The future, fact-checked.
Every prediction from the Moonshots podcast — extracted, timestamped,
and scored against what actually happened.
289episodes analyzed
2576predictions tracked
16came true
14missed
Latest episode · 2026-08-29
Nvidia's record $96.2B quarter reopens the circular-financing/bubble debate, with Alex Wissner-Gross flagging Nvidia's vendor financing of its own customers as the real 'elephant in the room' while Dave Blundin frames the whole AI economy as a self-contained Alpha-Centauri-style civilization indifferent to the legacy economy. OpenAI's new Jalapeno inference chip and Apple's 512GB-memory Mac Studio both signal the industry fragmenting away from pure Nvidia dependence, even as Nvidia's interconnect (post-Mellanox) becomes the new moat. A Principal Financial Group survey demolishes the AI-jobs-apocalypse narrative (only 4% of SMEs expect AI to cut staff/wages; 52% have added staff), while X's takedown of a 200,000-account Chinese bot farm seeding anti-data-center sentiment collides with Quincy, WA's real data-center-driven poverty turnaround. The panel also covers a first-in-class RAS-inhibitor pancreatic cancer drug nearly doubling median survival, tooth-enamel regeneration, weather-modification drones, lunar manufacturing economics, Tesla's Cyber Cab rollout, and a robotic-intimacy startup, closing on China's new crackdown on AI companion apps for minors.
New predictions on the clock
open Alex Wissner-Gross: The CCP will reverse its stance and embrace AI companions once it recognizes them as a party-control mechanism over youth, rather than continuing to restrict them.
“I think the party decides actually having... a sizable fraction of the youth of China deeply engaged with party deeply controlled AI companions is actually from the party's perspective net helpful not net harmful.”
open Alex Wissner-Gross: At least some US states will legalize AI companionship, including romantic and robotic romantic companionship, even as other states try to ban it.
“My bet is that at least in some places in the US AI companionship including romantic companionship including robotic romantic companionship will be legal.”
open Alex Wissner-Gross: OpenAI will launch its own hyperscaler cloud offering (hosted on its own chips), potentially even hosting rival models like Anthropic's, similar to how Elon Musk's SpaceX hosts others' compute.
“I could imagine a world where say an open AI compute cloud hosts an anthropic model and OpenAI and Anthropic win at the same time.”
open Alex Wissner-Gross: SpaceX/Tesla will merge within the next year or two, giving the combined entity Optimus robot revenue alongside hyperscaler cloud and Dyson swarm business lines.
“I think there is a path to that... one, SpaceX and Tesla merge sometime in the next sometime in the next year or two.”
open Peter Diamandis: Japan, Singapore, and South Korea will follow China's lead in regulating AI companion apps.
“My bet is Japan, Singapore, Korea is going to follow closely.”
open Dave Blundin: OpenAI's inference chip advances mean inference workloads are permanently moving off Nvidia hardware, even as Nvidia retains the training market.
“There's no doubt inference is moving off of Nvidia for sure... this is the first 2x of 100x performance gains.”
Latest verdicts
miss Dave Blundin: Grok 5, built on Nvidia's new GB300 chips with over an order of magnitude more compute, will be released.
“the next thing that comes out, which will be uh I guess Grok 5, uh will have been built on the new GB300s from Nvidia... that'll be out in a few months”
⚖️ As of late August 2026, Grok 5 still had not been released. xAI's original Q1 2026 target slipped to Q2, and Q2 also passed with no launch; the model remains in training on Colossus 2.
partial Peter Diamandis: The OpenAI lawsuit over its conversion from nonprofit to for-profit will go to trial, concurrent with Grok 5's release.
“that's also when when uh the trial uh should go to court if it's on schedule”
⚖️ The Musk v. OpenAI/Altman trial did go to trial on schedule (began April 28, 2026 in Oakland; jury ruled for OpenAI in May 2026 on statute-of-limitations grounds), matching the spring 2026 timing. But the 'concurrent with Grok 5' framing missed since Grok 5 itself was not released.
hit Peter Diamandis: Unitree will go public.
“This is another public company that's going to be going public this year, Unitree”
⚖️ Unitree Robotics IPO'd on Shanghai's STAR Market on August 19, 2026, raising ~$904M; shares closed up 460% on debut, valuing the company at roughly $50B.
hit NASA / Artemis program (clip): Artemis 2 (crewed lunar flyby carrying astronauts Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy — the first woman to travel near-lunar space) will roll out within about two weeks and launch within a window opening as early as February 6, 2026 and extending through April.
“the Artemis 2 launch window opens as early as February 6th... the window extends across multiple opportunities through April”
⚖️ Artemis 2 launched April 1, 2026 from Kennedy Space Center with Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen aboard, after slipping from the February/March opportunities but landing inside the stated window.
hit Peter Diamandis: SpaceX will go public, partly on the strength of plans to launch large-scale orbital compute.
“at the end of the day, it's going to go public this year”
⚖️ SpaceX IPO'd on Nasdaq (ticker SPCX) on June 12, 2026, the largest IPO in history at roughly a $1.75T valuation, with orbital data-center ambitions cited as part of the pitch.
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