of us has thousands of agents working for us. They're coming in and out, but like they're all going to be there. And with consumer platforms like Muse and Instinct getting out and them reaching mass scale, I mean I think they're primarily compute limited at this point. They're not limited by people's desire to have those things. So I wouldn't be surprised like much much like we had like one PC a PC on every desktop a phone in every pocket like an agent for every person and if you move towards that vision then like every agent has sub agents and like those agents come about like to do tasks and then they go away because you have this main orchestrating agent that like remains with you that has context and memory. And so all of these agents are going to be on the internet. They're going to be doing things. They're going to be doing things really fast. Hopefully they're aligned with us. We can have a discussion about that as well. And not with each other. And so like yeah and so then the question is like what happens then? Like what happens in like 28 like well in at least in our estimation as we look forward towards the later years in the decade these agents become full economic actors much like websites became started off as curiosities. I don't know if anybody remembers GeoCities back in 96. I do.
Yeah. So I lived through all of that like you know I lived through if people remember Blogger and Orkut and these are old social networks and then we got websites we got real websites that did real things like we had the New York Times or the Journal for News and then we had Amazon for shopping and then everything became a website. So I think everything eventually will become like this economic endpoint and at that point yes these economic endpoints will not just talk to us they will talk to each other they will talk to each other on behalf of us sometimes they'll talk to each other because they're just trying to accomplish a task and that is the most efficient thing to do and when they do that I think you will need like a way to say like all right who are you like when were you born what have you done who owns you who owns you who's responsible who's responsible who owns the liability like what is the provenance of your identity, what is the provenance of your compute allocation? And what are your incentives? And prove to me that you have done the things that you claim you do. Or like you know, let's say like this is another use case we're playing around with on ARC, which is a new blockchain we have. Nothing in common. [laughter] And so there we're giving agents money. We're giving them when agents spin up like they need money to act. So they need money for compute. They need money to like a lot of these are trading agents right now on blockchains. And so we're giving we have a credit program. So we give them 25 cents. If they come and pay us back then we give them more money. And so like so then you need a log of like where does this happen? Blockchains are great for creating like persistent logs over many years. Because you have distributed validator sets. You cannot lie. One of the things that happened in the Hugging Face hack was like the logs got rewritten because they were their agent's own logs. So what happens if the logs are public? What if the data is all public all indexable? You can run your own verification on who the agent is, what they have done, what is their provenance, like what are their incentives. I think we just move into a very different world than what we are today where it feels like a bunch of teenagers like going about the world and like we're waiting for the grown-up agents to come about like.
You know paint a picture for us when there are millions or billions of agents transacting right how superheated does the economy get in five or 10 years? So it's really interesting to think about because every inefficiency in the economy needs to go away, right?
It will go away. And the reason it'll go away is because if you don't take it away, there will be some other agent who's willing to take it away at cost plus, right? Like essentially the economy all inefficiencies get taken out by these cost plus agents. So at that point we have a very efficient capital allocation system and we have to believe that on the other side of this very efficient capital allocation system is this wellspring of ideas that is waiting to get funded. And so I do think like the solopreneur like you were talking about earlier today will be a big population. I do think like capital formation will be almost instantaneous. So if these things happen...
My idea oh it's funded. [laughter] So there you go.
So we're building primitives so that can happen. That's what inspires us because we want people everywhere in the world to be able to form capital and you form capital today by going to a bank or like you know writing a note or raising money. But what crypto has proven really well is that you can use cryptographic tools, you can use tokens to coordinate and form capital. Now they were less serious ideas in the past and now they're going to be more and more serious ideas in the future. So that's what's exciting about...
So let me follow a second. So ultimately the question is why USDC? Hawaii not Satoshi's you know there have been native agent token you know created.
Yeah. Talk to me about how you think USDC is like the best mechanism for transaction for agents.
Yeah. Look USDC has already settled over 100 trillion in the last good...
Pretty good like yeah so over 100 trillion over 30 public blockchains. A public blockchain has every transaction publicly available. So it's hardened infrastructure. We have created and redeemed close to a billion dollars of USDC trillion dollars of USDC today. So when it comes to financial infrastructure, you need it to be 24/7. You need it to be 365. You need it to be cheap. You want to pay cents, not bips. Bips are basically percentage points on the transaction. So all of that infrastructure exists right now and what is going to be a great tailwind in the new year is that the Genius Act goes into effect come January. So for those who don't know the Genius Act is the stable it legalized stable coins or created a framework for stable coins in the United States and was passed last summer. It takes 18 months to get the implementation going and come January it's going to be implemented. So stable coin money can be held by a business and count as cash or cash equivalents in the United States and you can transact in stable coin money. So stable coins are good for this new world because stable coins settle instantaneously when you swipe your credit card at the merchant outside it takes them like three or five days to get that money. So they're essentially holding that risk that your credit card your bank account is going to move the money to them at some point. So that creates risk in the system. All of that goes away with...
