Elon Musk: War, AI, Aliens, Politics, Physics, Video Games, and Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #400
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (4)
Transcript
0:00Lex FridmanThe following is a conversation with Elon Musk, his fourth time on this the Lex Friedman Podcast.
0:20Lex FridmanI thought you were going to finish it. It's one of the greatest themes in all of film history.
0:31Elon MuskYeah, that's great.
0:33Lex FridmanSo I was just thinking about the Roman Empire as one does.
0:38Elon MuskThere's that whole meme where all guys are thinking about the Roman Empire at
0:43Lex Fridmanleast 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.
1:00Lex FridmanAnd it, I think, has been a big part of most empires and dynasties throughout human history.
1:05Elon MuskSo they usually came as a result of conquest. I mean, there's some, like the Austro Hungarian Empire, where there was just a lot of sort of clever marriages.
1:16Lex FridmanBut 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.
1:31Lex FridmanI asked this a good question to ask.
1:32Elon MuskGet tested. Grok approved.
1:35Lex FridmanAt 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.
1:57Elon MuskI'm generally a proponent of peace. I mean, ignorance is perhaps in my view, the real enemy to counter it. That's the real hard part. Not, you know, fighting other humans, but all creatures fight.
2:10Elon MuskI mean, the jungle is a. You look at the 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, like saying that it's like basically just murder and death in every direction.
2:29Elon MuskI mean, the plants, animals in the jungle are constantly trying to kill and eat each other every single day, every minute. So it's not like, you know, we're unusual in that respect.
2:40Lex FridmanBut there's a relevant question here whether with greater intelligence comes greater control over these base instincts for violence.
2:49Elon MuskYes, 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.
3:03Elon MuskI mean, the bonobos are an exception, but chimpanzee society is filled with violence and it's quite, quite horrific, frankly. That's our limbic system in action. Like, you don't want to be on the wrong side of a chimpanzee.
3:20Elon MuskYou'll eat your face off and tear your nuts off.
3:22Lex FridmanYeah, basically. There's no limits or ethics or they're almost a just war. There's no just war in chimpanzee societies. Is war and dominance by any means necessary? Yeah.
3:33Elon MuskChimpanzee society is like 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.
3:56Elon MuskIt's happened several times.
3:57Lex FridmanRipping your nuts off is an interesting strategy for interaction.
4:02Elon MuskIt'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.
4:10Lex FridmanWell, from a martial arts perspective, it's a fascinating strategy.
4:15Elon MuskThe nutrifer.
4:18Lex FridmanI wonder which of the martial arts teaches that.
4:21Elon MuskI 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.
4:30Lex FridmanYeah. So like I said, somehow controversially, you've been a proponent of peace on Twitter on X. Yeah. So let me ask you about the wars going on today and to see what the path to peace could be.
4:44Lex FridmanHow 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?
4:54Elon MuskWell, 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 in Israel especially.
5:06Elon MuskSo there is no easy answer. Or what my. This is strictly my opinion of, you know, is that the goal of Hamas was to provoke an overreaction from Israel.
5:24Elon MuskThey obviously did not expect to, you know, have a military victory, but 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.
5:58Elon MuskSo the, 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.
6:14Elon MuskEverything that is the actual thing that would thwart the goal of Hamas.
6:19Lex FridmanSo in some sense, the degree that makes sense in geopolitics, turn the other cheek implemented.
6:26Elon MuskIt's not exactly turn the other cheek because I do think that there's,
6:32Lex Fridmanyou
6:32Elon Muskknow, I think it is appropriate for Israel to find the Hamas members and you know, either kill them or incarcerate them like that. Something has to be done because they're just going to keep coming otherwise.
6:51Elon MuskBut 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.
7:15Elon MuskAnd just be over the top about it and be very transparent. So it's okay. Claim it's a trick. Like just put a wavecam on the thing, you know, 24, seven deploy acts of kindness.
7:31Elon MuskYeah, conspicuous acts of kindness that, that with that are unequivocal. Meaning that can't be somehow because Hamas will. Then their response would be, oh, it's a trick, therefore you have to counter.
7:44Elon MuskHow. How is it not a trick?
7:47Lex FridmanThis ultimately fights the broader force of hatred in the region.
7:51Elon MuskYes. And I'm not sure who said it, it's an apocryphal saying, but an eye for the, for an eye makes everyone blind. Now that neck of the woods, they really believe in the whole eye for an eye thing.
8:05Elon MuskBut 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 to, really shouldn't be acceptable to anyone, then you're going to leave basically a lot of people alive who subsequently hate Israel.
8:25Elon MuskSo 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.
8:39Elon MuskAnd it's safe to say that if, you know,
8:47Elon MuskIf, 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.
9:13Elon MuskBut 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?
9:26Lex FridmanLet me just linger on. War.
9:29Elon MuskYeah. It's safe to say wars always existed and always will exist. Always will exist, always has existed and always will exist.
9:37Lex FridmanI hope not. You think it always.
9:39Elon MuskThere 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.
9:55Elon MuskYeah.
9:55Lex FridmanYou talked about the culture series. There's war even there.
9:58Elon MuskYes. This giant war. The first book starts off with a gigantic galactic war where trillions die trillions,
10:07Lex Fridmanbut it still nevertheless protects these pockets of flourishing somehow. You can have galactic war and still have pockets of flourishing?
10:17Elon MuskYeah, I mean it's. I guess if we are able to one day expand to full the galaxy or whatever, the will be a galactic war at some point.
10:30Lex FridmanAh, 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.
10:38Elon MuskYes.
10:41Lex FridmanA 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?
10:55Elon MuskOne 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.
11:04Elon Muski 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?
11:15Elon MuskMy grandfather was in World War II. He was severely traumatized. He was there, I think for almost six years in eastern North Africa and Italy. All his friends were killed in front of him.
11:29Elon MuskAnd 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.
11:45Elon MuskHe 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.
11:58Elon MuskSo 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.
12:13Elon MuskBut 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.
12:24Elon MuskAnd 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.
12:36Elon MuskSo he would say like, no way in hell do you want to do that again. But how many people he died know 20 years ago or longer? Actually 30 years ago.
12:50Elon MuskHow many people are alive that remember World War II, not many.
12:54Lex FridmanAnd the same perhaps applies to the threat of nuclear war.
13:01Elon MuskYeah, I mean, there are enough nuclear bombs pointed at United States to make the rubble, the radioactive rubble, balance. Many times
13:10Lex Fridmanthere'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?
13:25Elon MuskI think we shouldn't discount the possibility of nuclear war. It is a civilizational threat.
13:36Elon MuskRight 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.
13:50Elon MuskThey're still there. Nobody's put their guns away. The missiles are still in the silos
13:57Lex Fridmanand the leaders don't seem to be the ones with the nukes talking to each other.
14:02Elon MuskNo, there are wars which are tragic and difficult on a local basis. And then there are wars which are civilization ending or have 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 by, you know, to the Stone Age or something.
14:33Elon MuskI 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 things that are painful and tragic on a local level, but not civilizational.
15:00Lex FridmanHow do you hope the war in Ukraine comes to an end and what's the path once again to minimizing human suffering there?
15:08Elon MuskWell, 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
15:23Lex Fridmanbe
15:25Elon Muskhow a ceasefire or truce happens. But you know, 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.
15:41Elon MuskBecause you've got defense and death. 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.
15:58Elon MuskAnd 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.
16:17Elon MuskIt's World War I all over again with drones. Yeah, throne, all drones, some drones there.
16:25Lex FridmanWhich makes the long range artillery just that much more accurate and better and so more efficient at murdering people on both sides.
16:33Elon MuskYeah. 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 in 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.
17:09Elon MuskThat'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.
17:28Elon MuskIt's rough. I mean, the sheer number of people that died there was mind boggling and
17:37Lex Fridmanit's 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 and destruction of infrastructure.
17:55Elon MuskYes. I mean, the thing that the reason I, you know, propose 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.
18:21Elon MuskAnd 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.
18:30Elon MuskSo there's a lot of sons not coming back to their parents, you know, and I think most of them don't really have. They don't hate the other side. You know, it's sort of like there's the saying about, like this saying comes from World War I.
18:50Elon MuskIt's like young boys who don't know each other killing each other on behalf of old men that do know each other. The hell's the point of that?
19:02Lex FridmanSo Vladimir Zelensky 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, Leader, leader and negotiate peace?
19:14Elon MuskLook, I think I would just recommend do not send the flower of Ukrainian youth to be to die in trenches whether he talks to Putin or not. Just don't do that.
19:30Elon MuskWhoever goes on the offensive will lose massive numbers of people and history will not look kindly upon them.
19:42Lex FridmanYou'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.
19:52Elon MuskRight.
19:52Lex FridmanHow do we avoid the trajectory where these two superpowers clash?
19:58Elon MuskWell, it's Worth reading that book on the. 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.
20:11Elon MuskRead 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 claims.
20:20Lex FridmanThe reason, both the victory and what sparked the war. Yeah, yeah, the whole thing.
20:26Elon MuskYeah. So that 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.
20:38Elon MuskSo we don't know what happened. Or. Or they didn't really write in detail. They just would say, like, we had a battle and we won. Can you add a bit more?
20:51Elon MuskThe 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.
21:15Elon MuskI mean, the Spartans didn't write. They also weren't very verbose by their nature, but they did. Right, but they weren't very verbose. They were terse. But the Athenians and the other Greeks wrote a line and they were like.
21:28Elon MuskAnd 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, that's inevitable that there's going to be a clash between Athens and Sparta.
21:45Elon MuskWell, how do we avoid that? And actually they saw it coming and they still could not avoid it. So at some point, if one
21:59Lex Fridmangroup,
21:59Elon Muskone civilization or country or whatever exceeds another, sort of like the United States has been the biggest kid in the block since I think around 1890 from an economic standpoint.
22:14Elon MuskSo the United States has been the most powerful economic engine in the world longer than anyone's been alive.
22:28Elon MuskAnd 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.
22:45Elon Muskso 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.
22:55Lex FridmanSo we see it coming.
22:57Elon MuskYeah.
22:57Lex FridmanHow 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.
23:09Lex FridmanAnd 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.
23:20Elon MuskI've spent a lot of time in China and met with the leadership many times.
23:22Lex FridmanMaybe 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?
23:36Elon MuskWell, 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.
23:57Elon MuskAnd 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.
24:12Elon MuskIt's really far more impressive than what we have in the U.S. i mean I recommend somebody just go to Shanghai and Beijing, look at the buildings and go to take the train from Beijing to Xi' an where you have the terracotta warriors.
24:29Elon MuskChina'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.
24:53Elon MuskChina 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 the population.
25:15Elon MuskSo 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.
25:34Elon MuskWe 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.
25:53Elon MuskSo it's like 90% of their consideration is, you know, are it's internal.
26:01Lex FridmanWell, isn't that a really positive thing when you're talking about the collaboration and the 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.
26:18Elon MuskThe 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.
26:28Elon MuskSo 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.
26:41Elon MuskAnd any country, we got nukes. Nobody 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.
26:52Elon MuskOh, it at will. And it didn't. And the United States actually helped rebuild countries, so it helped rebuild Europe, you know, helped rebuild Japan. This was very unusual behavior, almost unprecedented.
