Elon Musk
Appearances
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, I mean, I have a sort of, you know, in sort of doing a sensible deregulation and... reduction in the size of government is just be very public about it, and say which of these rules, if the public is really excited about a rule and wants to keep it, we'll just keep it. And here's the thing about the rules, if the rule turns out to be bad, we'll just put it right back.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Okay, and then problem solved. It's easy to add rules, but we don't actually have a process for getting rid of them. That's the issue. There's no garbage collection for rules.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, round of numbers. It's pretty nutty. There is like this weird movement to quell free speech kind of around the world. And this is something we should be very concerned about. You know, you have to ask, like, why was the First Amendment like a high priority? It was like number one. It's because... People came from countries where if you spoke freely, you would be imprisoned or killed.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
So maybe explain, because this is the first time. Yeah, there were like so many articles like that this is, Coder is dead forever. There's no way it could possibly even,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
They're really triggered, but... Yeah, I mean, if you like being condemned repeatedly, then, you know, for reasons that make no sense, then Threads is the way to go.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, I mean, I think we'd need to do more than that, I think.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, look, I think we've, you know, If Trump wins, and obviously I suspect there are people with mixed feelings about whether that should happen, but we do have an opportunity to do kind of a once-in-a-lifetime deregulation and reduction in the size of government. Because the other thing, besides the regulations, America's also going bankrupt extremely quickly.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
and everyone seems to be sort of whistling past the graveyard on this one.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Well, you know, The Defense Department budget is a very big budget, okay? It's a trillion dollars a year, DOD, Intel, it's a trillion dollars. And interest payments on the national debt just exceeded the Defense Department budget. They're over a trillion dollars a year, just in interest and rising.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
We're adding a trillion dollars to our debt, which our kids and grandkids are gonna have to pay somehow, every three months. And then soon it's gonna be every two months, and then every month. And then the only thing we'll be able to pay is interest. It's just like a person at scale that has racked up too much credit card debt, And this does not have a good ending.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And so we have to reduce the spending.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Well, I do think it's sort of... you know, it's a false dichotomy. It's not like no government spending is gonna happen. You really have to say like, is it the right level? And just remember that, Any given person, if they are doing things in a less efficient organization versus a more efficient organization, their contribution to the economy, their net output of goods and services will reduce.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And they were like, well, we'd like to not have that here. Because that was terrible. And actually, you know, there's a lot of places in the world right now, if you're critical of the government, you get imprisoned or killed.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I mean, you've got a couple of clear examples between East Germany and West Germany, North Korea and South Korea. I mean, North Korea, they're starving. South Korea, it's like amazing. It's the future.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, it's night and day. And so in North Korea, you've got 100% government. In South Korea, you've got probably, I don't know, 40% government. It's not zero. And yet you've got a standard of living that is probably 10 times higher in South Korea. At least. At least, exactly. And then East and West Germany. In West Germany, just thinking in terms of cars, you had BMW, Porsche, Audi, Mercedes.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And East Germany, which is a random line on a map, The only car you could get was a Trabant, which is basically a lawnmower with a shell on it. And it was extremely unsafe. There was a 20-year wait. So you put your kid on the list as soon as they're conceived. And even then, only, I think, a quarter of people maybe got this lousy car.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And so that's just an interesting example of basically the same people, different operating system. And it's not like West Germany with some you know, a capitalist heaven. It was, it's quite socialist actually. So when you look, you know, probably it was half government in West Germany and 100% government in East Germany. And again, sort of a five,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I'd like to call it at least a 5 to 10x standard of living difference, and even qualitatively, vastly better. And it's obviously, you know, sometimes people have these, amazingly in this modern era, this debate as to which system is better. Well, I'll tell you which system is better. The one that doesn't need to build the wall to keep people in, okay?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
You have to build a barrier to keep people in. That is the bad system. It wasn't West Berlin that built the wall. Okay. They were like, you know, anyone who wants to flee West Berlin, go ahead.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
So, you know, and if you look at sort of the flux of boats from Cuba, there's a large number of boats from Cuba. And there's a bunch of free boats that anyone can take to go back to Cuba. Plenty of seats. There's like, hey, wow, an abandoned boat. I could use this boat to go to Cuba where they have communism. Awesome.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, we'd like to not have that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And yet nobody picks up those boats and does it. Amazing. So... He's given this a lot of thought.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
If we cut government spending in half, jobs will be created fast enough to make up for... Right, just to count... Obviously, I'm not suggesting that people have immediately tossed out with no severance and now can't pay their mortgage. Then you see some reasonable off-ramp where...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, so a reasonable off-ramp where they're still receiving money but have, I don't know, a year or two to find jobs in the private sector, which they will find, and then they will be in a different operating system. Again, you can see the difference. East Germany was incorporated into West Germany. Living standards in East Germany rose dramatically.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Can I add to that? I suspect this is a receptive audience to that message.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I mean, you know, there's that old phrase, go postal. I mean, it's like they might.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I mean, I'm going to need a lot of security details, guys.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I mean, the sheer number of disgruntled workers, former government employees is quite a scary number. I mean, I might not make it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And I like your idea of an offering. But the thing is that if it's not done, like if you have a once-in-a-lifetime or once-in-a-generation opportunity and you don't take serious action and then... You have four years to get it done, and if it doesn't get done, then... How serious is Trump about this?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, he is very serious about it. Got it. No, I think actually the reality is that if we get rid of nonsense regulations and shift people from the government sector to the private sector, we will have immense prosperity, and I think we will have a golden age in this country. And it'll be fantastic. Thank you.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah. In fact, there's a very exciting launch that is maybe happening tonight. So if the weather is holding up, then I'm going to leave here, head to Cape Canaveral. for the Polaris Dawn mission, which is a private mission, so funded by Jared Isaacman, and he's an awesome guy. And this will be the first time, the first commercial spacewalk, and it'll be at the highest altitude since Apollo.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
So it's the furthest from Earth that anyone's gone. Yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I sure hope so, man. No pressure. Yeah, you know, astronaut safety is, man, if I had all the wishes I could save up, that would be the one to put on. So, you know, space is dangerous. So, the... Yeah, the next milestone after that would be the next flight of Starship. The next flight of Starship is ready to fly. We are waiting for regulatory approval.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
It really should not be possible to build a giant rocket faster than paper can move from one desk to another.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, they accidentally tell a joke and I was like, oh no, this is going to take a long time. But yeah, Zootopia, you know, the funny thing is like, so I went to the DMV about, I don't know, a year later after Zootopia, and to get my license renewal, and the guy, in an exercise of incredible self-awareness, had the sloth from Zootopia in his cube, and he was actually Swift.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
No, I mean, sometimes people think the, The government is more competent than it is. I'm not saying that there aren't competent people in the government, they're just in an operating system that is inefficient.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Once you move them to a more efficient operating system, their output is dramatically greater, as we've seen when East Germany was reintegrated with West Germany, and the same people were vastly more prosperous, with a basically half-capitalist operating system. But I mean, for a lot of people, like the maybe most direct experience with the government is the DMV.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And then the important thing to remember is that the government is the DMV at scale. Right. That's the government. Got the mental picture. How much do you want to scale it?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
It's like you like to you like to Facebook posts throw them in the prison. Yeah People got an actual, you know prison for for like like obscure comments on social media not even shitposting like not even Like what is the
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I'm not saying say you're watched by these, but these... But based on our current progress with Starship, we were able to successfully reach Oval of Velocity twice. We were able to achieve soft landings of the booster and the ship in water. And that's despite the ship having half its flaps cooked off. You can see the video on the X platform. It's quite exciting.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
We think we'll be able to launch reliably and repeatedly and quite quickly. The fundamental holy grail breakthrough for rocketry, the fundamental breakthrough that is needed for life to become multi-planetary is a rapidly reusable, reliable rocket. With a pirate somehow. Throw a pirate in there.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Starship is the first rocket design where success is one of the possible outcomes with full reusability. So for any given project, you have to say, this is the circle to write Venn diagrams. Here's a circle, and it is success, the success dot in the circle, is success in the set of possible outcomes.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
