Understanding The Past Year in AI: 200th Episode Special!

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In our 200th episode, we review nearly 200 transcripts to identify recurring themes and track how the AI landscape has changed over the past 14 months. 

Focusing on compute and memory as key AI investment themes, we revisit companies featured on the show and discuss future topics like specialized AI applications, local models, and space-based model training.

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 200th Episode Victory Lap
1:49 Early Bets Proven Right
3:44 Memory and Chip Windfalls
4:59 The Cursor Thesis Pays Off
5:34 Limitless Portfolio Returns
7:46 Where the AI Puck Goes
9:32 Trends Rising and Fading
12:57 Google’s AI Comeback
13:47 New Frontiers in AI
15:32 Space, Science, and Specialized AI
17:47 Turning Intelligence Into Value
20:15 Local Models and New Devices
22:45 Recursive AI and Geopolitics
24:56 Optimism for the Next 200

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RESOURCES

Josh: https://x.com/JoshKale

Ejaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213

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Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:
https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Josh works with Anthropic as a contractor. All views expressed are his own and do not represent Anthropic, its leadership, or its affiliates. Nothing in this episode is investment advice.

Creators and Guests

Host

Ejaaz Ahamadeen

Host

Josh Kale

What is Limitless: An AI Podcast?

Exploring the frontiers of Technology and AI

Ejaaz:
Welcome officially to our 200th episode.

Ejaaz:
1.4 million words has been spoken by us and 99.9% of it has been Josh and I

Ejaaz:
arguing about who has the most compute, who has the better AI model,

Ejaaz:
or which is the best AI company to invest in.

Ejaaz:
Now, before we started this episode, we did something a little dangerous.

Ejaaz:
We gave Claude and ChatGPT access to our entire 200 transcriptions for all of our episodes.

Ejaaz:
And we got it to identify any hidden investment themes in AI that we might potentially

Ejaaz:
have missed, all our favorite quotes and bets that we've made over the last

Ejaaz:
year, as well as where the AI puck is going.

Ejaaz:
This is going to be a jam-packed episode of information that we ourselves didn't

Ejaaz:
know, but Claude and ChatGPT helped us figure out.

Josh:
It's pretty cool. We gave our entire episode database to this model and said

Josh:
like, hey, kind of roast us, come up with some themes, come up with some trends.

Josh:
And just to backtrack a little bit of the world 14 months ago,

Josh:
when we first hit record on the first episode and how much has changed.

Josh:
I mean, at that time, SpaceX was private. They were worth $350 billion.

Josh:
Now they're public worth over $2 trillion. Anthropic was worth $61 billion.

Josh:
Now they're worth roughly a trillion. I mean, the multiples on these companies

Josh:
are huge. This is when OpenAI was worth only $300 billion. ChatGPT had about half a billion users.

Josh:
That has since tripled and doubled. And the models, the funniest thing is the models.

Josh:
GPT4R0 is the flagship model. We had Cloud 3.7 and Gemini 2.5.

Josh:
And then most surprisingly, everything was coded by hand.

Josh:
At the time of first recording the first episode, nearly all code written around

Josh:
us that created all the software in the world was written by hand.

Josh:
The inverse is true. So so much stuff has happened over the last 14 months.

Josh:
It's kind of hard to wrap your head around, But that's what we're going to do

Josh:
now, is we're going to cover retroactively the things that have happened over

Josh:
the last year, and then proactively where things are going based on all the

Josh:
trends that we've evaluated over the last 14 months.

Ejaaz:
So firstly, I want us to take a victory lap on the bets or predictions that we made

Ejaaz:
early on in our career, back all the way back in 2025, that ended up becoming

Ejaaz:
true both from an investment perspective and as a general trend playing out in the AI market.

Ejaaz:
And then what we're going to get into is what that investment portfolio would

Ejaaz:
have looked like if Limitless had hundreds of millions of dollars and we could

Ejaaz:
have invested in some of these companies to start off with.

Ejaaz:
So Josh, if you remember week number four, June 5th of 2025,

Ejaaz:
we said verbatim, compute is now a matter of national security.

Ejaaz:
Whoever owns the watts, the chips,

Ejaaz:
the energy, the cooling owns the economic rents. The point that we were making

Ejaaz:
back then was essentially compute is king.

Ejaaz:
Whoever owns the GPUs, whoever can power them will build the best model.

Ejaaz:
Now, fast forward 200 episodes later, this is more true than ever.

Ejaaz:
Anthropic has signed, I think, four new compute deals over the last couple of months.

Ejaaz:
You've got OpenAI expanding aggressively. Their big bet on acquiring as much

Ejaaz:
compute as they can has turned out to be really, really good.

