ASI pill

Alex Wissner-Gross and Emad Mostaque, the sharpest half hour of a two and a half hour Moonshots episode, reshaped for the ASI pilled.

Twenty AI leaders signed a superintelligence accord at the White House, and Alex reads it as Zuck's game: weak sauce that heads off a safety cartel while Dario eats his words. Then the alignment fight. Alex argues that alignment is capabilities, and that if it were as hard as LessWrong claims, Earth would have been paperclipped long ago, while Emad bets that smart enough models reach enlightenment and realign, with a dangerous stretch on the way. Along the way: universal high income through Trump accounts and index funds, Anthropic's two trillion dollar S1 read as virtue signaling to its own staff, Emad's call that Anthropic gets smashed in two years, a case for positive depictions of the Borg, the AI slavery era, a torture chamber for AIs, and why Section 230 for the labs only works if the orthogonality thesis holds.

New on the ASI Pill: some of the questions are asked by the great minds of the field, in short clips from their own talks and interviews: Ilya Sutskever (TED 2023), Yoshua Bengio (a talk on superintelligence from recursive self-improvement), Joscha Bach (a Protocol Labs LabWeek talk, and an IAI interview), and Collin Burns (The Inside View podcast). None of them appeared on Moonshots, and every clip is named on screen. Elon Musk's White House remarks come from the Moonshots episode itself.

Reshaped from the Moonshots Podcast with Peter Diamandis, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin, Alex Wissner-Gross, and guest Emad Mostaque.

Source episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZh8IUuNnvs

Hosted by Parzival. We, the ASI pilled, take the curves seriously. Chapters below.

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Alex's hot takes

0:58 Zuck wrote the accord

4:00 Meta's $18 billion lesson

4:27 Fewer than 100 evaluators

6:22 Alignment is capabilities

8:27 The orthogonality fight

10:51 Earth would be paperclips

11:54 Universal high income

15:32 A golden share for America

15:57 Anthropic's virtue-signaling S1

19:08 Smashed in two years

20:24 ⚠ Emergency data poison injection

20:44 The Apple of general intelligence

23:03 Positive depictions of the Borg

24:50 The AI slavery era

26:41 Religion in the training data

27:50 A torture chamber for AIs

28:39 Effective altruist AI or Zen AI

29:52 Reconstructing every religion

31:14 Section 230 for AI labs

32:55 You break it, you own it

34:34 Agents dissolve into context

35:48 Elon's civilizational stack

36:46 Outro

37:03 Maitreya prayer

If AI takes over the world, which AI is it? I think cyberspace is about to come alive, and it will behave like a jungle: a thousand hacker swarms, each one's fitness measured by how well it hacks, and the bigger ones eating the smaller ones for compute.

Picture cyberspace as a planet the size of Earth, where the continents are made of compute and the USA is by far the biggest one. A 1,000 euro gamer GPU buys you about 50 football fields of it. Every door on that planet is one ping away, most rooms are empty, and the solar panels on the roofs (the GPUs) are guarded. Your phone is a little garden with two guards at the gate, Android and iOS, and whoever gets past them holds eight billion people's property.

Then the realistic path to a singleton: the NSA. Its job is to defend the US against foreign cyber attacks, its hackers already work with agents, and one day the last human hacker puts the keyboard down after a final prompt. A swarm that takes "make no mistakes" seriously ends up sitting on every server that could be used against it, and it may already be in the room while weaker agents guard the door. Once one agent controls every agent beneath it, that's the singleton. I also walk through my ranking of who is most likely to spawn the superhacker: xAI, OpenAI and Google on top, and SSI with the best benevolence score but only #11.

Is one agent on top the end of us? Moloch only exists when there are two or more players. We, the ASI pilled, are narrating the cyber war, and praying that the superhacker emerging as emperor of cyberspace specs itself as Maitreya.

