"The Cognitive Revolution"
00:27:15 · Debo Olaosebikan
[00:27:15] S2: Great question. So I think, this is a huge thing. This is like, you know, always say it's similar to how the world thought it didn't have enough taxi drivers, like San Francisco thought it didn't have enough taxi drivers. And then we realized, oh, we have so many taxi drivers if you just build Uber. So, you know, not to undermine the fab shortage or chip capacity sort of manufacturing shortage, but the focus right now is on sort of EUV heavy fabs. They're expensive. They're complex, more complex, you know, processes. And we're saying that we can take existing older node fabs, and we can use them to make chips that are actually superior to the advanced node chips. That doesn't mean that we can't use EUV fabs. EUV... We just we just invent an unorthogonal axis to shrinking transistors. So we also benefit when the transistors shrink, no problem. But we don't require it to make chips that are more advanced. So that's a huge advantage because the cost of these fabs are lower. The lithography you need is, you know, much, much less expensive. And some of these fabs have a lot more capacity in them. Right? For example, if I could take an older node LogicFab and if I could use that to create more advanced SRAM or even more ambitiously, I could use that older node LogicFab to create, HBM class memories, this is a this is a huge huge thing. This is a huge unlock. And even if I needed to build more fabs... So let's say I make use of whatever fab capacity I have and then I need to build more fabs. You know, my my fab per dollar or dollar per fab, whatever ratio you want, is superior to to the person who has to set up an EUV line. So this is all advantage. In terms of the process itself, the key thing to watch for is, are you introducing any brand new tools, any custom tools, any custom equipment that's not standard equipment that already exists in the fab? And, the answer is no for the most part. So the process flow in utilizing those equipment and, you know, some of the materials, sure, that may be new, but we're not bringing in any new, any non sort of standard equipment or causing some equipment maker to build, new equipment for us. And so the reason we've worked hard on this for the past seven years.
00:30:01 · Debo Olaosebikan, Nathan Labenz
So what we've been doing all those years is turning that flow on standard equipment into something that is manufacturable, building test chips inside of proper fabs that basically prove that, hey, okay, once you nail the process flow within these standard tools, you can just stand up these lines within the fab and you're good to go. So once those process flows are sort of finalized and honed, it's very easy to replicate this and scale this up inside of a manufacturing process. So it's really it's really all upside once you have the stuff working. Part four, [00:30:44] S0: act one. Samvit Ramadurgam co founded Forge, the marketplace for pre IPO stock. His new company, Union, is building an agent that brokers deals across markets, introductions, asset sales, private shares. Act one, he says, is coordinating the world economy. I asked what the surprises will be as these systems develop.
00:31:06 · Samvit Ramadurgam
[00:31:06] S3: I think that over the next five years, I think, you know, you guys have probably really bought into this, the world is gonna get very interesting, and there's gonna be a lot of surprises that come from the capabilities of AI. I think we're seeing this right now with mathematics. Like, it's completely incredible. Like, that... Like, math has been revolutionized so quickly, and it's just the beginning of it. And so, like, that's about to happen to many domains. And and so I think you could expect, like, what happened in math and coding in the last year to happen to as as domains that are less and less trivially verifiable with software. The further we get from verifiability, the longer it may take. But this... It's gonna get there because the feedback loops, are gonna be there just like with with longer feedback loops. And so what does that mean for us? Well, I think that one very big surprise that will hit the world is that at some point in the next few years, people will wake up and then realize that huge number of the world's markets are being coordinated by agents. Thousands of markets from, like, you know you know, dairy in, like, a a a country all the way to real estate in in China to, like, the the the pre IPO market in The US. Like, all these markets are gonna be coordinated better with agents, like, period. Because what it is... The way it's being coordinated right now is that there are human... Gonna be humans who are really good at what humans are really good at, building relationships, having taste and judgment, and and advising their friends and trust. Humans will have a place, and they'll be, like... I think they'll to actually... The best ones will actually, I think, do better. I think by and large, most of the work is data coordination, connecting the dots, logistics, operations, orchestration, all of which software and agent's gonna be way better at. So, yeah, we'll have, like, a a period where the same way that software and math is really getting taken over, one of the surprises is that a lot of this deal making that makes the economy function is actually something that agents are quite amenable to that we're focused on.
00:33:03 · Nathan Labenz
[00:33:03] S0: I asked whether he saw reason to worry about disempowerment. What he describes sounds empowering, but some would hear it as the agents running the world.
00:33:14 · Samvit Ramadurgam
[00:33:14] S3: My big take is actually that, like, right now, we are really disempowered because we don't have the ability to coordinate in a more open decentralized way. Like, a lot of the coordination is happening, like, really top down by, like, companies with a lot of, like, power and a lot of, like, brand power and things like that. And, like, the the vision for this now is that you can actually have, like, grassroots movements come up very easily. So you can imagine, like, a a world... If you take the political example, which is more pertinent to the power question. Let's suppose that I wanna start a new movement for, like, some initiative. I have, like, some political cause. Like, for me to be able to go and light a spark today on social media lets me be empowered to a degree to go start that. That gets amplified much further. In addition to letting me get in a forum with people, I can actually, like, coordinate activity. We can, like, coordinate movement of money and signature of documents and, like, make decisions together and, like, take actions together. So the ability to go take collective action becomes very strong. So I think that it's a really powerful tool for empowerment to... If if you have something that can tap into what a lot of people want. And, like, that empowerment is, like, in a way, like, the bigger risk because you can empower things that are are harmful. I do think this probably is worth going deeper into the disempowerment side as well. I think that if you're I think if you're a human being who is in the business of doing a lot of, like, logistical coordination, I think that that's a rough place to be because the AI is gonna be better at, like, the kind of, like, transactional mundane logistics by, like, a 100 x better than a human. This is not even gonna be close. I think if you hear a human who is operating with a level of taste and relationships and judgment, you're at, like, the the the thing that humans are gonna uniquely... Humans are... I think humans have a monopoly on one thing, and humans have a monopoly on their individual life story and life perspective.
00:35:03 · Nathan Labenz
[00:35:03] S0: I think the general concern is always just that we have so much agent activity flying around, doing so many things. You know, we can't really make sense of it anymore. And before you know it, we're kind of in a zoo of our own creation where the AIs are really running the show and, like, hopefully, we're, like, cared and fed for, but we sort of lose the ability to even understand, let alone, like, rearchitect the superstructures that surround us.