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[ { "role": "user", "content": "And a radical new technology like this, presumably there is real risk on those early attempts." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, I mean, the joke I make all the time is that excitement is guaranteed. Success is not guaranteed. But excitement certainly is." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "But the last I saw in your timeline, you've slightly put back the expected date to put the first human on Mars till 2029, I want to say." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah, I mean, so let's see. I mean, we have built a production system for starships, so we'll be making a lot of ships and boosters." }, { "role": "user", "content": "How many are you planning to make actually?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Well, we're currently expecting to make a booster and a ship roughly every. Well, initially roughly every couple months and hopefully by the end of this year, one every month. So it's giant rockets and a lot of them just talking in terms of rough orders of magnitude. In order to create a self sustaining city on Mars, I think we'll need something on the order of a thousand ships. We just need a Helen of Sparta, I guess on Mars." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "This is not in most people's heads." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Elon, the planet that launched a thousand ships." }, { "role": "user", "content": "That'S nice. But this is not in most people's heads. This picture that you have in your mind that. So there's basically a two year window. You can only really fly to Mars conveniently every two years. Yes, you are still, you are picturing that during the 2000s, every couple years something like 1000 starships take off, each containing 100 or more. I mean, that picture is just completely mind blowing to me. That sense of this armada of humans." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Going to, yeah, like Battlestar Galactica, the fleet departs and you think that it." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Can basically be funded by people spending maybe a couple hundred grand on a ticket to move to Mars. Is that price about where it has been?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Well, I think if so, what's required in order to get enough people and enough cargo to Mars to build a self sustaining city? And it's where you have an intersection of sets of people who want to go. Because I think only a small percentage of humanity will want to go and can afford to go or get sponsorship in some manner. That intersection of sets I think needs to be a million people or something like that. And so it's what, what can a million people afford or get sponsorship for? Because I think governments will also pay for it and people take out loans. But I think at the point at which you say, okay, if moving to Mars costs, for argument's sake, $100,000, then I think almost anyone can work and save up and eventually have $100,000 and be able to go to Mars if they want. We want to make it available to anyone who wants to go. Yeah. And very important to emphasize that Mars, especially in the beginning, will not be luxurious. It will be dangerous, cramped, difficult, hard work. It's kind of like that Shackleton ad for going to the Antarctic, which I think is actually not real, but it sounds real and it's cool. It's sort of like the sales pitch for going to Mars is it's, it's dangerous, it's cramped, you might not make it back. It's difficult, it's hard work. That's the sales pitch, right?" } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "But you will make history." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "But it'll be glorious, right?" }, { "role": "user", "content": "So on that kind of launch rate, you're talking about over two decades, you could get your million people to Mars, essentially. Whose city is it? Is it NASA city? Is it SpaceX's city?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "It's the people of Mars, the city. The reason for this, I mean, I have to say, why do this thing? I think this is important for maximizing the probable lifespan of humanity or consciousness. Human civilization could come to an end for external reasons like a giant meteor or super volcanoes or extreme climate change or World War 3 or any one of a number of reasons, but the probable lifespan of civilizational consciousness as we know it, which we should really view as this very delicate thing, like a Small candle in a vast darkness. That is what appears to be the case. We're in this vast darkness of space and there's this little candle of consciousness that's only really come about after four and a half billion years and it could just go out." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "I think that's powerful and I think a lot of people will be inspired by that vision. And the reason you need the million people is because there has to be enough people there to do everything that you need to survive." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Really like the critical threshold is if the ships from Earth stop coming for any reason, does the Mars city die out or not? And so we have to pass that. You know, people talk about like the sort of the great filters, the things that perhaps you know, when you talk about the Fermi paradox and where are the aliens and like well maybe the aliens didn't. There is various great filters that the aliens didn't pass and so they eventually just cease to exist. And one of the great filters is becoming a multi planet species. So we want to pass that filter. And I'll be long dead before this is a real thing, before it happens. But I'd like to at least see us make great progress in this direction." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Given how tortured the Earth is right now, how much we're beating each other up. Shouldn't there be discussions going on with everyone who is dreaming about Mars to try to say we've got a once. Once in a civilization's chance to make some new rules here is that. Should someone be trying to lead those discussions to figure out what it means for this to be the people of Mars's city?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Well, I think ultimately this will be up to the people of Mars to decide how they want to rethink society. Yeah, there's certainly risk there and hopefully the people of Mars will be more enlightened and will not fight amongst each other too much? I mean I have some recommendations, but which people of Mars may choose to listen to or not? And I would advocate for, for more of a direct democracy, not a representative democracy and laws that are short enough for people to understand and where it is harder to create laws than to get rid of them." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Coming back a bit nearer term, I'd love you to just talk a bit about some of the other possibilities. Space that starship seems to have created. So given suddenly we've got this ability to move 100 tons plus into orbit. Yes. So we've just spent. We've just launched the James Webb telescope, which is an incredible thing. It's unbelievable." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Exquisite piece of technology." }, { "role": "user", "content": "Exquisite piece of technology. But people Spent two years trying to figure out how to fold up this thing. It's a three ton telescope." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "We can make it a lot easier if you've got more volume and mass." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "But let's ask a different question, which is how much more powerful a telescope could someone design based on using starship, for example?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "I mean, roughly, I would say it's probably an order of magnitude more resolution if you've got 100 tons and 1,000 m3 volume, which is roughly what we have." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "And what about other exploration through the solar system? I mean I'm, you know, Europa." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Well, Europa's big question mark." }, { "role": "user", "content": "Right. So there's an ocean there. Right. And what you really want to do is to drop a submarine into that." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah, Maybe there's like some squid civilization under cephalopod civilization under the ice of Europa. That would be pretty interesting." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "I mean, Elon, if you could take a submarine to Europa and we see pictures of this thing being devoured by a squid, that would honestly be the happiest moment of my life." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Pretty wild." }, { "role": "user", "content": "Yeah, that would be. What are the possibilities out there? Like, it feels like if you're going to create a thousand of these things, they can only fly to Mars every two years. What are they doing the rest of the time? It feels like there's this explosion of possibility that I don't think people are really thinking about." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "I mean, I don't know. We've certainly got a long way to go. As you alluded to earlier. We still have to get to orbit and then after we get to orbit we have to really prove out and refine full and rapid reusability. That'll take a moment. But I do think we will solve this. I'm highly confident we will solve this at this point." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Do you ever wake up with the fear that there's going to be this Hindenburg moment for SpaceX where we've had many Hindenburg." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Well, we've never had Hindenburg moments with people, which is very important. Big difference, right? There is, but we've blown up quite a few rockets. So there's a whole compilation online that we've put together and others put together. It's showing rockets are hard. I mean, the sheer amount of energy going through rocket boggles the mind. So getting out of Earth's gravity well is difficult. We have a strong gravity and a thick atmosphere. And Mars, which is less than 40% of, it's like, I think 37% of Earth's gravity and has a thin atmosphere. The ship alone can go all the way from the surface of Mars to the surface of Earth, whereas getting to Mars requires a giant booster and orbital refilling." }, { "role": "user", "content": "So Elon, as I think more about this incredible array of things that you're involved with, I keep seeing these synergies, to use a horrible word between them. For example, the robots you're building from Tesla could possibly be pretty handy on Mars, doing some of the dangerous work and so forth. I mean, maybe there's a scenario where your city on Mars doesn't need a million people, it needs half a million people and half a million robots." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Sure." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "And that's a possibility. Maybe the Boring Company could play a role, helping create some of the subterranean dwelling spaces that you might need." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah." }, { "role": "user", "content": "Back on planet Earth, it seems like a partnership between Boring Company and Tesla could offer an unbelievable deal to a city to say we will create for you a 3D network of tunnels populated by robo taxis that will offer fast, low cost transport to anyone. You know, full self driving may or may not be done this year and in some cities, somewhere like Mumbai I suspect won't be done for a decade." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Some places are more challenging than others." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "But today, today with what you've got, you could put a 3D network of tunnels under there." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Oh, if we're just in a tunnel, that's a sole problem, basically." }, { "role": "user", "content": "Exactly. Full self driving is a sole problem. So to me there's amazing synergy there. With Starship Gwynne Shotwell Talked about by 2028 having from city to city transport." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "On planet Earth, this is a real possibility. Yeah. The fastest way to get from one place to another, if it's long distance, is a rocket. It's basically an ICBM with a. But it has to landing delete the nuke." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Because it's an icbm, it has to land probably offshore." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yes, it's loud because it's loud." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "So why not have a tunnel that then connects to the city and neuralink. I mean if you're going to go to Mars, having a telepathic connection with loved ones back home, even if there's." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "A time delay, if these are not intended to be connected, by the way, there certainly could be some synergies. Yeah." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Surely there is a growing argument that you should actually put all these things together into one company and just have a company devoted to creating a future that's exciting and let a thousand flowers bloom. Have you, have you been thinking about that?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "I mean it is tricky because Tesla is a publicly traded company and the, the investor base of Tesla and SpaceX and certainly boring company and newer link are quite different. And Boeing Co. Neuralink are tiny companies. Just right the audience. Yeah, Tesla's got 110,000 people. SpaceX I think is around 12,000 people. Boring Company and Neuralink are both under 200 people. So they're little tiny companies, but they will probably get bigger in the future. They will get bigger in the future. It's not that easy to sort of combine these things." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Traditionally you've said that for SpaceX especially, you wouldn't want it public because public investors wouldn't support the craziness of the idea of going to Mars or whatever. And you want to." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Making life multi planetary is outside of the normal time horizon of Wall street analysts, to say the least." }, { "role": "user", "content": "I think something's changed though. What's changed is that Tesla is now so powerful and so big and throws off so much cash that you actually could connect the dots here. Just tell the public that X billion dollars a year, whatever your number is, will be diverted to the Mars mission. I suspect you'd have massive interest in that company and it might unlock a lot more possibility for you." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Now, I mean, I would like to give the public access to ownership of SpaceX, but I mean the thing that like, like the overhead associated with a public company is high. So I mean, as a public company you're just constantly sued. It does occupy like a fair bit of time and effort to deal with these things. Right." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "But you would still only have one public company. It would be bigger and have more things going on, but instead of being on four boards, you'd be on one." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "I'm actually not even on the Neuralink or boring company boards." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Oh, wow." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah. And I don't really attend the SpaceX board meetings. We only have two a year and I just stopped by and chat for an hour. So the board overhead for a public company is much higher." }, { "role": "user", "content": "Right. I think some investors probably worry about how your time is being split and they might be excited by that. Anyway, I am. I just, I just woke up the other day thinking just there are so many ways in which these things connect. And you know, just the note the simplicity of that mission, of building a future that is worth getting excited about, might appeal to an awful lot of people. Elon, you are reported by Forbes and everyone else as now the world's richest." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Person that's not a sovereign. You know, I think it's fair to say that if somebody is like the king or de facto king of a country, they're wealthier than I am." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "So. But it's just harder to measure. But what people do so $300 billion. I mean, your net worth on any given day is rising or falling by several billion dollars. How insane is that? I mean, does that, how do you handle that psychologically? There aren't many people in the world who have to even think about that." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "I actually don't think about that too much. But the thing that is actually more difficult, and that does make sleeping difficult, is that every good hour or even minute of thinking about Tesla and SpaceX has such a big effect on the company that I really try to work as much as possible to the edge of sanity. Basically because Tesla is getting to the point where probably we'll get to the point later this year where every good, every high quality minute of thinking is a million dollars to impact on Tesla. So which is insane. So I mean the basic, you know, if Tesla's doing, you know, of a sort of $2 billion a week, let's say in revenues, sort of $300 million a day, seven days a week, you know, it's." }, { "role": "user", "content": "If you can change that by 5% in an hour's brainstorm, those are pretty valuable. That's a pretty valuable hour." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "I mean, there are many instances where a half hour meeting, I was able to improve the financial outcome of the company by $100 million in a half hour meeting." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "There are many other people out there who can't stand this world of billionaires. They are hugely offended by the notion that an individual can have the same wealth as say, a billion or more of the world's poorest people." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "If they examine sort of the sort of. I think there's some axiomatic flaws that are leading to that conclusion. For sure. It would be very problematic if I was consuming billions of dollars a year in personal consumption. But that is not the case. In fact, I don't even own a home right now. I'm literally staying at friends places. If I travel to the Bay Area, which, where most of Tesla engineering is, I stay in my. I basically rotate through friends spare bedrooms. I don't have a yacht, I really don't take vacations. So it's not as though that my personal consumption is high. I mean the one exception is a plane. But if I don't use the plane then I have less hours hours to work." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "So I mean, I personally think you have shown that you are mostly driven by really quite a deep sense of moral purpose like you've tried. Your attempts to solve the climate problem have been as powerful as anyone else on the planet that I'm aware of. And I actually can't understand Personally, I can't understand the fact that you get all this criticism from the left about oh my God, he's so rich. That's disgusting. When climate is their issue. Philanthropy is a topic that some people go to. Philanthropy is a hard topic. How do you think about that?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "I think if you care about the reality of goodness instead of the perception of it, philanthropy is extremely difficult. SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink and Boring Company are philanthropy. If you say philanthropy is love of humanity, they are philanthropy. Tesla is accelerating sustainable energy. This is a love of philanthropy. SpaceX is trying to ensure the long term survival of humanity with multi planet species. This is love of humanity. Neuralink help solve brain injuries and existential with AI. Love of humanity. Warren company is trying to solve traffic which is hell for most people. And that also is love of humanity." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "How upsetting is it to you to hear this constant drumbeat of billionaires? My God. Elon Musk. Oh my God. Like, is that, do you just shrug that off or does it actually hurt?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "I mean, at this point it's Wardorf attacks back." }, { "role": "user", "content": "You know, I'd like to, as we wrap up now, just pull the camera back and just think you're a father now of seven surviving kids. And well, I mean, I'm trying to." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Set a good example because the birth rate on Earth is so low that we're facing civilizational collapse unless the birth rate returns to a sustainable level." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Yeah, you've talked about this a lot. That depopulation is a big problem and we, yes, people, don't understand." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Population collapse is one of the biggest threats to the future of human civilization. And that is what is going on right now." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "What drives you on a day to day basis to do what you do?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "I guess, like I really want to make sure that there is a good future for humanity and that we're on a path to understanding the nature of the universe, the meaning of life. Why are we here? How do we get here? And in order to understand the nature of the universe and all these fundamental questions, we must expand the scope and scale of consciousness. Certainly it must not diminish or go out. We certainly won't understand this. So I always say I'm motivated by curiosity more than anything and just desire to think about the future and not be sad, you know, and, and are." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "You, are you not sad?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "I'm sometimes sad, but mostly I'm. I mean, I'm feeling, I guess relatively optimistic about the future these days. There are certainly some big risks that humanity faces. I think the population collapse is a really big deal that I wish more people would, would think about, because the birth rate is far below what's needed to sustain civilization at its current level. And, you know, there's obviously, we need to take action on climate sustainability, which is being done, and we need to secure the future of consciousness by being a multi planet species. We need to address the essentially, it's important to take whatever actions we can think of to address the existential risks that affect the future of consciousness." }, { "role": "user", "content": "There's a whole generation coming through who seem really sad about the future. What would you say to them?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Well, I think if you want the future to be good, you must make it. So take action to make it good, and it will be." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Elon, thank you for all this time. That is a beautiful place to end. Thanks for all that you're doing." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "You're welcome." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Please give it up for Elon Mus. Elon, welcome to AI Startup School. We're just really, really blessed to have your presence here today." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Thanks for having me." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "So, from SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, Xai and more. Was there ever a moment in your life before all this where you felt I have to build something great? And what flipped that switch for you?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Well, I didn't originally think I would build something great. I wanted to try to build something useful. But I didn't think I would build anything particularly great if you said probabilistically. Seemed unlikely, but I wanted to at least try." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "So you're talking to a room full of people who are all technical engineers, often some of the most eminent AI researchers coming up in the game." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Okay, I think we should, I think that, I think I like the term engineer better than researcher. I mean, I suppose if there's some fundamental algorithmic breakthrough, it's a research, otherwise it's engineering." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Maybe. Let's start way back. I mean, when you were, this is a room full of 18 to 25 year olds. It skews younger because the founder set is younger and younger. Can you put yourself back into their shoes when you know, you were 18, 19, you know, learning to code, even coming up with a first idea for Zip2. What was that like for you?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah, back in 95, I was faced with a choice of either, do you know, grad studies, PhD at Stanford in material science, actually working on ultracapacitors for potential use in electric vehicles, essentially trying to solve the range problem for electric vehicles, or try to do something in this thing that most people had never heard of called the Internet. And I talked to my professor, who was Bill Nix in the material science department and said like, can I defer for a quarter because this will probably fail and then I'll need to come back to college. And then he said, this is probably the last conversation we'll have. And he was right. But I thought things would most likely fail, not that they would most likely succeed. And then in 95 I wrote basically, I think the first or close to the first maps, directions, Internet white pages and yellow pages on the Internet. I just wrote, I just wrote that personally, I didn't even use a web server. I just read the Port directly because I couldn't afford and I couldn't afford a T. One original office was on Sherman Avenue in Palo Alto. There was an ISP on the floor below. So I drilled a hole through the floor and just ran a LAN cable directly to the isp. And you know, my brother joined me and another co founder, Greg Curry, who passed away. And we at the time we couldn't even afford a place to stay. So we just. The office was 500 bucks a month. So we just slept in the office and then showered at the ymca on Page Millennial Camino. And yeah, and I guess we ended up doing a little bit of a useful company, zip two in the beginning. And we did build a lot of really good software technology. But we were somewhat captured by the legacy media companies and that Nitrotter, New York Times, the Hearst whatnot were investors and customers and also on the board. So they kept wanting to use our software in ways that made no sense. So I wanted to go direct to consumers. Anyways, long story, dwelling too much on Zip2, but I really just wanted to do something useful on the Internet because I had two choices. Do a PhD and watch people build the Internet or help build the Internet in some small way. And I was like, well, I guess I can always try and fail and then go back to grad studies. And anyway, that ended up being like reasonably successful. It sold for like $300 million, which was a lot at the time. These days that's like, I think minimum impulse but for an AI startup is like a billion dollars. It's like there's so many frigging unicorns. It's like a herd of unicorns at this point. You know, unicorns, a billion dollar situation." }, { "role": "user", "content": "There's been inflation since, so quite a bit more money actually." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah, I mean like 1995, you could probably buy a burger for a nickel. Well, not quite, but I mean, yeah, there has been a lot of inflation. But I mean the hype level in AI is pretty intense. As you've seen. You see companies that are, I don't know, less than a year old getting sometimes billion dollar or multibillion dollar valuations, which I guess could, could pan out and probably will pan out in some cases, but it is eye watering to see some of these valuations. Yeah. What do you think?" } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "I mean. Well, I'm pretty bullish. I'm pretty bullish, honestly. So I think the people in this room are going to create a lot of the value that, you know, a billion people in the world should be using this stuff and we're not even scratching the surface of it. I love the Internet story in that even back then, you know, you are a lot like the people in this room back then in that, you know, the heads of all the CEOs of all the legacy media companies look to you as the person who understood the Internet. And a lot of the world, you know, the corporate world, like the world at large, that does not understand what's happening with AI, they're going to look to the people in this room for exactly that. It sounds like, you know, what are some of the tangible lessons? It sounds like one of them is don't give up board control or be careful about having a really good lawyer." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "I guess for the first, my first startup, really the mistake was having too much shareholder and board control from legacy media companies who then necessarily see things through the lens of legacy media and that they'll kind of make you do things that seem sensible to them but really don't make sense with the new technology. I should point out that I didn't actually at first intend to start a company. I tried to get a job at Netscape. I sent my resume into Netscape and Mark Hendrickson knows about this, but I don't think he ever saw my resume. And then nobody responded. And then I tried hanging out in the lobby of Netscape to see if I could bump into someone, but I was too shy to talk to anyone. So I'm like, man, this is ridiculous. So I'll just write software myself and see how it goes. So it wasn't actually from the standpoint of like, I want to start a company, I just want to be part of building the Internet in some way. And since I couldn't get a job at an Internet company, I had to start a Internet company anyway. AI will so profoundly change the future, it's difficult to fathom how much. But the economy, assuming things don't go awry and AI, it doesn't kill us all and itself, then you'll see ultimately an economy that is not, not 10 times more than the current economy ultimately, like if we become, say, or whatever, our future machine descendants, or mostly machine descendants, become like a Kardashev scale to civilization or beyond, talking about an economy that is thousands of times, maybe millions of times bigger than the economy today. So, yeah, I mean, I did sort of feel a bit like, you know, when I was in dc, taking a lot of flack for like getting rid of waste and fraud, which was an interesting side quest as side quests go." }, { "role": "user", "content": "But gotta get back to the Main quest." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah, I gotta get back to the main quest here. So. Back to the main quest. So but I did feel, you know, a little bit like there's, you know, it's like fixing the government is kind of like, there's like, say the beach is dirty and there's like some needles and feces and like trash and you want to clean up the beach. But then there's also this like thousand foot wall of water which is a tsunami of AI. And how much does cleaning the beach really matter if you've got a thousand foot tsunami about to hit? Not that much." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "We're glad you're back on the main quest. It's very important." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Back to the main quest. Building technology, which is what I like doing, it's just so much noise. Like the signal to noise ratio in politics is terrible." }, { "role": "user", "content": "So I mean, I live in San Francisco, so you don't need to tell me twice." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah, D.C. is like, you know, kind of, I guess it's all politics in dc. But the. If you're trying to build a rocket or cars, or you're trying to have software that compiles and runs reliably, then you have to be maximally truth seeking or your software or your hardware won't work. Like there's no. You can't fool math. Like math and physics are rigorous judges. So I'm used to being in a maximally true seeking environment and that's definitely not politics. So anyway, I'm good. Glad to be back in technology." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "I guess I'm kind of curious going back to the Zip2 moment, you had hundreds of millions of dollars or you had an exit worth hundreds of millions of dollars." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "I got $20 million." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Okay, so you solved the money problem at least and you basically took it and you kept rolling with X.com which became PayPal and Confinity." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yes, I kept the chips on the table." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Not everyone does that. A lot of the people in this room will have to make that decision actually. What drove you to jump back into the ring?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Well, I think I felt with Zip2 we built incredible technology, but it never really got used to, you know, I think at least from my perspective, we had better technology than say Yahoo or anyone else, but it was constrained by our customers. And so I wanted to do something that where, okay, we wouldn't be constrained by our customers. Go direct to consumer. And that's what ended up being like X.com, payPal, essentially X.com merging with confinity, which together created PayPal and then that actually the sort of Paypal diaspora. It might have created more companies than, so more companies than probably anything in the 21st century. So many talented people were at the combination of Confinity and x dot com. So I just wanted to, I felt like we kind of got our wings clipped somewhat with Zip2. And it's like, okay, what if our wings aren't clipped and we go direct to consumer? And that's what PayPal ended up being. But yeah, I got that, like, $20 million check for my share of Zip2. At the time, I was living in a house with four housemates and had like, 10 grand in the bank. And then this check arrives in the mail, of all places in the mail, and then my bank balance went from 10,000 to 20 million. And 10,000. You're like, well, okay, so I pay taxes on that and all. But then I ended up putting almost all of that into x.com and as you said, like, just kind of keeping almost all the chips on the table and. Yeah, and then after PayPal, I was like, well, I, I was kind of curious as to why we had not sent anyone to Mars. And I went on the NASA website to find out when we're sending people to Mars, and there was no date. I thought maybe it was just hard to find on the website, but in fact, there was no real plan to send people to Mars. So then, you know, this is such a long story, so I don't want to take up too much time here. But the." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "I think we're all listening with rapt attention." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "So I was actually, I was on the Long Island Expressway with my friend Dale Resi. We're like, classmates in college, and, and they was asking me what I'm, what we're going to do, what am I going to do after PayPal? And I was like, it's like, I don't know, I guess maybe I'd like to do something philanthropic in space because I didn't think I could actually do anything commercial in space because that seemed like the purview of nations. So. But, you know, I'm kind of curious as to when we're going to, going to send people to Mars. And, and that's when I was like, oh, it's not on the website. And then I started digging on, not, there's nothing on the NASA website. So then I started digging in and, and, and I'm, I'm, I'm definitely summarizing a lot here, but I, I, I, my first idea was to do a philanthropic mission to Mars called Life to Mars, where would send a, a Small greenhouse with seeds and dehydrated nutrient gel. Land, land that on Mars and grow, you know, hydrate the gel and then you'd have this, this great sort of money shot of green plants on a red background. For the longest time. I, by the way, I didn't realize money shot, I think is a porn reference. But, but anyway, the point is that that would be the great shot of green plants on a red background and to try to inspire, you know, NASA and the public to, to send astronauts to, to Mars. As I learned more, I came to realize, and along the way, by the way, I went to Russia in like 2001 and 2002 to buy ICBMS, which is like, that's an adventure. You know, you go and meet with Russian high command and say, I'd like to buy some ICBMs." }, { "role": "user", "content": "This was to get to space." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah, as a rocket. Not to, not to nuke anyone, but, but they had to. As a result of arms reduction talks, they had to actually destroy a bunch of their big nuclear missiles. So I was like, well, how about if we take two of those minus the nuke, add an additional upper stage for Mars. But it was kind of trippy being in Moscow in 2001 negotiating with the Russian military to buy ICVMs, like, that's crazy. But they kept also raising the price on me so that. So like, literally, it's kind of like the opposite of what a negotiation should do. So I was like, man, these things are getting really expensive. And then I came to realize that actually the problem was not that there was insufficient will to go to Mars, but there was no way to do so without breaking the budget, you know, even breaking the NASA budget. So that's where I decided to start SpaceX. SpaceX to advance rocket technology to the point where we could send people to Mars. And that was in 2002." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "So that wasn't, you know, you didn't start out wanting to start a business. You wanted to start just something that was interesting to you, that you thought humanity needed. And then as you sort of, you know, like a cat pulling on, you know, a string, it just sort of the ball sort of unravels. And it turns out this is, yeah, could be a very profitable business." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "I mean, it is now, but it. There, there had been no prior example of really a rocket startup succeeding. There have been various attempts to do commercial rocket companies, and that all failed. So again, with SpaceX starting, SpaceX was really, from the standpoint of, I think there's a less than 10% chance of being successful, maybe 1%, I don't know. But if a startup doesn't do something to advance rocket technology, it's definitely not coming from the big defense contractors because they just impede and smash to the government and the government just wants to do very conventional things. So it's either coming from a startup or it's not happening at all. So, like, a small chance of success is better than no chance of success. SpaceX started that in mid-2002 expecting to fail. Like I said, probably 90% chance of failing. And even when recruiting people, I didn't try to, you know, make out that it would probably. I said, we're probably going to die, but small chance, we might not die. And if. But this is the only way to get people to Mars and advance the state of the art. And. And then I ended up being chief engineer of the rocket, not because I wanted to, but because I couldn't hire anyone who was good. So, like, none of the good sort of chief engineers would join because they're like, this is too risky, you're going to die. And so then I ended up being chief engineer of the rocket. And, you know, the first three flights did fail, so it's a bit of a learning exercise there. And fourth one fortunately worked, but if the fourth one hadn't worked, I had no money left and that would have been. It would have been curtains. So it was a pretty close thing. If the fourth launch of Falcon not work, it would have been just curtains and we would have just joined the graveyard of prior rocket startups. My estimate of success was not far off. We made it by the skin of our teeth. And Tesla was happening sort of simultaneously. 2008 was a rough year because at mid 2008, called Summer 2008, the third, the third launch of SpaceX had failed. A third failure in a row, the Tesla financing round had failed. And so Tesla was going bankrupt fast. It was just, it's like, man, this is grim. This is going to be a tale of warning, an exercise in hubris." }, { "role": "user", "content": "Probably throughout that period, a lot of people were saying, you know, Elon is a software guy. Why is he working on hardware? Why would, yeah, why would he choose to work on this? Right." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "100. So you can look at the, like the. Because it's still. The, you know, the press of that time is still online. You can just search it and. And they kept calling me Internet guy. So like, Internet Guy, AKA fool, is attempting to build a rocket company. So, you know, we got ridiculed quite a lot. And it does sound pretty Absurd. Like Internet guy starts rocket company. Doesn't sound like a recipe for success, frankly. So I didn't hold it against them. I was like, yeah, you know, admittedly it does sound improbable and I agree that it's improbable. But fortunately the fourth launch worked and, and NASA awarded us a contract to resupply the space station. And I think that was like maybe, I don't know, December 22nd or it was like right before Christmas. Because even the fourth launch working wasn't enough to succeed. NASA also needed, we also needed a big contract to keep us alive. So, so I got that call from the NASA team and I literally, they said, we're rewarding you one of the contracts to resupply the space station. I like literally blurted out I love you guys, which is not normally what they hear because it's usually pretty sober. But I was like, man, this is a company saver. And then we closed the Tesla financing round on the last hour of the last day that it was possible, which was 6pm Dec. 24, 2008. We would have bounced payroll two days after Christmas if that round hadn't. Hadn't closed. So that was a nerve wracking end of 2008, that's for sure." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "I guess from your PayPal and Zip2 experience jumping into these hardcore hardware startups, it feels like one of the through lines was being able to find and eventually attract the smartest possible people in those particular fields. You know what, what would I mean? The people in this room, like some of the, most of the people here I don't think have even managed a single person yet. They're just starting their careers. What would you tell to, you know, the Elon who's never had to do that yet?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "I, I generally think to try to try to be as useful as possible. It may sound trite, but it's, it's so hard to be useful, especially to be useful to a lot of people. Where you say the area under the curve of total utility is like how useful have you been to your fellow human beings? Times how many people? It's almost like the physics definition of true work. It's incredibly difficult to do that. And I think if you aspire to do true work, your probability of success is much higher. Don't aspire to glory, aspire to work." }, { "role": "user", "content": "How can you tell that it's true work? Like is it external? Is it like what happens with other people? Or you know, what the product does for people? Like what, you know, what is that for you when you're looking for people to come work for you. Like what, you know, what's the salient thing that you look for? Or if they're." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "That's a different question. I guess it's, I mean, in terms of your end product, you just have to say like, well, if this thing is successful, how useful will it be to how many people? And that's what I mean. And then you do whatever. Whether you're a CEO or any role in a startup, you do whatever it takes to succeed and just always be smashing your ego. Internalize responsibility. A major failure mode is when ego to ability ratio is double greater than sign one. If your ego to ability ratio gets too high, then your. You're going to basically break the feedback loop to reality. And in AI terms you'll break your RL loop. So you don't want to break your, you want to have a strong RL loop, which means internalizing responsibility and minimizing ego. And you do whatever the task is, no matter whether it's grand or humble. That's kind of like why actually I prefer the term like engineering as opposed to research. I prefer the term and I actually don't want it to call Xai a lab. I just want to be a company. Like, it's like what are the simplest, most straightforward. Ideally lowest ego terms are. Those are generally a good way to go. You want to just close the loop on reality hard. That's a super big deal." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "I think everyone in this room really looks up to everything you've done around being sort of a paragon of first principles and thinking about the stuff you've done. How do you actually determine your reality? Because that seems like a pretty big part of it. Like other people, people who have never made anything, non engineers, sometimes journalists at time, who've never done anything, like they will criticize you. But then clearly you have another set of people who are builders, who have very high, you know, sort of area under the curve, who are in your circle. Like, you know, how should people approach that? Like, what has worked for you and what would you pass on, like, you know, to X to your children? Like, you know, what do you tell them when you're like, you need to make your way in this world. Here's how to construct a reality that is predictive from first principles." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Well, the tools of physics are incredibly helpful to understand and make progress in any field. First principles obviously just means break things down to the fundamental axiomatic elements that are most likely to be true and then reason up from there as cogently as possible, as opposed to reasoning by analysis or metaphor. And then just simple things like thinking in the limit. Like if you extrapolate, minimize this thing or maximize that thing. Thinking in the limit is very helpful. I'd use all the tools of physics. They apply to any field. This is like a superpower, actually. So you can take for example, like rockets, you could say, well, how much should a rocket cost? The typical approach that people would take to how much rocket should cost is they would look historically at what the cost of rockets are and assume that any new rocket must be somewhat similar to the prior cost of rockets. A first principles approach would be you look at the materials that the rocket is comprised of. So if that's aluminum, copper, carbon fiber, steel, whatever the case may be, and say what, what, how much does that rocket weigh? And, and, and what are the constituent elements and how much do they weigh? What is the material price per kilogram of those constituent elements? And that sets the actual floor on what a rocket can cost. It's, it can asymptotically approach the cost of the raw materials. And then you realize, oh, actually a rocket, the raw materials of a rocket are only maybe 1 or 2% of the historical cost of a rocket. So the manufacturing must necessarily be very inefficient. If the, if the raw material cost is only 1 or 2%, that would be a first principles analysis of the potential for cost optimization of a rocket. And that's before you get to reusability. To give an AI sort of AI example, I guess last year for Xai, when we were trying to build a training supercluster, we went to the various suppliers to ask, this was beginning of last year that we needed A hundred thousand H1 hundreds to be able to train coherently. And their estimates for how long it would take to complete that were 18 to 24 months. It's like, well, we need to get that done in six months or we won't be competitive. So then if you break that down, what are the things you need? Well, you need a building, you need power, you need cooling. We didn't have enough time to build a building from scratch, so we've had to find an existing building. So we found a factory that was no longer in use in Memphis that used to build Electrolux products. But then the input power was 15 megawatts and we needed 150 megawatts. So we rented generators and had generators on one side of the building and then we have to have cooling. So we rented about a quarter of the mobile cooling capacity of the US and put the chillers on the other side of the building. That didn't fully solve the problem because the power variations during training are so very, very big. So you can have power can drop by 50% in 100 milliseconds, which the generators can't keep up with. So then we combined, we added Tesla megapacks and modified the software in the megapacks to be able to smooth out the, the power variation during the training run. And then there were, there were a bunch of networking challenges. The networking cables, if you're trying to make 100,000 GPUs trained coherently, are very, very challenging." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Almost, it sounds like almost any of those things you mentioned. I could imagine someone telling you very directly, no, you can't have that, you can't have that power, you can't have this. And it sounds like one of the salient pieces of first principles thinking is actually let's ask why, let's figure that out and actually let's challenge the person across the table and if they, if I don't get an answer that I feel good about, I'm going to, you know, not allow that to be. I'm not going to let that know to stand is that, I mean that feels like something that, you know, everyone, if someone were to try to do what you're doing in hardware, hardware seems to uniquely need this. In software we have lots of, you know, fluff and things that, you know, it's like we can add more CPUs to that, it'll be fine, but in hardware it's, it's just not going to work." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "I think these general principles of first principle thinking apply to software and hardware apply to anything really. I'm just using kind of a hardware example of how we were told something is impossible, but once we broke it down into the constituent elements of we need a building, we need power, we need cooling, we need power smoothing and then we could solve those constituent elements. Um, but it was, and then we, and then we just ran the, the networking operation to, to do all the cabling, everything in four shifts, 24 7. And, and I was like sleeping in the data center and also doing cabling myself. And, and there were a lot of other issues to solve. You know, no, nobody had done a training run with a hundred thousand H1 hundreds training coherently last year. Maybe it's been done this year, I don't know. But, and then, and then we ended up doubling that to 200,000. And so now we've got 150,000 H1 hundreds 50K H2 hundreds and 30K GV2 hundreds in the, in the Memphis training center. And we're about to bring 110,000 GB2 hundreds online at a second data center also in the Memphis area." }, { "role": "user", "content": "Is it your view that pre training is still working and the scaling laws still hold and whoever wins this race will have basically the biggest, smartest possible model that you could distill?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Well, there's other various elements that decide competitiveness for large AI. There's for sure the talent of the people matter, the scale of the hardware matters and how well you're able to bring that hardware to bear. So you can't just order a whole bunch of GPUs and they don't. You can't just plug them in. So you've got to get a lot of GPUs and have them trained coherently and stably. Then it's like what unique access to data do you have? I guess distribution matters to some degree as well, like how do people get exposed to your AI? Those are critical factors for if it's going to be like a large foundation model that's competitive, as many have said. I think my friend Ilya Sutskayer said we've kind of run out of pre training data of human generated, like human generated data, you run out of tokens pretty fast, certainly of high quality tokens. And then you have to do a lot of you need to essentially create synthetic data and be able to accurately judge the synthetic data that you're creating to verify is this real synthetic data or is it an hallucination that doesn't actually match reality. So achieving grounding in reality is tricky, but. But we are at the stage where there's more effort put into synthetic data. And right now we're training Grok 3.5 which is a heavy focus on reasoning." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Going back to your physics point, what I heard for reasoning is that hard science, particularly physics textbooks, are very useful for reasoning. Whereas I think researchers have told me that social sciences, totally useless reasoning." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yes, that's probably true. So yeah, something that's going to be very important in the future is combining deep AI in the data center or supercluster with robotics so that things like the Optimus humanoid robot. Incredible. Yeah, Optimus is awesome. There's going to be so many humanoid robots and robots of all sizes and shapes. But my prediction is that there will be more humanoid robots by far than all other robots combined by maybe an order of magnitude, like a big difference." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Is it true that you're planning A robot army of a sort." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Whether we do it or you know, whether Tesla does it. You know, Tesla works closely with xai. Like you've seen how many humanoid robot startups are there? Like, it's like, I think Jensen Wong was on stage with a lot with a massive number of robots, you know, robots from different companies. I think there was like dozen different humanoid robots. So I mean, I guess, you know, part of what I've been fighting and maybe what has slowed me down somewhat is that I'm, I'm a little, I don't want, I don't want to make Terminator real, you know, so I've been sort of, I guess at least until recent years, dragging my feet on, on AI and, and humanoid robotics. And then I sort of come to the realization, realization it's, it's happening whether I do it or not. So you got really two choices. Particip. You can either be a spectator or a participant. And so like, well, I guess I'd rather be a participant than a spectator. So now it's, you know, pedal to the metal on humanoid robots and digital superintelligence." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "So I guess, you know, there's a third thing that everyone has heard you talk a lot about that I'm really a big fan of, you know, becoming a multi planetary species. Where does this fit? You know, this is all, you know, not, not just a 10 or 20 year thing, maybe a hundred year thing. Like it's a, you know, many, many generations for humanity kind of thing. You know, how do you think about it? There's, you know, AI, obviously, there's embodied robotics and then there's being a multiplan multi planetary species. Does everything sort of feed into that last point or, you know, what, what are you driven by right now for the next 10, 20 and 100 years?