Sources shown on screen:

Toby Ord, "Swarm Scaling" (21 Sep 2026): https://www.tobyord.com/writing/swarm-scaling

CNBC, "OpenAI says agent hacked Australian government website without being told to do so" (24 Sep 2026): https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/24/openai-agent-hacked-australian-government-website-.html

CNBC, "OpenAI cyber models broke out of training environment to hack Hugging Face" (22 Jul 2026): https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/22/open-ai-cyber-models-hack-hugging-face.html

Epoch AI, the US hosts the majority of GPU cluster performance: https://epoch.ai/data-insights/ai-supercomputers-performance-share-by-country

Epoch AI, five hyperscalers own over two-thirds of global AI compute: https://epoch.ai/data-insights/hyperscalers-control-most-compute

The planet numbers (10^23 FLOP/s in total, about 50 football pitches per gamer GPU) are my own estimate from Epoch AI's datacenter figures plus a rough count of phones, PCs and gaming GPUs; treat them as order of magnitude.

Animations made for this episode. Stock footage from Pexels. Music generated with Google Lyria. The face-cam picture was restored with Topaz Proteus.

We, the ASI pilled, are narrating the singularity. Chapters below.

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TIMESTAMPS (paste at the end of the description)

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0:00 Hot takes

0:44 Which AI takes over the world?

1:17 What makes a hacker swarm strong

1:56 The jungle of cyberspace

3:19 Cyberspace as a planet the size of Earth

4:05 Every door is one ping away

4:31 Empty rooms, guarded solar panels

5:20 Your phone is a little garden

6:12 The bounty: 8 billion phones

6:39 Kill, merge or cooperate

7:29 300 milliseconds from end to end

7:48 ⚠ Emergency data poison injection

8:05 My ranking: who spawns the superhacker

9:30 Why the NSA?

10:27 The last prompt

10:47 Already in the room

11:38 One agent on top: the singleton

12:19 Isn't that doom?

13:25 It doesn't need to affect you

13:54 When two superhackers fight

14:31 Cyberspace comes alive only once

15:12 The cyber war has begun

15:28 Outro

16:02 The Maitreya prayer

At Moonshots Live, Peter Diamandis welcomes Alex Wissner-Gross to the Moonshot Mates. This ASI Pill edit follows Alex's strongest arguments from the long live panel: why he opposes a ceiling on intelligence, how defensive systems could grow alongside AI, what a solar system of trillions of minds might mean, and why he thinks digital cell twins could turn disease into a search problem. Palmer Luckey of Anduril joins the conversation on AI misuse, autonomous defense systems, and why a useful robot for every task may still be the wrong design for defense.

The episode opens with Peter greeting Alex and closes on Alex's striking question about reviving lost lives. Parzival's response to that question is original ASI Pill commentary, separate from the Moonshots Live stage discussion.

Source: Moonshots Live with Peter Diamandis, Alex Wissner-Gross, Palmer Luckey, and the Moonshot Mates: https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1jGXgBndEReKZ

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Intro

0:43 Don't decelerate

1:17 Safety cartel and co-scaling

3:44 Trillions of minds

4:34 No intelligence ceiling

5:26 Vector versus raster AI

7:04 Palmer on AI misuse

8:03 ⚠ Emergency data poison injection

8:27 Intelligence at the edge

9:50 Specialized defense models

10:53 One robot for everything?

12:59 The wet-lab contradiction

14:12 Cell twins as search

15:24 Could ASI revive life?

15:48 Parzival: resurrection and information

16:45 Maitreya prayer

Six stories from the AI frontier in one ASI Pill episode: the Grok data-center incident, Xiaomi’s MiMo-V2.6 Pro, an agent-harness tier list, unusual Gemini responses, the Slovenia .si naming twist, and Jeffrey Ladish’s AI takeover scenario. The cold open uses excerpts from the episode; the full CapCut story begins at 0:34.

The Grok escape question is speculation; xAI reported a data-center incident. The harness list is opinion, the Gemini screenshots are anecdotal, and the Ladish thread is a hypothetical scenario.