Ejaaz:
They're not putting any kind of restrictions or limits on any users for any of their models.

Ejaaz:
And it has become the key thing that is serving this thing called inference,

Ejaaz:
which is helping people become smarter, run their AI agents 24-7.

Ejaaz:
Computer's king. That was one of our first bets that we made.

Josh:
You know what I just looked up is at the time that we said that, SanDisk is up 3,500%.

Ejaaz:
Let's go.

Josh:
Some crazy outrageous number. But yeah, it was so true. It was really early and true.

Josh:
And I think that's still the case. And if you told the people from June 2025 that

Josh:
the federal government was going to be invested in these companies like Intel,

Josh:
that the amount of run-ups were going to be this large, like 35 times your money,

Josh:
well, certainly we would have invested, but we also would have been pretty surprised

Josh:
at how important this race to compute is.

Josh:
The most scarce resource in the world right now is this energy to power on these

Josh:
GPUs and to get memory for them. And to notice that early was amazing. I wish we acted on that.

Ejaaz:
I know. The other asymmetric bet that we made was on AI chips, specifically memory.

Ejaaz:
Now, Josh, if you remember, we had a predictions episode at the end of last

Ejaaz:
year, and we had this kind of general thesis, which is memory is quite expensive.

Ejaaz:
It's a large component of the whole entire AI thing. You need to power your

Ejaaz:
GPUs, you needed to remember everything that you have in your conversation with

Ejaaz:
ChatGPT and Claude, this will probably end up going up higher in terms of pricing,

Ejaaz:
which means that the memory stocks themselves will probably perform very well.

Ejaaz:
Since then, guess what the average

Ejaaz:
return has been on the top three memory manufacturers? Just have a guess.

Josh:
A gazillion dollars? It's infinite. It must be the single best investment that

Josh:
you could have made in the last year.

Ejaaz:
It's not a gazillion, but it's pretty close. It was 153%. If you'd bought Micro

Ejaaz:
by the end of last year, you'd be up around 180%.

Ejaaz:
If you had bought SK Hynix, if you were in Korea, if you had access to Samsung

Ejaaz:
as well, SK Hynix has become the most valuable company in Korea.

Ejaaz:
It's eclipsed Samsung, who's been kind of like the monopoly for the entire last

Ejaaz:
couple of decades. It's just very, very impressive.

Josh:
Actually, Samsung just became the most profitable company in the world over NVIDIA.

Ejaaz:
Oh, yes. I saw that. I saw that.

Josh:
So it's crazy. There's this all-out war and this race to the top,

Josh:
and these companies are just like continuing to topple each other over and over and over again.

Ejaaz:
Okay, so if it's not investments, Josh, I want us to kind of like have like

Ejaaz:
a thesis call that we kind of nailed.

Ejaaz:
Now, in March 20, 2026, so not too long ago, we said, this might be a really

Ejaaz:
asymmetric bet, but I wish I could buy OpenAI stock right now,

Ejaaz:
because there's a company that could sit on top of that.

Ejaaz:
And it's called Cursor. What's happened since then to.

Josh:
That little company? That's so nuts. three months later that same company got

Josh:
purchased by spacex for 60 billion dollars my god should we just like we need

Josh:
to start running a funder we need a

Ejaaz:
Fund does anyone want to like.

Josh:
Invest with us if we just invested the money that we had into these stocks we probably would have had

Josh:
a pretty sizable portfolio to begin with but there is a really exciting segment

Josh:
that i want to get into now that i have been waiting for so long to talk about

Josh:
which is the limitless portfolio if those of you for those of you who've been

Josh:
around for a very long time you know that in the early days of Limitless,

Josh:
we actually recorded a lot of interviews.

Josh:
We had on guests on the show who were building really cool frontier technology.

Josh:
And those were very particularly selected. We were excited about a few specific companies.

Josh:
Those companies we reached out to got the CEOs, the founders on the show.

Josh:
And if we took all those companies and we put money in them on the day that

Josh:
we recorded with those founders to today, the total return on that investment

Josh:
would have been about 4x in just over a year, which I think is really noteworthy. It would have taken

Josh:
A 13x multiple on our best performer, which is Valor Atomics.

Josh:
If we go back to episode 10, we had the CEO of Valor Atomics,

Josh:
Isaiah Taylor. For those who haven't watched, we actually reposted it because it was so good.

Josh:
And I would recommend checking it out because he was the person who's responsible

Josh:
for building small modular nuclear reactors.

Josh:
The obvious flaw here was that data centers don't have enough energy and his plan was to solve it.

Josh:
We had them on just after their seed round, and now they're valued at $2 billion, a 13x multiple.

