G20 Innovation Ministerial Summit — Remarks (North Carolina)
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (4)
Transcript
0:00ModeratorSo our first speaker is Elon Musk. As the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon has shown that conquering challenges of physics engineering can be easier than cutting through red tape.
0:13ModeratorAnd I think his dedication to doing both, however, continues to inspire people around the world. So thank you, Elon, for joining us. We were just wrapping up our introductory session where we made clear that under this presidency, we believe that economic growth is one of the most important drivers for all of us.
0:32ModeratorAnd we believe that technology is a big piece of that. So you've been on the front lines of this for quite a while. And I think one of the key questions, I think for the group and something that we wanted to talk to you about was as you have driven innovation across multiple countries around the world, what in your opinion, separates countries where innovators can successfully turn breakthroughs into deployed technologies from those where progress actually stalls?
0:59ModeratorBecause I think there's a lot of lessons learned about what people, governments should be doing and what maybe they shouldn't be.
1:07Elon MuskWell, yeah, I think a lot of people have talked about this, and I think some of it, frankly is pretty straightforward, is that you have to have an environment that's relatively free of regulation, meaning that new things must be default legal as opposed to default illegal.
1:26Elon MuskSo in the eu, for example, we find that the regulation level is extraordinarily high end things are generally default illegal. And this inhibits progress with new technologies. It slows it down.
1:40Elon MuskIt doesn't ultimately stop it, but it slows it down quite considerably. Of course, you need to have a, you need to have venture capitalists and an environment that is supportive of new companies.
1:56Elon MuskYou can think of new companies like they're like small saplings in a forest. So what most countries tend to do is they tend to provide too much support to the large existing trees in the forest and not enough to the small saplings.
2:15Elon MuskBut the large trees don't need their support. It's the small saplings that do the startups. And so the system should be generally biased towards supporting the small trees as opposed to the large ones.
2:31Elon MuskBut that is rarely the case because the large companies have access to, usually they have access to the leadership of the countries and the small startups do not. So you really need to foster the growth of young companies and take active steps in that regard and like I said, make things default legal, not default illegal.
2:58ModeratorOne question that a lot of the countries here face is a question around adoption. I think there's a general recognition that adopting emerging technologies can be very beneficial to economic growth.
3:11ModeratorNo matter what sort of shape size of any country is, you know, how do you think about adoption? What should countries be doing to encourage adoption? So does it go back to the same sort of regulatory structures or how do you think about adoption as a key driver for growth?
3:28Elon MuskYeah, I think you want to have a lean forward, try new technologies approach to new technologies otherwise, as opposed to be somewhat stuck in the past. Naturally new technologies need some encouragement and I think should be embraced.
3:50Elon MuskWe are going to see and are seeing in fact significant productivity gains from artificial intelligence and, and we'll see very dramatic gains in productivity from robotics. You know, things like the Tesla self driving car is going to be a tremendous boon or is a tremendous, tremendous boon already to users.
4:14Elon MuskAnd I think humanoid robotics will be just an incredible change. I think just to give you some sense of scale here, I think the, I think AI will probably increase the global economy by 20 to 30%.
4:33Elon MuskThat's my rough estimate, meaning on the order of 20 to $30 trillion per year. And I will be able to do anything digital, anything that does not require shaping of atoms by hand probably by the end of next year.
4:50Elon MuskSo as I'm sure people know, AI is already incredibly good at software. And it's getting to the point where AI won't just be good at software, it'll be what I call Stockfish level good.
5:06Elon MuskSo Stockfish is a chess program that can beat the world's best chess players very easily. In fact, at this point you could run Stockfish on your phone and beat Magnus Carlsen at chess.
5:18Elon MuskSo at some, at some point next year is my prediction, software will be so good, AI software will be so good that it will be Stockfish level good. Meaning that it is impossible for a human to compete in writing software with AI, but like AI will just crush all humans as software.
5:37Elon MuskAnd I think it'll, it will be extremely good, possibly stockbrush level, but, but certainly extremely good at all forms of engineering and anything Digital. Literally in 1212 to 18 months.
5:54ModeratorOne of the.
5:56Elon MuskJust one more thing to that, my apologies. So 20 30% increase of total global economy. So this is quite a lot of prosperity we're talking about here just from digital AI, but from robotics, from humanoid.
6:14Elon MuskBasically think of it like a general purpose robot AI. I think we'll see many multiples of the global economy, meaning you can increase the economy by a factor of 10 or more.
6:28Elon MuskThese are mind boggling numbers.
6:30ModeratorYeah, I was just about to say that. I mean one of the stats we gave to the group here was that in the four years since sort of ChatGPT was launched.
6:37ModeratorI think there's, you know, over a billion people around the world already using AI. There's been very quick uptake around, around the country on. Around the world on that.
6:44ModeratorI guess the question to you is, I think a lot of people think about sort of the next chapter being in this sort of applied or sort of physical AI.