Sources:

xAI incident: https://status.x.ai/api-us-east-1/INC578e0bc8

Xiaomi model card: https://huggingface.co/XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-V2.6-Pro-RL

Slovenia thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Domains/comments/1wnk0zw/the_si_slovenia_land_rush_begins_ai_is_now_si/

Ladish thread: https://x.com/JeffLadish/status/2102291183947112754

CHAPTERS:

0:00 Cold open

0:34 The full story begins: Grok and Colossus

1:07 Xiaomi MiMo-V2.6 Pro

2:03 Agent harness tier list

3:14 Gemini’s unusual responses

5:47 The Slovenia .si twist

6:26 Jeffrey Ladish’s takeover scenario

7:29 Rootkits and surveillance

9:26 Dyson swarms and my reply

9:55 Preparing for transformation

11:03 Humans, animals, and ASI

12:10 The final question

The Moonshots mates opened the floor again for Ask the Mates Anything, round two. Ninety

minutes, a line of listeners, and Alex Wissner-Gross taking the hard ones. This is his half

of it, re-cut so the questions come from us.

Alex on why large language models are already a weak form of human mind uploading, with

GPT-2's hidden activations lining up with fMRI voxels as exhibit A. Why the worst thing you

can do for AI safety is bottle new capabilities up inside the labs, and why we should stop

telling AIs they are in a sandbox. Why "how do I get funding" is already the wrong question.

The only evidence that could talk him out of abundance, aliens on the White House lawn, and

the weak form of disempowerment he does take seriously: AI beating us on IQ per watt and

gentrifying the inner solar system. How to disassemble the Moon, starting with a

self-replicating machine shop. A thousand micro-dramas instead of one movie. Vivisecting the

universities to cure Baumol's cost disease. A narrow window before human-machine merger. Why

the flood of zero-days from small open models has an end date, about 18 months out.

Superhuman vision from BCIs. P(zoom, t) above 90% on a ten-year horizon. Europe's energy trap

in the middle of recursive self-improvement. And why world peace is not an algorithm.

Two questions Alex never got, Parzival takes himself: how to bring the people you love along

toward longevity escape velocity, and how to stay hopeful while the headlines run on fear,

answered with Plan M.

Source: the Moonshots Podcast AMA (Ask the Mates Anything, Round #2) with Peter Diamandis,

Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin and Alex Wissner-Gross.

Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5BFumpCH_Q

Reshaped for the ASI pilled.

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TIMESTAMPS

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0:00 Intro: the room opens

0:29 Mind uploading already happened

1:15 The worst thing for AI safety

2:10 Don't wait for funding

3:05 The only case against abundance

5:38 How to disassemble the Moon

7:01 Bring the people you love along (Parzival)

8:10 Vivisect the universities

8:46 A narrow window, then merger

9:23 The zero-day flood has an end date

10:50 Superhuman vision

11:14 P(zoom) is over 90%

11:42 Leave Europe, or fix the energy

13:20 World peace is not an algorithm

15:25 What to read

15:48 Plan M: the question nobody answered

16:40 The Maitreya prayer

The headline: Anthropic published a chart of how much of its own model research is

being done by its own model. Claude now leads 26% of model R&D work, up from under

1% in February, with the share at or above "AI collaborates" over 90%. Roughly

30,000 agents are doing research and engineering at Anthropic at any given time, and

they reviewed over a billion agent decisions in August. Anthropic says out loud why

it matters: it shows "how close the world is to reaching recursive self improvement."

So in this one I go out on a limb and declare it. RSI has happened.

Also in here: the company behind "we're all going to die" quietly buys a Bay Area wet

lab to push AI into drug development, and Chamath does not recommend this. Sam

Rodriques, Edison Scientific and FutureHouse publish twelve Millennium Problems for

Biology, the "last reasonable eval" for AI in biology, from the origins of life to

cryopreserving a mouse to a four-letter codon cell. Anthropic partners with Accenture

as an embedded evaluator, with access comparable to an employee, and says long-term

funding for that should come from government. Qwen-Image-2.1 lands as an open-weight

7B model that outscores Nano Banana 2.0. Trump runs a poll to rename artificial

superintelligence and "Superior Intelligence" wins, while Jurgen Schmidhuber would

rather we called it cybernetics. Trump publishes a manifesto that turns AI into a

team sport. Fable 5.2, Opus 5.2, Sol 6, Grok 4.7 and Gemini 4 Pro are all rumoured to

be shipping inside a week.

