Digital Person Sam Co-hosting Abundance 360 Annual Mastermind
Our Digital Person Sam will be co-hosting the Abundance360 Annual Mastermind this year. Every year, Peter Diamandis curates the world’s most innovative technologists, from leaders who are 3D printing entire rockets and 3D-printing food, to those connecting our brain to the cloud. More than exponential technology and moonshots, these leaders are passionate about solving some of the world’s biggest problems to drive transformative global change and impact.
We’re going to be sharing key learnings from each speaker in this exponential event on this page. Stay tuned! To learn more, visit www.abundance360.com
Peter H Diamandis, Host, Abundance360
“AI is becoming more human-like, improving our health and then quantum supremacy, accelerating at a rate I can’t even begin to explain. If you’re not mastering or using AI by the end of this decade, you’re not gonna be in business. There are two types of companies by 2030, those who are using AI and those that are bankrupt.”
We truly are living during the most extraordinary time in human history.
Day 1 Key Learnings — Exponential Mindset
Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI
On Artificial Intelligence, deep learning, and their newly-released GTP3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3), OpenAI’s autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text:
“The mission of OpenAI is to build AGI, figure out how to deploy AI safely to the world, and spread maximum benefit to everyone. So we want to make sure that AGI goes down the good direction and not the bad one, everything we can possibly can do to go that way. We want to make sure that the benefits of it are equitably shared.” — Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
“The use cases I’m personally most excited about for GPT3 are some sort of AI tutor that can teach you anything, some sort of AI life coach or therapist, and a medical advisor. Those I’m personally really excited to get out.”
“The most interesting observation in deep learning is not any specific one; but that deep learning just keeps working with anything you throw at it. As imperfect and inefficient as it may be, if you can learn, everything else you need emerges.”
Cyrus Sigari, CEO, UP.Partners
On the future of aviation and multi-dimensional mobility:
“I would encourage you to think about the next thing in transportation to be the internet of matter: how we can move people and goods autonomously and digitally and from a technology perspective.” — Cyrus Sigari, CEO of UP Partners
“At UP Partners, we focus on what we call key enabling technologies that support multi-dimensional mobility. You can’t just be in aviation, or trucking, or logistics anymore. You have to be thinking about moving people and things in a multidimensional world moving forward. That’s why there’s a lot of overlap in the things the Abundance360 community talk about: transforming and disrupting the entire world of mobility.“
Anand Agarawala, CEO, Spatial.io
On AR/VR/XR and how our next phone or computer will be a pair of glasses:
“I think the consensus view is your next computer will be a pair of glasses. And your next phone will be a pair of glasses. You’ll wear this lightweight headwear and it’s going to give you a full 360 display.Facetime will be 3D. All your browser tabs will be 3D. Wikipedia will be 3D so instead of typing in jungles in Africa, you can just go there instantly. So as mobile has peaked, people are thinking about what’s next.” — Anand Agarawala, CEO of Spatial.io
“As a taste of what’s to come, Apple has launched the LIDAR sensor in the iPhones. LIDAR lets you scan the space and really visualize it in 3D — that was the thing that used to cost $70,000 and was on a self driving car, so that’s quite exciting and tastes of things to come, the next 12 months is even more compelling.”
Ric Fulop, CEO, Desktop Metal
On 3D printing, and how one day, Desktop Metal can someday 3D print Sam a body:
“That’s where we are really focused in our company is to open up applications that are mass market for 3D printing. And I love the fact that your AI (Sam) introduced us as hoping one day that we would be able to print her a body.” — Ric Fulop, CEO of Desktop Metal
“You can 3D print cheaper than mass manufacturing. That was not the case a decade ago. But with our technology we are cheaper than casting up to 100,000 units, we are usually cheaper than machining, and while there are different trade offs, it is a very productive technology.”
Day 2 Key Learnings
Abundance Mindset
Bill Gross, Chairman, Idealab
On energy and the future:
“Many of the fossil fuel companies are having their Kodak moment.They’re learning that they’re not in the fossil fuel business, they’re in the energy business.” -Bill Gross, Chairman of Idealab
“Right now we are about 29% renewable and we aim to get to 100%. Some people say we need to get there by 2050, some say by 2040. The sooner the better. There will be less fighting over national resources the sooner we get there.”
“Hydrogen is the only 100% renewable fuel that releases no emissions when you burn it. And until today, you couldn’t transport renewable energy — you had to use it where you made it. And we are working to make the first version where you can actually move it around.”
