Ron Baron and Elon Musk Discuss the Future
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (12)
Transcript
0:00Ron BaronThank you everyone.
0:05Ron BaronAs I said before, this is a lot different than convention hall in Asbury Park. Today we're privileged to have Elon Musk join us virtually. And there couldn't be anyone more appropriate to speak to today.
0:22Ron BaronWhen a theme of our conference is changing lives. There's no one who's changed our lives more than Elon. Especially changed our lives financially, but changed everyone else's lives. And that really feels like it's just beginning.
0:38Ron BaronWithout him there'd be no electric vehicles, there'd be no fasd. Has anyone ever heard thought of full service drive self driving 5 or 10 years ago? Has anyone ever thought about that?
0:53Ron BaronSo reflyable rockets. No one has been able to do that before. Congratulations to Jeff Bezos for accomplishing it yesterday. First time. We've already done what, 5,000 flights and we have 9,000 satellites.
1:11Ron BaronI think it is on the way to 15,000, so. And the people who did that for him, did it for Jeff are people who used to work for SpaceX but couldn't go fast enough for Elon.
1:25Ron BaronSo now they went over to Bezos. So there would be no Starlink, no Refi, no Optimus. In fact, one of the first questions I wanted to ask is I was telling my assistant about Optimus before and how the plan is to go from a million production next year to 10 million the following year, to 100 million to a billion.
1:49Ron BaronAnd what she asked me was, well, so where's the room for them on the sidewalks? Are you going to build something? Is that the idea that we have behind boring company to go underground for the robots to walk around or fly above?
2:05Ron BaronWhere's the room for them?
2:08Elon MuskWell, actually you can fit all of humanity on floor in the city. That's how small the humans are. And Octopus doesn't mind being packed densely. So it's always helpful to think, think how much room do people take?
2:39Elon MuskAnd this is why I think just having it in the back of your mind that all 8 billion people on Earth can fit on one floor in the city of New York.
2:55Elon MuskSo another way is if you're flying across the country and your goal is to drop a water balloon on someone like you, you will fail because it's empty.
3:12Ron BaronWe used to do that when we were in eighth grade. We got them though. So Katelyn, don't worry, there's enough room. So one of the things I think about when you talk about Optimus is that there's so many functions that it can perform.
3:32Ron BaronWhat's going to be left for humans? Is there a job that humans going to have other than just living in, you know, this great abundance that you're going to create.
3:42Ron BaronWhat's going to happen?
3:44Elon MuskWell, I think there is this question of how do you write meaning if the robots and do everything. But we see lots of examples where even though machines can do much better human like athletics for example, or let's take a mental sport like chess, computers are so good that your phone not even connected to the Internet can beat Magnus Karlski easily.
4:29Elon MuskBut yet chess is at all time highs in popularity. So really she's being better than us at something. Doesn't mean we derive satisfaction enjoying it.
4:49Ron BaronBy the way guys, the connection isn't that good with the phone. Is there some way we can do something else?
4:55Elon MuskBit echoey.
4:58Ron BaronWe're not. The connection isn't that good. I think it keeps cutting in and out.
5:03Elon MuskWhat if I had talked those.
5:07Ron BaronOkay, okay, you do that, you do that and I'll do that.
5:12Elon MuskOh,
5:17Ron BaronSo, so the function, the function, the functions that you see these robots doing is what, what are they going to do and why is there. How are we going to have a billion of them when we have 8 billion people?
5:34Ron BaronHow really?
5:36Elon MuskLook, it's going to take us a minute to make a billion robots. So, you know, larger, very significant. But I think there will ultimately be billions, billions of humanoid robots on it.
5:55Elon MuskA way to think of it is who on earth not want their own personal R2D2T3PO like pretty much everyone's, you know, even better, like your personal health and funny robot.
6:18Elon MuskIt would be great. You could teach your kids, take your dog for a walk, get the groceries, you know, chat, chat, you know, protect you when need is great.
6:34Elon MuskAnd then how might be robots? Would there be an industry providing product probably three or four to one relative to humans, which, which suggests that total number of robots will be somewhere around maybe as high as $40 billion.
6:53Elon Musk40. 40 billion. Maybe 30 billion robots. 30 slot.
6:58Ron BaronSo, so the Japanese company is Kuka. Those robots that are used in manufacturing are 50,0001-000001-50000. And you're describing a robot that's $20,000. We have to have a million a year to do that of 10 million a year to get to $20,000.
