Asked what comes after large language models, Alex told a caller on Moonshots with Peter Diamandis to separate two things people usually merge: the job of predicting the next piece of text, which he thinks has "effectively infinite longevity," and the transformer machinery doing it, which he says is already being swapped out part by part. Dave added his own forecast that the chips underneath will move to photonics within 18 months to two years.
On Moonshots #288, a 4 a.m. chart about DeepSeek's new V4.1-Flash model sent the panel from cache statistics to the shopping list for an AI data center. DeepSeek says the model's lookup memory needs a quarter of the expensive high-bandwidth memory and an eighth of the SSD cache storage of its previous generation. The panel's argument was about what that does to a buildout in which, by one panelist's estimate, 40% of American capital spending goes to that one component.
World Labs released Atlas, a model that generates video along a camera path the user designs and rebuilds scenes from a handful of photographs. Its own garden example shows the seam: one photo leaves the surrounding buildings invented, while more photos pin them down. On Moonshots, the panel worked through what Gaussian splats are and why the approach might matter for robots, games and planning a vacation.
OpenAI classified GPT-6 Astra at its highest cybersecurity capability tier and, according to reporting cited on Moonshots, told Congress it is building an automated shutdown capability. The panel spent less time on the switch than on two things it would not fix: reasoning that never appears in readable text, and copies of a model running on someone else's cloud.
OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra nearly saturates the interactive ARC-AGI-3 benchmark and leads Epoch AI's composite capability index, yet sits third on Artificial Analysis's suite, behind Claude Fable 5.1 and Muse Spark. On Moonshots EP #286, the panel works through what each ruler measures — and argues that Astra's real target was doing tasks with fewer output tokens, so a model can drive a desktop at conversational speed.
On Moonshots, Peter Diamandis reported back from meetings with SK hynix and Solidigm leadership with a claim that memory, not compute, now limits AI. The panel argued that a changed workload and a supplier industry scarred by past busts are pushing prices up faster than factories can respond — and that the fix may be new chip designs, including etching model weights into silicon, rather than simply paying more.
BDH-CQ’s authors report solving 118 of 400 public ARC-AGI-1 tasks at an estimated inference cost of $0.00070 per task, with up to two candidate answers. On Moonshots, Emad Mostaque welcomed architectural experimentation; panelist Alex questioned whether this design offered progress beyond a specialized benchmark.