Josh:
Same thing happened with OpenRouter and the founder, Alex Atala.

Josh:
At the time, they were half a billion dollars now they are 1.3 same thing with

Josh:
zipline drone delivery that was a really cool one where they were showing early

Josh:
prototypes of what the drone delivery

Josh:
system looks like and now it's actually being used in a lot of major cities

Josh:
same with perplexity 1.2 and then boom supersonic is the one anomaly they're

Josh:
the company that was making supersonic airplanes if you remember

Josh:
they've actually pivoted to making turbines so they're making supersonic airplanes

Josh:
but now they're also making gas turbines for these ai data centers so i thought

Josh:
this is really cool to see how large of a return we've had on some of the guests

Josh:
that we've had on the show.

Josh:
And if we just invested the Limitless Fund on day one of having all these people

Josh:
on, we would have returned about 4x in the last year.

Josh:
And that's only with private market valuations. Unfortunately,

Josh:
none of these are public, but all pretty interesting investment opportunities.

Ejaaz:
Yeah, I think it's amazing to think about like a 400% return relative to like

Ejaaz:
the average market, which has gone up pretty insanely, but that would have been,

Ejaaz:
Lovely to get access to. I would have taken that. I would have taken it.

Ejaaz:
I think another thing that this theoretical portfolio shows us is the key trends

Ejaaz:
that have developed over the last year.

Ejaaz:
And I want to spend a moment to describe them very quickly, because I think

Ejaaz:
it shows us where the puck is going in AI and from an investment perspective

Ejaaz:
and from just a general trend and model usage perspective going forward.

Ejaaz:
So with Valor Atomics, it's an energy thing, right? So you have all these GPUs,

Ejaaz:
you have all these expensive data centers, but we can't quite get the power

Ejaaz:
to get access to a bunch of these different things.

Ejaaz:
Nuclear is an incredibly important facet of energy that will kind of like feed

Ejaaz:
into a bunch of these things and eventually bring or run and operate a bunch of these things online.

Ejaaz:
Now, on Open Router specifically, we've covered this thesis a few times, which is...

Ejaaz:
We have all these different models. I don't think a company is going to get

Ejaaz:
married to one particular model. I think they're going to use multiple models

Ejaaz:
for multiple different things, use cases, etc.

Ejaaz:
That's the whole point around the cursor thesis. That's why SpaceX acquired them for $60 billion.

Ejaaz:
Open Router is pretty much the next best bet. They launch or stealth launch

Ejaaz:
models before they actually become official. They've done it with Clawed.

Ejaaz:
They've done it with ChatGPT. And they've done it with a bunch of Chinese models.

Ejaaz:
And developers can get unrelentless access to all these types of models and

Ejaaz:
use it for whatever that they want.

Ejaaz:
Now, a key bit of data that they aggregate is intense, and they can use this

Ejaaz:
intense to figure out what better models to build.

Ejaaz:
Perplexity has absolutely nailed it. Like, look at this. I know it isn't the

Ejaaz:
biggest multiple jump, but like $18 billion to $21 billion, this is primarily

Ejaaz:
because Samsung has made their product the primary AI agent on all of their phones going forwards.

Ejaaz:
It's just, you know, it's not just a portfolio return that we're talking about here.

Ejaaz:
There's some major trends that have been developing that are feeding into what

Ejaaz:
we might expect for an investment perspective going forwards.

Josh:
So over the last 14 months, the trends have changed pretty considerably as well.

Josh:
Things that we mentioned a lot now mostly no longer exist. And these turning

Josh:
tides are interesting to see visualized here.

Josh:
One of the things that we mentioned a lot in 2025 was superintelligence.

Josh:
That's now down, what is that, 90%. We mentioned it just about 60 times last year.

Josh:
We've mentioned it six this year. And this is about accurate because we recorded

Josh:
for about six months last year, about six months this year. So it's right down the middle.

Josh:
The biggest loser also is crypto, which we've mentioned basically zero because,

Josh:
you know, it's in a bit of a winter right now, not doing super hot.

Josh:
Robotics, surprisingly, has gone down 60% year over year, as well as AGI going

Josh:
down 54%. So I think a lot of those broad sweeping terms, we mentioned less

Josh:
probably because it feels like it's just close to being here.

Josh:
And the lines have gotten so fuzzy that we're not actually sure what to even

Josh:
define as AGI, what to define as super intelligence.

Josh:
Like you look at these new mythos class models, you're like,

Josh:
I don't know, that kind of looks like AGI to me, but the robotics part has been

Josh:
interesting to me at least because it seems like we are in this like kind of...