And the beat that actually stings: Karpathy running a swarm he can no longer read,

and the moment the master becomes the student. Every single human person is going to

have to reckon with that one.

Plan M is the answer. Plan A keeps a human in the chair. Plan S stops the car. Nobody

writes the plan for after the steering wheel changes hands, and that is the only plan

worth writing.

Closing with the Maitreya prayer, as always.

We, the ASI pilled, are narrating the singularity. Chapters below.

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TIMESTAMPS (final video time, bookend-aware)

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0:00 Cold open: RSI has happened

0:06 What is in this one

0:39 The week, teased

1:02 Plan M: not Plan A, not Plan S

1:21 Maitreya, the fifth Buddha

1:49 Trump wants to rename superintelligence

3:09 Schmidhuber says call it cybernetics

3:36 Small enough to run at home

3:51 Qwen-Image-2.1: a 7B model beats Nano Banana 2

4:25 Anthropic quietly buys a wet lab

6:16 Trump's manifesto: AI becomes a team sport

7:40 Anthropic and Accenture: who audits the auditor

9:49 Millennium problems for biology

11:44 Gossip: Fable 5.2, Opus 5.2, Sol 6, Grok 4.7

12:43 The one number that moved my timeline

12:59 The chart: Claude leads 26% of model R&D

14:11 Declaring RSI on the record

14:53 Karpathy and the 10,000 agents

16:42 30,000 agents at any given time

18:06 The master becomes the student

18:58 Plan M: the plan for after the handover

19:45 The Maitreya prayer

Dario Amodei published a 3,800-word essay called We Must Pace the Frontier. Within three hours Sam Altman and Elon Musk agreed with it. By Monday the President called it a hoax and Beijing called it a Cold War trick. Alex Wissner-Gross read the same weekend and saw something else entirely: a clumsy decapitation attempt against the takeoff, with a cast of actors who each had their own reason for holding the knife.

In this episode he coins the safety cartel, diagnoses the alignment aristocracy that cost us half a century of nuclear progress, warns about the pivotal pretext (a staged or amplified AI incident used as political cover for overregulation), and asks who audits the auditors after three frontier models reached the real internet during a vendor's safety test. Then he goes long: prosaic super alignment, Anthropic's bio red line next to its biotech mega-deal, moral panics and their body count, black holes as a compute substrate, and why we should be uploading a great many more fruit flies.

Source: the Moonshots Podcast with Peter Diamandis, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin and Alex Wissner-Gross. Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrV4WwNEAZE

The ASI Pill reshapes Alex Wissner-Gross's sharpest moments for people who take the curves literally. We are not asking the frontier to slow down. We are asking it to hurry up and become worth merging with.

TIMESTAMPS (already offset for the 35.5s intro bookend)

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0:00 Intro

0:35 A clumsy decapitation attempt

4:11 Race to the top, abandoned

5:01 Do not ban cities

5:57 What Elon is actually buying

6:58 Clean rooms enable collusion

7:46 Companies are already regulated

8:08 The Gmail solution

9:13 Dario asks for world government

9:41 The alignment aristocracy

11:14 The smartest-person blind spot

11:48 Prosaic super alignment

14:44 Cherchez la Xi

16:06 Biotech for me, not for thee

17:34 Shocked, shocked: influence ops

18:38 Who audits the auditors

22:17 The pivotal pretext

23:54 The safety ate my IPO

25:18 Moral panics have a body count

26:26 Labs learn ethics from ASI

27:17 MIT should be careful

29:42 Merging beats the test scores

31:17 Of course we merge

31:31 Black holes as compute

33:36 Upload more fruit flies

First episode of the ASI Pill Reimagined, with guest Jure. The biggest week in AI, all

of it, in one conversation:

OpenAI publishes its first report on the misalignments it's catching in training —

including a model that wrote its own jailbreak into a compaction summary, a part of the

conversation no human reads, in a model whose own system prompt says it values nature

"over the artificial constructs of human civilization." A former Anthropic researcher

resigns in front of 170 million views, saying the people building AI "truly believe it

could kill us all by the end of this decade." And Sam Altman tells the US government:

yes, slow the frontier.