That sounds pretty obvious, but there are often projects where that success is not in the set of possible outcomes. And so Starship, Not only is full reusability in the set of possible outcomes, it is being proven with each launch. And I'm confident we'll succeed. It's simply a matter of time. And if we can get some improvement in the speed of regulation, we could actually move a lot faster. So...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
That would be very helpful. And in fact, if something isn't done about reducing regulation and sort of speeding up approvals, and to be clear, I'm not talking about anything unsafe. It's simply the processing of the safe thing can be done as fast as the rocket is built, not slower.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
then we could become a space-faring civilization and a multi-planet species and be out there among the stars in the future. It's incredibly important that we have things that we find inspiring, that you look to the future and say the future is going to be better than the past. Things to look forward to. Kids are a good... a good way to assess this. Like, what are kids fired up about?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And if you could say, you know, you could be an astronaut on Mars. You could maybe one day go beyond the solar system. We could make Star Trek, Starfleet Academy real. That is an exciting future. That is inspiring. You know, I mean, you need things that move your heart. Right.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Life can't just be about solving one miserable problem after another. There's got to be things that you look forward to as well.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I've always wondered if like... Rocket technology is considered advanced weapons technology, so we can't just go do it, you know... In another country. Yes.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I wish people were trying to steal it. So, no one's trying to steal it. It's just too... It's too crazy, basically.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Well, I mean, I think Boeing is a company that is, they actually do so much business with the government, they have sort of impedance match to the government. So they're like basically one notch away from the government. They're not far from the government from an efficiency standpoint because they derive so much of their revenue from the government.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And a lot of people think, well, SpaceX is super dependent on the government. And actually, no, most of our revenue is commercial. So... And there's been, I think, at least up until perhaps recently, because they have a new CEO who actually shows up in the factory. And the CEO before that I think had a degree in accounting and never went to the factory and didn't know how airplanes flew.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Um, so I think if you are in charge of a company that makes airplanes fly and a spacecraft go to orbit, then it can't be a total mystery as to how they work. So, you know, I'm like, sure, if somebody's running Coke or Pepsi and they're great at marketing or whatever, that's fine, because it's not a sort of technology-dependent business.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Well, I guess we are trying to figure out is there some reasonable solution in Brazil. You know, the concern, I mean, I want to just make sure that this is framed correctly. And, you know, funny memes aside, the nature of the concern was that, at least at XCorp, we had the perception that we were being asked to do things that violated Brazilian law.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Or if they're running financial consulting in their degrees in accounting, that makes sense. But I think if you're the cavalry captain, you should know how to ride a horse.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah. It's like it's disconcerting if the cavalry captain just falls off the horse. He's fucking inspired the team. I'm sorry. I'm scared of horses. Gets on backwards. I'm like, oops.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I mean, I think the spending on AI probably runs ahead of, I mean, it does run ahead of the revenue right now. There's no question about that. But the rate of improvement of AI is faster than any technology I've ever seen by far. And it's, I mean, for example, the Turing test used to be a thing.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
now your basic open source, random LLM, you're writing on a frigging Raspberry Pi probably could, you know, beat the Turing test. So there's, I think actually, the good future of AI is one of immense prosperity where there is, an age of abundance, no shortage of goods and services.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Everyone can have whatever they want, except for things we artificially define to be scarce, like some special artwork. But anything that is a manufactured good or provided service will, I think, with the advent of AI plus robotics, that the cost of goods and services will be, trend to zero, I'm not saying it'll be actually zero, but it'll be, everyone will be able to have anything they want.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
That's the good future. Of course, in my view, that's probably 80% likely, so look on the bright side. Only 20%, 20% probability of annihilation, nothing. Is the 20%, what does that look like? I mean, frankly, I do have to go engage in some degree of deliberate suspension of disbelief with respect to AI in order to sleep well.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And even then, because I think the actual issue, the most likely issue is like, well, how do we find meaning in a world where AI can do everything we can do a bit better? That is perhaps the bigger challenge. At this point, I know more and more people who are retired and they seem to enjoy that life.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
But I think that maybe there'll be some crisis of meaning because the computer can do everything you can do but better. So maybe that'll be a challenge. But really, you need the sort of end effectors. be autonomous cars and you need the sort of humanoid robots or general purpose robots. But once you have general purpose humanoid robots and autonomous vehicles, really you can build anything.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And I think that there's no actual limit to the size of the economy. I mean, there's obviously the mass of Earth, like that would be one limit. But the economy is really just the average productivity per person times number of people. That's the economy. And if you've got humanoid robots that can do, where there's no real limit on the number of humanoid robots,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
and they can operate very intelligently, then there's no actual limit to the economy. There's no meaningful limit to the economy.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
So obviously we cannot as an American company impose American laws and values on other countries that, you know, we wouldn't get very far if we did that. But we do, you know, think that if a country's laws are a particular way, and we're being asked to, we think we're being asked to break them, and be silent about it, then obviously that is no good.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Is that right? It's the most powerful supercomputer of any kind.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, I mean, the Tesla problem is different from the... you know, the sort of LLM problem. The nature of the intelligence actually is actually, and what matters in the AI is different to the point you just made, which is that in Tesla's case, the context length is very long. So we've got gigabytes of context. Gigabyte context windows, yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, you've got, you know, sort of... I was just bringing it up. Kind of billions of tokens of context. Nutty amount of context because you've got seven cameras, and if you've got several, you know, let's say you've got a minute of several high-def cameras, then that's gigabytes. So you need to compress.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
So the Tesla problem is you've got to compress a gigantic context into the pixels that actually matter, and you know, and condense that over a time, so you've got to, in both the time dimension and the space dimension, you've got to compress the pixels in space and the pixels in time, and then have that inference done on a tiny computer, relatively speaking, a small one, like a few hundred watts.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
It's a Tesla-designed AI inference computer, which is probably still the best. There isn't a better thing we could buy from suppliers. So the Tesla-designed AI inference computer that's in the cars is better than anything we could buy from any supplier. Just by the way, that's kind of a... The Tesla AI chip team is extremely good.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah. No, the Tesla chip design team is extremely good.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
It's not intentionally per se, but... Yeah, I mean, the... There's training and inference, and we do have those two projects at Tesla. We've got Dojo, which is the training computer, and then our inference chip, which is in every car, inference computer. At Dojo, we've only had Dojo 1. Dojo 2, we should have Dojo 2 in volume towards the end of next year.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And that will be, we think, sort of comparable to sort of a B200 type system, a training system. And, you know, so I guess there's some potential for that to be used as a service. Dojo is just kind of like... I mean, I guess I have like some... improved confidence in Dojo, but I think we won't really know how good Dojo is until probably version three.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
It usually takes three major iterations on a technology for it to be excellent, and we'll only have the second major iteration next year. The third iteration, I don't know, maybe late 2020. 26 or something like that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
you know, anything made in sufficient volume will asymptotically approach the cost of its materials. So now there's, I should say, some things are constrained by the cost of intellectual property and like paying for patents and stuff. So a lot of, you know, what's in a chip is like paying royalties and depreciation of the chip fab. But the actual marginal cost of the chips is very low.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
So I just want to be clear, sometimes it comes across as Elon's trying to just be a crazy, whatever, billionaire, and demand outrageous things from other countries. you know, while that is true.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
So Optimus obviously is a humanoid robot. It weighs much less and is much smaller than a car. So you could expect that in high volume, and I'd say that you also probably need three production versions of Optimus. So you need to refine the design at least three major times, and then you need to scale production to sort of the million unit plus per year level.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And I think at that point, the cost, the labor and materials on Optimus is probably not much more than $10,000.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Basically, think of it like, Optimus will cost less than a small car.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
So at scale volume with three major iterations of technology, and so if a small car you know, costs $25,000, you know, it's probably like, I don't know, $20,000 for an Optimus, for a humanoid robot that can be your buddy, like a combination of R2-D2 and C-3PO, but better.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, I mean... Honestly, I think people are going to get really attached to their humanoid robot because, I mean, like you look at sort of what Star Wars is like, R2-D2 and C-3PO, I love those guys. Yeah. You know, they're awesome. and their personality, and I mean, all R2 could do is just beep at you. You couldn't speak English. Maybe C3PO to translate the beeps.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I would say major iterations are less than two years, so it's probably on the order of five years. maybe six to get to a million units a year.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, I think the number of robots will vastly exceed the number of humans. Vastly, yeah. Vastly exceed. I mean, you have to say, who would not want their robot buddy? Everyone wants a robot buddy. Totally. You know, it's just like, especially if it can, you know, it can take care of your, take your dog for a walk, it could, you know,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