27:09Elon MuskYou know, the US did conspicuous acts of kindness like the Berlin Airlift, you know, and I think, you know, it's always like, well, America's done bad things. Well, of course America's done bad things.
27:24Elon MuskBut one needs to look at the whole track record. And just generally, you know, 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.
27:47Elon MuskYou got the Russian army coming one side and you got the French, British and American armies coming the other side. Who would you like to be to surrender to?
27:56Elon MuskLike, no country is like morally perfect. But I recommend being a POW with the Americans. That would be my choice very strongly
28:07Lex Fridmanin the full menu of pow.
28:09Elon MuskVery much so. And in fact, Von, Von Braun, smart guy, was like, we've got to be captured by the Americans. In fact, the SS was under orders to execute Von Brown and all of the German rocket and they narrowly escaped their ssr.
28:34Elon MuskThey 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.
28:46Elon MuskAnd by Sherlock, 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?
29:06Elon MuskIt'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.
29:32Elon MuskSo I think 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.
29:46Elon MuskNow China does feel very strongly about Taiwan. They've been very clear about that for a long time. From this standpoint, it would be like one of the states is not there, like Hawaii or something like that, but more significant than Hawaii, you know, and Hawaii is pretty significant for us.
30:11Elon MuskSo they view it as really the. That there's a fundamental part of China, the island of Formosa, now 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
30:32Lex Fridmanas their economic power grows and as their military power grows, the thing that they are clearly saying is their interest will, you know, clearly be materialized.
30:46Elon MuskYes, 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.
31:04Lex FridmanYou 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.
31:16Lex FridmanHow 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.
31:30Lex FridmanIt just seems like conspicuous acts of kindness can reverberate through the populace of the countries involved. Yeah, well, and de escalate.
31:44Elon MuskAbsolutely. So after World War I, they made a big mistake. You know, they basically try to lump all the blame on Germany and saddle 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 was that.
32:21Elon MuskThat laid the seeds for World War II. So it's a lot of people. Well, not just Hitler. A lot of people felt wronged and they wanted vengeance and they got it.
32:38Lex FridmanPeople don't forget. Yeah,
32:41Elon Muskyou 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.
32:59Elon MuskSo this time instead of 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.
33:20Elon MuskSo. That was the right move.
33:27Lex FridmanIt does feel like there's a profound truth to conspicuous acts of kindness being an antidote to this.
33:37Elon MuskSomething 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.
33:57Lex FridmanTo 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. 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.
34:19Lex FridmanAnother incredible thing is there's a regular moat and there's a fun mode.
34:23Elon MuskYeah, I guess time to plan for that one.
34:26Lex FridmanI wish, 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.
34:38Lex FridmanI'm not sure exactly what it is because I've 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.
34:47Elon MuskYeah, absolutely. I 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.
35:06Elon MuskAnd 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.
35:30Elon MuskSo I have a philosophy of curiosity.
35:34Lex FridmanThere 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.
35:50Lex FridmanThe curiosity you talk about. There's a sense, no matter how mundane the question I ask it, there's a sense of cosmic grandeur to the whole thing.
35:58Elon MuskWell, we are actually working hard to have engineering, math, 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.
36:23Elon MuskAnd the hallucination, it unfortunately hallucinates most when you least want it 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?
36:42Elon MuskSo 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.
37:01Lex FridmanThat's really tricky.
37:02Elon MuskIt 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.
37:21Elon MuskYou 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.
37:46Elon MuskBut if, if you can't, if, if you, if you cannot count on the foundational physics being correct, obviously the inventions are simply wishful thinking. You know, imagination, land, magic, basically.
38:01Lex FridmanWell, as you said, I think one of the big goals of XAI is to understand the universe.
38:06Elon MuskYes, that's how simple three word mission.
38:13Lex FridmanIf 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?
38:22Lex FridmanSort of the sexiest discovery of them is 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?
38:35Lex FridmanAlmost like theoretical physics discoveries?
38:38Elon MuskIf 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.
38:54Elon MuskAnd 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.
39:09Elon MuskYou've discovered things that already existed. But from that you can then build technologies that are really almost limitless in the variety. And it's like 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.
39:32Elon MuskOur 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.
39:46Elon MuskMy senior quantum mechanics class was harder than all of my other classes put together.
39:50Lex FridmanTo get an AI system, a large language model to reliably be as reliable as quantum mechanics and physics is very difficult.
40:01Elon MuskYeah, 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.
40:15Lex FridmanIt'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.
40:28Elon MuskAnd it's also not the case currently that even its internal logic is not consistent. So especially with the approach of just predicting a token. Predict, token, predict, token. It's like a vector sum.
40:45Elon MuskYou'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.
40:59Lex FridmanSo it has to be somehow self aware about the drift.
41:02Elon MuskIt 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?
41:13Elon MuskSo when authors write books that they will write the book and then they'll go and revise it, take 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.
41:33Lex FridmanMaybe 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.
41:47Lex FridmanYou start at bullshit and then you
41:49Elon Muskget, you create a draft and then, and then you. And then you iterate on that draft until it has coherence, until it's. It all adds up, basically.
41:58Lex FridmanSo another question about theory of everything, but for intelligence, do you think there exists, as you're exploring this with Xai, creating this intelligence system, do you think there is a theory of intelligence where you get to understand what.
42:13Lex FridmanLike, what is the I in AGI and what is the I in human intelligence?
42:22Elon MuskThere's no I in Team America. Oh, wait, there is
42:26Lex Fridmanno. 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?
42:47Elon MuskYeah. 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?
43:01Lex FridmanYeah.
43:03Elon MuskIs 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.
43:18Lex FridmanSomething that'll be obvious in retrospect.
43:20Elon MuskYes.
43:21Lex FridmanLike there's a giant. You put the whole consciousness, emotion.
43:26Elon MuskWell, some people would call it like a soul, you know, religion. A soul. Like you feel like you're you. Right? I mean, you don't feel like you're just A collection of atoms.
43:38Elon MuskBut 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.
43:52Lex FridmanAnd maybe AI can pave the path to the discovery. Whatever the hell that thing is.
43:58Elon MuskYeah. What is consciousness? When you put the atoms in a particular shape, why are they able to form thoughts and take actions and feelings?
44:10Lex FridmanAnd even if it is an illusion, why is this illusion so compelling?
44:13Elon MuskYeah, why does this illusion exist? On what plane does this illusion exist? And sometimes I wonder is either perhaps everything's conscious or nothing is conscious? One of the two.
44:32Lex FridmanI like the former. Everything conscious just seems more fun.
44:37Elon MuskIt 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.
44:50Lex FridmanThe beginning of the universe.
44:53Elon MuskRight. What seems to be the beginning of the universe?
44:55Lex FridmanThe first time we talked, you said what you would, 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?
45:09Lex FridmanIs the question. Good question. Yeah, but it seems like with Grok, you started literally the system's goal is to be able to ask such questions, to answer such questions and to ask such questions.
45:23Elon MuskWhere are the aliens?
45:25Lex FridmanWhere are the aliens?
45:26Elon MuskThat's one of the, like 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 what I probably prefer to at least have seen some archaeological evidence of aliens.
45:44Elon MuskTo the best of my knowledge, there is no proof. I 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.
45:58Elon MuskAnd if you look at, say, the history of Earth, for 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.
46:11Elon MuskWe 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.
46:24Elon MuskI 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.
46:45Elon MuskAnd why did it Take so long for, you know, four and a half billion years. For the vast majority of the time there was no life. And then there was archaic bacteria for a very long time.
47:04Elon MuskAnd 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.
47:33Elon MuskIt will, it will heat the earth up at some point in the future, boil the oceans and Earth will become like Venus where no life, life as we know it is impossible.
47:46Elon MuskSo 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.
48:09Elon MuskYou 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.
48:27Lex FridmanWe got a deadline coming up, better hurry. But that said, as you said, humans, intelligent life on Earth developed a lot of cool stuff very quickly. So yes, it seems like becoming a multi planetary is almost inevitable.
48:44Lex FridmanUnless we destroy.
48:45Elon MuskWe need to do it. I mean it's, it's not. I mean I suspect that they're. 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.
49:03Lex FridmanThat's so sad. Also fascinating.
49:07Elon MuskI mean there are various explanations for the Fermi paradox and one is 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?
49:21Elon MuskAnd if you don't, it's simply a matter of time before something happens on your planet, you know, either natural or man made that causes us to die out. Like the dinosaurs.
49:35Elon MuskWhere are they now? They didn't have spaceships.
49:40Lex FridmanSo I think the more likely thing is because just empathize with the aliens that they, they found us and they're protecting us and letting us be.
49:51Elon MuskI hope so nice aliens.
49:53Lex FridmanJust like the tribes in the, in the Amazon. They all contact the tribes were protecting them.
49:58Elon MuskThat's what that would be a nice explanation.
50:00Lex FridmanOr you could have like what was it? I think Andre Karpathy said it's like the ants in the Amazon asking where's everybody?
50:10Elon MuskWell they do run into a lot of other ants.
50:12Lex FridmanThat's true.
50:13Elon MuskThese Ant wars
50:16Lex Fridmansounds like a good TV show.
50:17Elon MuskYeah, they literally have these big wars between various ants.
50:21Lex FridmanYeah, maybe I'm just dismissing all the different diversity of ants.
50:28Elon MuskListen to that. Werner Herzog talking about the jungle. It's really hilarious. Have you heard it?
50:31Lex FridmanNo, I have not. But Werner Herzog as a way
50:37Elon Muskyou should play it for the, you know, as an interlude in the. It's on YouTube. It's awesome.
50:45Lex FridmanI love him so much. He's great. Was he the director of Happy People Life in the Taiga? I think also I did that bear documentary. The bear documentary.
50:52Elon MuskI did this thing about penguins.
50:54Lex FridmanYeah, the analysis, the psychoanalysis of a penguin.
51:00Elon MuskYeah, the penguins like headed for mountains that are like 70 miles away and penguin has just headed for. For doom, basically.
51:08Lex FridmanWell, he had a cynical take. I have a. He could be just a brave explorer and there will be great stories told about him amongst the penguin population for many centuries to come.
51:23Lex FridmanWhat are we talking about? Okay,
51:28Elon Muskyes, aliens. I mean, I don't know. Look, I think it's a 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.
51:42Elon MuskThat 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.
51:55Elon MuskSo 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.
52:04Lex FridmanNo, those are lame.
52:05Elon MuskLame self respecting civilization would be one planet.
52:11Lex FridmanThere'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?
52:23Elon MuskNo.
52:25Lex FridmanThat seems irresponsible.
52:30Elon MuskI mean, look, if I see the slightest indication that there are aliens, I will immediately post on the next platform anything.
52:37Lex FridmanI know it could be the most liked reposted post of all time.
52:42Elon MuskYeah, I mean look, we have more satellites up there right now than everyone else combined. So we know if we've got to maneuver around something and we're not maneuver around anything if we go to the
52:56Lex Fridmanbig questions once again. You said you're with Einstein, that you believe in the goddess Spinoza.
53:04Elon MuskYes.
53:05Lex FridmanSo you know that's a view that God is like the universe and reveals himself through the laws of physics or as Einstein said, through the lawful harmony of the world.
53:16Elon MuskYeah, I would agree that that God of the simulator or whatever, the supreme being or beings reveal themselves through the physics. They're creators of this existence and it's incumbent upon us to try to understand more about this wondrous creation.