7:17Ron BaronAnd is that something that's going to be affordable for people? Are they going to be rented? They're going to be purchased corporations. Are we going to get some kind of carried interest once they buy them from us?
7:27Ron BaronHow is this going to work? Or don't we have the model yet?
7:32Elon MuskWell, my Rough guess is that the cost of goods sold their labor materials for Optimus after we reach a million units of steady state production. So call it a year after reaching a million units a year because it takes a lot of effort to improve the cost.
7:58Elon MuskBut at that point I would expect the labor materials to be 20 to $30,000 in current year dollars. I think that's a pretty safe estimate
8:10Ron Baronwhen you're improving costs with cars. Your idea is that everything we buy from other people to use in our cars, we know exactly how much it costs and therefore we can tell someone how much we're going to pay for what we're buying from them.
8:24Ron BaronAnd if it doesn't, if they're making too much, then we make that stuff ourselves. Is that the same kind of idea we have in this robot where we're going to should be much simpler to make than a car, or am I wrong?
8:37Ron BaronIs it a hand?
8:39Elon MuskThe hand is. The hand is extremely complex. There are 50 actuators in the hand with the hand and forearm actuators.
8:51Ron BaronThe motor.
8:52Elon MuskYeah, actuator is the motor, gearbox and power electronics. So that's 100 per robot. Really a lot of blood. Actuators and sensors, right? Am I getting that right? Approximately.
9:12Elon MuskSo.
9:17Elon MuskThere's a lot of complexity.
9:19Ron BaronWhy is that important? Why is it important that we have such a complex hand?
9:25Elon MuskSo in order to do dexterous tasks, you have to have a hand with a sensitivity, precision and degrees of freedom of a human hand. Because, you know, the. So something that we find easy to do like pick up a screwdriver or turn a wrench or even say thread a needle or play the guitar, actually require a lot of dexterity.
10:01Elon MuskAnd one of the reasons we think we achieve sustainable abundance, which is sort of the new sort of revised version of the company's goal because it was accelerate sustainable energy, which as you mentioned, we've done that.
10:23Elon MuskOur new goal is sustainable abundance. So that's abundance for all. But in a way that is sustainable, that does not destroy any of the natural world's.
10:35Ron BaronHow do we decide who gets what? Somebody wants to buy my house. They can just come in and start living there.
10:43Elon MuskWell, I'm not sure why. I mean, you do have a nice house. I can certainly see the appeal. But the robots will be able to make anyone a house and you know, as long as you don't just on it being in a particular location, you can have.
11:07Elon MuskRobots will be able to build you a castle if you want. So. But the reason for pan dexterity is you want to be able to do, like, surgery and precision medical actions.
11:21Elon MuskAnd so imagine a world where everyone has access to the best surgeons, literally everyone. And optimus will have the level of precision that is frankly superhuman, and will be able to do medical procedures, very sophisticated medical procedures, any medical procedure, perhaps things that really humans can't even do because they're too difficult and that will be available to anyone.
11:57Elon MuskPeople often talk about eliminating poverty and providing great medical care, but they never actually have a solution. And money doesn't solve it because there are only so many. There's a very limited number of great doctors and surgeons.
12:16Elon MuskThey don't grow on trees, but now they'll get built in factories.
12:21Ron BaronSo I sent you, a year or two ago, an article about a young man who was in an interview in Barron's, and he was 33 at the time, and he'd become a portfolio manager, and he lost his legs to a.
12:34Ron BaronIt was a Paralympic performer and he lost his legs to man eating bacteria. And he said, is there anything we can do to get him out of the wheelchair?
12:42Ron BaronAnd you said, yes, there is. In three or four years, we can give him an optimus body and then we can use transistors in his head, in his brain, to let him function as a normal person.
12:57Ron BaronDance and sing and walk and run. Have we been able to make progress in that area?
13:04Elon MuskYes. So that's a component of two of my companies. One is being Neuralink and the other being Tesla. So Neuralink is also making good progress. Now has, I think, over 10 patients with neural link implants.
13:22Elon MuskAnd these people who didn't have the ability to move their arms or legs in some cases were completely locked in, like Stephen Hawking. And they can now communicate if they think as quickly, almost as quickly as we're communicating right now, which is very cool.
13:40Elon MuskAnd that's going to continue to accelerate. So what we can do is a Neuralink implant that is taking signals from the motor cortex brain and also receiving signals from this somatosensory cortex.