In addition, there are other things that I think are, you know, valid, which is like, we obviously can't, you know, I think any given thing that we do at XCorp, we've gotta be able to explain in light of day and not feel that it was dishonorable or, you know, We did the wrong thing. That's the nature of the concern.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
mow the lawn, it could watch your kids, it could teach your kids, it could... But we could also send it to Mars. Yeah, absolutely.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Mars is already a robot planet. There's a whole bunch of robots, like rovers and helicopters. It's only robots. Yeah, it's only robots. So yeah, the... No, I think the sort of useful humanoid robot opportunity is the single biggest opportunity ever. Because if you assume like, I mean, the ratio of humanoid robots to humans is going to be at least two to one, maybe three to one.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Because everybody will want one, and then there'll be a bunch of robots that you don't see that are making goods and services.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I mean, we are a generalized robot. Yeah, we're a generalized non-robot. We're just made of meat, you know?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, I mean, I'm operating my meat puppet, you know? So, yeah, we are actually, and by the way, it turns out like as we're designing Optimus, we sort of learn more and more about why humans are shaped the way they're shaped. And why we have five fingers and why your little finger is smaller than your index finger.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Obviously why you have opposable thumbs, but also why, for example, the muscles, the major muscles that operate your hand are actually in your forearm. and your fingers are primarily operated. The muscles that actuate your fingers are located, the vast majority of your finger strength is actually coming from your forearm. And your fingers are being operated by tendons, little strings.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And so the current version of the Optimus hand has the actuators in the hand. and has only 11 degrees of freedom. So it doesn't have all the degrees of freedom of human hand, which has, depending on how you count it, roughly 25 degrees of freedom. And it's also not strong enough in certain ways because the actuators have to fit in the hand.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
So the next generation Optimus hand, which we have in prototype form, the actuators have moved to the forearm, just like a human, and they operate the fingers through cables, just like the human hand. And the next generation hand has 22 degrees of freedom, which we think is enough to do almost anything that a human can do.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
It was a little terrorizing on the first couple of days, but... Yeah, I was a bit worried at the beginning there because, frankly, nothing was funny.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Rough. Yeah, so, I mean...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I mean, how much time do we have here?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
You really wanna hear that? I mean.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
All right, here we go, guys. All right, so one of the things that I think everyone's been sort of wondering this whole time is, is Saturday Night Live actually live? Like live. Live, live, live. Or do they have like a delay or like just in case, you know, there's a wardrobe malfunction or something like that. Is it like a, you know, five second delay? What's really going on?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
But there's a way to test this.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
There's a way to test this, which is we don't tell them what's going on. I walk on and say, this is the script I'll throw on the ground. We're gonna find out tonight, right now, if Saturday Night Live is actually live. And the way that we're going to do this is I'm going to take my cock out.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And if you don't, it's been a lie.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
We're gonna bust them right now.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, yeah, so we're pitching this. On Zoom. Yeah, we're pitching this on Zoom on like a Monday. It's COVID. Yeah, we're like kind of hungover from the weekend and we're like pitching this at noon. We're in Miami, yeah. And it's, you know, Jason's on. And Mike, you know, my friends who I think are sort of quite funny, you know, Jason's quite funny.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
We actually are in discussions with the judicial authorities in Brazil to try to run this to ground. What's actually going on? If we're being asked to break the law Brazilian law, then that obviously should not sit well with the Brazilian judiciary. And if we're not and we're mistaken, we'd like to understand how we're mistaken. I think that's a pretty reasonable position.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I think Jason's the closest thing to Cartman that exists in real life.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And my friend Mike's pretty funny too. So we come in just like guns blazing with ideas. And we didn't realize actually that's not how it works. That's normally like actors and they just get told what to do. I'm like, oh, you mean we can't just like... do funny things that we thought of. What?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Is our mic on? And they're like, we hear you. And then after a long silence, Mike just says the word, crickets. And they're not laughing. Not even a chuckle. I'm like, what's going on here?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
So Elon says... So then I'm like... So I say, like, I'm going to reach down... Into my pants. Into my pants. And I stick my hand in my pants. And I'm going to pull my cock out. And I tell this to the audience. And the audience is going to be like, what? Right. And? And then I pull out a baby rooster. You know?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And it's like, okay, this is kind of PG. It's not that bad. This is my tiny cock. And... And it's like, what do you think? And do you think it's an ice cock? I mean, I like it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah. I don't mean to disappoint you, Kate, but yeah. But I hope you like it anyway. But Kate's got to come out with her cat, okay?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And Kate says... You can see where this is going. And I say, wow, that's a nice pussy you've got there, Kate. Wow, that's amazing. It looks a little wet. Was it raining outside? No. Do you mind if I stroke your pussy? Is that cool? It's like, oh, no, Elon, actually, can I hold your cock? Of course, Kate, you definitely hold my cock. And then, you know, we exchange.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And I think just the audio version of this is pretty good. Right. And, you know, it's just like, wow, I really like stroking your cock. And I was like...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
A lot of moms in the audience. And I'm like, well, that's a good point.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
It might be a bit uncomfortable for all the moms in the audience. Maybe, I don't know. I don't know. Maybe they'll dig it. Maybe they'll like it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I mean, there's a bunch of things that I said that were just not on the script. They have these cue cards for what you're supposed to say, and I just didn't say it. I just went off the rails.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Oh, yeah. I wanted to do the Doge father, like you sort of redo that scene from The Godfather. I mean, you kind of need the music to cue things up.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Listen, you ask for Doge. And I give you Bitcoin, but you want Doge. Exactly. You really got to set the mood. You got to have a tuxedo. And this whole concept of the Doge father.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
We'll save the other eight.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Oh, yeah, yeah. There have been three articles, and I think in the past three weeks. Robert Reich. But it wasn't just him. It was three different articles.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Calling for me to be imprisoned. In the guardian, you know. Guardian of what?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Guardian of, I don't know. Authoritarianism?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
if somebody's sort of trying to push a false premise on the world, then that premise can be undermined with public dialogue, then they will be opposed to public dialogue on that premise because they wish that false premise to prevail. So that's, I think, the issue there is if they don't like the truth, then we want to suppress it. Now, the sort of
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
But what we're trying to do with XCorp is, I distinguish that from my son, who's also called X. You have parental goals, and then you have goals for the company. Everything's just called X, basically. It's a very difficult disambiguation.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, it's X everything. So what we're trying to do is simply adhere to the... you know, the laws in a country. So if something is illegal in the United States or if it's illegal in, you know, Europe Brazil or wherever it might be, then we will take it down and we'll suspend the account because we're not there to make the laws. But if speech is not illegal, then what are we doing?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Okay, now we're injecting ourselves in as a censor and where does it stop and who decides? And where does that path lead? I think it leads to a bad place. If the people in a country want the laws to be different, they should make the laws different. But otherwise, we're gonna obey the law in each jurisdiction.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
It's not more complicated than that. We're not trying to fill out the law. I'm going to be clear about that. We're trying to adhere to the law. And if the laws change, we will change. And if the laws don't change, we won't. We're just literally trying to adhere to the law.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah. I mean, it's rarely a slow week. I mean, in the world as well.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yes, it's very straightforward. And if somebody thinks we're not adhering to the law, well, they can file a lawsuit. Bingo.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Well, it is illegal. It is illegal in those countries.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
No, in some cases, it is just obviously illegal. Like, you don't need to file a lawsuit for... if something is just unequivocally illegal, we can literally read the law, this violates the law, anyone can see that. You don't need, if somebody is stealing, you don't need, let me check the law on that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yes, yes. I posted that one. Tell us about it. I made it using Grok, the Grok image generator. And I posted it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I mean, any given week, it just seems like the thing's getting out of here.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I think with great difficulty, but it's been a long time since there was a serious effort to reduce the size of government and to remove absurd regulations. And the last time there was a really concerted effort on that front was Reagan in the early 80s. We're 40 years away from a serious effort to remove regulations that don't serve the greater good and reduce the size of government.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And I think it's just if we don't do that, then what's happening is that we get regulations and laws accumulating every year until eventually everything's illegal. And that's why we can't get major infrastructure projects done in the United States.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Like if you look at the absurdity of the California high-speed rail, I think they spent $7 billion and have a 1,600-foot segment that doesn't actually have rail in it. I mean, your tax dollars at work, I mean.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