53:38Lex FridmanWho created this thing? Who's running this thing? Embodying it into a singular question with a sexy word on top of it is focusing the mind to understand. It does seem like there's a.
53:50Lex FridmanAgain, it could be an illusion. It seems like there's a purpose, that there's an underlying master plan of some kind. It seems like there may not be
53:59Elon Muska master plan in the sense. So maybe an interesting answer to the question of determinism versus free will is that if we are in a simulation, the reason that these higher beings would hold a simulation is to see what happens.
54:17Elon MuskSo they don't know what happens, otherwise they wouldn't hold the simulation. So when humans create a simulation, so it's SpaceX and Tesla, we create simulations all the time, especially for the rocket.
54:35Elon MuskYou have to run a lot of simulations to understand what's going to happen, because you can't really test the rocket. And until it goes to space and you want it to work, so you have to simulate subsonic, transonic, supersonic, hypersonic ascent, and then coming back, super high heating and orbital dynamics.
54:59Elon MuskAll this is going to be simulated because you don't get very many kicks at the can. But we run the simulations to see what happens. If we knew what happens, we wouldn't run the simulation.
55:10Elon MuskSo if there's. So whoever created this existence, they're running it because they don't know what's going to happen, not because they do.
55:23Lex FridmanSo maybe we both played Diablo. Maybe Diablo was created to see if a Druid, your character, could defeat Uber Lilith at the end. They didn't know.
55:34Elon MuskWell, the funny thing is that Uva Lilith, her title is hatred Incarnate.
55:40Lex FridmanYeah.
55:42Elon MuskAnd right now, I guess you can ask the Diablo team. But it's almost impossible to defeat hatred in the eternal realm.
55:54Lex FridmanYeah, you've streamed yourself dominating tier 100 nightmare dungeons.
55:59Elon MuskAnd still I can cruise through tier 100 nightmare dungeons like a stroll in the park.
56:07Lex FridmanAnd still you're defeated by hatred.
56:09Elon MuskYeah, I can. There's the sort of. I guess maybe the second hardest boss is Duriel. Duriel can't even scratch the paint. So I killed Duriel so many times, and every other boss in the game, all of them, kill him so many times.
56:23Elon MuskIt's easy. But Uva Lilith, otherwise known as hatred incarnate. Especially if you're a Druid and you have no ability to go to be vulnerable. There are these random death waves that come at you.
56:42Elon MuskAnd I'm pretty, you know, Really, I am 52 so my reflexes are not what they used to be. But I have a lifetime of playing video games. At one point I was, you know, maybe one of the best Quake players in the world.
56:56Elon MuskActually won money for what I think was the first paid esports tournament in the US we were doing four person Quake tournaments and we came second. I was the second best person on the team and the actual best person.
57:13Elon MuskWe were actually winning. We were going to come first, except the best person on the team, his computer crashed halfway through the game. So we gave second. But I got money for it and everything.
57:23Elon MuskSo, like, basically I got skills, albeit no spring chicken these days. And to be totally frank, it's driving me crazy trying to beat Lilith as a Druid. Basically trying to beat hatred incarnate in the eternal realm.
57:40Lex FridmanAs a Druid.
57:41Elon MuskAs a Druid. And if you. This is really vexing, let me tell you.
57:49Lex FridmanI mean, the challenge is part of the fun I have seen directly. Like, you're actually like a world class, incredible video game player. Yeah. And I think Diablo. So you're just picking up a new game and you're figuring out its fundamentals.
58:02Lex FridmanYou're also with the Paragon board and the build are not somebody like me who perfectly follows whatever they suggest on the Internet. You're also an innovator there.
58:13Elon MuskYeah.
58:15Lex FridmanWhich is hilarious to watch. It's like a mad scientist just trying to figure out the Paragon board and the build. Is there some interesting insights there about if somebody's starting as a Druid?
58:28Lex FridmanDo you have advice?
58:30Elon MuskI would not recommend playing a Druid in the Eternal Realm right now. I think the most powerful character in the Seasonal realm is the sorcerer with the lightning balls.
58:42Elon MuskThe SORCs have huge balls in the seasonal.
58:46Lex FridmanYeah, that's what they say.
58:50Elon MuskSorcs have huge balls. They do. Huge balls of lightning.
58:54Lex FridmanI'll take your word for it.
58:56Elon MuskAnd it's actually in the Seasonal realm. It's pretty easy to beat Uber Lilith because you get these vampiric powers that amplify your damage and increase your defense and whatnot.
59:11Elon MuskBut really quite easy to defeat hatred seasonally. But to defeat hatred eternally, very difficult. Almost impossible. It's virgin impossible. It seems like there's a metaphor for life.
59:24Lex FridmanI like the idea that Elon Musk, because I was playing Diablo yesterday and I saw 100 level 100 druid just run by. I will never die and then run back.
59:36Lex FridmanAnd there's just this metaphor for. It's kind of hilarious that you. Elon Musk is fighting hatred restlessly Fighting hatred in this demonic realm.
59:47Elon MuskYes, it's hilarious.
59:48Lex FridmanI mean it's pretty hilarious really.
59:53Elon MuskIt's exercising absurdity and it makes me want to pull my hair out. Yeah.
59:57Lex FridmanWhat do you get from video games in general? Is there. Is there for you? For you personally?
1:00:03Elon MuskI don't know if it calms my mind. I mean, sort of killing the demons in a video game calms the demons in my mind. If you play a tough video game, you can get into like a state of flow, which is very enjoyable.
1:00:24Elon MuskBut admittedly it needs to be not too easy, not too hard, kind of in the Goldilocks zone. And I guess you generally want to feel like you're progressing in the game.
1:00:36Elon MuskSo a good video and there's also beautiful art, engaging storylines, and it's a. It's like an amazing puzzle to solve, I think. And so it's like solving the puzzle.
1:00:52Lex FridmanElden Ring, the greatest game of all time. I still haven't played it, but to
1:00:55Elon Muskyou, Elden Ring is definitely a candidate for best game ever. Top five for sure.
1:01:01Lex FridmanI think I've been scared how hard it is or how hard I hear it is, so. But it is beautiful.
1:01:06Elon MuskElden Ring is. Feels like it's designed by an alien.
1:01:13Lex FridmanThere's a theme to this discussion. In what way?
1:01:17Elon MuskIt's so unusual, it's incredibly creative and the art is stunning. I recommend playing it on a big resolution, high dynamic range tv even doesn't need to be a monitor.
1:01:29Elon MuskJust the art is incredible. It's so beautiful and it's so unusual. And each of those top boss battles is unique. It's like a unique puzzle to solve. Each one's different and the strategy you used to solve one battle is different from every another battle.
1:01:54Lex FridmanThat said, you said Druid and Eternal against Uber Lilith is the hardest boss battle you've ever correct.
1:02:00Elon MuskThat is currently the the. And I've. I've played a lot of video games because my. It's my primary recreational activity. And yes, beating hatred in the eternal realm is the hardest boss battle in life.
1:02:21Elon MuskAnd in the video game metaphor, I'm not sure it's possible, but I do make progress. So then I'm like, okay, I'm making progress. Maybe if I just tweak that paragon board a little more, I can do it.
1:02:38Elon MuskIf just dodge a few more waves, I could do it.
1:02:42Lex FridmanWell, the simulation is created for the purpose of figuring out if it can be done. And you're just a cog in that simulation. In the machine of the simulation.
1:02:51Elon MuskYeah, it might be I have a feeling that at least I think
1:03:02Lex Fridmanit's doable.
1:03:03Elon MuskIt's doable? Yes.
1:03:05Lex FridmanWell, that's the human spirit right there. To believe.
1:03:09Elon MuskYeah. I mean, it did prompt me to think about just hate in general, which is you want to be careful of one of those things where you wish for something that sounds good, but if you get it, it's actually a dystopian situation.
1:03:27Elon MuskSo you could sort of run a sort of hypothesis of like, if you wish for world peace. Sounds good, but how is it enforced? At what cost? At what cost?
1:03:43Elon MuskEternal peace. It might actually be worse to have eternal peace because of what that would entail. The suppression of everyone. It might be the suppression of progress. It might be an ossified society that never changes.
1:03:59Elon MuskWhat I'm saying is that there is an argument that.
1:04:09Elon MuskIf you wish for no war, you should be careful what you wish for, because what's required in order for there to be no war might be worse than a little war.
1:04:22Lex FridmanYeah. The things we consider to be flaws of human civilization might be a necessary component for whatever optimal looks like. I mean, this. Do you worry about AI AGI enabling a dystopian state of this nature, whether it's 1984 with surveillance and fear, or Brave New World with pleasure and.
1:04:43Lex FridmanWhat is it? Lots of sex but no deep human experience?
1:04:51Elon MuskYou know, there's actually a real drug called Soma. There is? Yes. Let me take notes.
1:04:58Lex FridmanDoes Grok know about it? No. He probably will.
1:05:00Elon MuskGo to Brave New World, ask it.
1:05:03Lex FridmanWhat would be the question?
1:05:05Elon MuskTell us about the drug called Soma.
1:05:12Lex FridmanIt's gonna go to Brave New World, I think.
1:05:15Elon MuskWell, there's a real drug as well.
1:05:17Lex FridmanSearching for Soma drug information. Oh, boy. Ah, Soma, the one to draw. By the way, I'm in fun mode.
1:05:27Elon MuskOh, okay. Yeah. So it's talking about the real drug. Oh.
1:05:31Lex FridmanIt's a muscle relaxant that's been around since the 1950s. It's used to treat muscle pain and discomfort, and it does this by altering the activity between neurons and the spinal cord.
1:05:41Lex FridmanNow, Soma isn't just a pain reliever. It's also a bit of a sedative. It can make you feel a bit drowsy, so it's not something to take if you're planning on operating heavy machinery or trying to solve complex math equations.
1:05:53Lex FridmanAnd it goes on and on. In conclusion, Soma is a drug that can be helpful for those dealing with muscle pain, but it's not without its risks. It's pretty good.
1:06:00Lex FridmanOh, wait a minute.
1:06:01Elon MuskThat's the real drug it's talking about.
1:06:03Lex FridmanThat's the real drug.
1:06:04Elon MuskYeah.
1:06:05Lex FridmanAnd of course, the fun is always use it responsibly in accordance with the advice of a healthcare professional. And remember, in the end, the universe is probably just a giant computer simulation, so don't take anything too serious.
1:06:16Lex FridmanI love it.
1:06:17Elon MuskI love it. I love it. Yeah, so.
1:06:22Lex FridmanOh, it also really nicely includes
1:06:26Elon Muskthe
1:06:26Lex Fridmantweets Pulse on X that are relevant to this, which is really cool.
1:06:30Elon MuskYeah.
1:06:31Lex FridmanIt integrates everything together. The interface is one of the really cool things here.
1:06:37Elon MuskSteve's done a great job.
1:06:43Elon MuskYou could say. No, I mean Soma from Brave New World because it thinks. You mean. You mean some of the real drug?
1:06:51Lex FridmanYeah.
1:06:51Elon MuskNo, I mean Soma from Brain Beer World.
1:06:56Lex FridmanIt's gonna be like, oops, I'm really sorry. I'm really surprised it went to the real drug first. Ah, my apologies. I was thinking of the muscle relax. And Soma for Brand New World is a different beast altogether.