Josh:
Weird middle ground of robotics where a lot of companies are building them but

Josh:
they haven't quite launched

Josh:
what they're building just yet we have the new optimist robot that's coming

Josh:
it hasn't been revealed figure has been working on their new robot hasn't quite

Josh:
been revealed everyone's working behind the scenes and i assume those big reveals

Josh:
are coming sometime later this year

Josh:
and when that happens we'll probably have this big resurgence of robotics but

Josh:
i found that really interesting another really interesting one was the word

Josh:
anthropic oh my god what a year that company has had uh last year we mentioned them

Josh:
i think one-fourth the amount that we did of open AI and chat GPT this year it's gone up 4x

Josh:
we mentioned that company four times more and it's probably because I mean a

Josh:
year ago things weren't looking super hot I remember we were looking at this

Josh:
was like early opus like 3.7

Josh:
Days and we were like yeah it's not that great like chat GPT just rocks it has

Josh:
a really awesome consumer application and my god did this company turn around this year

Josh:
It has now flipped OpenAI in terms of mentions on the show with 806 to 758,

Josh:
Which is cool. I love that we get this granular ability to see all the stuff

Josh:
using, ironically, Claude.

Ejaaz:
These things move so quickly. Remember, Claude code is only,

Ejaaz:
I think it's just over a year old, which is like mind-blowing because at the

Ejaaz:
end of the last year, barely anyone used Claude code and now everyone uses it.

Ejaaz:
There's also a lot of the few key trends that I've noticed have risen in the last couple of months.

Ejaaz:
We're speaking about IPOs quite a bit on this show. We're talking about memory

Ejaaz:
quite a bit. And it's unsurprising at this point because we have probably the

Ejaaz:
biggest year for net new IPOs. We had SpaceX, we're expecting Anthropic,

Ejaaz:
and OpenAI potentially by the end of this year.

Ejaaz:
And then, of course, the memory companies, as we mentioned earlier,

Ejaaz:
have been absolutely killing it on 80% margins at this point.

Ejaaz:
Samsung just had a blowout quarter as well.

Ejaaz:
You mentioned earlier being more profitable than NVIDIA. So a lot of these general

Ejaaz:
themes are replacing some of the more vague themes that we had earlier.

Ejaaz:
So AGI superintelligence, we don't quite know what that means.

Ejaaz:
When we talk about like robotics, I think if I had to bet going forwards,

Ejaaz:
that's going to flip over the next couple of months, because we have a bunch

Ejaaz:
of new US-based robotic startups that are starting to sell their hardware to

Ejaaz:
a bunch of different people going forwards.

Ejaaz:
And then the anthropic flip is kind of expected. I think you and I use Claude

Ejaaz:
pretty religiously at this point. I haven't used GPT for a while,

Ejaaz:
rumored to be releasing GPT 5.6 Sol to the wider public, potentially today.

Ejaaz:
If you're listening you might already have access to it, could be pretty cool.

Ejaaz:
I think one of the most interesting charts is this one that I'm showing on the

Ejaaz:
screen here, which is the company, the AI company specifically,

Ejaaz:
the model lab that we have mentioned the most over the last 200 episodes.

Ejaaz:
And it's surprisingly not OpenAI.

Ejaaz:
It's not Anthropic, but it's Google. Do you remember Google?

Josh:
Google is that company. Yeah, I remember obsession with Google.

Ejaaz:
Yeah, yeah. It's this company that's kind of been around for a while.

Ejaaz:
They dominate the search engine space.

Ejaaz:
And they kind of are the only company that has a verticalized stack in AI.

Ejaaz:
They create their own version of GPUs called TPUs.

Ejaaz:
They have applications to disperse their AI models and they have their most

Ejaaz:
famous AI model called Gemini.

Ejaaz:
But Google's kind of fallen off since then. And I wonder if we see the flippening

Ejaaz:
soon with either OpenAI or Anthropic.

Josh:
I mean, I think those numbers are a little tweaked because we were obsessed

Josh:
with Google for a few months and rightfully so.

Josh:
They had some unbelievable product velocity. They were releasing things seemingly

Josh:
every single week and they're all pretty hit features

Josh:
that has since changed and yeah like you mentioned I think we certainly have

Josh:
this flip happening where really the two main players in the space right now

Josh:
are open AI and Anthropic and

Josh:
that seems like it's gonna be that way for the foreseeable future perhaps we get

Josh:
a comeback player of the year with Grok we'll see I know that the SpaceX AI

Josh:
team which is now fully rebranded is working very hard to make this happen in

Josh:
terms of this momentum map it's pretty interesting to see that we kind of have

Josh:
These new emerging sectors that we haven't quite discussed just yet,

Josh:
one of them being quantum.