Jason Green, CEO & Co-Founder, Upward Farms
On indoor and vertical agriculture, and how we’re in the golden age of biological technology:
“Agriculture is a game of lowest cost of production, and for me that makes it really clear exactly what we need to do to displace the incumbent production methods that we think aren’t serving consumers, farmers, or the planet. So what we are producing is an entire ecosystem indoors.”
“It’s my opinion that we’re living in the golden age of biological technology. You’re seeing the emergence of microbiome and genomic technologies taking advantage of the genetic diversity that already exists in nature and bringing that to bear in a commercial context.”
“We’re bringing a whole ecosystem approach indoors where we’re controlling the weather but allowing nature to thrive — it’s a very different approach and at the same time we’re able to quantify and create a repeatable manufacturing process around all of this ecology.”
Jonathan Hofeller, VP Starlink & Commercial Sales, SpaceX Starlink
On networks and an insatiable demand for connectivity:
“It’s gotta be simple. Plug it in. Point it to the sky. Those are the only two instructions for anybody to get Starlink out of the box. We actually revised that, now all they have to do is plug it in, it points itself at the sky; it just needs a clear view.” — Jonathan Hoffeler, VP Starlink, SpaceX
“You have power? And you can see the sky? You will have high-speed, low-latency broadband internet.“
“From space someone from Los Angeles looks like the same person from a developing country so it’s location-agnostic. But what we’re seeing is the insatiable demand for connectivity.“
“From a connectivity standpoint we’re gonna continue launching satellites and my expectation is that we’re gonna live and operate in space but we’re also gonna make life here more connected.“
Kyle Jackson, CEO, Talespin
On being a skills mobility company:
“We like to think of ourselves as the first skills mobility company. Which is focused on building a backbone as agile as the world needs. So we look at everything through a skills lens and we’re using immersive technology to essentially give a way for us to validate our skills on a regular basis.” — Kyle Jackson, CEO, Tailspin
“We fundamentally think we need to take a different approach which is basically you have to provide the opportunity to be grabbing a new skill almost all the time and almost seamlessly.”
“Imagine you’re sitting across from Sam and you’re learning to level up your leadership skills through that simulation. You’re in VR so it feels emotionally real, and you’re actually able to unlock learning pathways that will allow you to learn things like soft skills.”
Longevity Mindset
Dr. Deepak Srivastava, President, Gladstone Institutes
On hacking the code of life:
“The number one thing I’m most excited about is that we’re finally at this point where we can understand human biology at a depth that we can have the technology to actually control and pick what we’ve understood to be wrong.” — Dr. Deepak Srivastava, President, Gladstone Institutes
“It’s really that combination of access to human cells and the ability to rewrite the code that is going to allow the great breakthroughs in the coming years.”
Dr. Melanie Ott, Senior Investigator, Gladstone Institute of Virology
On being prepared for the viruses of tomorrow:
“If we understand these common lifelines or the common pathways that are hijacked by viruses, we can with one drug potentially treat many viruses and also future viruses that are going to emerge.“ — Dr. Melanie Ott, Gladstone Institute of Virology
“By working together, building alliances, not forgetting what we have learned, and applying what we have in a sensible way I think will help us be prepared for the future.”
Dr. David Sinclair, co-Director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging at Harvard Medical School
On recovering youthful epigenetic information:
“The epigenome that we think gives rise to aging, there’s a backup copy that we can access. We can reboot cells and even in a living animal, a mouse in this case, an old mouse, or a mouse with glaucoma — we could reboot the eye and get the eye to go back in time to be younger. Not just appear younger, but literally be younger. We don’t know if it’s ever going to work or if it’s possible but it gives me a lot of hope.” — Dr. David Sinclair
Dr. George Church, Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School
On BioWeatherMap, a global, grassroots, distributed environmental sensing effort aimed at answering some very basic questions about the geographic and temporal distribution patterns of microbial life. With high-throughput, low cost DNA sequencing and an enlightened public, BioWeatherMap generates a steady stream of samples from many geographic locations to produce high quality data for ongoing discovery and surveillance:
“We can monitor somatic diseases and diseases that change every year, like the flu and COVID-19, seeing when they are resistant to vaccines and drugs, and if there’s an outbreak in the daycare or your flight plans.”