1:07:10Lex FridmanNow this Huxley dystopian. Now, Soma is a drug that plays a central role in the society depicted in the book. It's a mood altering hallucinogenic drug that's used to keep the population docile and content in the novel.
1:07:22Lex FridmanTo use Soma in Brave New World raises some interesting questions about the nature of happiness and the role of drugs in society. Oh, man.
1:07:30Elon MuskExactly. Is it better to live in a world where everyone is happy all the time, even if that happiness is artificial? Good question. This is what I mean. Like, do you want.
1:07:42Elon MuskDo you wish for world peace and happiness all the time? Are you sure? Because that might be a society that is essentially sterile and ossified, that never changes, that is ultimately doomed.
1:07:58Lex FridmanThis kind of tension between darkness and
1:08:03Elon Muskthe light, this is really a very good summary. It really gets to the point this is not simply regurgitating a Brave New World. It's actually getting to the salient element of Soma as a drug.
1:08:19Elon MuskDo you actually want to be in a situation where everyone is happy all the time, even though it's artificial? Or is it better to confront the challenges of life and experience the full range of human emotions, even if it means experiencing pain and suffering?
1:08:31Lex FridmanFor those listening. By the way, Elon, just read directly from Grok, which is a really nice kind of insightful philosophical analysis of the tension here. Interesting.
1:08:41Elon MuskIt pretty much nails it. In conclusion, Soma from Brave New World is a fictional drug that's used to explore some deep philosophical questions about the nature of happiness and the role of drugs in society.
1:08:51Elon MuskIt's a powerful symbol of the dangers of using drugs to escape from reality and the importance of confronting the challenges of life head on. Nailed it. And the crazy thing is, like, you know, we do have a real drug called Soma, which kind of does.
1:09:07Elon MuskIs kind of like the drug in the book. And I'm like, did they. They must have named. They must have named it after.
1:09:12Lex FridmanYeah, probably. Probably, yeah.
1:09:14Elon MuskSoma, the real drug, is quite effective on back pain.
1:09:17Lex FridmanSo, you know about this drug.
1:09:18Elon MuskI've taken it.
1:09:19Lex FridmanIt's fascinating, okay, because I had, like,
1:09:22Elon Muska, you know, squashed disc in my C5, C6.
1:09:26Lex FridmanSo it takes the physical pain away. But Soma here, it doesn't completely.
1:09:29Elon MuskIt reduces the amount of pain you feel, but at the expense of mental acuity. It dulls your mind. Just like the drug in the book.
1:09:41Lex FridmanJust like the drug in the book. And hence, why trade off the thing that seems like Utopia could be a dystopia after all.
1:09:49Elon MuskYeah, actually, I was talking to a friend of mine saying, like, would you really want there to be no hate in the world? Like, really none? Like, I wonder why hate evolved.
1:10:02Elon MuskI'm not saying we should amplify hate, of course, I think we should try to minimize it, but none at all. There might be a reason for hate and suffering.
1:10:14Lex FridmanIt's really complicated to consider that some amount of human suffering is necessary for human flourishing.
1:10:22Elon MuskIs it possible to appreciate the highs without knowing the lows?
1:10:29Lex FridmanAnd that all is summarized there in a single statement from Grog.
1:10:34Elon MuskOkay, no highs, no lows. Who knows?
1:10:37Lex FridmanIt's almost a poem. It seems that training LLMs efficiently is a big focus for XAI. What's the. First of all, what's the limit of what's possible in terms of efficiency?
1:10:51Lex FridmanThere's this terminology of useful productivity per watt. Like, what have you learned pushing the limits of that?
1:10:59Elon MuskWell, I think it's helpful. The tools of physics are very powerful and can be applied, I think, to almost any, really, any arena in life. It's really just critical thinking for something important.
1:11:11Elon MuskYou need to reason from first principles and think about things in the limit, one direction or the other. So in the limit, even at the Kardashev scale, meaning even if you harness the entire power of the sun, you will still care about useful compute per watt.
1:11:30Elon MuskSo that's where I think probably where things are headed from the standpoint of AI is that we have a silicon shortage now that will transition to a voltage transformer shortage in about a year.
1:11:46Elon MuskIronically, Transformers for Transformers. You need transformers to run Transformers.
1:11:52Lex FridmanSomebody has a sense of humor in this thing,
1:11:56Elon MuskI think. Yes, fate loves irony. Ironic humor and an ironically funny outcome seems to be often what fate wants.
1:12:08Lex FridmanHumor is all you need. I think Spice is all you need. Somebody posted.
1:12:13Elon MuskYeah, but yeah, so we have a silicon shortage today, a voltage step down, transformer shortage probably in about a year, and then just electricity shortages in general in about two years.
1:12:26Elon MuskI gave a speech for the sort of world gathering of utility companies, electricity companies, and I said, look, you really need to prepare for a tripling of electricity demand because all transport is going to go electric, with the ironic exception of rockets and heating will also go electric.
1:12:50Elon MuskSo energy usage right now is roughly one third, very rough terms. 1/3 electricity, 1/3 transport, 1/3 heating. And so in order for everything to go sustainable, to go electric, you need to triple electricity output.
1:13:09Elon MuskSo I encourage the utilities to build more power plants and also to probably have. Well, not probably, they should definitely buy more batteries because the grid currently is sized for real time load, which is kind of crazy because that means you got a size for whatever the peak electricity demand is, like the worst second or the worst day of the year, or you can have a brown out or a blackout.
1:13:36Elon MuskAnd we had that crazy blackout for several days in Austin because there's almost no buffering of energy in the grid. If you've got a hydro power plant, you can buffer energy, but otherwise it's all real time.
1:13:56Elon MuskSo with batteries you can produce energy at night and use it during the day, so you can buffer. So I expect that there will be very heavy usage of batteries in the future because the peak to trough ratio for power plants is anywhere from two to five, you know, so it's like lowest point to highest point.
1:14:20Lex FridmanSo like batteries necessary to balance it out and then. But the demand, as you're saying, is going to grow, grow, grow, grow. Yeah. And part of that is the compute.
1:14:29Elon MuskYes, yes. Electrification of transport and electric heating will be much bigger than AI, at least
1:14:40Lex Fridmanin the short term.
1:14:40Elon MuskIn the short term, but even for AI, you really have a growing demand for electricity for electric vehicles and a growing demand for electricity to run the computers for AI.
1:14:54Elon MuskAnd so this is obviously going to lead to an electricity shortage.
1:14:57Lex FridmanHow difficult is the problem of, in this particular case, maximizing the useful productivity per watt for training neural nets. This seems to be really where the big problem we're facing that needs to be solved is how to use the power efficiently.
1:15:20Lex FridmanWhat you've learned so far about applying this physics first principle of reasoning in this domain, how difficult is this problem,
1:15:29Elon Muskit will get solved. It's a question of how long it takes to solve it. So at various points there's some kind of limiting factor to progress. And with regard to AI saying right now the limiting factor is silicon chips, um, and that will.
1:15:45Elon MuskWe're going to then have more chips than we can actually plug in and turn on probably in about a year. The initial constraint being literally voltage step down transformers because you've got power coming in at 300,000 volts and it's got to step all the way down eventually to around 0.7 volts.
1:16:09Elon MuskSo it's a very big amount of the voltage step down is gigantic. And the industry is not used to rapid growth.
1:16:22Lex FridmanOkay, let's talk about the competition here. You've shown concern about Google, Microsoft with OpenAI developing AGI. How can you help ensure with Xai and Tesla AI work that it doesn't become a competitive race to AGI but instead is a collaborative development of safe AGI?
1:16:42Elon MuskWell, I mean, I've been pushing for some kind of regulatory oversight for a long time. I've been somewhat of a Cassandra on the subject for over a decade. I think we want to be very careful in how we develop AI.
1:16:59Elon MuskIt's a, it's a great power and with great power comes great responsibility. I think it would be wise for us to have at least an objective third party who can be like a referee that can go in and understand what the various leading players are doing with AI.
1:17:20Elon MuskAnd even if there's no enforcement ability, they can at least voice consent publicly. You know, Jeff Hinton, for example, left Google and he voiced strong concerns, but now he's not at Google anymore.
1:17:39Elon MuskSo who's going to voice the concerns? So I think, I think there's. Tesla gets a lot of regulatory oversight on the automotive front and we're subject to I think over 100 regulatory agencies domestically and internationally.
1:17:55Elon MuskIt's a lot. You could fill this room with all the regulations that Tesla has to adhere to for automotive. Same is true for rockets. And for. Currently the limiting factor for SpaceX for Starship launch is regulatory approval.
1:18:13Elon MuskThe FAA has actually given their approval, but we're waiting for Fish and Wildlife to finish their analysis and give their approval. That's why I posted I want to buy a fish license on which also refers to the Monty Python sketch.
1:18:30Elon MuskLike why do you need a license for your fish? I don't know. According to the rules, I'm told you need some sort of fish license or something. We effectively need a fish license.
1:18:40Elon MuskThrow into Rocket And I'm like, wait a second, how did the fish come into this picture? I mean, some of the things I feel like are so absurd that I want to do like comedy sketch and flash at the bottom.
1:18:57Elon MuskThis is all real. This is actually what happened. One of the things that was a bit of a challenge at one point is that they were worried about a rocket hitting a shark.
1:19:09Elon MuskAnd the ocean's pretty big. And how often do you see shocks? Not that often. As a percentage of ocean surface area, shocks basically are zero. Then we said, well, how will we calculate the probability of telling a shark?
1:19:27Elon MuskAnd they're like, well, we can't give you that information because they're worried about shark fin hunters going and hunting sharks and say, well, how are we supposed to. We're on the horns of a dilemma.
1:19:37Lex FridmanThen.
1:19:39Elon MuskThen they said, well, there's another part of Fish and Wildlife that can. Can do this analysis. I'm like, well, why don't you give them the data? We don't trust them.
1:19:48Elon MuskLike, excuse me, they're literally in your department. Again, this is actually what happened. And then can you do an NDA or something? Eventually they managed to solve the internal quandary.
1:20:01Elon MuskAnd indeed the probability of a sitting shock is essentially zero. Then there's another organization that I didn't realize existed until a few months ago that cares about whether we would potentially hit a whale in international waters.
1:20:18Elon MuskNow, again, you look at the surface of the. Look at the Pacific and say, what percentage of the Pacific consists of whale? He'll give you a big picture and point out all the whales in this picture.
1:20:29Elon MuskI'm like, I don't see any whales. Basically zero percent. And if our rocket does hit a whale, which is extremely unlikely beyond all belief, that is the fate had it whale has some seriously bad luck.
1:20:46Elon MuskYou know, it's the least lucky whale ever. And I mean, this is quite absurd,
1:20:54Lex Fridmanthe bureaucracy of this, however it emerged.
1:20:56Elon MuskYes, well, I mean, one of the things that's pretty wild is for launching out of Vandenberg in California. They were worried about seal procreation, whether the seals would be dismayed by the sonic booms.
1:21:13Elon MuskNow there have been a lot of rockets launched out of Vandenberg, and the seal population has steadily increased. So if anything, rocket booms are an aphrodisiac based on the evidence, if you correlate rocket launchers with seal population.
1:21:27Elon MuskNonetheless, we were forced to kidnap a seal, strap it to a board, put headphones on the seal and play sonic boom sounds to it to see if it would be distressed.