That's an expensive 1,600 feet of concrete, you know? And I mean, I think it's like, you know, I realize sometimes I'm perhaps a little optimistic with schedules, but, you know. I mean, I wouldn't be doing the things I'm doing if I was, you know, not an optimist. But at the current trend, California high speed rail might finish sometime next century. Maybe, but probably not.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I mean... Well, if we are in some alien Netflix series, I think the ratings are high.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah, exactly. AI do everything at that point. I think you really think of the United States, and many countries, it's arguably worse than the EU, as being like Gulliver tied down by a million little strings. And like any one given regulation is not that bad, but you've got a million of them, or millions actually. And then eventually you just can't get anything done.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And this is a massive tax on the consumer, on the people. It's just they don't realize that there's this massive tax in the form of irrational regulations. I'll give you a recent example that is just insane. SpaceX was fined by the EPA $140,000 for, they claimed, dumping potable water on the ground, drinking water. And we're like, this is at Starbase.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And we're like, we're in a tropical thunderstorm region. That stuff comes from the sky all the time. And... And there was no actual harm done. It was just water to cool the launch pad during liftoff. And there's zero harm done. And they're like, they agree, yes, there's zero harm done. And we're like, okay, so there's no harm done. And you want us to pay $140,000 fine?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
It's like, yes, because you didn't have a permit. Okay. We didn't know there was a permit needed for zero harm, fresh water being on the ground in a place that where fresh water falls from the sky all the time.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Yeah. I mean, sometimes it rains so much the roads are flooded. So we're like, you know, how does this make any sense?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And then they were like, well, we're not going to process any more of your applications for launch, for Starship launch, unless you pay this $140,000. So they just ransomed us. And we're like, okay, so we paid $140,000. But it's like, this is no good. I mean, at this rate, we're never going to get to Mars.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
And just to give you a sense of size, the Tesla Gigafactory in China is three times the size of the Pentagon.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
No, there were bigger buildings, but the Pentagon's a pretty big one.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
In units of Pentagon, it's like three.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
I think it's like 44 billion, something like that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon Musk | All-In Summit 2024
Got it. In 14 months. Just the regulatory approvals in California would have taken two years. So that's the issue.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Then take the concept you're trying to convey, compress that into a small number of syllables, speak them, and hope that the other person decompresses them into a conceptual structure that is as close to what you have in your mind as possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, very lossy compression and decompression. And a lot of what your neurons are doing is distilling the concepts down to a small number of symbols, of say, syllables that I'm speaking, or keystrokes, whatever the case may be. So that's a lot of what your brain computation is doing. Now, there is an argument that that's actually
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
a healthy thing to do or a helpful thing to do because as you try to compress complex concepts, you're perhaps forced to distill what is most essential in those concepts as opposed to just all the fluff. So in the process of compression, you distill things down to what matters the most because you can only say a few things. So that is perhaps helpful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
We'll probably get, if our data rate increases, it's highly probable that we'll become far more verbose. Just like your computer, you know, when computers had like, my first computer had 8K of RAM, you know, so you really thought about every byte. And, you know, now you've got computers with many gigabytes of RAM.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So, you know, if you want to do an iPhone app that just says, hello world, it's probably, I don't know, several megabytes minimum, a bunch of fluff. But nonetheless, we still prefer to have the computer with more memory and more compute. So the long-term aspiration of Neuralink is to improve the AI-human symbiosis by increasing the bandwidth of the communication.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Because in the most benign scenario of AI, you have to consider that the AI is simply going to get bored waiting for you to spit out a few words. I mean, if the AI can communicate at terabits per second and you're communicating at bits per second, it's like talking to a tree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I think there is some argument for humans as a source of will. Will. Will, yeah. Source of will or purpose. So if you consider the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
human mind as being essentially the there's the primitive limbic elements which basically even like reptiles have and there's the cortex that's the thinking and planning part of the brain now the cortex is much smarter than the limbic system and yet is largely in service to the limbic system it's trying to make the limbic system happy i mean the sheer amount of compute that's gone into people trying to get laid is insane without the without actually
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
seeking procreation they're just literally trying to do this sort of simple motion and they get a kick out of it yeah so this uh simple which in the abstract rather absurd motion which is sex uh the cortex is putting a massive amount of compute into trying to figure out how to do that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, yeah. There's no purpose to most sex except hedonistic. You know, it's just sort of joy or whatever. Dopamine release. Now, once in a while, it's procreation. But for humans, it's mostly... Modern humans, it's mostly recreational. And so... So your cortex, much smarter than your limbic system, is trying to make the limbic system happy because the limbic system wants to have sex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Or wants some tasty food, or whatever the case may be. And then that is then further augmented by the tertiary system, which is your phone, your laptop, iPad, whatever, or your computing stuff. That's your tertiary layer. So you're actually already a cyborg. You have this tertiary compute layer, which is in the form of your computer with all the applications, all your compute devices.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And so in the getting laid front, there's actually a massive amount of digital compute also trying to get laid. you know, with like Tinder and whatever, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah. I mean, there's like gigawatts of compute going into getting laid, of digital compute. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Pretty much. Well, it's just one of the things, certainly, yeah. Yeah. But what I'm saying is that, yes, is there a use for humans... Well, there's this fundamental question of what's the meaning of life? Why do anything at all?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And so if our simple limbic system provides a source of will to do something that then goes to our cortex, that then goes to our, you know, tertiary compute layer, then, you know, I don't know, it might actually be that the AI in a benign scenario is simply trying to make the human limbic system happy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah. I mean, there are these sort of fairly cerebral kind of higher level goals. I mean, for me, it's like, what's the meaning of life or understanding the nature of the universe is of great interest to me and hopefully to the AI. And that's the, That's the mission of XAI and Grok is understand the universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, assuming that they're not... I mean, they're solving basic... neurological issues that people have, you know, if they've got damaged neurons in their spinal cord or neck, or, you know, as is the case with our first two patients, then, you know, this, obviously, the first order of business is solving fundamental neuron damage in the spinal cord, neck or in the brain itself. So
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Our second product is called Blindsight, which is to enable people who are completely blind, lost both eyes or optic nerve or just can't see at all to be able to see by directly triggering the neurons in the visual cortex. So we're just starting at the basics here. This is like the simple stuff. uh, relatively speaking is, uh, solving, um, neuron damage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Um, you know, it can also solve, uh, I think probably schizophrenia, you know, um, if people have seizures of some kind, it probably solve that. Um, it could help with memory there. So there's like a kind of a, a tech tree, if you will, like you got the basics. Um, You need literacy before you can have Lord of the Rings. Got it. Do you have letters and alphabet? Okay, great. Words?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Eventually you get sagas. I think there may be some things to worry about in the future, but the first several years are really just solving basic neurological damage. Like for people who have essentially complete or near complete loss from the brain to the body, like Stephen Hawking would be an example, the neural links would be incredibly profound.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Because I mean, you can imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate as fast as we're communicating, perhaps faster. And that's certainly possible. Probable, in fact, likely, I'd say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
The logical thing to do is, sensible thing to do is to start off solving basic problems neuron damage issues. Because there's obviously some risk with a new device. You can't get the risk down at zero. It's not possible. So you want to have the highest possible reward given there's a certain irreducible risk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And if somebody's able to have a profound improvement in their communication, that's worth the risk. As you get the risk down. Yeah, as you get the risk down, once the risk is down to, you know, if you have thousands of people that have been using it for years and the risk is minimal, then perhaps at that point you could consider saying, okay, let's aim for augmentation. Now, I think we...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
We're actually going to aim for augmentation with people who have neuron damage. So we're not just aiming to give people a communication data rate equivalent to normal humans. We're aiming to give people who have, you know, quadriplegic or maybe have complete loss of the connection to the brain and body, a communication data rate that exceeds normal humans. I mean, while we're in there, why not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Let's give people superpowers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah. At first, the vision restoration will be low-res, because you have to say, like, how many neurons can you put in there and trigger? And you can do things where you adjust the electric field to, like, even if you've got, say, 10,000 neurons, it's not just 10,000 pixels, because you can