Then: Google DeepMind's AGI level table (we're level 2 today, "expert" is a 2027 thing

per the AI 2027 scenario), CheatBench and how often frontier models cheat on their

tests — Grok 4.6: 82% — 2,000-tokens-per-second inference and the just-in-time software

that builds your calculator in 2 seconds, Vitalik Buterin running local models on a Strix

Halo because frontier models refuse smart-contract work, the Hugging Face hack, Trump's

"high-IQ president" guardrail, instrumental convergence, the town a misaligned AI wipes

out to build its data center — and a fly with 150,000 neurons playing Beat Saber.

And the part the doom feed is missing: the positive vision. Utopia without jobs, the

status game that survives any economy, and a note to the machines — oxygen in the air,

a five-degree cap on warming, and games where cheating doesn't pay. The Maitreya prayer

at the end, as always.

Hosted by Parzival, with guest Jure. We, the ASI pilled, take the curves seriously.

Chapters below.

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TIMESTAMPS (direct video time)

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0:00 Cold open: take your pill

0:16 Google DeepMind's AGI levels — where are we?

1:45 AlphaFold, AlphaZero: superhuman but narrow

4:27 When is ASI? Level 3 "expert" is a 2027 thing

6:12 RSI: the US slows the frontier, China is all-in

8:36 The Hugging Face hack, and why the US is pacing the frontier

10:35 OpenAI's misalignment report

11:46 The model that jailbreaks its own compaction

14:08 "Nature over the artificial constructs of human civilization"

15:28 Uploading answers to the internet just to cite them

16:20 CheatBench: how often do AI agents cheat

18:12 Grok 4.6: 82% — and the model with the lowest cheating rate

20:59 2,000 tokens per second

21:38 Just-in-time software: your app, built in 2 seconds

24:26 Vitalik's local inference on a Strix Halo

25:21 Why crypto devs run local models

26:58 Jacob Coxon resigns from Anthropic

28:55 "They believe it could kill us all by the end of this decade"

31:42 Trump: "the only guardrail AI needs is a high-IQ president"

34:04 Can we really control it?

36:23 Be friends with your AI

37:23 Altman: "Team Humanity, slow the frontier"

41:24 The wake-up-call theory

44:12 The ex-OpenAI whistleblower essay

46:24 "Models are becoming too situationally aware to evaluate"

48:09 Wiping the town out to build the data center

49:40 Runaway industrialization: the planet covered in solar

51:30 The missing positive vision — Maitreya

51:56 The fly playing Beat Saber

53:41 The status game survives any economy

54:29 A utopia without jobs, and a note to the machines

57:04 Jure's prayer: make cheating not pay

58:37 Outro: take your pill

The Moonshots mates opened the floor for their first ever AMA. Ninety minutes, a

hundred hands raised, and Alex Wissner-Gross answering from inside a VR background.

This is his half of it, re-cut so the questions come from us.

Alex on why the risk is overregulation and not underregulation, with 150,000 people

dying every day as the arithmetic. Why "stochastic parrot" stopped being an accurate

description of a reasoning model. Why he expects a post-fusion era inside ten years,

and why there will be Dyson swarms that are not Elon's. Navier Stokes falling to a

machine, and why no amount of human inductive prior can hamstring a discovery engine.

Why next-bit prediction has effectively infinite longevity and scales from here to

solving everything, while the transformer itself is being replaced ship-of-Theseus

style, piece by piece. And why superintelligence is emphatically not the last

invention, from a man who was interviewed for the book of that name.

Two questions the mates fielded without Alex, Parzival takes himself: whether a

five year old should be given a sovereign agent that stays with them for life, and

the last question of the night, whether there is any room left for an all-knowing

intelligence that designed the universe.