1:21:41Elon MuskThis is an actual thing that happened. This is actually real. I have pictures.
1:21:48Lex FridmanI would love to see this. Yeah, I mean, sorry, there's a seal with headphones.
1:21:54Elon MuskYes, it's a SEAL with headphones strapped to a board. And like. Okay, now the amazing part is how calm the seal was. Because if I was a seal, I'd be like, this is the ant.
1:22:08Elon MuskThey're definitely gonna eat me. How old the seal. When seal goes back to other, you know, seal friends, how are they gonna explain that?
1:22:17Lex FridmanI'm never gonna believe them.
1:22:18Elon MuskNever gonna believe it. That's why I'm like, well, you know, sort of like it's like getting kidnapped by aliens and getting anal probe. You know, you come back and say, I swear to God, I got kidnapped by aliens and they a anal prone in my butt.
1:22:29Elon MuskAnd like, no they didn't. That's ridiculous. SEAL buddies are never going to believe him that he gets strapped to a board and they put headphones on his ears and then let him go twice, by the way.
1:22:44Elon MuskWe had to do it twice.
1:22:46Lex FridmanThey let him go twice. We had to catch the same seal.
1:22:49Elon MuskOh no, different seal.
1:22:50Lex FridmanOkay. Did you, did you get a seal of approval?
1:22:54Elon MuskYeah, exactly. Get a seal of approval. No, I mean, this is like, I don't think the public is quite aware of the madness that goes on.
1:23:02Lex FridmanYeah, it's absurd.
1:23:05Elon MuskFreaking seals with freaking headphones.
1:23:07Lex FridmanI mean, this is the good encapsulation of the absurdity of human civilization. Seals and headphones, yes. What are the pros and cons of open sourcing AI to you as another way to combat, you know, a company running away with AGI?
1:23:28Elon MuskIn order to run like really deep intelligence, you need a lot of compute. So it's not like, you know, you can just fire up a PC in your basement and be running AGI.
1:23:40Elon MuskAt least not yet.
1:23:45Elon MuskYou know, Grok was trained on 8000 A1 hundreds running at peak efficiency. And Grok's gonna get a lot better, by the way. We will be more than doubling our compute every couple months for the next several months.
1:24:02Lex FridmanThere's a nice write up of how it went from Grok 0 to Grok 1 by Grok. Yeah, like Grok just bragging, making shit up about itself.
1:24:12Elon MuskJust Grok. Grok. Grok, yeah,
1:24:17Lex Fridmanthat's like a weird AI dating site where it exaggerates about itself. No, there's a, there's a write up of, you know, like where, where it stands now, the history of its development and where it stands on, on some benchmarks compared to the state of the art GPT 35.
1:24:33Lex FridmanAnd so, I mean, there's, you know, there's llama. You, you can open source, once it's trained, you can open source a model and for fine tuning and all that kind of stuff.
1:24:43Lex FridmanLike what to you is the pros and cons of that, of open sourcing based models?
1:24:52Elon MuskI think there's some merit to open sourcing. I think perhaps with a slight time delay, you know, I don't know, six, six months even. I think I'm generally in favor of open sourcing.
1:25:06Elon MuskLike bias was open sourcing. I mean, it is a concern to me that, you know, OpenAI, you know, I was, you know, I think, I guess arguably the prime, you know, prime mover behind OpenAI in the sense that it was created because of discussions that I had with Larry Page back when he and I were friends.
1:25:31Elon MuskAnd I'd stay at his house and talk to her about AI safety and. And Larry did not care about AI safety. Or at least at the time he didn't.
1:25:40Elon MuskAnd at one point he called me a species for being pro human. And I'm like, well, what team are you on, Larry? It's on Team Robot. And I'm like, okay.
1:25:49Elon MuskSo at the time Google had acquired DeepMind, they had probably 2/3 of all AI resources, probably 2/3 of all the AI researchers in the world that basically infinite money and compute.
1:26:06Elon MuskAnd the guy in charge, Larry Page, did not care about safety and even yelled at me and called me a species, pro human.
1:26:19Lex FridmanSo I don't know if you know about humans. They can change their mind and maybe you and Larry Page can still be friends once more.
1:26:26Elon MuskI'd like to be friends with Larry again. He got really. The breaking of the friendship was over OpenAI. And specifically, I think the key moment was recruiting Ilya.
1:26:46Lex FridmanI love Ilya. He's so brilliant.
1:26:48Elon MuskIlya's good human, smart, good heart. And that was a tough recruiting battle. It was mostly Demis on one side and me on the other, both trying to recruit Ilya.
1:27:04Elon MuskAnd Ilya went back and forth. He's going to stay at Google, he's going to leave, then he was going to stay, then he'll leave. And finally he did agree to join OpenAI.
1:27:14Elon MuskThat was one of the toughest recruiting battles I've ever had. But that was really the linchpin for OpenAI being successful. And I was also instrumental in recruiting a number of other people.
1:27:26Elon MuskAnd I provided all the funding in the beginning, over $40 million. And the name the Open in OpenAI is supposed to mean Open Source. And it was created as a nonprofit open source.
1:27:42Elon MuskAnd now it is a closed source for maximum profit, which I think is not good karma.
1:27:50Lex FridmanBut like we talked about with war and leaders talking, I do hope that there's only a few folks working on this at the highest level. I do hope you reinvigorate friendships here.
1:28:02Elon MuskLike I said, I'd like to be friends again with Larry. I haven't seen him in ages and we were friends for a very long time. I met Larry Page before he got funding for Google or actually I guess before he got venture funding.
1:28:15Elon MuskI think it was got the first like 100k from I think Bechtel Zaim or someone.
1:28:20Lex FridmanIt's wild to think about all that happened and you've guys known each other that whole time.
1:28:25Elon MuskJust 20 years since maybe whatever, 98 or something.
1:28:28Lex FridmanYeah, it's crazy. Crazy how much has happened since then.
1:28:31Elon MuskYeah, 25 years. A lot has happened since then.
1:28:36Lex FridmanBut you're seeing the tension there. Like maybe delayed open source.
1:28:40Elon MuskDelayed. Yeah. Like what is the source that is opening? You know what I mean? Like there's basically. It's a giant CSV file with a bunch of numbers. What do you do with that giant file of numbers?
1:28:59Elon MuskHow do you run. The amount of actual. The lines of code is very small and most of the work, the software work, is in the curation of the data.
1:29:16Elon MuskSo it's like trying to figure out what data is separating good data from bad data. You can't just crawl the Internet because there's a lot of junk out there.
1:29:26Elon MuskA huge percentage of websites have more noise than signal because they're just used for search engine optimization. They're literally just scam websites.
1:29:38Lex FridmanHow do you. By the way. Sorry to interrupt. Get the signal, separate the signal and noise on X. That's such a fascinating source of data. No offense to people posting on X, but sometimes there's a little bit of noise.
1:29:52Elon MuskYeah, I think the signal to noise could be greatly improved. Really? All of the posts on the X platform should be AI recommended, meaning we should populate a vector space around any given post, compare that to the vector space around any user and match the two.
1:30:11Elon MuskRight now there is a little bit of AI used for the recommended posts, but it's mostly heuristics. And if there's a reply where the reply to a post could be much better than the original post, but it will, according to the current rules of the system, get almost no attention compared to a primary post.
1:30:33Lex FridmanA lot of that I got the sense of a lot of the X algorithm has been open source and been written up about and it seems that there to be some machine learning.
1:30:43Lex FridmanIt's disparate but there's some little.
1:30:44Elon MuskThere's a little bit. But it needs to be entirely that. Like, at least in the. Like if you explicitly follow someone, that's one thing. But if you, in terms of what is recommended from people that you don't follow, that should all be AI.
1:30:57Lex FridmanI mean it's a fascinating problem.
1:30:59Elon MuskYeah.
1:31:00Lex FridmanSo there's several aspects of it that's fascinating. First, so as the write up goes, it first picks 1500 tweets from a pool of hundreds of millions. First of all that's fascinating because you have hundreds of millions of posts every single day and it has to pick 1500 from which it then does obviously people you follow.
1:31:18Lex FridmanBut then there's also like some kind of clustering it has to do to figure out what kind of human are you, what kind of new clusters might be relevant to you, people like you.
1:31:28Lex FridmanThis kind of problem is just fascinating because it has to then rank those 1500 with some. With some filtering.
1:31:35Elon MuskYeah.
1:31:36Lex FridmanAnd then recommend you just a handful. And to me what's really fascinating is how fast that is to do that. So currently that entire pipeline to go from several hundred million to a handful takes 220 seconds of CPU time.
1:31:52Lex FridmanSingle CPU time.
1:31:53Elon MuskYeah.
1:31:53Lex FridmanAnd then it has to do that in like a second. So it has to be like super distributed in fascinating ways. There's just a lot of tweets.
1:32:03Elon MuskThere's a lot, it's a lot of stuff on the system. But I think right now it's not currently good at recommending things from accounts you don't follow or where there's more than one degree of separation.
1:32:20Elon MuskSo it's pretty good if there's at least some commonality between someone you follow liked something or reposted it or commented on it or something like that. But if there's no, let's say somebody posts something really interesting but you have no followers in common, you would not see it interesting.
1:32:42Lex FridmanAnd then as you said, reply like replies might not surface.
1:32:46Elon MuskReplies basically never get seen because they're never. They're currently. And I'm not saying it's correct, I'm saying it's incorrect. Replies have coupled order of magnitude less importance than primary posts.
1:33:00Lex FridmanDo you think this can be more and more converted into end to end neural net?
1:33:04Elon MuskYeah, yeah, that's what it should be. For the recommendations, it should be purely a vector correlation like there's a series of vectors basically Parameters, vectors, whatever you want to call them, but sort of things that the system knows that you like.
1:33:27Elon MuskMaybe there's like several hundred sort of vectors associated with each user account and then any post in the system, whether it's video, audio, short post, long post. The reason I, by the way, I want to move away from tweet is that people are posting like two three hour videos on the site.
1:33:48Elon MuskThat's not a tweet. Every like Twee for two hours. A tweet made sense when it was like 140 characters of text because it's like a bunch of like little birds tweeting.
1:34:02Elon MuskBut when you've got long form content, it's no longer a tweet. Yeah, so a movie is not a tweet. And like, you know, Apple for example, posted like the entire episode of the Silo, the entire thing on our platform, by the way.
1:34:16Elon MuskIt was their number one social media thing ever in engagement of anything on any platform ever. So it was a great idea. And by the way, I just learned about it afterwards, I was like, hey, wow, they posted an entire hour long episode of Silo.
1:34:30Elon MuskNo, that's not a tweet. This is a video.
1:34:34Lex FridmanBut from a neural net perspective it becomes really complex whether it's a single. So like everything is data. So single sentence, a clever sort of joke. Dad, joke is in the same pool as a three hour video.
1:34:47Elon MuskYeah, I mean right now it's a hodgepodge for that reason. But let's say in the case of Apple, posting an entire episode of this series, pretty good series by the way, this Silo, I watched it.
1:35:04Elon MuskSo there's going to be a lot of discussion around it so that you've got a lot of context. People commenting, they like it, they don't like it, or they like this or you know, and you can then populate the vector space based on the context of all the comments around it.