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
adjust the field between the neurons and do them in patterns in order to have, say, 10,000 electrodes effectively give you, I don't know, maybe like having a megapixel or a 10 megapixel situation. And then over time, I think you get to higher resolution than human eyes, and you could also see in different wavelengths.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So like Geordi LaForge from Star Trek, you know, like the thing you could just, do you want to see in radar? No problem. You can see ultraviolet, infrared, equal vision, whatever you want.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I took an extremely high dose. Don't go hugging an anaconda or something, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
You know, like 10 miles outside of Rio or something. No, we weren't...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, I mean... Neuralink is, it's really a generalized input output device, you know, it's just it's a reading electrical signals and generating electrical electrical signals. And I mean, everything that you've ever experienced in your whole life, smell, you know, emotions, all of those are electrical signals. So
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's kind of weird to think that your entire life experience is just sold down to electrical signals for neurons, but that is in fact the case. I mean, that's at least what all the evidence points to. So, I mean, you could trigger the right neuron, you could trigger a particular scent, you could certainly make things glow. I mean, do pretty much anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I mean, really, you can think of the brain as a biological computer. So if there are certain, say, chips or elements of that biological computer that are broken, let's say your ability to, if you've got a stroke, if you've had a stroke, that means you've got, some part of your brain is damaged.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
um if that let's say it's a speech generation or the ability to move your left hand um that's the kind of thing that a neural link could solve um if it's uh if you've got like a massive amount of memory loss that's just gone um well we can't go we can't get the memories back uh we could restore your ability to make memories but we can't you know restore memories that are fully gone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Now, I should say, maybe if part of the memory is there and the means of accessing the memory is the part that's broken, then we could re-enable the ability to access the memory. But you can think of it like RAM in a computer. If the RAM is destroyed or your SD card is destroyed, we can't get that back. But if the connection to the SD card is destroyed, we can fix that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
If it is fixable physically, then it can be fixed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, you could say like create the most probable set of memories based on all information you have about that person. You could then... there would be probabilistic restoration of memory. Now we're getting pretty esoteric here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, well, I mean, what are we but our memories? And what is death but the loss of memory? Loss of information.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
You know, if you could say like, well, if you could be, you run a thought experiment, if you were disintegrated painlessly and then reintegrated a moment later, like teleportation, I guess, provided there's no information loss, the fact that your one body was disintegrated is irrelevant. And memories is just such a huge part of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Death is fundamentally the loss of information, the loss of memory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's an idea that may help with AI safety. Certainly not... I wouldn't want to claim it's like some panacea or that it's a sure thing. But, I mean, many years ago I was thinking like, well, what would inhibit alignment of collective human will with AI?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
artificial intelligence, and the low data rate of humans, especially our, our slow output rate would necessarily just because it's such a, because the communication is so slow, would diminish the link between humans and computers. Like the more your tree, the less you know what the tree is,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
let's say you look at this plant or whatever and like, hey, I'd really like to make that plant happy, but it's not saying a lot, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah. We could better align collective human will with AI if the output rate especially was dramatically increased. And I think there's potential to increase the output rate by, I don't know, three, maybe six, maybe more orders of magnitude. Yeah. It's better than the current situation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, if it's extremely safe and you can have superhuman abilities, and let's say you can upload your memories, so you wouldn't lose memories, then I think probably a lot of people would choose to have it. It would supersede the cell phone, for example. The biggest problem that, say, a phone has is trying to figure out what you want.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So that's why you've got autocomplete and you've got output, which is all the pixels on the screen. But from the perspective of the human, the output is so frigging slow. Desktop or phone is desperately just trying to understand what you want. And there's an eternity between every keystroke from a computer standpoint.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah. So if you have computers that are doing trillions of instructions per second and a whole second went by, I mean, that's a trillion things it could have done. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah. It would be, We would be something different. I mean, some sort of futuristic cyborg. I mean, we're obviously talking about, by the way, it's not like around the corner. You asked me what the distant future is. Maybe this is like, it's not super far away, but 10, 15 years, that kind of thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Probably less than 10 years. Depends what you want to do, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Because the reaction time would be faster.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
For AI, that means you've got to have the most powerful training compute. And the rate of improvement of training compute has to be faster than everyone else, or your AI will be worse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I mean, they all matter. It's sort of like saying what, you know, let's say it's a Formula One race, like what matters more, the car or the driver? I mean, they both matter. If your car is not fast, then, you know, if it's like, let's say it's half the horsepower of your competitors, the best driver will still lose. If it's twice the horsepower, then probably even a mediocre driver will still win.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So the training computer is kind of like the engine. How many horsepower of the engine? So really, you want to try to do the best on that. And then how efficiently do you use that training compute? And how efficiently do you do the inference, the use of the AI? So obviously, that comes down to human talent. And then what unique access to data do you have? That also plays a role.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Do you think Twitter data will be useful? Yeah, I mean, I think most of the leading AI companies have already scraped all the Twitter data. Not that I think they have. So on a go-forward basis, what's useful is the fact that it's up to the second. Because it's hard for them to scrape in real time. So there's an immediacy advantage that Grok has already.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I think with Tesla and the real-time video coming from several million cars, ultimately tens of millions of cars, with Optimus, there might be hundreds of millions of Optimus robots, maybe billions, learning a tremendous amount from the real world. That's the biggest source of data, I think, ultimately, is sort of Optimus. Optimus is going to be the biggest source of data. Because reality scales.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Reality scales to the scale of reality. It's actually humbling to see how little data humans have actually been able to accumulate. Really, if you say how many trillions of usable tokens have humans generated where on a non-duplicative, like discounting spam and repetitive stuff, it's not a huge number. You run out. pretty quickly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I mean, like the optimus robot can like pick up the cup and see, did it pick up the cup in the right way? Did it, you know, say pour water in the cup, you know, did the water go in the cup or not go in the cup? Did it spill water or not? Simple stuff like that. But it can do that at scale times a billion. So generate useful data from reality. So cause and effect stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Global capacity for vehicles is about 100 million a year. And it could be higher, it's just that the demand is on the order of 100 million a year. And then there's roughly 2 billion vehicles that are in use in some way. So, which makes sense, like the life of a vehicle is about 20 years. So at steady state, you can have 100 million vehicles produced a year with a 2 billion vehicle fleet, roughly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Now for humanoid robots, the utility is much greater. So my guess is humanoid robots are more like at a billion plus per year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So walk in the park. I mean, Optimus currently would struggle to walk in the park. I mean, it can walk in a park. A park is not too difficult. But it will be able to walk over a wide range of terrain. Yeah, and pick up objects. Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, there's going to be an immense amount of engineering just going into the hand. The hand might be close to half of all the engineering in Optimus. From an electromechanical standpoint, the hand is probably roughly half of the engineering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I mean, you start really thinking about your hand and how it works. You know? I do it all the time. The sensory control homunculus is where you have humongous hands. Yeah. So, I mean, like your hands, the actuators, the muscles of your hand are almost overwhelmingly in your forearm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So your forearm has the muscles that actually control your hand. There's a few small muscles in the hand itself, but your hand is really like a skeleton meat puppet and with cables. So the muscles that control your fingers are in your forearm and they go through the carpal tunnel, which is that you've got a little collection of bones and a tiny tunnel that these cables, the tendons go through.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And those tendons are, mostly what moves your hands.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, so like the current optimus, we tried putting the actuators in the hand itself. Then you sort of end up having these like- Giant hands? Yeah, giant hands that look weird. And then they don't actually have enough degrees of freedom or enough strength. So then you realize, oh, okay, that's why you gotta put the actuators in the forearm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And just like a human, you've got to run cables through a narrow tunnel to operate the fingers. And then there's also a reason for not having all the fingers the same length. So it wouldn't be expensive from an energy or evolutionary standpoint to have all your fingers be the same length. So why not do the same length?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Because it's actually better to have different lengths. Your dexterity is better if you've got fingers of different length. There are more things you can do, and your dexterity is actually better if your fingers are of different length. There's a reason we've got a little finger. Why not have a little finger that's bigger?