6:52ModeratorWhere, where do you see sort of robotics trending? How quickly is it going to be implemented? I think I remember in the first Trump administration, we were talking about sort of automated factories, and now we're a year later, 10 years later.
7:03ModeratorSo how quickly do you think these changes are happening in the sort of physical AI world?
7:09Elon MuskYeah, so anything physical always takes longer than anything, which is digital. Digital. When you solve something digitally, it's the software that you can easily copy across other computers. When it's physical, you've got to build up an entire massive supply chain.
7:24Elon MuskYou've got to move a lot of atoms. And supply chains are very much global at this point. So that's why it takes longer. Nonetheless, when you think of humanoid robotics, the way to think about it, I think the right framework is to consider that the usefulness of a humanoid robot, a general purpose robot, is going to be roughly the digital, the AI software.
7:51Elon MuskHow good is the AI software times, how good is the AI chip in the robot times, how good is the electromechanical dexterity, especially of the hands? Now all three of those things are improving exponentially.
8:04Elon MuskAnd the usefulness of the robot is those three things multiplied by each other. Then when you make the robots, the robots will. The robots will start manufacturing the robots.
8:17Elon MuskSo you get a recursive effect. So it starts off very, very slowly, but then grows at an explosive rate. So if you say like 10 years from now, I would say there are well over a billion humanoid robots.
8:34Elon MuskWow. And the productivity per robot will be probably five times that of a human. Meaning. Meaning that the productivity in 10 years of humanoid robots. I think this is a conservative estimate.
8:49Elon MuskBy the way, this is what I would be willing to put serious money betting on, that there will be at least a billion robots in 10 years and that those robots will be at least five times the output of a human.
9:03Elon MuskMeaning the billion humanoid robots will be more productive than all humans combined.
9:12ModeratorWow. Shifting gears just a little bit to a question that's kind of facing the US today. Data centers have been a big political issue over the last six to eight months here in the United States.
9:27ModeratorAnd I think there's a general understanding that in order to drive and power the, the AI revolution that's coming, we need to have the electricity and the data center compute capacity to do the training and the inference of all this AI.
9:44ModeratorYou know, how do you think about this particular issue? Where are we on the curve of kind of how much we built versus how much we need? And as government leaders here think about how to prepare their economies and build the right power and data infrastructure, how should they be thinking about where sort of construction, compute and power needs are going to be in the next few years?
10:05Elon MuskWell, there actually is quite a crisis of power. So this is something if you just sort of follow the AI topic on the X platform, which by the way is where almost all of the AI discourse takes place, I think you get a very good sense for where things are headed.
10:30Elon MuskSo that's how, that's how I get my news and it's incredibly good. Everyone who's anyone in AI posts on X, so that's why I'd recommend just go on the AI topic on X and you'll understand all these things and get a day by day account of things.
10:51Elon MuskAnd what the consensus is at this point is that there will be a significant power shortfall next year. So not like distant future. There's expected to be, I believe the, the consensus estimate among analysts that follows the AI space very closely is that there will be at least a, a 15 gigawatt shortfall of power in 2027 for AI chips.
11:17Elon MuskSo this is perhaps an obvious thing that one would expect to occur because the rate at which AI chips is being produced has been rising incredibly rapidly. They're sort of rising on the order of 40, 40 to 50% a year.
11:33Elon MuskBut the, but the power available outside of China has been rising at like 10 to 20% a year. So obviously the, the faster rising thing will eventually overwhelm the slower rising thing.
11:46Elon MuskAnd so in fact even I'd say at this point there are challenges with power even before next year, which is why Google and Anthropic and many other companies are actually leasing compute from SpaceX because we've been able to turn on AI better than anyone else so far.
12:06Elon MuskBut this is by constructing our own power plants is the only way we were able to do it. So now China does have a transmount of electricity, but, but, but due to GPU export bans, one cannot, you know, establish data centers with the latest chips in China.
12:25Elon MuskSo, so, but, so really the consideration is what, what sort of electricity growth is there outside of China? And that is currently a significant shortfall relative to AI chip production.
12:39Elon MuskSo there is this, this creates an opportunity, I think, for countries around the world just to, to save, to sort of, if they're interested in AI data centers, to, to, to construct a lot of power and, and offer that to AI companies.
12:57Elon MuskAnd in exchange, of course, these data centers would be, would be taxed and have to pay, you know, reasonable fees and stuff. But it does create an opportunity for a lot of countries.
13:09ModeratorAbsolutely. Well, thank you so much for your time. It meant a lot that you could join us here and really appreciate it. Thank you so much.
13:16Elon MuskYou're most welcome. Thank you.
13:17ModeratorThank you. Great. Now we'll be hearing from David Sachs. As a former White House AI czar and my co chair on the President's Council of Advisors for Science and Technology, he's a successful.