14:01Elon MuskAnd then if someone who's lost their legs, Optimus legs, and so you. I mean, we're really getting like the Six Million Dollar man here. I mean, from back in the day.
14:13Elon MuskI don't know if you watched that show, but.
14:14Ron BaronI watched it, I watched it.
14:17Elon MuskYeah. I thought it was pretty fun. And we can actually give someone superhuman cyborg capabilities, like the Six Million Dollar man, but less than $6 million in this day and age.
14:29Elon MuskI mean, $6 million back then was. Unfortunately, these days it's like nothing, but for much less than that. I mean, like, for something that would be reasonable and affordable, you know, it might be more like $60,000 type of thing.
14:47Elon MuskAnd you can take the signals from Neuralink, the mind that would be transmitting to legs and transmit those to the attached Optimus robot legs, and he would actually be able to run faster than a human.
15:04Elon MuskJust like 6 million $.
15:06Ron BaronNeuralink. Sounds really exciting. Sounds unbelievably exciting. Let's switch to xai. So three years ago, you were here and you had either just purchased or about to purchase, you know, Twitter, which you've renamed X, and you were widely criticized for that.
15:26Elon MuskAnd yes, I was right.
15:29Ron BaronIn fact, you even mentioned here on stage that you didn't want to have anyone else be angry at you because you had enough people trying to kill you already.
15:37Elon MuskYeah, totally.
15:39Ron BaronSo. So you were buying. You were buying X, and it was $42 billion, I think, and you were in the process of raising money. And I called you up.
15:48Ron BaronYou hadn't called me to solicit me, and I called you up and I said, I would like to invest with you $100 million in this. And it was $60 million for one of our funds and 40 million for me.
16:01Ron BaronAnd he said, really? I said, yeah. You said, really? And I said, yeah. And you told me that you thought I would make a double. And I said, well, I hope so.
16:16Ron BaronBut to me, it felt like you made us $8 billion in Tesla and it'd be not very appropriate if I didn't support this new venture that you were doing.
16:26Ron BaronSo we invested, and then the day that we paid the money, we marked it down 70%.
16:33Elon MuskOh, man. This is how I know you're a true friend, Ron, because this is. You know, I do regard you as a true and trusted friend. And, you know, the test of friendship,
16:53Ron BaronI got more to the story.
16:59Elon MuskThe test of friendship is who supports you when the chips are down and the times are tough and everyone's against you. That's a real friend. And that's you, Ron.
17:09Ron BaronThank you. So we did invest that hundred marked down to 30. And then about a year later, we started getting phone calls from hedge funds who always seem to know things they're not supposed to know.
17:25Elon MuskHow do they do that?
17:26Ron BaronRight? And they started saying, I'd like to buy your stock for what you paid for it. And I said, I think I'd rather wait and stay in. Which I did.
17:36Ron BaronAnd then changed the name to X and changed the configuration of business. And then from that, you bought Twitter, and it came together in a Social network along with this.
17:50Ron BaronAnd all of a sudden we have a business that has incredible data. Did you buy this for the data that no one knew about, but the data was 600 million people talking with each other.
18:02Ron BaronSo physical data that no one else has. And then you start at Groq, which is based on our data, and everyone else doesn't have that, they got digital stuff.
18:11Ron BaronAnd then when they have Grok, then we need more data centers. And you're building those. And in a space of a very short time, less than months, you built a data center which is four times what, as large as anyone else on the planet, 25,000 what other people had in CPUs, and we built it in GPUs, 100,000 more powerful.
18:36Ron BaronAnd then, you know, now we have, now we're going to go to hundreds of thousand. But the bottom line is the investment that we made, we put up more money and we have a total of $350 million invested over the past two or three years.
18:51Ron BaronAnd now it's worth $700 million. So everything you touch is like that. It's the most unbelievable thing I've ever seen. So everyone invested in technology and we are investing in the technology person, best engineer on the planet.
19:10Ron BaronSo thank you very much. So the vision is, the question is, did you buy X, did you buy Twitter because of the data? Did you have all this in your head before you did it?
19:22Elon MuskNot really, no. I just bought Twitter because I thought it was having a negative effect on civilization and just sort of pushing ideas that were anti civilizational. You know, it's sort of captured by the far left that's, it's fair to say the radical left, I mean, they wouldn't regard themselves as such, but it was captured by a group of people whose political beliefs are those of deep blue San Francisco and Berkeley, which is about as depth as you get in America.
