Transcript of Vinod Khosla on Moonshots with Peter Diamandis Podcast

If you weren’t at the Abundance Summit, it’s not too late. You can watch the entire Abundance Summit online by going to ExponentialMastery.com. That’s ExponentialMastery.com.

You’ve said that the most consumer access of the Internet could be agents acting for consumers. I don’t think my agent is going to be interested in Google Ads or is interested in a, you know, a TV commercial of somebody with white teeth on it. Toothpaste. What happens to advertising if agents are doing the buying?

VINOD KHOSLA: I actually might disagree. Okay, first I’d say the one thing that’s clear is the level of unpredictability in all this, including what I say.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Okay, the only thing we know about the future is we’ll probably be wrong.

VINOD KHOSLA: Well, the only thing we know about the future is it’ll be uncertain. We have to figure it out in increments. Yes, but what is advertising? It’s information to emotionally induce us into buying $300 pair of jeans when $30 Levi’s will do just fine. That’s a filter the AI can apply. So the nature of advertising, I suspect will change to more informational, which is the original purpose of advertising.

It has switched to… One of my big beefs with capitalism is mostly capitalism is about making you buy things you had no intention of buying. That’s what advertising had become, but that’s not what it was. And so making people buy things they don’t want to buy or had no intention of buying makes them unhappy. That doesn’t add to societal good. But information is valuable.

And frankly, I think people will pivot into other models. I mean, Chat GPT has been phenomenally successful and nobody thought consumers would pay $20 a month. Look, if that was true, that’s more revenue per user than Google or Facebook get. In fact, they should have tried this model earlier. If they added enough value, which you know, in the past pre AI, they had added a lot of value.

So where will this stop? You know, the $200 a month level of Chat GPT is incredibly valuable. How many people have tried it? A good number of hands. How many people have tried Deep Research? Yeah, it is amazing. Like it is way more valuable. I’ll tell you a fun story. My chief of staff is a PhD in viral immunology and we were researching a particular application like a developmental model, a model for developmental biology, a fundamental, the foundation model for developmental biology. She did an 18 page report for me, including recommending what indications to go into after she’d finished. I said just enter into Deep Research and give it some time to think. Coincidentally, it came back with an 18 page report and the same two end disease indications to go after. Now that’s mind blowing.

The Value of AI Research Tools

PETER DIAMANDIS: It is. How much did you pay Deep Research for that?

VINOD KHOSLA: Not a lot.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Not a lot.

VINOD KHOSLA: Well worth it for anybody who hasn’t tried it. I was just talking to the CFO. So I gave you a very technical example. I was talking to the CFO of OpenAI and she was talking to a retailer.

PETER DIAMANDIS: You’ve been a big Investor Supporter of OpenAI?

VINOD KHOSLA: Yeah, we committed in 2018 and you have to believe in things. And I believed in it enough to make the largest initial investment I’d ever made by a factor of two. 40 years of venture capital. I’d never even made an investment half the size because I was a believer. That’s turned out well.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Yeah, it has turned out well.

VINOD KHOSLA: But my point is this retailer CEO was talking to her and he said he had just finished a large strategy review on what products to add to their retail operation. She, while on the call, summoned Deep Research. It came back with a report she gave to him almost instantly, tens of minutes, and he said, you know, to be honest, this was a better report than my strategy team produced over the last however many months. So we are at a transition point.

PETER DIAMANDIS: And I think that’s one of the things I tell people. You’re not using this technology even a fraction of your potential. Is it open in every board meeting? Is it open every executive meeting. Are you giving it the same challenges you’re giving your team about?

VINOD KHOSLA: Yeah. Look, the other thing I want to add is the range of applicability is large from what products should a retailer add?

PETER DIAMANDIS: Yes.