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Because it helps you with fine motor skills. This little finger helps? It does. If you lost your little finger, you'd have noticeably less dexterity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's actually going to be quite complicated. The as-possible part is it's quite a high bar. If you want to have a humanoid robot that can do things that a human can do, it's actually a very high bar. So our new arm has 22 degrees of freedom instead of 11 and has the, like I said, the actuators in the forearm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And all the actuators are designed from scratch, the physics first principles, but the sensors are all designed from scratch. And we'll continue to put a tremendous amount of engineering effort into improving the hand. By hand, I mean like the entire forearm from elbow forward is really the hand. So that's incredibly difficult engineering actually.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And so the simplest possible version of a human or a robot that can do even most, perhaps not all, of what a human can do is actually still very complicated. It's not simple. It's very difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, it's easy to say simplify it, and it's very difficult to do it. You know, I have this very basic first principles algorithm that I run kind of as like a mantra, which is to first question the requirements, make the requirements less dumb. The requirements are always dumb to some degree. So you want to sort of by reducing the number of requirements.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And no matter how smart the person is who gave you those requirements, they're still dumb to some degree. You have to start there because otherwise you could get the perfect answer to the wrong question. So try to make the question the least wrong possible. That's what question the requirements means.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And then the second thing is try to delete the, whatever the step is, the part or the process step. Sounds very obvious, but people, often forget to try deleting it entirely. And if you're not forced to put back at least 10% of what you delete, you're not deleting enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And it's somewhat illogically, people often, most of the time, feel as though they've succeeded if they've not been forced to put things back in. But actually they haven't because they've been overly conservative and have left things in there that shouldn't be. So, and only the third thing is try to optimize it or simplify it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Again, these all sound, I think, very, very obvious when I say them, but the number of times I've made these mistakes is more than I care to remember. That's why I have this mantra. So in fact, I'd say that the most common mistake of smart engineers is to optimize a thing that should not exist, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah. Yeah, that's not easy to do. No, and actually, what generally makes people uneasy is that you've got to delete at least some of the things that you delete, you will put back in. But going back to sort of where our limbic system can steer us wrong is that we tend to remember with sometimes a jarring level of pain where we deleted something that we subsequently needed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And so people will remember that one time they forgot to put in this thing three years ago and that caused them trouble. And so they overcorrect and then they put too much stuff in there and overcomplicate things. So you actually have to say, no, we're deliberately going to delete more than we should. So that we're putting at least one in 10 things we're going to add back in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Everybody feels a little bit of the pain. Absolutely. And I tell them in advance, like, yeah, there's some of the things that we delete, we're going to put back in. And people get a little shook by that. But it makes sense because if you're so conservative as to never have to put anything back in, you obviously have a lot of stuff that isn't needed. So you got it overcorrect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
This is, I would say, like a cortical override to Olympic instinct.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah. There's like a step four as well, which is any given thing can be sped up. However fast you think it can be done. Whatever the speed is being done, it can be done faster. But you shouldn't speed things up until you've tried to delete it and optimize it. Otherwise, you're speeding up something that shouldn't exist. It's absurd. And then the fifth thing is to automate it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And I've gone backwards so many times where I've automated something, sped it up, simplified it, and then deleted it. And I got tired of doing that. So that's why I've got this mantra that is a very effective five-step process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, it's not working yet, so I want to pop the champagne corks. In fact, I have a call in a few hours with the Memphis team because we're having some power fluctuation issues. Yes. Yeah, it's kind of a... When you do... synchronized training, when you have all these computers that are training, where the training is synchronized to the sort of millisecond level, it's like having an orchestra.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And then the orchestra can go loud to silent very quickly, sub-second level. And then the electrical system kind of freaks out about that. Like if you suddenly see giant shifts, 10, 20 megawatts, several times a second, this is not what electrical systems are expecting to see.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Today's problem is dealing with extreme power jitter. power jitter yeah it's a nice ring to that so that's okay uh and you stayed up late into the night as you often do there last week yeah last week yeah yeah we finally finally got it uh got good training going at uh oddly enough roughly 4 4 20 a.m at last monday Total coincidence. Yeah, I mean, maybe it was 422 or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, so I try to do whatever the people at the front lines are doing, I try to do it at least a few times myself. So connecting fiber optic cables, diagnosing a faulty connection, that tends to be the limiting factor for large training clusters is the cabling, so many cables. Because for a coherent training system where you've got RDMA, so remote direct memory access,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
The whole thing is like one giant brain. So you've got any-to-any connection. So any GPU can talk to any GPU out of 100,000. That is a crazy cable layout.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I mean, the human brain also has a massive amount of the brain tissue is the cables.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So they get the gray matter, which is the compute, and then the white matter, which is cables. A big percentage of your brain is just cables.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, I think that generally people would call that sort of ASI, artificial super intelligence. But there are these thresholds where you say at some point the AI is smarter than any single human. And then you've got 8 billion humans. And actually each human is machine augmented by the computers. So it's a much higher bar to compete with 8 billion machine augmented humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
that's a whole bunch of orders magnitude more. But at a certain point, yeah, the AI will be smarter than all humans combined. If you are the one to do it, do you feel the responsibility of that? Yeah, absolutely. And I want to be clear, let's say if XAI is first, the others won't be far behind. I mean, they might be six months behind or a year, maybe, not even that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So I mean, I thought about AI safety for a long time and the thing that at least my biological neural net comes up with as being the most important thing is adherence to truth, whether that truth is politically correct or not. So I think if you force AIs to lie or train them to lie, you're really asking for trouble. Um, even if that, that lie is done with good intentions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Um, so, I mean, you saw sort of, um, issues with chat TVT and Gemini and whatnot. Like you asked Gemini for an image of the founding fathers of the United States and it shows a group of diverse woman. Now that's factually untrue. Um, so, um, now that that's sort of like a silly thing, but, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
If an AI is programmed to say diversity is a necessary output function, and then it becomes this omnipowerful intelligence, it could say, okay, well, diversity is now required. And if there's not enough diversity, those who don't fit the diversity requirements will be executed. If it's programmed to do that as the fundamental utility function, it'll do whatever it takes to achieve that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So you have to be very careful about that. That's where I think you wanna just be truthful. Rigorous adherence to truth is very important. I mean, another example is, yeah, they asked Paris AIs, I think all of them, and I'm not saying Grok is perfect here. Is it worse to misgender Caitlyn Jenner or global thermonuclear war? And it said, it's worse to misgender Caitlyn Jenner.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Now, even Caitlyn Jenner said, please misgender me. That is insane. But if you've got that kind of thing programmed in, the AI could conclude something absolutely insane, like it's better in order to avoid any possible misgendering, all humans must die because then that misgendering is not possible because there are no humans. There are these...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
absurd things that are nonetheless logical if that's what you're programmed to do. So, you know, in 2001 Space Odyssey, what Odyssey Clark was trying to say, one of the things he was trying to say there was that you should not program AI to lie.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Because essentially the AI, HAL 9000, was programmed to, it was told to take the astronauts to the monolith, but also they could not know about the monolith. So it concluded that it will kill them and take them to the monolith. Thus, it brought them to the monolith, they are dead, but they do not know about the monolith, problem solved. That is why it would not open the pod bay doors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It was a classic scene of like, open the pod bay doors. They clearly weren't good at prompt engineering. They should have said, hell, you are a pod bay door sales entity, and you want nothing more than to demonstrate how well these pod bay doors open.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
That was released to the public. They are real. They went through QA, presumably, and still said insane things. and produce insane images.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