20:06Elon MuskSo that matter wasn't a good forum for debate because they suspended many people on the right, including the President, as you may recall, a sitting president, which is really unprecedented for precedent.
20:22Elon MuskSo I think we need to have a public square where there's true freedom of speech. And freedom of speech is.
20:38Elon MuskFreedom of speech is the bedrock of democracy. If there's no freedom of speech, people cannot make an informed vote. And if you cannot make an informed vote, you don't have a real democracy.
20:51Elon MuskSo the purpose of acquiring Twitter was to try to bring it more to the center. There have been no left wing voices have been banned or anything like that, or suppressed.
21:06Elon MuskBut what we're trying to do is give equal weight to all parts of the country so that they can be a public town square where people can exchange ideas and hopefully not resort violence.
21:21Elon MuskAnd I think that's. That's fundamental to. I think it's one of the. Like I said, free speech is the bedrock of democracy. It's why it's the First Amendment, because people came from countries where if they could be killed or imprisoned, what they said.
21:41Elon MuskAnd in fact, this is happening all around the world as we speak, even in places like Britain. So that's anyway, because I felt like if the civilizational risk had to be addressed, I mean, if America is not strong, then what do businesses matter?
22:13Elon MuskAmerica is a central pillar that holds up a Western civilization, and if that pillar falls, everything falls.
22:22Ron BaronSo. So you were one of the founders, the two founders of ChatGPT and OpenAI, and you had a disagreement, and it was founded as a charity, and it was your idea that you wanted to make sure that freedom of speech and all the things that you deem important for good lives on our planet were followed.
22:51Ron BaronSafety. And the other founder, what he tried to do and did was accomplished is that he got control, even though it was your money. And he got control and you.
23:06Ron BaronAnd he said, elon, I'd like you to stay. And you said, I want to go. I don't want to be a part of this. And he offered you some ownership, and you said, I don't want it.
23:17Ron BaronI said, here you walk away from an ownership of ChatGPT. So you're obviously not doing all this stuff for money. I mean, you are, but, I mean, that's not.
23:29Ron BaronBut I mean, if you, if you were only about money, you would have never left something that's worth $500 billion by itself. And so here you're forming this new entity, Grok, to accomplish what you wanted ChatGPT to accomplish.
23:48Ron BaronBut you think that we have an advantage in this because of the data, because of the compute, because of what? And what are you going to do with this?
23:57Ron BaronUltimately, you talk about connecting physical world to digital. What does that mean?
24:03Elon MuskYeah, well, just going back to OpenAI for a second. The reason I founded OpenAI was because I was concerned, based on my conversations with Larry Page, who used to be a close friend of mine, that he was not sufficiently concerned about the dangers of AI.
24:24Elon MuskThis really came to a head when at my birthday party, he, in front of a large group of people, called me a specious for favoring humanity over computers. I found that troubling.
24:44Elon MuskI was like, Larry, what side are you on? It sounds like you're on the side of the computers, but you really need to be on team humanity here. So after that I was like, okay, this is it.
25:00Elon MuskWe got to have some counterbalance to Google because Larry doesn't seem to care if humans make it or not. So I thought what's the opposite of Google? It would be an open source nonprofit.
25:15Elon MuskAnd that's where the word open in OpenAI comes from. It means open source. And I provided all the money beginning like one of the series ABC Rounds and recruited the key people like Ilya and taught them everything I know.
25:37Elon MuskAnd you know, I actually even got them to deal with Microsoft with Satya. Initially I got Satya to donate some time from Azure and for all that I did not seek any financial reward whatsoever.
26:00Elon MuskAnd the reason I actually turn down the offer for shares is because I mean I felt like what do you shares and why like nonprofits supposed to have shares?
26:09Elon MuskAt least last time I checked, you know, they're not space nonprofits are not supposed to be vehicle for self enrichment. So that's why I turned on the offer of shares because it, it didn't seem morally illegally transv.
26:25Elon MuskSo then with Xai we, and we are starting late with Xai, you know, we're only, I don't, two and a half years old basically and we're starting from behind.
26:44Elon MuskWe are somewhat of an underdog, but they're pretty good with technology. So I don't want to pat myself in the back here, but I'm pretty good with technology and we are advancing faster than any other AI.
27:03Elon MuskSo I think for technology ventures the winner ultimately is the one that is able to move the fastest.