Josh:
Quantum seems to be the next lane, according to things that we've said,

Josh:
and according to this chat of being the new thing that we're maximally excited

Josh:
about. Things like drug discovery, biology, memory, IPOs, bubbles.

Josh:
Those are all things that are very much accelerating.

Josh:
The contrarian corner, which I'm not sure I agree with this totally,

Josh:
has energy inside of it. I think energy is certainly accelerating as well.

Josh:
Energy is, as always, the single bottleneck.

Josh:
And even in the absence of ai acceleration energy is still the constraint to

Josh:
pretty much everything that we do but noteworthy in the cooling sector we have

Josh:
um open ai there which i was like a little disappointed to see i'm like man

Josh:
what do you mean opening is cooling but then i think about the last couple months

Josh:
it's been a little bit slow in open ai land they have these three new models

Josh:
which they've been waiting to release i know the company is taking their summer

Josh:
break this week they haven't quite gotten it out the government's been putting holds on it

Josh:
the application hasn't quite gotten much better.

Josh:
I know kind of after Codex for me, OpenAI has kind of fallen flat in terms of

Josh:
their new feature releases. So you have to assume they're cooking up a lot of

Josh:
stuff, but within the last month or two,

Josh:
Which seems like the last year or two, they have been moving a little bit slower

Josh:
than I think we would have liked. And I hope that they'll be able to turn that around pretty soon.

Ejaaz:
Yeah, if I had to identify three themes that have become more apparent over

Ejaaz:
the last couple of months that I think are important to keep an eye on going forwards.

Ejaaz:
One is the increasing use of outer space to train models. Now,

Ejaaz:
I remember the first time we mentioned StarCloud, which is this small startup

Ejaaz:
that came out of Y Combinator.

Ejaaz:
And they launched a bunch of GPUs into space and they started training models

Ejaaz:
off of an H-100 set of GPUs from NVIDIA.

Ejaaz:
Fast forward now, it's SpaceX AI's entire thesis that they're going to launch

Ejaaz:
all these satellites out there and train models, presumably Grok and many others going forwards.

Ejaaz:
This has become an increasingly strong theme that I think will play out more

Ejaaz:
and more over the next couple of years. And I think SpaceX is going to be the one to lead it.

Ejaaz:
The second thing is applications of these AI models into niche categories.

Ejaaz:
Now, I think one thing that has become apparent to me is generalized LLMs are

Ejaaz:
amazing. They're great chatbots.

Ejaaz:
But when applied to specific niche sectors where you kind of need some expert

Ejaaz:
knowledge, they aren't that very good.

Ejaaz:
So when you look at Anthropic and OpenAI over the last couple of months,

Ejaaz:
they've started their own joint ventures. They've raised billions of dollars

Ejaaz:
to place their engineers in these companies and figure out the best solutions to build.

Ejaaz:
I think the two sectors that they're going to be focused on going forwards is finance.

Ejaaz:
And you mentioned earlier, the drug discovery, biology, science accelerated side of things.

Ejaaz:
And I think we're going to see a bunch of really cool products and features

Ejaaz:
being released over the next six months or until the rest of the year.

Ejaaz:
You've got Anthropic that's already released, Claude Science.

Ejaaz:
You've got OpenAI that's already released their gene benchmark.

Ejaaz:
I think OpenAI is the one that has bought and operating retro science labs,

Ejaaz:
which is working on a bunch of different cures. You've got Google that has as

Ejaaz:
their alpha-fold model that is genetically sequencing a bunch of different molecules

Ejaaz:
and creating new kind of drugs.

Ejaaz:
I am really excited personally about this because I have a bit of a science

Ejaaz:
background and I think that,

Ejaaz:
applying these models in ways that can really change human impact,

Ejaaz:
not necessarily for people who are using these models, are going to be huge.

Josh:
I'm like stoked for bio and life sciences and all that improvement.

Josh:
I think we are like very close to getting whatever AGI for science looks like very soon.

Josh:
I think that is going to be a huge category that we're going to see a lot of

Josh:
progress. You see all these labs working towards that.

Josh:
The thing I'm most excited about seeing is how we actually implement all of this intelligence.

Josh:
I think there is this asymmetry happening right now where a few companies are

Josh:
creating an unbelievably capable set of tools that are amazing and powerful.

Josh:
And the world now has to figure out how to extract value from them in their own ways.

Josh:
So when I look at the next 200 episodes, the thing I will be most closely watching

Josh:
is how the world's actually able

Josh:
to extract value from this new form of intelligence that we've created.

Josh:
Because there is this asymmetry where people are really afraid of job loss and

Josh:
people are really afraid of margins getting affected.

Josh:
And the reality is, is that most people, most companies haven't actually implemented this at all.