VINOD KHOSLA: To… I was sitting in a scientific meeting for a couple of days, multiple days, small group of scientists going after a particular topic of personal interest to me. So I sat in and anything I didn’t understand, ChatGPT was able to explain to me where I could really not only follow the conversation, but ask not so dumb questions.

AI as a Creative Superpower

PETER DIAMANDIS: Yeah. I mean, it is a superpower. And one of the things I love, I keep on mentioning this is the ability to ask it to look at something from a completely different perspective. Right. My favorite is like, how would Steve Jobs answer this question?

VINOD KHOSLA: Yeah.

PETER DIAMANDIS: And we are so limited inside our organization by the knowledge and the opinions that we have in our team that. Why would you limit yourself in that way?

VINOD KHOSLA: Well, the best example is the row 37 example. Yes. Of course, you know, centuries of humans hadn’t come up with the row 37 example because we look incrementally upon what others have done, not think outside the box. So that’s a real massive accelerator for humanity. Pretty soon when AI does science and scientists and things, do you believe that.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Most Nobel prizes in the future will get basically derived from AI human partnerships or AI alone?

VINOD KHOSLA: Possibly AI alone. I think that will happen now. Whether us humans will allow recognize it as such, recognize AI as capable of winning a Nobel Prize. That’s a human limitation. But that’s also true in most creative tasks.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Let’s go into programming. So probably the single area that’s had the most success with the LLMs besides just written word, has been programming. How do you think about the future of programming? Is it a future of no more programmers or everyone’s a programmer?

The Future of Programming and AI

VINOD KHOSLA: Both. So we investors, to be fair in cognition, that doesn’t give you a copilot like Microsoft does for a programmer. It does the programming for you. And their model is very much what I explained earlier. They’ll give you a software intern who can program an intern programmer today. And they’ll grow up in seniority and experience over time.

At the other end, we investors in Replit. So you don’t need to know anything about programming or even know the names of the language you’re coding in. You just speak in English language and it codes for you. So whether you’re an individual, your son or daughter asks you a particular question, you want to build a model of the planetary system you just code it in Replit without ever having touched code or knowing anything about coding.

That as well as, you know, if there’s an employee in a large enterprise and this is starting to happen, every employee can write their own applications without going to IT. So any of you who worked in large companies and need to go through IT and security reviews and all that other stuff, know how freeing it is if you don’t have to deal with IT at all. You can just program your apps in English language.

So there’s a fundamental thing I like to say. In the past, users of computers have had to learn computers. You get trained on SAP or Oracle or Workday or your favorite application. I think in the future, instead of humans learning computers, computers will learn humans and humans won’t have to adapt to how a program works. The notion of a menu will go away.

PETER DIAMANDIS: I think about 13 years ago, I had my two kids, my two boys. And I remember at that moment in time, I made a decision to double down on my health. Without question, I wanted to see their kids, their grandkids. And really during this extraordinary time where the space frontier and AI and crypto is all exploding, it was like the most exciting time ever to be alive. And I made a decision to double down on my health.

And I’ve done that in three key areas. The first is going every year for a Fountain upload. Fountain is one of the most advanced diagnostics and therapeutics companies. I go there, upload myself, digitize myself about 200 gigabytes of data that the AI system is able to look at to catch disease at inception. Look for any cardiovascular, any cancer, any neurodegenerative disease, any metabolic disease. These things are all going on all the time. And you can prevent them if you can find them at inception. So super important. So Fountain is one of my keys. I make that available to the CEOs of all my companies, my family members, because health is a new wealth.

But beyond that, we are a collection of 40 trillion human cells and about another hundred trillion bacterial cells, fungi, viri, and we don’t understand how that impacts us. I use a company and a product called Viome. Viome has a technology called Metatranscriptomics. It was actually developed in New Mexico, the same place where the nuclear bomb was developed as a biodefense weapon. And their technology is able to help you understand what’s going on in your body, to understand which bacteria are producing which proteins. And as a consequence of that, what foods are your superfoods that are best for you to eat? Or what foods should you avoid what’s going on in your oral microbiome. So I use their testing to understand my foods, understand my medicines, understand my supplements and Viome really helps me understand from a biological and data standpoint what’s best for me.