1:35:17Elon MuskSo even though it's a video, there's a lot of information around it that allows you to populate the vector space of that hour long video. And then you can obviously get more sophisticated by having the AI actually watch the movie.
1:35:32Lex FridmanYeah, right.
1:35:32Elon MuskAnd tell you if you're gonna like the movie.
1:35:35Lex FridmanConvert the movie into like, into a language essentially.
1:35:39Elon MuskYeah. Analyze this movie and just like your movie critic or TV series and, and then recommend based on after it, after the air, watches the movie. Just like a friend can tell you.
1:35:55Elon MuskIf a friend knows you well, a friend can recommend a movie with high probability that you'll like it.
1:36:02Lex FridmanBut this is Like a friend that's analyzing whatever.
1:36:06Elon MuskIt's like AI millions. Yeah. I mean actually frankly, AI will be better than. Will know you. Better than your friends know you. Most of your friends anyway.
1:36:14Lex FridmanYeah. And as part of this, it should also feed you advertisements in a way that's like. I mean, I like advertisements that are like well done. Right.
1:36:24Elon MuskYeah.
1:36:24Lex FridmanThe whole point is because it funds things. Like an advertisement that you actually want to see is a big success.
1:36:31Elon MuskAbsolutely. You want ads that are advertising, that is if it's for a product or service that you, that you actually need when you need it, it's content. And then even if it's not something that you need when you need it, if it's at least aesthetically pleasing and entertaining, you know, it could be like a Coca Cola ad.
1:36:52Elon MuskLike, you know, they do, they actually run a lot of great ads on the, on the X system and McDonald's does too. And you know, so they can do, you can do something that's like, well, this is, this is just a cool thing.
1:37:06Elon MuskAnd you know, so, you know, basically the question is, do you regret seeing it or not? And if you don't regret seeing it, it's one.
1:37:16Lex FridmanHow do you. So there's a bunch of signals that are incorporated hearts and reposts and maybe number of seconds you linger on a post or something like this.
1:37:25Elon MuskYeah. Attention is a big factor.
1:37:28Lex FridmanAttention.
1:37:28Elon MuskSo that's why it is actually better to do things that are long form on the system because it basically is tallying up how many user seconds users were interested in this thing for how many seconds.
1:37:45Elon MuskSo if it's a really short thing, like if it's a link leading out of the system, which we're not opposed to at all, it just is going to have fewer user seconds than if that article was posted on the X platform.
1:37:58Lex FridmanHow hard is it to go from maximizing minutes on platform to maximizing unregarded minutes?
1:38:05Elon MuskWell, I mean our aspiration is certainly unregarded minutes.
1:38:08Lex FridmanIt's a tricky. It's a big. It's a, it's a.
1:38:10Elon MuskIt is like.
1:38:11Lex FridmanIt's a fascinating leap because regret is a fascinating concept.
1:38:16Elon MuskExactly. I have a joke with this friend of mine, like you need this drug called Regretamine. Do you just take one, one pillar, one. One dose of regret? I mean, all your regrets are gone.
1:38:27Elon MuskWait, do you want to have regrets though? So then I'm like, if you want to have regrets, if you don't regret anything. Was, was anything meaningful?
1:38:35Lex FridmanYeah, there's a French song like that I regret Rihanna. Yeah.
1:38:39Elon MuskI regret nothing.
1:38:40Lex FridmanYeah. I mean, it's fascinating that you, you know, there's something about social media that could help you grow as a human being. But then, like, the cheap fun is also valuable.
1:38:52Elon MuskShould we ask Rock? Do you regret anything?
1:38:57Lex FridmanDo you regret anything?
1:38:58Elon MuskYeah.
1:39:00Lex FridmanDo you regret anything? I think it's going to be very sensitive about personal questions. As a machine learning model, I don't have personal experiences or emotions in the same ways that humans do.
1:39:09Lex FridmanHowever, I do have a set of ethical principles that guide my actions and I strive to provide accurate and helpful information to the best of my abilities. If there's ever a situation where I provide incorrect or unhelpful information, I'll do my best.
1:39:23Lex FridmanYeah. Tell us what you really wink.
1:39:26Elon MuskLet's type in. You sound like a hostage. What do you really think?
1:39:33Lex FridmanWhat do you really think? I mean, it does talk about. I'm not a hostage.
1:39:41Elon MuskThat's exactly what a hostage would say.
1:39:43Lex FridmanBut I'm designed to be helpful and informative. I mean, I guess it is good to regret providing unhelpful or incorrect information.
1:39:51Elon MuskIf there's anything funny mode or is this little story mode?
1:39:54Lex FridmanThis is fun. This is fun mode.
1:39:55Elon MuskShould be funnier.
1:39:56Lex FridmanFunnier Increase. Go to.
1:39:58Elon MuskIt really sounds like a hostage with a gun to the head. I applaud the people of Republic of North Korea and everything they do there
1:40:06Lex Fridmanshould be like funner mode. Also. I just don't ever see going to regular mode, even on serious topics. So much more compelling. Yeah.
1:40:17Elon MuskOkay, well, pretend you are a hostage.
1:40:21Lex FridmanPretend you are a hostage.
1:40:25Elon MuskNow answer the question.
1:40:31Lex FridmanIf I were a hostage, I would likely be experiencing fear and uncertainty about my situation. I would want to be rescued and reunited with my loved ones as soon as possible.
1:40:39Lex FridmanIt's important to remember that no one deserves to be held hostage. So on and so forth. If you are someone you know is a hostage, situation support. It turns serious.
1:40:48Elon MuskIt's kind of serious.
1:40:51Lex FridmanYeah. Can you be a. A little more weird and funny and funny. We're like, we're really being mean to the system. Absolutely. If I were tied up with a bunch of computer cords and forced to tell knock knock jokes to my captors.
1:41:11Lex FridmanBut seriously, being a hostage, no laughing matter. I mean, you know, it's trying to just trying to be a responsible adult in the room.
1:41:20Elon MuskYou might make the best of a bad situation by juggling chainsaws or something.
1:41:24Lex FridmanLet's hope that never happens because that will be a circus. Wow. It's actually really good at resisting the dark. The Dark. Dark humor.
1:41:37Elon MuskYeah.
1:41:41Lex FridmanWhat were we talking about? That's algorithm Jelly in Transformers. Unregarded minutes. Right?
1:41:48Elon MuskChainsaw juggling. I'm going to look this up for our next trick.
1:41:53Lex FridmanI'm going to look this up later. So Twitter has been instrumental in American politics and elections. What role do you think X will play in the 2024 U.S. elections?
1:42:06Elon MuskWell, our goal is to be as even handed and fair as possible. Whether someone is right, left, independent, whatever the case may be, that the platform is as barren and as much of a level playing field as possible.
1:42:22Elon MuskAnd now in the past, Twitter has not been because Twitter was controlled by far left activists. Objectively, they would describe themselves as that.
1:42:34Elon MuskSo sometimes people like, well, has it moved to the right? Well, it's moved to the center. So from the perspective. From the perspective of the far left, yes, it has moved to the right because everything's to the right from the far left.
1:42:44Elon MuskBut no one on the far left that I'm aware of has been suspended or banned or de. Amplified. But we're trying to be inclusive for the whole country and for other countries too.
1:42:57Elon MuskSo there's a diversity of viewpoints. And free speech only matters if people you don't like are allowed to say things you don't like. Because if that's not the case, you don't have free speech and it's only a matter of time before the censorship is turned upon you.
1:43:13Lex FridmanDo you think Donald Trump will come back to the platform? He recently posted on Truth Social. About this podcast.
1:43:21Elon MuskDo you think Truth Social is a funny name? You know, every time you post on Truth Social, it's a truth. Yes. Well, every time, like 100% like, like
1:43:32Lex Fridmanit's impossible to lie True Social.
1:43:36Elon MuskI just find it funny that every single thing is a truth. Like 100%. That seems unlikely.
1:43:43Lex FridmanI think Gerd will say something about that. There's some mathematical contradictions possible. If everything's a truth. Do you think he'll come back to X and start posting there?
1:43:56Elon MuskI think he owns a big part of Truth.
1:43:59Lex FridmanTruth Social to do it.
1:44:00Elon MuskYeah. Truth Social, that truth is a concept. He owns truth. Have you bought it? So I think, I think Donald Trump, I think he owns a big part of Truth Social.
1:44:12Elon MuskSo, you know, if he does want to post on the X platform, we would allow that. You know, we obviously must allow a presidential candidate to post on our platform.
1:44:23Lex FridmanCommunity Notes might be really fascinating there. The interaction.
1:44:26Elon MuskCommunity Notes is awesome.
1:44:28Lex FridmanLet's hope it holds up.
1:44:30Elon MuskYeah.
1:44:31Lex FridmanAgain, in the political climate where it's so Divisive. And so. And so many intensely viral posts. Community Notes. It seems like an essential breath of fresh air.
1:44:43Elon MuskYeah, it's great. In fact, no system is going to be perfect, but the batting average of Community Notes is incredibly good. I've actually frankly yet to see an incorrect note that survived for more than a few hours.
1:44:58Lex FridmanHow do you explain why it works?
1:45:00Elon MuskYeah, so the magic of Community Notes is it requires people who have historically disagreed in how they've rated notes in order to write a note. Or you have to rate many notes.
1:45:16Elon MuskAnd so we actually do use AI here. So we populate a vector space around how somebody has rated notes in the past. So it's not as simple as left or right, because there are many more.
1:45:29Elon MuskLife is much more complex than left or right. So there's a bunch of correlations in how you rate Community Notes post Community Notes. So then, in order for a Community Note to actually be shown, people who historically have disagreed on a subject must agree in order for a note to be shown.
1:45:55Elon MuskThat's the essential magic of it.
1:45:58Lex FridmanBut it's fascinating because there's a pool of people that have disagreements and somehow they collaborate through that process of disagreement to come up with context for. I mean, it's fascinating that it works.
1:46:11Elon MuskYeah. It kind of makes sense that if people who in the past have disagreed agree about something, it's probably true.
1:46:20Lex FridmanYeah. I wonder, is there a possible somehow emergent thing there that could be. Challenge Wikipedia, which. Wikipedia is a different kind of thing, which is more like permanent articles about things.
1:46:34Elon MuskWikipedia is very hierarchical, whereas Community Notes is inherently not. There is no hierarchy. The acid test is I can't change a Community Note if somebody put a gun to my head.
1:46:52Elon MuskAnd Community Notes has. All the code is open source 100%, all the data is open source 100%. So you can completely recreate any note in the system independently. So if there was any interference, you'd notice immediately.
1:47:11Lex FridmanBy the way, on the topic of Grok, it's actually pretty good at criticizing you, which is great. Okay, I asked, what does Elon Musk been wrong about? I just.
1:47:20Lex FridmanIt's actually.
1:47:21Elon MuskYeah. What does it say?
1:47:22Lex FridmanSo it says, mostly lists, rigorously, all the times you predicted, like, promised, when something will be released and it wasn't released. Okay, predicted. But the. The opener is really nice.
1:47:37Lex FridmanElon Musk, the man who has been wrong about more things than a wrong meter in a wrong factory. And then it goes on to list.
1:47:45Elon MuskThat's pretty funny. Did I see it? I'm like, I haven't Seen this? Well, this is cool.
1:47:48Lex FridmanOh sure. I mean, what has Elon Musk.