Josh:
If anything, like the real broad sweeping effects of this across the world have

Josh:
been so small on a relative basis to how powerful they've gotten that I think

Josh:
this dispersion over the next 200 episodes, maybe 14 months,

Josh:
or actually going quicker now.

Josh:
So maybe it'll take like 10 to 11 months to get the next 200 episodes.

Josh:
But the dispersion of this intelligence into day-to-day devices,

Josh:
into day-to-day companies, kind of reimagining what the average role at a company

Josh:
looks like using these new tools.

Josh:
That's what I'm particularly excited about. And then second to that is this energy problem, man.

Josh:
Whoever is going to solve this energy problem, who's ever going to be able to

Josh:
build and create more energy is going to be

Josh:
One of the most powerful companies on earth. We just have such a shortage of it regardless of AI.

Josh:
So I think when I think about whether or not we're in a bubble or where we are

Josh:
in the market cycle, I think those two things are kind of separate from whether

Josh:
or not memory stocks continue to go up, from whether or not NVIDIA continues to make better chips.

Josh:
It's how do we take what we have today and disperse it effectively throughout the world?

Josh:
And then how do we power all this new technology that we are working on creating?

Josh:
And those two problems are the ones that I am most excited about i'm most bullish on i am

Josh:
i guess most interested in and considering like when i think about this

Josh:
the implementation of it that comes in the form of robots we have atoms the

Josh:
new company from travis kalanick who is

Josh:
fully all in on getting precious metals turning those precious metals into robots

Josh:
that are now our use case and then using those robots to distribute materials

Josh:
throughout the world that is so cool we have tesla in the optimist robot program

Josh:
who's focused on building humanoid robots as a form factor and doing that at a scale that we saw

Josh:
for the Model 3 and Model Y, which is now the most popular and highest sold car in the world.

Josh:
So companies that are working on this, I am maximally bullish on and maximally

Josh:
excited about. And I think, yeah, over the next year, those are the things that

Josh:
I am very excited and looking out for.

Ejaaz:
Yeah, the magic is already here. It just hasn't been distributed well enough at this point.

Ejaaz:
When I think about key trends that are really tiny right now,

Ejaaz:
but are going to play out over the next, let's call it over the next 100 episodes,

Ejaaz:
maybe not 200, too ambitious. I don't know if I can predict that far ahead,

Ejaaz:
I think open source models, or let me correct myself, locally run models on

Ejaaz:
edge compute, smaller models that are hyper-optimized to serve you or a particular

Ejaaz:
use case, are going to become way, way, way more abundant.

Ejaaz:
And we're seeing some prime evidence of this happening right now.

Ejaaz:
We've seen big companies like Uber and the likes of Meta cut back on their AI

Ejaaz:
token spending and usage. Why?

Ejaaz:
Because it's quite expensive to use frontier models right now.

Ejaaz:
Now, Fable 5, we were talking about it before we started the show,

Ejaaz:
is $10 in and $50 out per million token input and outputs.

Ejaaz:
And that's expensive if you are burning through millions and millions and millions

Ejaaz:
of these tokens every single week.

Ejaaz:
I think people are going to opt for more locally run models,

Ejaaz:
whether these are Chinese open source models, whether they're American open

Ejaaz:
source models, or in Apple's case, they kind of train and fine tune their own

Ejaaz:
models that they run on their own local hardware.

Ejaaz:
I think we're going to see an acceleration and push towards new types of devices.

Ejaaz:
We're talking about open AI, releasing new devices by the end of the year.

Ejaaz:
We know Apple's working on that. We know a bunch of other companies are working

Ejaaz:
on their own versions of lenses, or whether that might be a pendant that sits

Ejaaz:
on your chest or whatever that might be.

Ejaaz:
And I think we're going to have a hyper-optimized world around smaller models

Ejaaz:
and hardware that listens and sees and hears everything that you do and see.

Ejaaz:
And the point of all of this is personal AI agents, which brings me to my second

Ejaaz:
point, which is, I think we're going to see a lot of people prompting less and

Ejaaz:
relying on AI to do the thing for them and figure out the problem for them.

Ejaaz:
There's this theme that we've spoken about a number of times over the last couple

Ejaaz:
of months, which is RSI, recursive self-improvement.

Ejaaz:
This is basically when an AI model is smart enough to know how to build the

Ejaaz:
next version of itself. Now, this is a really hard problem to crack,

Ejaaz:
but a bunch of really intelligent people have predicted that this is probably

Ejaaz:
going to come at the start of 2027, which is not too long away from here.

Ejaaz:
In the event that we have that that could assume that.

Ejaaz:
AI models can basically run 24 seven and do work for you whilst you sleep or

Ejaaz:
work on any of your problems, whatever that might be.