And then finally feeling good, being intelligent, moving well is critical, but looking good when you look yourself in the mirror saying I feel great about life is so important. And so a product I use every day, twice a day is called OneSkin, developed by four incredible PhD women that found this 10-amino acid peptide that’s able to zap senile cells in your skin and really help you stay youthful in your look and appearance. So for me these are three technologies I love and I use all the time. I’ll have my team linked to those in the show notes down below. Please check them out. Anyway, hope you enjoyed that. Now back to the episode.

I remember early on the Palm Pilot had us adapting to it to have the proper language and then finally the computer got smart enough to adapt to us. Energy. Energy is one of the single most important things from so many IT tips health, IT tips AI. IT tips everything. You’ve been a huge investor proponent across a multitude of different energy investments. How are you thinking about where we’re in the near term, in the middle term?

The Future of Energy

VINOD KHOSLA: Well, so I am pretty optimistic about energy and about climate solutions. So let’s talk about energy. Coincidentally, the year we committed to OpenAI, which was 2018, we made two other investments I’m very proud of. One was Commonwealth Fusion. Yes, happened to be same time. They weren’t orchestrated. I didn’t connect. AI will need more power. So it wasn’t that visionary. And the third was another one of my favorites which hopefully we’ll have time to talk about public transit. Using AI it completely upends every assumption about public transit. There is no chance if you have a chauffeured car it’ll be more convenient than public transit. That’s the world we are going towards. I suspect most cars in most cities will be replaced by 2050. But let’s talk about energy.

PETER DIAMANDIS: So let’s talk about so Commonwealth is a fusion company. Last time I looked Vinod there were some. I mean blows me away. There was something like 40 VC funded fusion companies which I would have never imagined.

VINOD KHOSLA: Yeah, well you couldn’t imagine that till 2018. Nobody wanted to fund fusion. I won’t name the names who said never to me. When we funded it, they said, you’re being ridiculous. It’s 50 years.

PETER DIAMANDIS: It’s always been 50 years in wait and holding.

VINOD KHOSLA: The Department of Energy didn’t want to talk about fusion as an energy source when I visited them. We invested anyway. Almost certainly this won’t be a question in five years. So my current perspective is everything we can make happen by 2030. By 2030, nobody will be debating whether fusion’s an economic possibility. There may be some question of exactly how much it costs.

PETER DIAMANDIS: So educate us. One second on Commonwealth. Where are they? What have they been able to demonstrate?

VINOD KHOSLA: So, you know, without going into details, they expect to demonstrate positive energy.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Net energy output.

VINOD KHOSLA: Net energy output by early 2027 and start soon thereafter, the construction of their first plant. And they’ve announced a site for it. In the interest of time, let me just say they won’t build fusion power plants. The fastest way to deploy fusion, I believe one of my forecasts is we will replace every coal and natural gas plant in this country by just repowering the boiler. So we’ll have a fusion boiler.

PETER DIAMANDIS: I love that vision, by the way.

VINOD KHOSLA: You know the environmentalists who say, well, we need to shut down all the coal plants. I think we will repower them with fusion boilers and maybe a turbine change and steam conditions. There’s lots of technical detail, but you don’t need 10 years of permitting, 10 years of getting a grid connection, power lines, all that stuff. You just retrofit the same locations. That’s why I’m optimistic this won’t be a problem. There’s another technology that nobody’s talking about.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Please.

VINOD KHOSLA: Geothermal.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Ah, yes.

VINOD KHOSLA: We’ve toyed at the edges.

PETER DIAMANDIS: We need better drilling.

