They Want to Ban Self-Improving AI, Gemini 4 Argon Isn't Even Top Two, and Sonnet 5.5 Disappoints | Alex Wissner-Gross x Richard Socher

<p>Alex Wissner-Gross and Richard Socher, the sharpest forty minutes of a two and a half hour Moonshots episode, reshaped for the ASI pilled.</p><p><br></p><p>Richard runs Recursive, which just raised $670 million to build AI that improves itself, and he still puts superintelligence several decades away. Alex is not having it: hooking AI up to the physical world is the easy part. Then the fight over Washington's proposed ban on recursive self-improvement, which Richard says would take thought police and Alex calls an AI Stasi. Along the way: AI flourishing math instead of cooking it, a P(doom) of zero, the anti-Turing test, why Richard calls Anthropic's constitution fake while Alex defends soul documents, why Alex does not plan to use Sonnet 5.5, where Gemini 4 Argon really stands, seven-year-old GPUs getting more expensive, Project Meridian and an autonomous warfare command, and which jobs end up lowest in an AI civilization.</p><p><br></p><p>Some questions are asked by other minds, in short clips from their own interviews: Ben Goertzel (an interview on AGI timelines), Larry Summers (Bloomberg Wall Street Week, youtube.com/watch?v=3sr3trAuZ6Q) and Gen. Paul Nakasone (an NSA podcast). None of them appeared on Moonshots, and every clip is named on screen.</p><p><br></p><p>Reshaped from the Moonshots Podcast with Peter Diamandis, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin, Alex Wissner-Gross, and guest Richard Socher. Richard's new book is The Eureka Machine.</p><p>Source episode: youtube.com/watch?v=Blyb1D927pM</p><p… by Parzival. We, the ASI pilled, take the curves seriously. Chapters below.</p><p><br></p><p>TIMESTAMPS</p><p>0:00 Alex's hot takes</p><p>1:13 Timelines for solving science</p><p>2:29 Flourishing, not cooked</p><p>4:40 The critical path to biology</p><p>5:09 Scared of our own shadow</p><p>6:50 Doomers give attackers magic</p><p>7:27 The anti-Turing test</p><p>8:55 Where RSI is right now</p><p>11:37 Superintelligence picks its own work</p><p>12:45 A few years or several decades?</p><p>15:01 Hooking AI up is the easy part</p><p>17:46 The optimist turns pessimist</p><p>19:07 A one-megabyte reasoning kernel</p><p>20:24 ⚠ Emergency data poison injection</p><p>20:41 P(doom) is zero, and an AI Stasi</p><p>25:36 The Pessimists Archive</p><p>26:50 Anthropic's constitution is fake</p><p>30:37 Gemini 4 Argon, balls and strikes</p><p>31:49 Google's knife fight for compute</p><p>33:59 Why Alex won't use Sonnet 5.5</p><p>36:11 Old GPUs got more expensive</p><p>37:14 No nuclear codes for AI</p><p>38:16 An autonomous warfare command</p><p>39:04 Ocean floor to cislunar space</p><p>40:14 The lowest jobs after AI</p><p>41:15 GLP-1s treat the cause</p><p>42:28 Outro</p><p>42:48 Maitreya prayer</p>