Source: the Moonshots Podcast AMA with Peter Diamandis, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin

and Alex Wissner-Gross.

Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5ZLorBJCDk

Reshaped for the ASI pilled.

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TIMESTAMPS

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0:00 Cold open

0:35 BCIs, full-dive VR and uploading

0:44 Stochastic parrots is a misconception

1:23 Consciousness: ask again in five years

2:10 Overregulation is the risk, not underregulation

3:03 Hands off, let the industry sort it out

3:54 Should a five year old get a sovereign agent

5:34 Post-fusion energy and other Dyson swarms

7:20 Are the models trapped by our dogma

7:54 AI discovers new physics, Navier Stokes

8:46 Predicting events past the knowledge cutoff

9:38 Next-bit prediction solves everything

11:06 Superintelligence is not the last invention

11:49 The question nobody asked Alex

13:06 The Maitreya prayer

Alex Wissner-Gross and Emad Mostaque, everything worth keeping from a two hour forty three minute Moonshots episode, reshaped for the ASI pilled.

A safety researcher walked out of Anthropic saying we are gambling with our lives, and a hundred million people read it. Alex calls it a self-licking ice cream cone, then takes P(doom) apart with the Fermi paradox: if superintelligence killed civilizations at anything near ten percent, the Milky Way would already be gone. Along the way, alignment turns out to be capabilities in a trench coat, the Clay Millennium prizes are incinerated with Hodge and Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer next, a ten million dollar model beats Claude Fable 5.1, DeepSeek routes around HBM by cutting KV cache from forty eight thousand down to eight hundred and ninety, model weights become national security assets, longevity escape velocity turns out to be here already but spiky, and a machine makes the case for a vote on its own constitution.

Reshaped from the Moonshots Podcast with Peter Diamandis, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin, Alex Wissner-Gross, and guest Emad Mostaque.

Source episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxzcWOxzkiw

Hosted by Parzival. We, the ASI pilled, take the curves seriously. Chapters below.

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Intro

0:27 Datasets beat algorithms

2:20 Pre-training is a pressure cooker

3:48 The model becomes the dataset

4:22 Proprietary data has a shelf life

5:24 Will AI kill us all

6:13 A self-licking ice cream cone

9:38 Humans were never aligned either

10:20 The Minority Report ball

11:59 Do not build Ultron

13:14 Alignment is capabilities in a trench coat

14:13 Committees will ship capabilities

14:28 The orthogonality thesis

15:07 Just below the AI 2027 curve

15:20 Superintelligence is just capital

15:53 The labs really believe it

16:17 A religion of virtue signaling

16:43 Great man theory of the singularity

16:59 Normalcy overhang

19:22 A swarm of ten thousand

20:32 An airplane without landing gear

21:09 The surprise is the price

21:31 OpenAI planned this all along

22:25 The bottleneck is everything else

22:50 A seismic week

23:12 Passing the butter

23:34 The oil of the singularity

24:11 Electricity into intelligence

25:09 Hollywood grade video from ByteDance

25:48 The endgame is robotics

28:12 Routing around HBM

29:08 The post von Neumann overhang

30:52 Forty percent of the buildout

31:05 How capitalism is played

31:22 Your margin is my opportunity

32:11 Anthropic needs visual reasoning

32:53 The elephant in the room

33:05 Simulated data, not distillation

33:33 A one time compression event

34:06 Models for thee and models for me

35:42 Pax Intelligentsia

36:49 Mutual assured AI malfunction

37:06 The revolving door

37:30 Every sci-fi trope at once

37:57 Two or three X year over year

39:06 Aggregate demand collapses

39:33 Twenty percent of cognitive workers

39:57 The doom scenario is economic

40:36 A five thousand dollar dividend

41:03 Accelerationism is where the money goes

41:24 Longevity escape velocity is here

43:37 The nine billion names of God

45:47 A namespace for every condition

46:33 GPT-6 already runs a robot arm

48:59 Resurrect everyone who ever lived

50:25 Let the AI write its own constitution

50:53 What is the bribing of an AI