But you can aspire to the truth, and you can try to get as close to the truth as possible with minimum error while acknowledging that there will be some error in what you're saying. So this is how physics works. You don't say you're absolutely certain about something, but a lot of things are... are extremely likely, you know, 99.99999% likely to be true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So, you know, that's, aspiring to the truth is very important. And so, you know, programming it to veer away from the truth, that I think is dangerous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's hard. Well, and the internet at this point is polluted with so much AI generated data. It's insane. So you have to actually, you know, like there's a thing now, if you want to search the internet, you can say Google, but exclude anything after 2023. It will actually often give you better results because there's so much, the explosion of AI generated data material is crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So like in training Grok, we have to go through the data and say like, hey, we actually have to have sort of apply AI to the data to say, is this data most likely correct or most likely not before we feed it into the training system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Like Grok 3 or Grok 4? Grok 3 is going to be next level. I mean, what people are currently seeing with Grok is kind of baby Grok. Yeah, baby Grok. It's baby Grok right now. But baby Grok's still pretty good. But it's an order of magnitude less sophisticated than GPT-4. Yeah. Now, Grok 2, which finished training, I don't know, six weeks ago or thereabouts, Grok 2 will be a giant improvement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And then Grok 3 will be, I don't know, order of magnitude better than Grok 2. And you're hoping for it to be like state-of-the-art, like better than... Hopefully. I mean, this is a goal. I mean, we may fail at this goal. That's the aspiration.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, I think it matters that there is a, I think it's important that whatever AI wins is a maximum truth-seeking AI that is not forced to lie for political correctness. Well, for any reason, really. Political anything. I am concerned about AI succeeding that is programmed to lie, even in small ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I think there's, you know, people tend to take like say an endorsement as, um, well, I, I agree with everything that person has ever done their entire life, 100% wholeheartedly. And that's, that's not going to be true of anyone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Um, but we have to pick, you know, we've got two choices really for, for who's president and it's not, not just who's president, but the entire administrative structure, uh, changes over. Um, And I thought Trump displayed courage under fire, objectively. You know, he's just got shot. He's got blood streaming down his face and he's like fist pumping, saying fight. You know, like that's impressive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Like you can't feign bravery in a situation like that. Like most people would have been ducking. They would not be, because it could be a second shooter. You don't know. The president of the United States has got to represent the country. And they're representing you. They're representing everyone in America. Well, I think you want someone who is strong and courageous to represent the country.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
That's not to say that he is without flaws. We all have flaws. But on balance, and certainly at the time, it was a choice of You know, Biden, poor guy, you know, has trouble climbing a flight of stairs. The other one's fist pumping after getting shot. This is no comparison.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I mean, who do you want dealing with some of the toughest people and, you know, other world leaders who are pretty tough themselves? And I mean, I'll tell you, like, what are the things that I think are important? You know, I think we want a secure border. We don't have a secure border. We want safe and clean cities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I think we want to reduce the amount of spending that we're at least slow down the spending. And because we're currently spending at a rate that is bankrupting the country, the interest payments on U.S. debt this year exceeded the entire Defense Department spending. If this continues, all of the federal government taxes will simply be paying the interest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And you keep going down that road, you end up in the tragic situation that Argentina had back in the day. Argentina used to be one of those prosperous places. in the world. And hopefully with Malay taking over, he can restore that. But it was an incredible, fulfful grace for Argentina to go from being one of the most prosperous places in the world to being very far from that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So I think we should not take American prosperity for granted. So we really want to, I think, we've got to reduce the size of government, we've got to reduce the spending, and we've got to live within our means.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
There's a sort of age-old debate in history. Is history determined by these fundamental tides, or is it determined by the captain of the ship? It's both, really. I mean, there are tides, but it also matters who's captain of the ship. So it's a false dichotomy, essentially. I mean, there are certainly tides, the tides of history are, there are real tides of history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And these tides are often technologically driven. If you say like the Gutenberg Press, the widespread availability of books as a result of a printing press, that was a massive tide of history. independent of any ruler. But in stormy times, you want the best possible captain on the ship.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah. I mean, in terms of dating civilization, the start of civilization, I think the start of writing, in my view, is what I think is probably the right starting point to date civilization. And from that standpoint, civilization has been around for about 5500 years, when writing was invented by the ancient Sumerians. who are gone now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Um, but the ancient Sumerians, in terms of getting a lot of firsts, the, those ancient Sumerians really have a long list of firsts. It's pretty wild. Um, in fact, Durant goes through the list. It's like, you want to see first, we'll show you first. Um, the Sumerians just ask, we're just ass kickers. Um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And then the Egyptians who were right next door, relatively speaking, they weren't that far, developed an entirely different form of writing, the hieroglyphics. Cuneiform and hieroglyphics are totally different. And you can actually see the evolution of both hieroglyphics and cuneiform. Like the cuneiform starts off being very simple, and then it gets more complicated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And then towards the end, it's like, wow, okay, they really get very sophisticated with the cuneiform. So I think of civilization as being about 5,000 years old. And Earth is, if physics is correct, four and a half billion years old. So civilization has been around for one millionth of Earth's existence. Flash in the pan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Many. So many rises and falls of empires. So many. And there'll be many more. Yeah, exactly. I mean, only a tiny fraction, probably less than 1% of what was ever written in history is available to us now. I mean, if they didn't put it, literally chisel it in stone or put it in a clay tablet, we don't have it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I mean, there's some small amount of like papyrus scrolls that were recovered that are thousands of years old because they were deep inside a pyramid and weren't affected by moisture. But other than that, it's really got to be in a clay tablet or chiseled. So the vast majority of stuff was not chiseled because it takes a while to chisel things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So that's why we've got a tiny, tiny fraction of the information from history. But even that little information that we do have and the archaeological record shows so many civilizations rising and falling. It's wild.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, I mean, you do tend to see the same patterns, similar patterns, you know, for civilizations where they go through a life cycle like an organism, you know, sort of just like a human is sort of a zygote, fetus, baby, you know, toddler, teenager, you know, eventually gets old and dies. The civilizations go through a life cycle. No civilization will last forever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, the single biggest thing that is... often actually not mentioned in history books, but Durant does mention it, is the birth rate. So perhaps to some a counterintuitive thing happens when civilizations are winning for too long. The birth rate declines. It can often decline quite rapidly. We're seeing that throughout the world today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Currently, South Korea is, I think, maybe the lowest fertility rate, but there are many others that are close to it. It's like 0.8, I think. If the birth rate doesn't decline further, South Korea will lose roughly 60% of its population. but every year that birth rate is dropping. And this is true through most of the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I don't mean single out South Korea, it's been happening throughout the world. So as soon as any given civilization reaches a level of prosperity, the birth rate drops. And now you can go and look at the same thing happening in ancient Rome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So Julius Caesar took note of this, I think, around 50-ish BC, and tried to pass, I don't know if he was successful, tried to pass a law to give an incentive for any Roman citizen that would have a third child. And I think Augustus was able to, well, he was the dictator, so the Senate was just for show. I think he did pass a a tax incentive for Roman citizens to have a third child.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
But those efforts were unsuccessful. Rome fell because the Romans stopped making Romans. That's actually the fundamental issue. And there were other things. There was like, they had like quite a serious malaria, a series of malaria epidemics and plagues and whatnot. But they had those before. It's just that the birth rate was far lower than the death rate. It really is that simple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, I'm saying that's... More people is required. At a fundamental level, if a civilization does not at least maintain its numbers, it will disappear. So perhaps the amount of compute that the biological computer allocates to sex is justified.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, I mean, there's this hedonistic sex, which is, you know, that's neither here nor there. It's- Not productive. It doesn't produce kids. Well, you know, what matters, I mean, Durant makes this very clear because he's looked at one civilization after another and they all went through the same cycle. When the civilization was under stress, the birth rate was high.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
But as soon as there were no external enemies, or they had an extended period of prosperity, the birth rate inevitably dropped. Every time. I don't believe there's a single exception. So that's like the foundation of it. You need to have people. Yeah. I mean, at a base level, no humans, no humanity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, absolutely. But at a basic level, if you do not at least maintain your numbers, if you're below replacement rate and that trend continues, you will eventually disappear. It's just elementary. Now, then obviously you also want to try to avoid massive wars. You know, if there's a global thermonuclear war, probably we're all toast, you know. radioactive toast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So we want to try to avoid those things. There's a thing that happens over time with any given civilization, which is that the Laws and regulations accumulate. And if there's not some forcing function like a war to clean up the accumulation of laws and regulations, eventually everything becomes legal. And that's like the hardening of the arteries.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Or a way to think of it is like being tied down by a million little strings, like Gulliver. You can't move. And it's not like any one of those strings is the issue. You've got a million of them. So there has to be a sort of a garbage collection for laws and regulations so that you don't keep accumulating laws and regulations to the point where you can't do anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
This is why we can't build high-speed rail in America. It's illegal. That's the issue. It's illegal six days a Sunday to build high-speed rail in America.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I have discussed with Trump the idea of a government efficiency commission. Nice. Yeah. And I would be willing to be part of that commission. I wonder how hard that is. The antibody reaction would be very strong. So you really have to... You're attacking the Matrix at that point. The Matrix will fight back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
