The Future Is Going to Be Great

The Next Big Idea

Next Big Idea Club

Education, Social Sciences, Science, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 9 October 2025

⏱️ 92 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dave Blundin has co-founded 23 companies, co-hosts the Moonshots podcast, runs the VC firm Link Ventures, teaches at MIT, and has been building neural networks since the 1980s. His take: “[AI is] under-hyped. It's absolutely going to change the world in the next couple of years more than any change in human history. There's nothing even vaguely comparable to it.” — (7:37) “Stop sleeping. Rush to everything you do.” (15:16) Why he started building neural nets at MIT in the 1980s (16:19) Should you finish college or start a business? (20:38) Why best friends are the best co-founders (25:00) San Francisco is still king, but Boston is AI startup central (28:06) “The chip shortage is going to be incredibly bad.” (34:26) The AI energy shortage (36:32) Are we in an AI bubble? (55:44) The case for human immortality before 2050 (1:02:00) Advice for first-time founders (and second-time, and 23rd-time) — 💿 Catch up on our other AI episodes with this Spotify playlist 🔗 Follow Rufus on ⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠ 📖 Subscribe to our daily newsletter, ⁠⁠Book of the Day⁠⁠ ✉️ Send us an email: ⁠⁠podcast@nextbigideaclub.com⁠⁠

Transcript

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0:00.0	Ready to do it?
0:01.1	Yeah, let's go for it.
0:02.6	I'm Rufus Griscombe, and I'm Caleb Bissinger, and this is the next big idea.
0:07.7	Today, are we living in an AI bubble?
0:11.3	Or are these the last few years before superintelligence makes the world unrecognizable?
0:34.7	Yeah. Okay, so I want to push back just a little bit on what you just said, Rufus.
0:36.0	Please help yourself.
0:41.0	So I actually think it's possible that both of those things may be true, right?
0:49.8	I think right now there are people throwing good money at terrible ideas just because the pitch deck says AI a lot.
0:51.3	And that's going to end badly.
1:00.0	But I also think it is probably true that this technology is going to change the world.
1:07.2	I love your multisyllabic, probably. And that's we're going to unpack that. We're going to unpack that in this episode.
1:11.5	But you make a good point. Both things could be true. We could have a stock market bubble and correction followed by an intelligence explosion. Yeah, though I also think we should
1:17.8	say that like that intelligence explosion, even that's not guaranteed, right? I mean,
1:22.4	there are a lot of smart people who are not convinced that we know how to build superintelligence.
1:28.7	You know, for instance,
1:32.7	our buddy Cal Newport, who, unlike the two of us, actually has a PhD in computer science,
1:37.3	he wrote this really interesting piece in The New Yorker over the summer where he argues, essentially,
1:46.0	AI might not get any better than it is today. I would be very happy with that outcome personally, but I think it's unlikely.
1:51.2	As impressed as I am by Cal, Newport, one of my favorite of our guests and thinkers,
1:53.4	I'm not with him on this one.
1:56.4	Yeah, well, you're also AI Utopia Pilled.
	...

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