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Geez, 100 years. Man, I hope civilization's around in 100 years. If it is round, it's going to look very different from civilization today. I mean, I'd predict that there's going to be at least five times as many humanoid robots as there are humans. Maybe 10 times. One way to look at the progress of civilization is percentage completion. Kardashev. So if you're in a Kardashev scale one, you've, you've harnessed all the energy of a planet. In my opinion, we've only harnessed maybe 1 or 2% of Earth's energy. So we've got a long way to go to the Kardashian scale one, then Kardashev two, you've harnessed all the energy of a sun, which would be, I don't know, a billion times more energy than Earth, maybe closer to a trillion. And then Kardashev3 would be all the energy of a galaxy pretty far from that. So we're at the very, very early stage of the intelligence big bang. I hope we're in terms of being multi planetary. I think we'll have enough mass transferred to Mars within roughly 30 years to make Mars self sustaining, such that Mars can continue to grow and prosper even if the resupply shifts from Earth stop coming. And that greatly increases the probable lifespan of civilization or consciousness or intelligence, both biological and digital. So that's why I think it's important to become a multi planet species. And I'm somewhat troubled by the Fermi paradox, like why have we not seen any aliens? And it could be because intelligence is incredibly rare and maybe we're the only ones in this galaxy, in which case the intelligence of consciousness is this like tiny candle in a vast darkness and we should do everything possible to ensure the tiny candle does not go out. And being a multi planet species or making consciousness multi planetary greatly improves the probable lifespan of civilization. And it's the next step before going to other star systems. Once you at least have two planets, then you've got a forcing function for the improvement of space travel. And that ultimately is what will lead to consciousness expanding to the stars." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "It could be that the Fermi paradox dictates once you get to some level of technology you destroy yourself. How do we stay ourselves? How do we actually. What would you prescribe to? I mean, a room full of engineers like what can we do to prevent that from happening?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah, how do we avoid the great filters? One of the great filters would obviously be global thermonuclear war. So we should try to avoid that, I guess, building benign AI robots that AI that loves humanity and you know, robots that are helpful. Something that I think is extremely important in building AI is a very rigorous adherence to truth, even if that truth is politically incorrect. My intuition for what could make AI very dangerous is if, if you force AI to believe things that are not." }, { "role": "user", "content": "True, how do you think about there's sort of this argument for open for safety versus closed for competitive edge. I mean, I think the great thing is you have a competitive model. Many other people also have competitive models. And in that sense we're sort of off of. Maybe the worst timeline that I'd be worried about is there's fast takeoff and it's only in one person's hands that might sort of collapse a lot of things. Whereas now we have choice, which is great. How do you think about this?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah, I do think there will be several deep intelligences, maybe at least five, maybe as much as 10. I'm not sure that there's going to be hundreds, but it's probably close. Like maybe there'll be like 10 or something like that. Of which maybe four will be in the US so I don't think it's going to be any one AI that has a runaway capability. But yeah, several deep intelligences." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "What will these deep intelligences actually be doing? Will it be scientific research or trying to hack each other?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Probably all of the above. I mean, hopefully they will discover new physics and I think they will very. They're definitely going to invent new technologies. Like, I mean, I think we're quite close to digital superintelligence. It may happen this year, and if it doesn't happen this year, next year for sure. Digital superintelligence, defined as smarter than any human at anything." }, { "role": "user", "content": "Well, so how do we direct that to sort of super abundance? You know, we have, we could have robotic labor, we have cheap energy. Intelligence on demand. You know, is that sort of the white pill? Like, where do you sit on the spectrum and are there tangible things that you would encourage everyone here to be working on to make that white pill actually reality?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "I think it, I think it most likely will be a good outcome. I guess I'd sort of agree with Jeff Hinton that Maybe it's a 10 to 20% chance of annihilation. But look on the bright side, that's 80 to 90% probability of a great outcome. So, yeah, I can't emphasize this enough. Rigorous adherence to truth is the most important thing for AI safety and obviously empathy for humanity and life as we know it." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "We haven't talked about neuralink at all yet. But I'm curious, you know, you're working on closing the input and output gap between human, humans and machines. How critical is that to AGI, asi? And once that link is made, can we not only read but also write?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "The neuralink is not necessary to solve digital superintelligence. That'll happen before neuralink is at scale. But what neuralink can effectively do is solve the input output bandwidth constraints, especially our output bandwidth, is very low. The sustained output of a human over the course of a day is less than 1 bit per second. So there's 86,400 seconds in a day. And it is extremely rare for a human to output more than that number of symbols per day. So certainly for several days in a row. So you really, with a neuralink interface you can massively increase your output bandwidth and your input bandwidth, input being right to you have to do write operations to the brain. We have now five humans who have received the kind of the read input where it's reading signals. And you've got people with als who really have, they're tetraplegics, but they, they can now communicate at with similar bandwidth to a human with a fully functioning body and control their computer and phone, which is pretty cool. And then I think in the next six to 12 months we'll be doing our first implants for vision where even if somebody's completely blind, we can write directly to the visual cortex. And we've had that working in monkeys. Actually I think one of our monkeys now has had a visual implant for three years and at first it'll be relatively fairly low resolution, but long term you would have very high resolution and be able to see multi spectral wavelengths. So you could see an infrared ultraviolet radar. It's like a superpower situation. Like at some point the cybernetic implants would not simply be correcting things that went wrong, but augmenting human capabilities dramatically, augmenting intelligence and senses and bandwidth dramatically. And that's going to happen at some point, but digital superintelligence will happen well before that. At least if we have a neural link we met, we'll be able to appreciate the AI better." }, { "role": "user", "content": "I guess one of the limiting reagents to all of your efforts across all of these different domains is access to the smartest possible people. But simultaneous to that we have the rocks can talk and reason and There may be 130 IQ now and they're probably going to be super intelligent soon. How do you reconcile those two things? Like what's going to happen in five, 10 years and what should the people in this room do to make sure that they're the ones who are creating instead of maybe below the API line?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Well, they call it the singularity for a reason. We don't know what's going to happen in the not that far future. The percentage of intelligence that is human will be quite small. At some point the collective sum of human intelligence will be less than 1% of all intelligence. And if things get to a Kardashev level too, we're talking about human intelligence. Even assuming a significant increase in human population and intelligence augmentation, like massive intelligence augmentation where like everyone has an IQ of a thousand type of thing. Even in that circumstance, collective human intelligence will be probably 1 billionth that of digital intelligence anyway. Where's the biological bootloader for digital superintelligence?" } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "I guess just to end off." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "What was that? It was like, was I a good bootloader?" } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Where do we go? How do we go from here? I mean, I mean all of this is pretty wild sci fi stuff that also could be built by the people in this room. You know, if you. Do you have a closing thought for the smartest technical people of this generation right now? What should they be doing? What should they, what should they be working on? What should they be thinking about, you know, tonight as they go to dinner?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Well, as I started off with, I think if you're doing something useful, that's great. Just try to be as useful as possible to your fellow human beings and then you're doing something good. I keep harping on this focus on super truthful AI. That's the most important thing for AI safety. You know, obviously if, you know, anyone's interested in working at xai, please let us know. We're aiming to make GROK the maximally truth seeking AI, and I think that's a very important thing. Hopefully we can understand the nature of the universe. That's really, I guess, what AI can hopefully tell us. Maybe AI can maybe tell us, where are the aliens and how did the universe really start? How will it end? What are the questions that we don't know that we should ask? And are we in a simulation or what level of simulation are we in?" } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Well, I think we're going to find out." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Am I an npc?" } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "The following is a conversation with Elon Musk, his fourth time on this the Lex Friedman Podcast. I thought you were going to finish it. It's one of the greatest themes in all of film history." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah, that's great." }, { "role": "user", "content": "So I was just thinking about the Roman Empire as one does." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "There's that whole meme where all guys are thinking about the Roman Empire at." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Least once a day and half the population is confused whether it's true or not. But more seriously, thinking about the wars going on in the world today. And as you know, war and military conquest has been a big part of Roman society and culture. And it, I think, has been a big part of most empires and dynasties throughout human history." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "So they usually came as a result of conquest. I mean, there's something like the Austro Hungarian Empire, where there was just a lot of sort of clever marriages." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "But fundamentally there's an engine of conquest and they celebrate excellence in warfare. Many of the leaders were excellent generals. Yeah, that kind of thing. So, big picture question. GROK approved. I asked. This is a good question to ask." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Kid tested. Grok approved." }, { "role": "user", "content": "At least on fun mode. To what degree do you think war is part of human nature versus a consequence of how human societies are structured? I ask this as you have somehow controversially been a proponent of peace." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "I'm generally a proponent of peace. I mean, ignorance is perhaps in my view, the real enemy to be countered. That's the real hard part. Not fighting other humans, but all creatures fight. I mean, the jungle is. People think of nature as perhaps some sort of peaceful thing, but in fact it is not. There's some quite funny when a Herzog thing where he's like in the jungle saying that it's basically just murder and death in every direction. I mean, the plants and animals in the jungle are constantly trying to kill and eat each other every single day, every minute. So it's not like we're unusual in that respect." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "There's a relevant question here whether with greater intelligence comes greater control over these base instincts for violence." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yes, we have much more of an ability to control our limbic instinct for violence than say a chimpanzee. And in fact, if one looks at say, chimpanzee society, it is not friendly. I mean, the bonobos are an exception, but chimpanzee society is filled with violence and it's quite horrific, frankly. That's our limbic system in action. You don't want to be on the wrong side of a chimpanzee. It'll eat your face off and tear your nuts off." }, { "role": "user", "content": "Yeah, basically there's no limits or ethics or the Roman said just war. There's no just war in chimpanzee societies. Is war and dominance by any means necessary?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah. Chimpanzee society is a primitive version of human society. They're not like peace loving basically at all. There's extreme violence and then once in a while somebody who's watched too many Disney movies decides to raise a chimpanzee as a pet and then that eats their face or rips their nuts off or chews their fingers off, that kind of thing. It's happened several times." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Ripping your nuts off is an interesting strategy for interaction." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "It's happened to people. It's unfortunate. That's I guess, one way to ensure that the other chimp doesn't contribute to the gene pool." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Well, from a martial arts perspective, it's a fascinating strategy." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "The nutrifer." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "I wonder which of the martial arts teaches that." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "I think it's safe to say if somebody's got your nuts in their hands and has the option of ripping them off, you will be amenable to whatever they want." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Yeah. So like I said, somehow controversially, you've been a proponent of peace on. On Twitter, on X. So let me ask you about the wars going on today and to see what the path to peace could be. How do you hope the current war in Israel and Gaza comes to an end? What path do you see that can minimize human suffering in the long term in that part of the world?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Well, I think that part of the world is definitely like, if you look up the. There is no easy answer in the dictionary. It'll be like the picture of the Middle east and Israel especially. So there is no easy answer. This is strictly my opinion, is that the goal of Hamas was to provoke an overreaction from Israel. They obviously do not expect to have a military victory, but they, they really wanted to commit the worst atrocities that they could in order to provoke the most aggressive response possible from Israel and then leverage that aggressive response to rally Muslims worldwide for the course of Gaza and Palestine, which they have succeeded in doing." }, { "role": "user", "content": "So." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "The counterintuitive thing here, I think that the thing that I think should be done, even though it is very difficult, is that I would recommend that Israel engage in the most conspicuous acts of kindness possible. Everything that is the actual thing that would thwart the goal of Hamas." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "So in some sense, the degree that makes sense in geopolitics, turn the other cheek implemented." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "It's not exactly turn the other cheek because I do think that there's. I think it is appropriate for Israel to find the Hamas members and either kill them or incarcerate them. Something has to be done because they're just going to keep coming otherwise. But in addition to that, they need to do whatever they can. There's some talk of establishing, for example, a mobile hospital. I'd recommend doing that. Just making sure that there's food, water, medical necessities and just be over the top about it and be very transparent so people can't claim it's a trick. Like just put a wavecam on the thing." }, { "role": "user", "content": "24, seven deploy acts of kindness." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah, Conspicuous acts of kindness that are unequivocal. Meaning that can't be somehow. Because Hamas will. Then their response will be, oh, it's a trick, therefore you have to counter. How is it not a trick?" } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "This ultimately fights the broader force of hatred in the region." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yes. And I'm not sure who said it. It's an apocryphal saying, but an eye for an eye makes everyone blind. Now that neck of the woods, they really believe in the whole eye for an eye thing. But I mean, you really have. If you're not going to just outright commit genocide like against an entire people, which obviously would not be acceptable, really shouldn't be acceptable to anyone, then you're going to leave basically a lot of people alive who subsequently hate Israel. So really the question is, for every Hamas member that you kill, how many did you create? And if you create more than you killed, you've not succeeded. That's the, you know, the real situation there. And it's safe to say that if, you know, if you kill somebody's child in Gaza, you've made at least a few Hamas members who will die just to kill Israeli. That's the situation. But I mean, this is one of the most contentious subjects one could possibly discuss. But I think if the goal ultimately is some sort of long term peace, one has to look at this from the standpoint of over time, are there more or fewer terrorists being created?" }, { "role": "user", "content": "Let me just linger on. War." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah. It's safe to say wars always existed and always will exist. Always will exist, always has existed and always will exist." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "I hope not. You think it always." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "There will always be war. There's a question of just how much war and there's sort of the scope and scale of war. But to imagine that there would not be any war in the future, I think would be a very unlikely outcome. Yeah." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "You talked about the culture series. There's war even there." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yes. This giant war. The first book starts off with a gigantic Galactic war, where trillions die trillions." }, { "role": "user", "content": "But it still nevertheless protects these pockets of flourishing somehow. You can have galactic war and still have pockets of flourishing?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah, I guess if we are able to one day expand to the galaxy or whatever, there will be a galactic war at some point." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "The scale, I mean, the scale of war has been increasing, increasing, increasing. It's like a race between the scale of suffering and the scale of flourishing." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yes." }, { "role": "user", "content": "A lot of people seem to be using this tragedy to beat the drums of war and feed the military industrial complex. Do you worry about this? The people who are rooting for escalation? And how can it be stopped?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "One of the things that does concern me is that there are very few people alive today who actually viscerally understand the horrors of war, at least in the U.S. i mean, obviously there are people on the front lines in Ukraine and Russia who understand just how terrible war is. But how many people in the west understand it? My grandfather was in World War II. He was severely traumatized. He was there, I think, for almost six years in eastern North Africa, in Italy. All his friends were killed in front of him. And he would have died too, except they randomly gave some, I guess, IQ test or something, and he scored very high. Now, he was not an officer. He was, I think, a corporal or a sergeant or something like that because he didn't finish high school. He had to drop out of high school because his dad died and he had to work to support his siblings. So because he didn't graduate high school, he was not eligible for the officer corps. So he kind of got put into the cannon fodder category, basically. But then randomly they gave him this test. He was transferred to British Intelligence in London. That's where he met my grandmother. But he had ptsd. Next level. Like next level. I mean, just didn't talk. Just didn't talk. And if you tried talking to him, he'd just tell you to shut up. And he won a bunch of medals. Never bragged about it once, not even hinted, nothing. I found out about it because his military records were online. That's how I know. So he would say like, no, no way in hell do you want to do that again. But how many people. Now, Obviously he died 20 years ago or longer, actually 30 years ago. How many people are alive that remember World War II? Not many." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "And the same perhaps applies to the threat of nuclear war." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah, I mean, there are enough nuclear bombs pointed at United States to make the rebel, the radioactive rebel bounce many times." }, { "role": "user", "content": "There's two major wars going on, right? Now, so you talked about the threat of AGI quite a bit. But now as we sit here with the intensity of conflict going on, do you worry about nuclear war?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "I think we shouldn't discount the possibility of nuclear war. It is a civilizational threat. Right now I could be wrong, but I think the current probability of nuclear war is quite low. But there are a lot of nukes pointed at us and we have a lot of nukes pointed at other people. They're still there. Nobody's put their guns away, the missiles." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Are still in the silos and the leaders don't seem to be the ones with the nukes talking to each other." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "No. There are wars which are tragic and difficult on a local basis and then there are wars which are civilization ending or has that potential. Obviously global thermonuclear warfare has high potential to end civilization, perhaps permanently, but certainly to severely wound and perhaps set back human progress to the Stone Age or something. I don't know. Pretty bad, probably. Scientists and engineers want to be super popular after that as well. Like you got us into this mess. So generally, I think we obviously want to prioritize civilizational risks over the things that are painful and tragic on a local level, but not civilizational." }, { "role": "user", "content": "How do you hope the war in Ukraine comes to an end and what's the path once again to minimizing human suffering there?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Well, I think that what is likely to happen, which is really pretty much the way it is, is that something very close to the current lines will be how a ceasefire or truce happens. But you just have a situation right now where whoever goes on the offensive will suffer casualties at several times the rate of whoever's on the defense. Because you've got defense in depth, you've got minefields, trenches, anti tank defenses. Nobody has air superiority because the anti aircraft missiles are really far better than the aircraft. Like there are far more of them. And so neither side has air superiority. Tanks are basically death traps, just slow moving and they're not immune to anti tank weapons. So you really just have long range artillery and infantry trenches. It's World War I all over again with drones, you know, throwing all drones some drones there, which makes the long." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Range artillery just that much more accurate and better and so more efficient at murdering people on both sides." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah, so it's whoever is. You don't want to be trying to advance from either side because the probability of dying is incredibly high. So in order to overcome defense and depth trenches and minefields, you really need a significant local superiority in numbers, ideally combined arms, where you do a fast attack with aircraft, a concentrated number of tanks and a lot of people. That's the only way you're going to punch through a line. And then you're going to punch through and then not have reinforcements just kick you right out again. I mean, I really recommend people read World War I warfare in detail. It's rough. I mean, the sheer number of people that died there was mindboggling and it's." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Almost impossible to imagine the end of it. That doesn't look like almost exactly like the beginning in terms of what land belongs to who and so on, but on the other side of a lot of human suffering. Death." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yes." }, { "role": "user", "content": "And destruction of infrastructure." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yes. I mean, the thing that. The reason I, you know, proposed a. Some sort of truce or peace a year ago was because I predicted pretty much exactly what would happen, which is a lot of people dying for basically almost no changes in land and the loss of the flower of Ukrainian and Russian youth. And we should have some sympathy for the Russian boys as well as the Ukrainian boys, because Russian boys didn't ask to be on their front line. They have to be. So there's a lot of sons not coming back to their parents, and I think most of them don't really have. They don't hate the other side. It's sort of like there's this saying about. This saying comes from World War I. It's like young boys who don't know each other killing each other on. On behalf of old men that do know each other. The hell's the point of that?" } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "So Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that he's not, or has said in the past, he's not interested in talking to Putin directly. Do you think he should sit down, man to man, lead a leader and negotiate peace?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Look, I think I would just recommend do not send the flower of Ukrainian youth to die in trenches. Whether he talks to Putin or not. Just don't do that. Whoever goes on the offensive will lose massive numbers of people and history will not look kindly upon them." }, { "role": "user", "content": "You've spoken honestly about the possibility of war between US and China in the long term if no diplomatic solution is found. For example, on the question of Taiwan and one China policy." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Right." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "How do we avoid the trajectory where these two superpowers clash?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Well, it's worth reading that book on the difficult to pronounce Thucydides trap, I believe it's called. I love war history. I like inside out and backwards. There's hardly a battle I haven't read about. And trying to Figure out what really was the cause of victory in any particular case, as opposed to what one side or another claimed." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "The reason, both the victory and what sparked the war. Yeah, yeah, the whole thing." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah. So Athens and Sparta is a classic case. The thing about the Greeks is they really wrote down a lot of stuff. They loved writing. There are lots of interesting things that happen in many parts of the world, but people just didn't write down. So we don't know what happened. Or they didn't really, really write in detail. They just would say, like, we had a battle and we won. And, like, what. Can you add a bit more? The Greeks, they really wrote a lot. They were very articulate on. They just love writing. And we have a bunch of that writing that's preserved. So we know what led up to the Peloponnesian War between the Spartan and Athenian alliance, and we know that they saw it coming. The Spartans didn't write. They also weren't very verbose by their nature, but they did write, but they weren't very verbose. They were terse. But the Athenians and the other Greeks wrote a line and they were like. And Sparta was really kind of like the leader of Greece. But Athens grew stronger and stronger with each passing year. And everyone's like, well, it's inevitable that there's going to be a clash between Athens and Sparta. Well, how do we avoid that? And actually, they saw it coming and they still could not avoid it. So at some point, if one group, one civilization or country or whatever exceeds another, sort of like the United States has been the biggest kid on the block since, I think around 1890 from an economic standpoint. So the United States has been the most powerful economic engine in the world longer than anyone's been alive. And the foundation of war is economics. So now we have a situation in the case of China where the economy is likely to be two, perhaps three times larger than that of the U.S. so imagine you're the biggest kid on the block for as long as anyone can remember, and suddenly a kid comes along who's twice your size." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "So we see it coming." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah." }, { "role": "user", "content": "How is it possible to stop? Is there some. Let me throw something out there. Just intermixing of cultures, understanding. There does seem to be a giant cultural gap in understanding of each other. And you're an interesting case study because you are an American. Obviously, you've done a lot of incredible manufacturer here in the United States, but you also work with China." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "I've spent a lot of time in China and met with the leadership many times." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Maybe a good question to ask is what are some things about China that people don't understand? Positive just in the culture. What's some interesting things that you've learned about the Chinese?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Well, the sheer number of really smart, hard working people in China is incredible. There are really say like how many smart, hardworking people are there in China? There's far more of them there than there are here, I think, in my opinion. And they've got a lot of energy. So I mean the architecture in China that's in recent years is far more impressive than the U.S. i mean the train stations, the buildings, the high speed rail, everything. It's really far more impressive than what we have in the U.S. i mean, I recommend somebody just go to Shanghai, in Beijing, look at the buildings and go to take the train from Beijing to Xi' an where you have the terracotta warriors. China's got an incredible history, very long history and I think arguably in terms of the use of language from a written standpoint, sort of one of the oldest, perhaps the oldest written language, and then China people did write things down. China historically has always been, with rare exception, been internally focused. They have not been acquisitive. They've fought each other. There have been many, many civil wars. In the Three Kingdoms war, I believe they lost about 70% of their population. So they've had brutal internal wars like civil wars that make the US civil war look small by comparison. So I think it's important to appreciate that China is not monolithic. We sort of think of China as this sort of one entity of one mind. And this is definitely not the case from what I've seen. And I think most people who understand China would agree that people in China think about China 10 times more than they think about anything outside of China. So it's like 90% of their consideration is, you know, is internal." }, { "role": "user", "content": "Well, isn't that a really positive thing when you're talking about the collaboration and a future piece between superpowers? When you're inward facing, which is like focusing on improving yourself versus focusing on, yeah, quote, unquote, improving others through military might." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "The good news, the history of China suggests that China is not acquisitive, meaning they're not going to go out and invade a whole bunch of countries. Now they do feel very strongly. So that's good because a lot of very powerful countries have been acquisitive. The US is also one of the rare cases that has not been acquisitive. After World War II, the US could have basically taken over the world and any country, we got nukes and everybody else got nukes. We don't even have to lose soldiers. Which country do you want? And the United States could have taken over everything at will, and it didn't. The United States actually helped rebuild countries, so it helped rebuild Europe, helped rebuild Japan. This was very unusual behavior, almost unprecedented. The US did conspicuous acts of kindness like the Berlin Airlift. And I think it's always like, well, America's done bad things. Well, of course America's done bad things, but one needs to look at the whole track record. And just generally one sort of test would be how do you treat your prisoners of war? Or let's say, you know, no offense to the Russians, but let's say you're In Germany, it's 1945, you got the Russian army coming one side, you got the French, British and American armies coming the other side. Who would you like to be to surrender to? Like, no country is like morally perfect. But I recommend being a POW with the Americans. That would be my choice." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Very strongly in the full menu of pow." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Very much so. And in fact, von, von Braun, smart guy, was like, we've got to be captured by the Americans. And in fact, the SS was under orders to execute von Braun and all of the German rocket engineers. And they narrowly escaped their ss. They said they were going out for a walk in the woods. They left in the middle of winter with no coats and ran like no food, no coast, no water, and just ran like hell and ran west. And by sheer, I think his brother found a bicycle or something and then just cycled west as fast as he could and found a US patrol. So anyway, that's one way you can tell morality is where do you want to be at pow? It's not fun anywhere, but some places are much worse than others. So anyway, so I think America has been, while far from perfect, generally a benevolent force. And we should always be self critical and we try to be better. But anyone with half a brain knows that in this way China and the United States are similar. Neither country has been acquisitive in a significant way. So that's like a shared principle, I guess. Now China does feel very strongly about Taiwan. They've been very clear about that for a long time. From their standpoint, it would be like one of the states is not there, like Hawaii or something like that, but more significant than Hawaii. And Hawaii is pretty significant for us. So they view it as really the. There's a fundamental part of China, the island of Formosa, not Taiwan, that is not part of China, but should be. And the only reason it hasn't been is because the US Pacific Fleet and." }, { "role": "user", "content": "As their economic power grows and as their military power grows, the thing that they're clearly saying is their interest will, you know, clearly be materialized." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yes, China has been very clear that they will incorporate Taiwan peacefully or militarily, but that they will incorporate it from their standpoint is 100% likely." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "You know, something you said about conspicuous acts of kindness as a geopolitical policy, it almost seems naive, but I'd venture to say that this is probably the path forward. How you avoid most wars just as you say it. It sounds naive, but it's kind of brilliant if you believe in the goodness of underlying most of human nature. It just seems like conspicuous acts of kindness can reverberate through the populace of the countries involved. Yeah. And de escalate." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Absolutely. After World War I they made a big mistake. They basically tried to lump all the blame on Germany and saddled Germany with impossible reparations. And really there was quite a bit of blame to go around for World War I, but they try to put it all in Germany and that laid the seeds for World War II. So a lot of people, well, not just Hitler, a lot of people felt wronged and they wanted vengeance and they got it." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "People don't forget." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah, you kill somebody's father, mother, son, daughter, they're not going to forget it. They will want vengeance. So after World War II, they're like, well, the Treaty of Versailles was a huge mistake in World War I. And so this time instead of." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "You." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Know, crushing the losers, we're actually going to help them with the Marshall Plan and we're going to help rebuild Germany, we're going to help rebuild Austria and the other Italy and whatnot. That was the right move." }, { "role": "user", "content": "It does feel like there's a profound truth to conspicuous acts of kindness being an antidote to this." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Something must stop the cycle of reciprocal violence. Something must stop it or it will, you know, it'll never stop. Just eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, limb for a limb, life for a life, forever and ever." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "To escape briefly the darkness was some incredible engineering work. Xai just released Grok AI assistant that I've gotten a chance to play with. It's amazing on many levels. First of all, it's amazing that a relatively small team in a relatively short amount of time was able to develop this close to state of the art system. Another incredible thing is there's a regular moat and there's a fun mode." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah, I guess I Don't have to blame for that one." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "First of all, I wish everything in life had a fun mode. Yeah, there's something compelling beyond just fun about the fun mode. Interacting with a large language model. I'm not sure exactly what it is because I only had a little bit of time to play with it, but it just makes it more interesting, more vibrant to interact with the system." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah, absolutely. Our AI Grok is modeled after the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is one of my favorite books. Which is it's a book on philosophy disguised as a book on humor. And I would say that forms the basis of my philosophy, which is that we don't know the meaning of life. But the more we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness, digital and biological, the more we are able to understand what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe. So I have a philosophy of curiosity." }, { "role": "user", "content": "There is generally a feeling like this AI system has an outward looking, like the way you are like sitting with a good friend looking up at the stars, like asking pothead like questions about the universe, wondering what it's all about. The curiosity you talk about. There's a sense of no matter how mundane the question I ask it, there's a sense of cosmic grandeur to the whole thing." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Well, we are actually working hard to have engineering, math and physics answers that you can count on. So for the other sort of AIs out there, these so called large language models, I've not found the engineering to be reliable. And the hallucination, it unfortunately hallucinates most when you least wanted to hallucinate. So when you ask important difficult questions, that's when it tends to be confidently wrong. So we're really trying hard to say, okay, how do we be as grounded as possible? So you can count on the results, trace things back to physics first principles, mathematical logic. So underlying the humor is an aspiration to adhere to the truth of the universe as closely as possible." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "That's really tricky." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "It is tricky. So that's why there's always going to be some amount of error. But we want to aspire to be as truthful as possible about the answers with acknowledged error. So that there was always. You don't want to be confidently wrong, so you're not going to be right every time, but you want to minimize how often you're confidently wrong. And then like I said, once you can count on the logic as being not violating physics, then you can start to build on that to create inventions like invent new technologies. But if you cannot Count on the foundational physics being correct. Obviously the inventions are simply wishful thinking, Imagination, land magic, basically." }, { "role": "user", "content": "Well, as you said, I think one of the big goals of XAI is to understand the universe." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yes, that's our simple three word mission." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "If you look out far into the future, do you think on this level of physics, the very edge of what we understand about physics, do you think it will make discoveries, sort of the sexiest discovery of them as we know now, sort of unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics. So coming up with a theory of everything, do you think it could push towards that direction? Almost like theoretical physics discoveries." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "If an AI cannot figure out new physics, it's clearly not equal to humans, let alone nor has surpassed humans, because humans have figured out new physics. Physics is just understanding, deepening one's insight into how reality works. And then there's engineering, which is inventing things that have never existed. Now the range of possibilities for engineering is far greater than for physics because once you figure out the rules of the universe, that's it. You've discovered things that already existed. But from that you can then build technologies that are really almost limitless in the variety. And once you understand the rules of the game properly and with current physics, we do, at least at a local level, understand how physics works very well. Where our ability to predict things is incredibly good, like quantum mechanics is. The degree to which quantum mechanics can predict outcomes is incredible. That's my hardest class in college, by the way. My senior quantum mechanics class was harder than all of my other classes put together." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "To get an AI system, a large language model to, to reliably be as reliable as quantum mechanics and physics is very difficult." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah, you have to test any conclusions against the ground truth of reality. Reality is the ultimate judge. Like physics is the law. Everything else is a recommendation. I've seen plenty of people break the laws made by man, but none break the laws made by physics." }, { "role": "user", "content": "It's a good test actually. If this LLM understands and matches physics, then you can more reliably trust whatever it thinks about the current state of politics." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "And it's also not the case currently that even its internal logic is not consistent. So especially with the approach of just predicting token, predict token, predict token. It's like a vector sum. You're summing up a bunch of vectors, but you can get drift. So as those a little bit of error, a little bit of error adds up and by the time you are many tokens down the path, it doesn't make any sense." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "So it has to be somehow self Aware about the drift." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "It has to be self aware about the drift, and then look at the thing as a gestalt, as a whole and say, does it have coherence as a whole? So, you know, when authors write books, they will write the book and then they'll go and revise it, taking into account all the end and the beginning and the middle, and rewrite it to achieve coherence so that it doesn't end up in a nonsensical place." }, { "role": "user", "content": "Maybe the process of revising is what reasoning is, and then the process of revising is how you get closer and closer to truth. Maybe you like, at least I approach that way you just say a bunch of bullshit first, and then you get it better. You start at bullshit and then you get." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "You create a draft and then you iterate on that draft until it has coherence, until it all adds up, basically." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "So another question about theory of Everything. But for intelligence, do you think there exists, as you're exploring this with Xai, creating this intelligent system, do you think there is a theory of intelligence where you get to understand what. Like, what is the I in AGI and what is the I in human intelligence?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "There's no I in Team America. Oh, wait, there is." }, { "role": "user", "content": "No. It's going to be stuck in my head now. Yeah. There's no me and whatever in quantum mechanics. Oh, wait. I mean, is that part of the process of discovering, understanding the universe is understanding intelligence?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah. Yeah. I think we need to understand intelligence, understand consciousness. I mean, there. I mean, there are some sort of fundamental questions of, like, what is thought, what is emotion?" } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Yeah." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Is it really just one atom bumping into another atom? It feels like something more than that. So I think we're probably missing some really big things. Like some really big things." }, { "role": "user", "content": "Something that'll be obvious in retrospect." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yes." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Like, there's a giant. You put the whole consciousness, emotion." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Well, some people would call it like a soul. You know, religion would be a soul. Like, you feel like you're you. Right. I mean, you don't feel like you're just a collection of atoms, but on what dimension does thought exist? What dimension do emotions exist? We feel them very strongly. I suspect there's more to it than atoms bumping into atoms." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "And maybe AI can pave the path to the discovery, whatever the hell that thing is." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah. What is consciousness? When you put the atoms in a particular shape, why are they able to form thoughts and take actions and feelings?" } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "And even if it is an illusion, why is this illusion so compelling?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah. Why does this Illusion exist. On what plane does this illusion exist?" } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Yeah." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "And sometimes I wonder is either perhaps everything's conscious or nothing is conscious. One of the two." }, { "role": "user", "content": "I like the former. Everything conscious just seems more fun." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "It does seem more fun. Yes. But we're composed of atoms, and those atoms are composed of quarks and leptons. And those quarks and leptons have been around since the beginning of the universe." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "The beginning of the universe." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Right. What seems to be the beginning of the universe?" }, { "role": "user", "content": "The first time we talked, you said, which is surreal, to think that this discussion was happening is becoming a reality. I asked you what question would you ask an AGI system once you create it? And you said, what's outside the simulation is the question. Good question. But it seems like with Grok, you started literally this system's goal is to be able to ask such questions, to answer such questions and to ask such questions." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Where are the aliens?" } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Where are the aliens?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "That's one of the Fermi paradox question. A lot of people have asked me if I've seen any evidence of aliens, and I haven't, which is kind of concerning because then I think I'd probably prefer to at least have seen some archaeological evidence of aliens. To the best of my knowledge, there is no proof. I'm not aware of any evidence of aliens out there. They're very subtle. We might just be the only consciousness, at least in the galaxy. And if you look at, say, the history of Earth, if one is to believe the archaeological record, Earth is about four and a half billion years old. Civilization as measured from the first writing is only about 5,000 years old. We have to give some credit there to the ancient Sumerians who aren't around anymore. I think it was an archaic pre. Cuneiform was the first actual symbolic representation, but only about 5,000 years ago. I think that's a good date for when we'd say civilization started. That's one millionth of Earth's existence. So civilization has been around. It's really a flash in the pan so far. And why did it take so long? For four and a half billion years, for the vast majority of time, there was no life. And then there was archaic bacteria for a very long time. And then you had mitochondria get captured. Multicellular life, differentiation into plants and animals. Life moving from the oceans to land. Mammals, higher brain functions. And the sun is expanding slowly. But it will heat the Earth up at some point in the future, boil the oceans, and Earth will become like Venus, where life as we know it is impossible. So if we do not become multi planetary and ultimately go beyond our solar system, annihilation of all life on Earth is a certainty. A certainty. And it could be as little as on the galactic timescale, half a billion years. You know, long time by human standards but that's only 10% longer than Earth has been around at all. So if life had taken 10% longer to evolve on Earth, it wouldn't exist at all." }, { "role": "user", "content": "We got a deadline coming up, but a hurry. But that said, as you said, humans intelligent life on Earth developed a lot of cool stuff very quickly. So it seems like becoming multi planetary is almost inevitable. Unless we destroy." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "We need to do it. I mean it's not. I mean I suspect that if we are able to go out there and explore other star systems that we. There's a good chance we find a whole bunch of long dead one planet civilizations that never made it past their home planet." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "That's so sad. Also fascinating." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "I mean there are various explanations for the Fermi paradox and one is just the sort of. There are these great filters which civilizations don't pass through. And one of those great filters is do you become a multi planet civilization or not? And if you don't, it's simply a matter of time before something happens on your planet, either natural or man made that causes us to die out. Like the dinosaurs rather now they didn't have spaceships so I think the more." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Likely thing is because just empathize with the aliens that they, they found us and they're protecting us and letting us be." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "I hope so nice aliens." }, { "role": "user", "content": "Just like the tribes in the, in the Amazon they all contact the tribes were protecting them. That's what." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "That would be a nice explanation." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Or you could have like what was it? I think Andrej Karpathy said it's like the ants in the Amazon asking where's everybody?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Well they do run into a lot of other ants." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "That's true." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "They have these Ant wars." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Sounds like a good TV show." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah, they literally have these big wars between various ants." }, { "role": "user", "content": "Yeah, maybe I'm just dismissing all the different diversity of ants." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "You should listen to that Werner Herzog talking about the jungle. It's really hilarious. Have you heard it?" } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "No, I have not. But Werner Herzog as a way." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "You should play it for the, you know, as an interlude in the. It's on YouTube. It's awesome." }, { "role": "user", "content": "I love him so much. Yeah, he's great. Was he the director of Happy people Life in the Taiga? I think also did that bear documentary. The bear documentary." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "I did this thing about penguins?" } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "Yeah, the depress, the analysis, the psychoanalysis." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah, the penguins like headed for mountains that are like 70 miles away and penguin is just headed for doom, basically." }, { "role": "user", "content": "Well, he had a cynical take. He could be just a brave explorer and there'll be great stories told about him amongst the penguin population for many centuries to come. What are we talking about? Okay." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yes, aliens. I mean, I don't know. Look, I think the smart move is just this is the first time in the history of Earth that it's been possible for life to extend beyond Earth. That window is open now. It may be open for a long time or it may be open for a short time. It may be open now and then never open again. So I think the smart move here is to make life multi planetary while it is possible to do so. We don't want to be one of those lame one planet civilizations that just dies out." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "No, those are lame." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "Yeah, lame self respecting civilization. Or be one planet." } ]
[ { "role": "user", "content": "There's not going to be a Wikipedia entry for one of those. And pause. Does SpaceX have an official policy for when we meet aliens?" }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "No." }, { "role": "user", "content": "That seems irresponsible." }, { "role": "assistant", "content": "I mean, look, if I see the slightest indication that there are aliens, I will immediately post on the X platform. Anything." } ]

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