VINOD KHOSLA: Yeah. So turns out the same well, if it’s at 200 degrees or 250 degrees, which is almost all geothermal anywhere in the world today, produces certain amount of power. But you take that drill to 400 degrees or 450 degrees, you get 10 times the power out of the same well. Suddenly super hot. Geothermal, as it’s called, is cheaper than natural gas. And I think that will be deployed well before 2030. We have two different efforts. The hard part is drilling at high temperatures because metal becomes soft and metal can’t drill in hard rock. And sometimes hard rock is hard to frack. Both those technologies are well on their way and will surprise us in how much power they can generate.

The Future of Transportation

PETER DIAMANDIS: Do you want to jump into cultured meat? Do you want to dive into transportation? What are you most excited about?

VINOD KHOSLA: I’m very excited about transportation.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Let’s go there. What does it look like? I want to go from point A to point B in the future.

VINOD KHOSLA: Yeah. So here’s what it looks like. First let me start by what it shouldn’t be and what the right role for self driving cars are. If when we added Uber to cities, what happened? Congestion increase. Simulate driverless cars and they increase even more. So we’ll have gridlock but people won’t be driving, which is, you know, driverless cars are cool. I recommend everybody fly to a site that has driverless cars and try them. They’re amazing but they increase congestion.

So what should you do? Driverless public transit. That is personal vehicles. Should you get off your restaurant job at 1am A car shows up for you. You don’t need to know when on the schedule. Why? Because there’s no driver. So your cost is zero to have a car available when you show up, not when the public transit is scheduled. It gets to where you’re going independent time of day, traffic lights, doesn’t stop anywhere, gets to your destination and drops you off. And because it’s personal, nobody gets picked up or dropped off along the way. So it will always be faster than a chauffeur driven car. That’s the right use of self driving. And then off these fixed routes is when a Waymo might make sense for the last mile. And I think it has a useful purpose.

But here’s the fundamental thing. What is the one thing if you ask basic question that’s limited in cities it’s street widths. Only one thing limited. Everything else you can change. And so if you can increase the throughput of streets because you’re not going to destroy the buildings on both sides of a street, you got solved congestion.

Turns out with a self driving system like this, if you model can 10x the capacity of a street by building more capacity than light rail in a bicycle lane width, that’s the system we are designing. It can run in bicycle lanes, on the road, in cordoned off areas, not interacting with other traffic because that’s key to throughput. But 10x the capacity of street, you’ve suddenly created 10 streets wherever you had one and regular cars can just still flow without disrupting the thing. This is a far better solution than congestion charges. And you know New York has 14th Street. You can’t have public private cars on or constraints isn’t the right way to go. Getting 10x more capacity is the right way to go. And then you can solve the housing problem too because you can live further away and have the same 30 minute commute.

Abundance and Resource Constraints

PETER DIAMANDIS: I love that. I want to close on a question before we go to the Q&A. So please, again, get your questions ready. You know, I have been so adamant since I wrote Abundance with Steven Kotler about there is no resource constraints. There are no resource limitations. Technology is a force that converts whatever was scarce into abundance. I think you agree with that.

VINOD KHOSLA: I 100% agree with that. And I would urge somebody to ask me the question that always gets asked. Well, we have restricted amount of minerals or metals or ores. Turns out it’s a constraint because we are not looking or not looking with the right tools. So we have a separate effort to look under the earth’s surface for minerals and metals. We’ve only mined stuff that’s on the surface.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Mostly the most convenient stuff you run into.

VINOD KHOSLA: Yeah. Accidentally run into. And if we can look a kilometer under the Earth’s surface, we’ll have plenty of abundance of minerals, metals, cobalt, lithium, whatever you’re looking for.

PETER DIAMANDIS: Yeah. Amazing. All right, guys, let’s give it up for Vinod Khosla. If you enjoyed this episode, I’m going to be releasing all of the talks, all the keynotes from the Abundance Summit, exclusively on exponentialmastery.com you can get on demand access there. Go to Exponentialmastery.com.

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