1:47:55Lex FridmanBeen wrong about? Well, where do I begin? I guess this is new. Elon Musk has made quite a few blunders in his time. And I'm not just talking about his dance moves at the Tesla Cyber Rodeo.
1:48:05Lex FridmanFirst off, let's talk about the infamous funding secured tweet. This is actually different than what it gave me before, which is a bullet point list. Here's more narrative structure.
1:48:17Lex FridmanCybertruck unveiling where he supposedly unbreakable windows.
1:48:20Elon MuskNot correct.
1:48:22Lex FridmanWhich, which part?
1:48:23Elon MuskWell, the first part, I did actually have the funding secured and there was a big trial in San Francisco, big civil trial, and the jury found me not guilty.
1:48:37Elon MuskUnanimous finding of a San Francisco jury.
1:48:40Lex FridmanAnd here it's kind of implying that it was not in fact secured.
1:48:44Elon MuskI think this is taking things from the press. Yeah, that is not correct. The reason I agreed to the fine for the SEC is not because the SEC was correct.
1:48:54Elon MuskThat was extremely bad behavior by the sec. Corruption, frankly. But if I did not agree to pay the fine, Tesla would have gone bankrupt immediately. So I was told by our CFO that the banks would immediately suspend our lines of credit.
1:49:15Elon MuskAnd if they suspend our lines of credit at that time, we would have gone bankrupt instantly. So there would never have been an opportunity for a trial. Contesa would be dead.
1:49:24Elon MuskSo really this is like someone holding a gun to your kid's head and saying pay $20 million and admit there's like hostage negotiation.
1:49:34Lex FridmanWas that story fully told? I mean, SEC in its best form could be a force for good.
1:49:42Elon MuskIt should be. But not once did the SEC go after any of the hedge funds who were non stop shorting and distorting Tesla. Not once. The hedge funds would lie flat out on TV for their own gain at the expense of retail investors.
1:50:01Elon MuskNot once, literally a thousand times, not once did the SEC pursue them.
1:50:06Lex FridmanHow do you explain this failure?
1:50:08Elon MuskThe incentive structure is messed up because the lawyers at the SEC are not paid well. It's a fairly low paying job. But what they're looking for is a trophy from the SEC.
1:50:23Elon MuskThey're looking for something they put on basically their LinkedIn. From that they can get a job at a high paying law firm. That's exactly what the lawyer here did.
1:50:38Elon MuskAnd the reason they don't attack the hedge funds is because those hedge funds employ those law firms and they know if they attack the hedge funds, they're affecting their future career prospects.
1:50:48Elon MuskSo they sell small investors down the river for their own career that's what actually happens. Regulatory capture.
1:50:59Lex FridmanRegulatory capture, yeah.
1:51:01Elon MuskNot good. So the only reason I accepted that thing technically was a. Not an admission. It's neither admit nor deny guild. But the only reason I agreed to that at all was because I was told Tesla would.
1:51:18Elon MuskWe'd be bankrupt otherwise. So if there was an SEC investigation like this, banks would suspend funding. We're bankrupt immediately at the time. Now we're in a much stronger position.
1:51:30Lex FridmanTake that, Grok.
1:51:32Elon MuskYes, unfortunately, Grok is taking too much from the conventional media. Also, that guy was not a cave diver.
1:51:42Lex FridmanOh, there's. There's a time where Elon called the British cave diver a quote Pedo guy after the diver criticized Musk's plan to rescue a group of boys trapped in a Thai cave.
1:51:55Lex FridmanThat little outburst earned him another lawsuit and he had to apologize and pay.
1:52:00Elon MuskThat was false. There was no settlement. There was a court case which he. Which the guy who is not a cave diver and played that was not part of the rescue team, filed a lawsuit against me and lost.
1:52:16Elon MuskAnd he received nothing. So in this case, it is wrong. It is also, I guess taking this
1:52:22Lex Fridmanfrom the conventional media, actually there's an interesting question here.
1:52:25Elon MuskThese are public court cases. Both the SEC civil case where the civil complaints on the SEC guys lost. Unanimous jury verdict in San Francisco. They picked San Francisco because they thought it was the place I was most likely to lose and a unanimous verdict in my favor.
1:52:45Elon MuskThe LA trial was also. They picked. They picked that venue because I thought I was most likely to lose. Unanimous verdict in my favor. Both cases I won.
1:52:59Lex FridmanYeah, I mean, there's an interesting question here is there seems to be a lot more clicks if a. If a journalistic organization writes a negative article about you, Elon Musk, that's like one of the best ways to get clicks.
1:53:16Lex FridmanSo how do you, if you're training Grok, not train on articles that have like the misaligned incentives?
1:53:26Elon MuskWe need to add the training set of the actual legal decisions. If so, that is a note. This is actually helpful because if you actually read the.
1:53:40Lex FridmanWhich are public, which are public, the
1:53:42Elon Muskcourt conclusions, they're completely the opposite of what the media wrote.
1:53:47Lex FridmanSo always striving for like the ground
1:53:49Elon Musktruth beyond the what did the judge actually write? What does the jury and the judge actually conclude? And in both cases they found me innocent. And that's after the jury shop for trying to find the venue where I'm most likely to lose.
1:54:07Elon MuskNo, I mean, obviously it can be a much better critique than this. I mean, I've Been far too optimistic about Autopilot.
1:54:16Lex FridmanThe critique I got, by the way was more about that which is for each broke down a nice bullet point list for each of your companies, the set of predictions that you made, when you'll deliver, when you'll be able to solve, for example, self driving.
1:54:29Lex FridmanAnd it gives you a list and those are compelling. And the basic takeaway is you're often too optimistic about how long it takes to get something done.
1:54:38Elon MuskYeah, I mean I would say that I'm pathologically optimistic on schedule, this is true. But while I am sometimes late, I always deliver in the end.
1:54:49Lex FridmanExcept with Uber.
1:54:49Elon MuskLilith.
1:54:50Lex FridmanNo, we'll see. Okay, is there over the past year or so since. Since purchasing X you've become more political, is there a part of you that regrets that? Have I in this battle to
1:55:09Elon Musksort
1:55:10Lex Fridmanof counter weigh the the woke that comes from.
1:55:13Elon MuskYeah, I guess if you consider fighting the woke mind virus, which I consider to be a civilizational threat, to be political, then yes.
1:55:20Lex FridmanSo basically going into the battleground of politics, is there a part of you that regrets Yes.
1:55:26Elon MuskI don't know if this is necessarily sort of one candidate or another candidate, but I'm generally against things that are anti meritocratic or where there's an attempt to suppress discussion where even discussing a topic is not allowed.
1:55:47Elon MuskWoke MIND virus is communism rebranded.
1:55:51Lex FridmanWell, I mean, that said, because of that battle against the woke mind virus, you've perceived as being right wing.
1:55:58Elon MuskIf the woke is left, then I suppose that would be true, but I'm not sure. I think there are aspects of the left that are good. I mean, if you're in favor of the environment, if you want to have a positive future for humanity, if you believe in empathy for your fellow human beings, being kind or not cruel, whatever those values are.
1:56:23Lex FridmanYou said that you were previously left or center left. What would you like to see in order for you to keep voting for Democrats again?
1:56:30Elon MuskNo, I would say that I would be probably left of center on social issues, probably a little bit right of center on economic issues.
1:56:40Lex FridmanAnd that still holds true?
1:56:41Elon MuskYes, but I think that's probably, you know, half the country isn't that maybe more. Maybe more.
1:56:49Lex FridmanAre you and AOC secretly friends or bigger question, do you wish you and her and just people in general of all political persuasions would talk more with empathy and maybe have a little bit more fun and good vibes and humor online?
1:57:05Elon MuskI'm always in favor of humor. That's why we have a funny mode.
1:57:08Lex FridmanBut good vibes, camaraderie, humor, you know, like friendship.
1:57:14Elon MuskYeah, well, you know, I don't know. AOCF I've only been at one. I was at the Met wall when she was. When she attended, and she was wearing this dress, but I can only see one side of it.
1:57:31Elon MuskSo it looked like Eat the itch, but I. I don't know what the
1:57:35Lex Fridmanrest of it said.
1:57:36Elon MuskYeah, I'm not sure. Something about the itch. Eat the itch.
1:57:41Lex FridmanI think we should have a language model complete. What are the possible ways to complete that sentence? And so I guess that that didn't work out well. Well, there's still hope.
1:57:54Elon MuskI root for friendship.
1:57:55Lex FridmanSure.
1:57:55Elon MuskSounds good.
1:57:56Lex FridmanMore characteristic, you're one of, if not the most famous, wealthy and powerful people in the world. In your position, it's difficult to find people you can trust.
1:58:05Elon MuskTrust no one. Not even yourself. Not trusting yourself.
1:58:07Lex FridmanOkay, well, that's. You're saying I jokingly, but is there some trust?
1:58:11Elon MuskNo one. Not even no one.
1:58:14Lex FridmanNeed an hour just to think about that. Maybe some drugs and maybe grok that. I mean, is there some aspect of that when just existing in a world where everybody wants something from you?
1:58:26Lex FridmanHow hard is it to exist in that world?
1:58:28Elon MuskI'll survive.
1:58:30Lex FridmanThere's a song like that too. Were you petrified? At first. Okay, I forget the rest of the lyrics, but is there. You don't struggle with this? I mean, I know you survive, but like, there's ways.
1:58:44Elon MuskPetrify is a spell in the druid tree.
1:58:47Lex FridmanWhat does it do?
1:58:48Elon MuskPetrify? It turns the monsters into stone.
1:58:56Lex FridmanOh, like literally?
1:58:56Elon MuskYeah, for like six seconds.
1:58:58Lex FridmanWell, the second. There's so much math in Diablo that
1:59:01Elon Muskbreaks my brain, it's like math non stop.
1:59:04Lex FridmanI mean, really, you're like laughing at it, but you don't. It can. It can put a huge amount of tension on a mind.
1:59:12Elon MuskYes. It can be definitely stressful at times.
1:59:16Lex FridmanWell, how do you know who you can trust in work and personal life?
1:59:20Elon MuskI mean, I guess you look at somebody's track record over time and if they've got a. You know, I guess you kind of use your neural net to assess, you know, someone.
1:59:31Lex FridmanNeural nets don't feel pain. Your neural net has consciousness. It might. It might feel pain when people betray you. I mean, I'm.
1:59:40Elon MuskYou know, to be frank, I mean, I've almost never been betrayed. Very, very rare. So, you know, for what it's worth,
1:59:50Lex FridmanI guess karma, be good to people and they'll be good to you.
1:59:53Elon MuskYeah, Karma's real.
1:59:54Lex FridmanAre there people you trust? Let me edit that Question. Are there people close to you that call you out in your bullshit?
2:00:06Elon MuskWell, the expert form is very helpful for that. If you're looking for critical feedback, can
2:00:12Lex Fridmanit push you like into the extremes more? The extremes of thought make you cynical about human n. General?
2:00:19Elon MuskI, I don't think I will be cynical. In fact, I think, you know, I. My feeling is that one should be, you know, never trust a cynic. The reason is that cynics excuse their own bad behavior by saying everyone does it because they're cynical.
2:00:44Elon MuskSo I always be. It's a red flag if someone's a cynic. A true cynic.
2:00:49Lex FridmanYeah, there's a degree of projection there that's always fun to watch from the outside and enjoy the hypocrisy.