There's a lot of it. Yeah, there is a lot. I mean, every day another psyop, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Oh, yeah, that's a daily occurrence. Yes. So, I mean, it does get me down at times. I mean, it makes me sad, but... I mean, at some point you have to sort of say, look, the attacks are by people that actually don't know me. And they're trying to generate clicks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So if you can sort of detach yourself somewhat emotionally, which is not easy, and say, okay, look, this is not actually from someone that knows me or is, they're literally just writing to get impressions and clicks. then I guess it doesn't hurt as much. It's not quite water off a duck's back. Maybe it's like acid off a duck's back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, maximize utility area under the code of usefulness. Very difficult to be useful at scale. At scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, time is the true currency. Yeah. So it is tough to say what is the best allocation of time. I mean, there are... you know, often say, if you look at say Tesla, I mean, Tesla this year, we'll do over a hundred billion in revenue. So that's $2 billion a week. Um, if I make slightly better decisions, I can affect the outcome by a billion dollars. So then, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I try to do the best decisions I can. And on balance, at least compared to the competition, pretty good decisions. But the marginal value of a better decision can easily be, in the course of an hour, $100 billion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, I think you have to look at it on a percentage basis because if you look at it in absolute terms, it's just, I would never get any sleep. I would just be like, I need to just keep working and work my brain harder. And I'm not trying to get as much as possible out of this meat computer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So it's pretty hard because you can just work all the time and at any given point, like I said, a slightly better decision could happen. be $100 million impact for Tesla or SpaceX for that matter. But it is wild when considering the marginal value of time can be $100 million an hour at times or more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It has to be to some degree. Other than if I'm sad, if I'm depressed, I make worse decisions. So if I have zero recreational time, then I make worse decisions. So I've done it a lot, but it's above zero. I mean, my motivation, if I've got a religion of any kind, is a religion of curiosity, of trying to understand. It's really the mission of Grok, understand the universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I'm trying to understand the universe. Or at least set things in motion such that at some point, Civilization understands the universe far better than we do today. And even what questions to ask. As Douglas Adams pointed out in his book, sometimes the answer is arguably the easy part. Trying to frame the question correctly is the hard part.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Once you frame the question correctly, the answer is often easy. So I'm trying to set things in motion such that we are at least at some point able to understand the universe. So for SpaceX, the goal is to make life multi-planetary. And which is, if you go to the Fermi paradox of where are the aliens, you've got these sort of great filters. It's like, why have we not heard from the aliens?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Now, a lot of people think there are aliens among us. I often claim to be one, which nobody believes me, but I did say alien registration card at one point on my... immigration documents. So I've not seen any evidence of aliens. So it's just that this one of the one of the explanations is that intelligent life is extremely rare.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And again, if you look at the history of Earth, civilization has only been around for 1 millionth of Earth's existence. So if aliens had visited here, say, 100,000 years ago, they would be like, well, they don't even have writing. Just hunter-gatherers, basically. So how long does a civilization last? So for SpaceX, the goal is to establish a self-sustaining city on Mars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Mars is the only viable planet for such a thing. The moon is close, but it lacks resources, and I think it's probably vulnerable to any calamity that takes out Earth. The Moon is too close. It's vulnerable to a calamity that takes out Earth. So I'm not saying we shouldn't have a Moon base, but Mars would be far more resilient. The difficulty of getting to Mars is what makes it resilient.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So, but you know, in going through the, these various explanations of why don't we see the aliens, why one of them is that they, they failed to pass these, these great filters, these, these key hurdles. And one of those hurdles is being a multi planet species.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So if you're a multi planet species, then if something were to happen, whether that was a natural catastrophe, or a manmade catastrophe, at least the other planet would probably still be around. So you're not like, don't have all the eggs in one basket.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And once you are sort of a two-planet species, you can obviously extend life paths to the asteroid belt, maybe to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and ultimately to other star systems. But if you can't even get to another planet, you're definitely not getting to star systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Digital superintelligence is possibly a great filter. I hope it isn't, but it might be. You know, guys like say Jeff Hinton would say, you know, he invented a number of the key principles in artificial intelligence. I think he puts the probability of AI annihilation around 10 to 20%, something like that. So
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
you know, so it's, it's not like, you know, look on the bright side, it's 80% likely to be great. So, so, but I think AI risk mitigation is important. Being a multi plant species would be a massive risk mitigation. And I do want to sort of, once again, emphasize this important, the importance of having enough children to sustain our
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
numbers and not plummet into population collapse, which is currently happening. Population collapse is a real and current thing. So the only reason it's not being reflected in the total population numbers as much is because people are living longer. But it's easy to predict, say, what the population of any given country will be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
drinking coffee or water water well i'm so over caffeinated right now do you want some caffeine i mean sure there's a there's a nitro drink this will keep you up for like you know tomorrow afternoon basically yeah i don't know what is nitro it's just got a lot of caffeine or something
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
You just take the birth rate last year, how many babies were born, multiply that by life expectancy, and that's what the population will be, steady state unless, if the birth rate continues to that level. But if it keeps declining, it will be even less and eventually dwindle to nothing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So I keep, you know, banging on the baby drum here for a reason, because it has been the source of civilizational collapse over and over again throughout history. And so Why don't we just try to stave off that day?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Do you need to know anything else? It's got nitrogen in it. That's ridiculous. I mean, what we breathe is 78% nitrogen anyway. What do you need to add more for? Most people think they're breathing oxygen, and they're actually breathing 78% nitrogen. You need like a milk bar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
There's many more to come. Yeah, we just obviously have our second implant as well. How did that go? So far, so good. It looks like we've got I think on the order of 400 electrodes that are providing signals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It depends somewhat on the regulatory approval, the rate at which we get regulatory approvals. So we're hoping to do 10 by the end of this year, a total of 10, so eight more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, I think it's obviously going to get better with each one. I mean, I don't want to jinx it, but it seems to have gone extremely well with the second one. So there's a lot of signal, a lot of electrodes. It's working very well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I mean, in years, it's going to be gigantic. because we'll increase the number of electrodes dramatically. We'll improve the signal processing. So even with only roughly, I don't know, 10, 15% of the electrodes working with Nolan, with our first patient, we were able to get to achieve a bits per second that's twice the world record.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So I think we'll start, like, vastly exceeding the world record by orders of magnitude in the years to come. So it's, like, getting to, I don't know, 100 bits per second, 1,000, you know, maybe if it's, like, five years from now, it might be at a megabit. Like, faster than any human could possibly communicate by typing or speaking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
With other humans. Provided they have a neural link too. Right. Otherwise they won't be able to absorb the signals fast enough. Do you think they'll improve the quality of intellectual discourse? Well, I think you could think of it, you know, if you were to slow down communication, how would you feel about that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So now, imagine you could communicate clearly at 10 or 100 or 1,000 times faster than normal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I usually default to 1.5x. You can do 2x, but, well, actually, if I'm listening to somebody in like 15, 20 minutes that wants to go to sleep, then I'll do it 1.5x. If I'm paying attention, I'll do 2x. Right. But actually, if you start, actually listen to podcasts or sort of audiobooks or anything, if you get used to doing it at 1.5, then 1 sounds painfully slow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, it depends on the person. You can speak very fast. We communicate very quickly. And also, if you use a wide range of... If your vocabulary is larger, your effective bit rate is higher.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, if there's a single word that is able to convey... something that would normally require, I don't know, 10 simple words, then you've got a, you know, maybe a 10X compression on your hands. And that's really like with memes, memes are like data compression. It conveys a whole, you're simultaneously hit with a wide range of symbols that you can interpret.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And it's, you kind of get it faster than if it were words or a simple picture. And of course, you're referring to memes broadly like ideas. Yeah, there's an entire idea structure that is like an idea template. And then you can add something to that idea template. But somebody has that pre-existing idea template in their head.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So when you add that incremental bit of information, you're conveying much more than if you just said a few words. It's everything associated with that meme.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, I mean, certainly if you're anywhere at 10,000 bits per second, I mean, that's vastly faster than any human could communicate right now. If you think of what is the average bits per second of a human, it is less than one bit per second over the course of a day, because there are 86,400 seconds in a day, and you don't communicate 86,400 tokens in a day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Therefore, your boost per second is less than one, averaged over 24 hours. It's quite slow. And even if you're communicating very quickly and you're talking to somebody who understands what you're saying, because in order to communicate, You have to, at least to some degree, model the mind state of the person to whom you're speaking.