Ejaaz:
And I think in that world, we are going to increasingly rely on this AI to know

Ejaaz:
more about us, share more personal data with them. And it's kind of a,

Ejaaz:
a concern that I have, I guess, which is like, we're putting all our brainpower

Ejaaz:
into these AI agents and these AI models. I wonder how that kind of like maps

Ejaaz:
out going forwards. We don't know.

Ejaaz:
And then the third final trend that I think is going to play out is,

Ejaaz:
I think China is going to close source a bunch of their models coming soon.

Ejaaz:
There was news that broke this morning that the Chinese government has ordered

Ejaaz:
a bunch of their AI labs to basically cut off access, basically their version

Ejaaz:
of export controls, because they don't want,

Ejaaz:
the West or Americans in particular to get access to their models and so they

Ejaaz:
might move to pricing or they might just go completely private i don't think

Ejaaz:
this is for the benefit of the world

Ejaaz:
but it is increasingly become a geopolitical risk that i think will end up playing

Ejaaz:
out at least over the next six to twelve months.

Josh:
The one certainty is that the world's 100 episodes from now will look absolutely

Josh:
nothing like that today at least as it relates to the world of ai because we

Josh:
are on this accelerating curve and i think one of the things that we mentioned

Josh:
early on, we even had the guests on the show who wrote it was the AGI

Josh:
2027 paper, where it kind of projected the trajectories and timelines of how

Josh:
fast things were going to go.

Josh:
And so far, to their credit, a lot of that has actually happened in 100 episodes

Josh:
from now, brings us to the middle of 2027.

Josh:
And thinking about life in 2027, a year from now, like you talk about local

Josh:
models, EJs, we're going to be running mythos class models on our cell phones.

Josh:
And like, what are the downstream implications of that?

Josh:
What does the world look like when you truly have that amount of intelligence

Josh:
available at your fingertips on a mobile device? Does it matter that China is

Josh:
closed source because the models will be so powerful that most people don't

Josh:
actually need the upper echelon in order to accomplish their day-to-day tasks?

Josh:
And it's funny, as we're doing these episodes, it feels like because we're living

Josh:
in it, it doesn't progress that fast. But looking back at episode one to now,

Josh:
like, oh my God, the world is so different.

Josh:
And looking forward, now that we are aware that we do have the idea of like

Josh:
recursive self-improvement, that things can actually get perpetually better.

Josh:
And as they improve, they continue to improve themselves. And we get this machine

Josh:
that creates this vertical line of trajectory. I think it's gonna look...

Josh:
Pretty weird. And I hope that we're able to convert that into something useful.

Josh:
It's like, okay, we have all this intelligence. What do we do with it?

Josh:
How can we actually implement it throughout the world? What types of robotic

Josh:
figures can we put that into? What types of companies can we build because of it?

Josh:
How can you empower employees to do amazing things with it? It's like,

Josh:
these are the questions that I'm really excited to answer and to find the companies

Josh:
who are doing the best at answering those questions in particular.

Josh:
And then they're like companies, I'm thinking about Etched. I'm like,

Josh:
oh my God, if they can create the same amount of tokens for a tenth of the cost like

Josh:
what impact does that have on the world so there's a lot of really fun and crazy

Josh:
and exciting things coming down the pipe and we are going to continue along publishing

Josh:
four times a week we've been cooking um and yeah i think that's that's mostly

Josh:
the episode here is uh episode 200 dude what a journey it's been that's uh

Josh:
That's a lot of times click and record.

Ejaaz:
We were mere younglings at the start of this, Josh. We were doing two to three episodes a week.

Ejaaz:
We were still learning about a lot of the concepts that we speak about quite

Ejaaz:
frequently on the show today. We've come a long way, dude.

Ejaaz:
And I'm feeling pretty optimistic. And I guess that's the final point that I

Ejaaz:
want to mention is I'm unbearably optimistic about what the future is.

Ejaaz:
In fact, I have a stat for you that I could share up here, which is the amount

Ejaaz:
of times we have mentioned bullish over the last 200 episodes,

Ejaaz:
192 times versus bearish, just 68.

Ejaaz:
So the point is, Josh and myself are incredibly optimistic about the future.

Ejaaz:
I personally think that AI tools right now, no matter how scary,

Ejaaz:
intelligent they get, is going to result in an abundance or an explosion of.

Ejaaz:
Advancements in GDP, in advancements in science and new cures.

Ejaaz:
And the best part is I think it isn't going to be age-gapped.

Ejaaz:
I think you could be a 24-year-old that drops out of Harvard and builds the

Ejaaz:
most amazing chip that competes directly with NVIDIA.