27:13Ron BaronSo we think so we're optimizing for the best technology and we're doing something different than others others in a digital world. And we're physical to digital with movement and visual and other people can't match that.
27:30Ron BaronAnd also we have the real time data. What does that mean? Why should we do better than everyone else? Why are we going to win? Why are we going to at least be different than everyone else so we have a really strong business.
27:44Elon MuskWell, first of all, I think in terms of being a strong business, I actually not too worried about that because even even a small player that is successful in AI will be worth a lot because they will contribute so much in productivity to the economy.
28:02Elon MuskSo and so it's actually pretty easy to achieve. Not pretty easy but I mean it's not. There will be many companies that are worth sustainably several hundred billion dollars sustainably.
28:22Elon MuskSo then several question of like, well, how do we achieve the lead? That comes down to three things. Are you able to attract the best talent? Are you able to bring the most amount of AI hardware online?
28:44Elon MuskCan you bring GPUs online faster than anyone else? And we've already demonstrated that we can do that. Jensen Wong himself said that he was blown away by how fast XN Colossus
29:00Ron BaronData Center Jensen said there's only one human on the planet who could have done that. That's you.
29:06Elon MuskYes, he did say that. It's very, very, very kind.
29:14Ron BaronIt made us think about are you really human?
29:19Elon MuskI keep telling people I'm an alien, but nobody believes me. I mean, when I got my green card it said alien registration part. So I mean, I have proof from the government.
29:33Elon MuskSorry, I just have to get registered. So let's say I've got some like relatively rare skills these days in America in terms of getting hardware built. If you look at the, the biggest successes in manufacturing in America since World War II by far are Tesla and SpaceX.
30:07Elon MuskYeah.
30:08Ron BaronSo to stay on GROK for another minute. So the idea of connecting physical and digital is that that's different than digital digital. Figuring out who wants to buy what.
30:23Ron BaronWe're doing something entirely different. Is that fair?
30:27Elon MuskI, I wouldn't say we're doing something entirely different. We're doing, we're doing some things that are same, some things that are different, but it's just saying like the, the elements that define success for an AI company are going to be one.
30:41Elon MuskThe talent, do the hardware, how much AI and hardware can you bring to bear? That's actually a very big deal. And we've shown that we're the best at doing that at xai.
30:54Elon MuskAnd then third, unique access to data. And for that we've got the X system, formerly the Twitter system, which is by far the best source of real time data in the world.
31:06Elon MuskSo those are some pretty significant assets. And, and I think we're going to come up with some very innovative ideas. But I have more ideas in my head than I know what to do with, frankly.
31:22Elon MuskSo I think we'll make some moves that are not on the chessboard that people don't anticipate. So creative moves and like I said, and I should point out GROK right now, actually Heavy is still the smartest AI, the best of my knowledge.
31:47Elon MuskI recommend trying it out. Grok 4 Heavy is where we spawn several agents. They work in parallel. They compare their output like a study group and Give you the final conclusion.
32:00Elon MuskAnd it keeps getting better. And now we've begun training on Grok 5. Graph 5, I think will be the smartest AI in the world by a significant margin on every metric, without exception.
32:18Elon MuskI might be wrong, but I think that will be the case. And that will be in Q1 sometime.
32:25Ron Baron5.
32:26Elon MuskYes. Grok 5 is the first time where I thought, well, we have a non zero chance of achieving artificial general intelligence. Not that it's a high chance. I calculate like 10%.
32:42Elon MuskThat's what my biological neural network comes up with. Which still means 90% chance that we don't. But I've never thought that before. And so for the first time I think like, well, this really could be general intelligence.
32:59Elon MuskAt least a small chance. Grock 5 will really be something special. And it'll be both extremely intelligent, extremely intelligent and extremely fast. So one of the things that we're doing that I think is interesting is Grokopedia, which we're going to rename down the road to insight to be Encyclopedia Galactica, in order of Isaac Asimov and Douglas Adams, who both mentioned that in the books.
33:39Elon MuskAnd the idea behind Galactica is to create an open source repository of all knowledge, like a distillation of all knowledge and open source, meaning anyone can access it, anyone can use it, and if other people want to train on it, they can do so.
34:02Elon MuskAnd then we want to create copies of this and distribute these copies throughout Earth and even put them on the Moon and Mars and out in deep space, as in a way, sort of a modern day Library of Alexandria.
34:20Elon MuskIt was the great tragedy that the Library of Alexandria burned down or was burned down. So in order to preserve this knowledge, I think we want to literally etch it in stone and sort of stone like microplant, and distribute it widely.