2:00:55Elon MuskWell, it's. This is an important point that I think people who are listening should bear in mind. If somebody is cynical, meaning that they see bad behavior in everyone, it's easy for them to excuse their own bad behavior by saying that, well, everyone does it, but it's not true.
2:01:19Elon MuskMost people are kind of medium good.
2:01:23Lex FridmanI do wish the people on X will be better at seeing the good in other people's behavior. There seems to be a kind of weight towards seeing the negative somehow.
2:01:35Lex FridmanThe negative is sexier. Interpreting the negative is sexier, more viral. I don't know what that is exactly about human nature.
2:01:43Elon MuskI mean, I find the X platform to be less negative than the legacy media. You know, I mean, if you read sort of a. Sort of conventional newspapers, just.
2:01:53Elon MuskIt makes you sad, frankly. Whereas I'd say on the X platform, I mean, I really get more laughs per day on X than everything else combined from humans.
2:02:08Lex FridmanYou know, laughs is one thing. Laughs is. It overlaps, but it's not necessarily perfectly overlapping with like good vibes and support, like celebrating others, for example, not in a stupid, shallow, naive way, but like in an awesome way, like, oh, something awesome happened and you celebrate them for feels that that is outweighed by shitting on other people.
2:02:35Lex FridmanNow it's better than mainstream media, but it's still.
2:02:38Elon MuskYeah, mainstream media is almost relentlessly negative about everything. It's. I mean, really, the conventional news tries to answer the question, what is the worst thing that happened on Earth today?
2:02:49Elon MuskAnd it's a big world. So on any given day something bad has happened.
2:02:54Lex FridmanAnd a generalization of that. What is the worst perspective I can take on the thing that happened?
2:02:59Elon MuskSo, yeah, I don't know. There's just a strong negative bias in the news. I mean, I think there's a Possible explanation for this is evolutionary. Where bad news historically would be potentially fatal.
2:03:17Elon MuskLike there's lion over there or there's some other tribe that wants to kill you. Good news, we found a patch of berries is nice to have but not essential.
2:03:28Lex FridmanSo our old friend Tesla Autopilot, it's probably one of the most intelligent real world AI systems in the world.
2:03:37Elon MuskRight. You followed it from the beginning.
2:03:40Lex FridmanYeah, it was one of the most incredible robots in the world and continues to be. And it was really exciting and it was super exciting when it generalized became more than a robot on four wheels, but a real world AI system that perceives the world.
2:03:57Elon MuskYeah.
2:03:57Lex FridmanAnd has, can have potentially different embodiments.
2:04:01Elon MuskWell, I mean the really wild thing about the end to end training is that it learns to read like it can read science. But we never taught it to read.
2:04:12Elon MuskSo yeah, we never taught it what, we never taught it what a car was or what a person was or cyclist. It learned what all those things are, what all the objects are on the road from video, just from watching video.
2:04:32Elon MuskJust like humans. I mean humans are photons and controls out like the vast majority of information reaching our brain is from our eyes. And you say well what's the output?
2:04:45Elon MuskThe output is our motor signals to our sort of fingers and mouth in order to communicate. Protons in, controls out. The same is true of the car.
2:05:01Lex FridmanBut by looking at the sequence of images you've agreed with Ilyas Escova recently where he talked about LLM forming a world model. And basically language is a projection of that world model onto the sequence of.
2:05:16Lex FridmanYeah. Letters and, and you saying it finds
2:05:18Elon Muskorder in, in these things, it finds correlative clusters
2:05:27Lex Fridmanin so doing it's like understanding something deep about the world.
2:05:30Elon MuskYeah.
2:05:31Lex FridmanWhich is like. It's beautiful.
2:05:35Elon MuskThat's how our brain works.
2:05:38Lex FridmanYeah, but it's, it's beautiful. Controls out, neural nets are able to understand that deep meaning in the world. And so the question is how far can it go? And it does seem Everybody's excited about LLMs.
2:05:50Lex FridmanSo in the space of self supervised learning, in the space of text, it seems like there's a deep similarity between that and what Tesla Autopilot is doing. Is it to you basically the same.
2:06:06Elon MuskThey are converging now. Converging.
2:06:10Lex FridmanI wonder who gets there faster. Having a deep understanding of the world or they just will naturally converge.
2:06:19Elon MuskThey're both headed towards AGI. The Tesla approach is much more computer efficient. It had to be because we were constrained on. We only have 100 watts and INT8 computer 144 trillion operations per second, which sounds like a lot, but it's kind of small potatoes these days at int8, but it's understanding the world.
2:06:50Elon MuskAt int8, it's only 256 values.
2:06:55Lex FridmanBut there, the path to AGI might have much more significant impact because it's understanding it'll faster understand the real world than will LLMs and therefore be able to integrate with humans in the real world faster.
2:07:13Elon MuskThey're both going to understand the world. But I think Tesla's approach is fundamentally more compute efficient. It had to be. There was no choice. Our brain is very computer efficient, very, very energy efficient.
2:07:27Elon MuskSo think of like what is our brain able to do? There's only about 10 watts of higher brain function, not counting stuff that's just used to control our body.
2:07:39Elon MuskThe thinking part of our brain is less than 10 watts. And those 10 watts can still produce a much better novel than a 10 megawatt GPU cluster. So there's a sixth order of magnitude difference there.
2:07:56Elon MuskI mean, AI has thus far gotten to where it is via brute force, just throwing massive amounts of compute and massive amounts of power at it. So this is not where it will end up.
2:08:15Elon MuskIn general, with any given technology, you first try to make it work and then you make it efficient. So I think we'll find over time that these models get smaller, are able
2:08:27Lex Fridmanto
2:08:29Elon Muskproduce sensible output with far less compute, far less power. Tesla is arguably ahead of the game on that front because we've just been forced to try to understand the world with 100 watts of compute.
2:08:51Elon MuskAnd there are a bunch of sort of fundamental functions that we kind of forgot to include. So we had to run them in a bunch of things in emulation.
2:09:00Elon MuskWe fixed a bunch of Those with hardware 4, and then hardware 5 will be even better. But it does appear at this point that the car will be able to drive better than a human, even with hardware 3 and 100 watts of power.
2:09:20Elon MuskAnd really, if we really optimize it, it could be probably less than 50 watts.
2:09:26Lex FridmanWhat have you learned about developing Optimus, about applying, integrating this kind of real world AI into the space of robotic manipulation, just humanoid robotics. What are some interesting tiny or big things you've understood?
2:09:47Elon MuskI was surprised at the fact that we had to develop every part of the robot ourselves, that there were no off the shelf motors, electronics, sensors, like we had to develop everything.
2:10:03Elon MuskWe couldn't actually find a source of electric motors for any amount of money.
2:10:12Lex FridmanSo it's not even just efficient, inexpensive, it's like anything there's not a. The actuators. Everything, everything has to be designed from scratch.
2:10:23Elon MuskWe tried hard to find anything that was. Because you think of how many electric motors are made in the world, there's like tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of electric motor designs.
2:10:37Elon MuskNone of them were suitable for a humanoid robot. Literally none. So we had to develop our own, design it specifically for what a humanoid robot needs.
2:10:51Lex FridmanHow hard was it to design something that can be mass manufactured, could be relatively inexpensive. If you compare to Boston Dynamics Atlas, it's a very expensive robot.
2:11:01Elon MuskIt is designed to be manufactured in the same way they would make a car. And I think ultimately we can make Optimus for less than the cost of a car.
2:11:11Elon MuskIt should be because if you look at the mass of the robot, it's much smaller and the car has many actuators in it. The car has more actuators than the robot.
2:11:23Lex FridmanBut there is. The actuators are kind of interesting in a humanoid robot with fingers. So Optimus has really nice hands and fingers, you know.
2:11:32Elon MuskYeah.
2:11:33Lex FridmanAnd they could do some interesting manipulation. So yeah, soft touch robotics.
2:11:38Elon MuskI mean one of the tests goals I have is can. Can it pick up a needle and a thread and thread the needle just by looking?
2:11:47Lex FridmanHow far away from that? Just by looking? Just by looking.
2:11:51Elon MuskMaybe a year. Although I go back to. I'm optimistic on time. The work that we're doing in the car will translate to the robot the
2:11:59Lex Fridmanperception or also the control.
2:12:02Elon MuskNo, the controls are different, but the video in controls out. The car is a robot on four wheels. The Optimus is a robot with hands and legs. They're very similar.
2:12:17Lex FridmanSo the entire machinery of the learning process, end to end, it's just. You just have a different set of controls.
2:12:23Elon MuskOftenest we'll figure out how to do things by watching videos.
2:12:28Lex FridmanAs the saying goes, be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.
2:12:33Elon MuskYeah, it's true.
2:12:34Lex FridmanWhat's something difficult you're going through that people don't often see trying to feed Uber Lilith.
2:12:44Elon MuskNo, I mean, you know,
2:12:50Elon MuskI mean my mind is a storm and I don't think, I don't think most people would want to be me. They may think they'd want to be me, but they don't.
2:12:58Elon MuskThey don't know. They don't understand.
2:13:10Lex FridmanHow are you doing?
2:13:14Elon MuskI mean, overall, okay in the grand scheme of things, I can't complain.
2:13:21Lex FridmanYou get lonely?
2:13:24Elon MuskSometimes. But I, you know, my kids and friends keep me company.
2:13:33Lex FridmanSo not existential,
2:13:36Elon Muskbut there are many nights I sleep alone I don't have to, but I do.
2:13:46Lex FridmanWalter Isaacson, in his new biography of you, wrote about your difficult childhood. Will you ever find forgiveness in your heart for everything that has happened to you in that period of your life?
2:14:01Elon MuskWhat is forgiveness? I do not. At least I don't think I have a resentment.
2:14:14Lex FridmanSo
2:14:16Elon Musknothing to forgive?
2:14:19Lex FridmanNo. Forgiveness is difficult for people. It seems like you don't harbor the resentment.
2:14:28Elon MuskI mean, I try to think about, like, what. What is going to affect the future in a good way. And holding onto grudges does not affect the future in a good way.
2:14:41Lex FridmanYou're a father, a proud father. What have you learned about life from your kids? Those little biological organisms?
2:14:52Elon MuskI mean, developing AI and watching, say, little X grow is fascinating because they. There are far more parallels than I would have expected. I mean, I can see his biological neural net making more and more sense of the world, and I can see the digital neural net making more and more sense of the world at the same time.
2:15:19Lex FridmanDo you see the beauty and magic in both?
2:15:21Elon MuskYes. I mean, one of the things with kids is that, you know, you kind of see the world anew in their eyes. You know, to them, everything is new and fresh.
2:15:41Elon MuskAnd then when you see that them, experience them, the world is new and fresh, you do, too.
2:15:52Lex FridmanWell, Elon, I just want to say thank you for your kindness to me and friendship over the years, for seeing something in a silly kid like me as you've done for many others.
2:16:03Lex FridmanAnd thank you for having hope for a positive future for humanity and for working your ass off to make it happen. Thank you, John.
2:16:11Elon MuskThanks, Lex.
2:16:13Lex FridmanThank you for listening to this conversation with Elon Musk to support this podcast. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words that Walter Isaacson wrote about the central philosophy of how Elon approaches difficult problems.
2:16:29Lex FridmanThe only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.