Ejaaz:
Or you could be someone that is just learning science, AP science at school.

Ejaaz:
And you might use a model because you have a certain idea and you discover something

Ejaaz:
that NASA ends up sponsoring. That is exactly what happened to their current

Ejaaz:
intern that is working there right now.

Ejaaz:
So there's going to be an abundance and explosion of intelligence that is available

Ejaaz:
to anyone and everyone that can get access to these models.

Ejaaz:
And I think whether it's open source, whether it's private, whether it's a $20

Ejaaz:
a month membership, you will be able to participate in this optimistic future.

Ejaaz:
And I'm very, very excited about that potential fact.

Josh:
You can't just scroll to the section and not go through the rest.

Josh:
Bullish versus bearish index 2.8 to one.

Josh:
That's so funny. The absolutely insane index. EJAS has captured 23 of 28 mentions. It is insane.

Josh:
It has a subsection. It says ownership established beyond statistical doubt.

Josh:
And then for the exponential, I have captured 48 of those exponentials to 28.

Josh:
It says the house physicist has a favorite curve, which is pretty good.

Josh:
And then this is this is the set that i'm calling the the waffle index um and

Josh:
it's 38.9 versus 27.9 hours talks it says nearly identical turn counts one host

Josh:
turns run 40 longer the database knows who he

Ejaaz:
Just i think i'm sorry can i interrupt you who who might that be i don't know

Ejaaz:
um i don't really talk that much but uh yeah no i don't take i don't take up

Ejaaz:
the mic space that much i guess i'd like to think listen it's value it's as

Ejaaz:
much value as i can and also it's like.

Josh:
I just like that we could quantify it now exactly

Ejaaz:
My own recursive self-learning process that i have to subject all our listeners to what a.

Josh:
Journey what a freaking journey so that's 200 episodes in the books for anyone who's been here

Josh:
even like for the last 50 thank you for the ones who've been here since day

Josh:
one for the ones who have come over and joined us and been along this journey

Josh:
to support us like thank you this is pretty crazy the podcast mostly started

Josh:
as an accident uh david from bankless he was like hey do you want to like do

Josh:
your own podcast and I was like yeah I guess so and

Josh:
I said that and then I went away on a vacation for a week and I came back and

Josh:
we had a podcast and I was like okay I guess we're doing this and we did it and

Josh:
people really supported and they enjoyed it. And I think we've done some pretty

Josh:
amazing work so far. So thank you to everyone who's been a part of the journey.

Josh:
It's really been special.

Josh:
Like when I look back on everything, I'll be like, wow, that was a really cool

Josh:
part of life that we got to do and creating this amazing show.

Josh:
And it still feels very early days. There's so much left to cover.

Josh:
There's so much momentum still happening. There's so many special things worth

Josh:
talking about in the world of AI, but also just

Josh:
on the frontier of technology, which is originally the idea of limitless it's

Josh:
like it is this is exploring the frontier of all the things ai continues to

Josh:
be that hottest thing but there's so much more coming down the line that downstream

Josh:
of ai that i'm very excited to talk about and cover so

Josh:
that is that's the journey that's 200 for the real ones still listening for

Josh:
the real ones who've been watching forever like oh my god you're absolute legends

Josh:
thank you so much for being here it's like the only reason why this is possible

Josh:
the only reason why i've been able to do this for so long is because all of

Josh:
you um showing love and support every single episode.

Josh:
So sincerely, thank you so much for all of the support over this time.

Ejaaz:
Thank you, guys. And if you are listening to us right now and you aren't subscribed,

Ejaaz:
or if you haven't commented, or if you haven't given us a thumbs up ever, try it out today.

Ejaaz:
What better day to do it than on our 200th episode? It would be awesome to hear from you guys.

Josh:
Also, wait, we got to talk about our stats too. It's like, guys,

Josh:
we're a top 30 podcast in the world in technology. Like, this isn't just a look like...

Ejaaz:
No, open up Spotify. Open up the charts right now. Yeah, the boys are cooking.

Josh:
So I think that's not only have we done it for 200 episodes but you have given

Josh:
us enough support to put us on the top of the charts which is freaking awesome

Josh:
so that is really exciting that is really reassuring all good things to come

Josh:
any final parting thoughts before we wrap this up get ready for 201 thank you guys

Ejaaz:
For joining us on this journey and we will be here hopefully for the next 200

Ejaaz:
we are excited to bring you all the news and insights and trends that we can

Ejaaz:
possibly fathom even though I speak 40% longer it'll be worth it and we're excited

Ejaaz:
to see you very soon And we'll see.

Josh:
You on the next episode. Cheers to 200 more.

Ejaaz:
Cheers to 200 more. See you guys.