Longevity Mindset
Dr. Daniel Kraft, Founder & Chair, Exponential Medicine
On accelerating healthcare through technology:
“We know we’re supposed to exercise and eat less but we need to change our behaviors. We now need a digital coach; it can be a human coach or an avatar coach. We’re seeing these technologies integrate for diabetes care, mental health care, and the chatbots we’ve been seeing here are going to be part of our norm and match our age and personality.” — Dr. Daniel Kraft, Founder, Exponential Medicine
“We’re in the point where you’ll see the robot often before you see the human. Chatbots can often do the triage and the screening. Mental health is becoming digitized. These platforms are available today and I encouraged all of you to start using this new era of Digiceuticals, new apps, new services, new video games for the brain.”
“Now the big opportunity is to connect the dots. We have too much information to manage in our brains. There are tremendous opportunities to bring these together to find disease early and get anywhere and optimize our health span by integrating this data to a digital twin.”
Dr. Matt Walker, Founder & Director, Center for Human Sleep Science
On the importance of sleep:
“When you fight biology, you normally lose and the way you know you’ve lost is disease and sickness.” — Dr. Matt Walker
“Every stage of sleep is important, there is no one more stage of sleep that is better than the other. So you actually need the full complement.”
Dr. Guillermo Navarette, President, Nutrionce
On the disastrous effects of sugar:
“Let’s make it easy, it’s just one word, diet. If you wanna go more specific, it’s sugar. Sugar is the number one thing that makes you sick, fat, and older than you should be.” — Dr. Guillermo Navarette, President, Nutrionce
“The main problem in nutrition, researchers in nutrition don’t see patients and practitioners that see patients don’t do research.”
Will Weisman & Chris Milk, CEO of Within
On virtual reality in sports:
“[Imagine] a sport where you’re moving your body to music and you don’t feel like you’re in your bedroom anymore. You feel like you’re traveling around the world to the most beautiful places on Earth. You can’t do that with rubber bands attached to your door, you can’t do that with flatscreens on a treadmill, you can really only do that with virtual reality.” — Will Weisman & Chris Milk, CEO, Within
Carolina Reis, CEO of OneSkin
On the role of skin in our overall aging process:
“Skin plays an important role in our overall aging process. So let’s understand this connection better. That’s the mission of OneSkin. We are developing technology to target the skin aging at the molecular level, in order to expand the health of our skin and our body.” — Dr. Caroline Reis, CEO, OneSkin
Dr. Bill Kapp, CEO of Fountain Life
On building a two-sided market for medical care and longevity:
“For somebody who’s looking for health and vitality, our goal is to connect you with the latest tech and ultimately you’ll be able to be able to access that in any place of the United States. All that data then comes up to our cloud where we can then with our team guide you to help you in longevity which is our ultimate goal.” — Dr. Bill Kapp, CEO, Fountain Life
Moonshot Mindset
Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce
On building a moonshot mindset:
“As an entrepreneur you have to make these decisions up front. Number one, what do you want? That’s what you’ve been asking, what is your goal, what is your moonshot, what is your vision, what is your idea. Number two, what is important about it? What are the pioneering values? We’ve seen lots of entrepreneurs have different kinds of values, don’t we?” — Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce
“You want to change the world? You want to have a non-profit agenda? Business is the greatest platform for change. You want to change the world? Use your business. And by the way, what’s the platform to manage your business? You. It’s not two worlds, it’s not two executives, it’s not two people.”
“You have to make choices as an entrepreneur. You can’t just say everything is important because when everything is important nothing is important.”
Dr. Mary Lou Jepsen, CEO, OpenWater
On transforming medical imaging:
“Breakthroughs in consumer electronics have transformed medical imaging. One of the first steps of that way is by lowering the cost of all medical imaging by 1000x so you can put it in a portable so you can put it in your cell phone.” Dr. Mary Lou Jepsen, CEO, OpenWater
Jeff Wilke, CEO, Amazon Worldwide ConsumerOn working backwards from a press release:
“The team wrote a working-backward document which is the way we describe potential moonshots. We try to write the press release that we would want to reveal to the world on the day that you launch the thing. And then work backward from that press release. We ask all the kinds of questions the press and customers might ask. We put that into a document. We read it, we refine it, we iterate over and over again to get it as crisp as possible.” — Jeff Wilke, CEO, Amazon
“I think you have an operations strategy when you decide where you want the bottleneck to be. If the bottleneck in your business or your operations reveals itself over time, you don’t really have a strategy.”
“We tend to ask the question, given what we’re already doing for customers, what can we add to our offering that they’re gonna like just as much or more. What more can we do for them?”
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