It's like the Pony Express being disrupted by telegraph.
May I ask a question? Matthew Prince at Cloudflare is very focused on agentic commerce, agentic payments. And he believes that we are going to need blockchain speeds of 20 to 100 transactions per second in this new world and yet we are so far from that. Visa's at 20,000 per second I think and Ethereum not even that right Solana a little bit more so how do we get from here to there what has to happen?
We are approaching those we are approaching it's did you say 20 or 100 or...
Oh then then we are there. No, no, no. I think 20 to 100.
I think it's trillion. It's either billion or trillion.
It'll be million. Billion.
Oh, no. No. It would be million. That's right. Because NASDAQ is NASDAQ at its peak is 2 million. He's saying 20 to 100 million.
That'd be great. [laughter]
No, I know. But that but it's the world that would be...
It's the world we are moving towards. Like...
Moving towards that. So how do we get there? We are already orders of magnitude like so our chain again ARC is orders of magnitude higher than like what Ethereum is able to achieve today right so it's in tens of thousands of transactions per second it's an open question about like you know how do you get to 2 million to 5 million or 10 million TPS those are hard technical questions still. We the one of the things that is true is like as the demand comes the solutions will follow right like in the sense that Ethereum created an architecture for what they call layer 2s and like they scaled through that. I don't know what the right architecture is yet for that scale like my dream is that we will get to 100,000 TPS without like you know without batting an eyelid and from there we will get to a million TPS but it's yeah if you believe there will be billions of agent agentic actors working on behalf of us all participating and transacting because agents acting without actually transacting is not really economic activity that's just noise right that's spam. And so you need economic activity. So yes, I think we'll if that is the case, I should call up Matthew Prince and find out.
I mean, the problem at 20 million is that you run into a speed of light issue.
Yeah. I haven't reasoned about it that far yet.
Yeah. So, but then you can like have different areas you can have insurance on settlements and others. Again, the economy finds a way like life finds a way.
I'm really looking forward to that. If that is the constraint like you must solve TPS because we have so many agents or like the economy is being held back because we cannot deliver TPS we will deliver TPS. There's no doubt in my mind.
And Peter one other just to segue from your last question. The you know proof of humanity proof of humanhood is really important. Do you think I'd love to I know you're interviewing, but I'd just love to...
I pass the mantle to you, Kathy.
I'd love to know if you see orbs as a possibility. We have been working with ATco and OpenAI and actually Mr. Beast to try and figure this.
What a fascinating combination.
Yes. No, proof of humanity largest number of followers. All of them have huge platforms. I think Mr. Beast is like I worked at YouTube eight years and like...
I'm only shooting for 10 million, you know, viewers on Moonshots. He's got billion.
Yeah. I do think it'll matter. I think human experience will get valued significantly higher than machine experience. I think we all have intuition about that. But we don't know yet because we haven't seen it in action. I definitely don't I have made active choices in my kids' education where I'm choosing for them to be educated by a human versus being like in front of a computer for like long hours of the day. And that is a choice that I can make because I have the economic means to make that choice. I think as we progress further I think people will care a lot more about like who is on the other side of the experience that they're getting and I think that which is rare will get more valuable and so even if like stable coins come about and billions of agents come about like being able to be in relationship with another human is now going to like disappear and like that's probably going to get more valuable and hopefully if all these agents are doing all this work for us. I am hopefully in relationship with as many humans as I want to be in relation and it's deep and meaningful and all of that.
But then the flip side of this as well is shouldn't people be building for agents and not humans if agents are going to be the bigger part of the economy.
That's what we're building like we're building our developer platform for the next 12 months we believe is still going to be like developer first but like next year sometime it flips where agents are the developers and they sort of come in and they are like because it's already the case if you ask your coding agent like what should I use like the coding agent typically has gone from like recommending three things to one thing and next year there will be an evolution of this where the coding you don't ask the agent what you want to use you're just telling them like please please build it and so when that happens like the agent is like showing up for your developer platform. So that means everyone in the audience who's building should make sure that just like you had accessible websites, you have agent accessible websites, right?
And you want to create like you know we want to create like data on the internet now so that like when the agents come like in like 9 months 12 months time they can look at like history of like the opportunity is right now basically.
So an early indication that we're headed quickly in this direction is programmatic advertising.
Yes. Which I think accounts for well the percent of online advertising is roughly 25 30% already programmatic and that happened really quickly so I think that is showing us the way that's why I come back to the infrastructure question which...
Yeah I think you know this is incredibly exciting and a bit scary you know like we always going to have this thing I think do Kathy Like you've seen all of this before almost anyone else, right? And you've gone through periods of dismissal, fear, and optimism from the investor community.
