Shaan Puri says AI's real opportunity is in physical things like drugs, food and housing, while software is a race to the bottom.
Puri calls Anthropic the fastest-growing business ever, generating $2tn in five years as founders' stakes fell to about 2%.
ZURU Tech prints a home a day in China with $1bn of the founders' own money.
The AI money is moving from software to atoms
Shaan Puri argues that the AI opportunity has left software. The model labs took the first wave, and Anthropic's cofounders already own only about 2% of the company each , so the returns are moving into physical things. Sam Parr answers with the American industrial record between 1880 and 1970, and the two debate whether today's institutions can support another boom .
Takeaways
The money has moved to atoms. Puri says the tools worth building five years ago were video generation like Runway and image generation like Midjourney . Applying AI to content and software is now a race to the bottom, so the opportunity sits in physical things .
Drug discovery is opening to individuals. Puri says a drug used to take ten years and $2bn with an 80 to 90% failure rate, so only large drug companies play that game . Eli Lilly has leaned in hard and is buying compute like a tech company .
Housing costs are about to collapse. Mortgage rates are 7.25% and building costs $600 to $800 per square foot. Puri says we are within ten years of a night-and-day difference in the cost to build a home .
War is becoming drones against drones. Puri predicts war will look like tiny unmanned aircraft that are super cheap to build in high volume . Joe Lonsdale has a company working underwater that is the navy version of Anduril .
Self-driving is spreading beyond cars. Puri says his Tesla drives about 95% of all his miles and he only takes over in parking lots . The same technology is going into forklifts inside warehouses and machines that clean skyscraper windows .
The opportunity is bigger and stranger. Puri says people look through a peephole at what is right in front of them instead of widening their field of vision . The opportunities are bigger than anything we have seen, but they sit in new spaces where you have no experience .
One man's self-cure
A man who worked at GitLab used AI to sequence his own tumour, find candidate drugs, synthesise them and take them, and cure his cancer. About seven others are doing the same.
Sam Parr says a friend with cancer signed up for the service and is doing great . Their former producer Ben posted that he is much better, though still not out of the woods .
The boom against the fear
Parr points to the American growth between 1880 and 1970, when ore shipped from Duluth through the Great Lakes and 50 tariff-free states fed the boom .
Puri's worries are socialism in New York and California and hollowed-out manufacturing. AI either takes every job or proves a bubble that tanks the market .
Puri wants a leader who says AI is good and capitalism rocks . Parr calls the socialism of the Democratic Socialists of America historically bad .
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