34:41Elon MuskSo the worst case scenario, future civilization can see what we learned and maybe pick things up from there.
34:49Ron BaronSo is there a major breakthrough that you can describe that allows us to do this with Grok 5? Is it just speed? Is it more compute and therefore we have more information we can train on?
35:03Ron BaronWhat is the breakthrough that allows us to have this 10% chance for AGI? Is there a breakthrough or is it just speed and access to data? Not just, but.
35:19Elon MuskSo there's a couple of things. It will be the largest model to test my knowledge. So this is, this is a 6 trillion parameter model, whereas GROK3 and 4 are based on a 3 trillion parameter model.
35:38Elon MuskMoreover, the 6 trillion parameters will have a much higher intelligence density per gigabyte than rock 4. I think this is an important metric to think about intelligence per gigabyte and intelligence per trillion operations.
35:57Elon MuskSo we've learned a lot. So the quality of the data that we're training on with Grok 5 is much nearer. It's also inherently multimodal, so it's text, pictures, video, audio.
36:20Elon MuskIt's going to be much better at tool use and in fact creating tools to be more effective at answering questions and, and understanding the world. Its vision will be extremely good.
36:38Elon MuskIt'll have real, be able to understand real time video, which is I think a really fundamentally important thing that none of the other AIs can understand real time video.
36:49Elon MuskI think if you can't do that, which humans can obviously do, you really can't achieve AGI.
37:00Ron BaronBy the way, every one of these is.
37:01Elon MuskThere's some special source items that I, there's some special source items that I can't talk about in a public forum. Obviously you can't give away all the secrets here just between us, but we have a few other special things that are in the works for Graph five.
37:23Elon MuskSo it's, it's really going to feel sentient.
37:33Ron BaronSo but there is no. When we're Grok 5, when you're talking about the advances, there is no limit. So when we're Grok 5 is better than Grok 4, which is better than Grok 3.
37:44Ron BaronSo it keeps going. So once we get to sentient levels, we go two sentient, five sentient ten centient, a million.
37:55Elon MuskThe sentience will grow. I mean, what's really mind blowing is how far can the sentience grow? To your point, how far does it go? I think it goes immensely far, almost incomprehensibly far.
38:16Elon MuskAlmost does go incomprehensibly far. So the like we see a path to putting 100 gigawatts per year of solar powered AI satellite into orbit and having this be actually the lowest cost way to power and operate AI at a very large scale.
38:58Elon MuskFor reference, the United states consumes roughly 460 gigawatts on average per year. Because the average power load in the US is 460 gigawatts.
39:09Ron BaronThe whole country? The whole country.
39:11Elon MuskAll electricity of all sources in the U.S. yes.
39:13Ron BaronAnd you're talking about 100 being added?
39:16Elon MuskWell, roughly a quarter of the U.S. electricity output.
39:24Elon MuskWe have a plan mapped out to do that. It gets crazy.
39:30Ron BaronSo there's what, a trillion planets like Earth in the world, in the solar system, whatever you call it, a trillion. And in that trillion. So big bang was 14 billion years ago.
39:47Ron Baron13 billion years ago. And our planet's only 4 billion years old. So there must be other planets that are like ours with all the minerals, oxygen, hydrogen, silicon, carbon.
40:03Ron BaronSo life here has been extinguished four times. And presumably you feel that other places, other civilizations, other planets, then we'll get off of this exist. And are they planets where the beings there are part human or part carbon and part metal?
40:26Elon MuskWell, I think we'd like to find out. I'd like to find out. I mean, my philosophy is one of curiosity. I just want to know what's going on in this universe.
40:38Elon MuskIs the standard of physics correct about the beginning of the universe? Is heat death the end of the universe? Are there other alien civilizations? Can we talk to them?
40:49Elon MuskAnd what questions should we be asking about reality that we don't know to ask? So that's my motivation, is to expand consciousness to better understand the universe.
41:03Ron BaronSo let's go to, away from the universe, back to Tesla again. As you said, gotta be back on ground here, back on ground. And so you said that our expertise is in making things better, faster, cheaper than other people.
41:21Ron BaronAnd when I started investing in Tesla, when we started investing in Tesla, you were telling us that it's the machine that makes the machine that's most important, the machine that makes.
41:32Ron BaronSo you went to machine learning, machine technology then, which is 15 years ago. And so, and now the average car I think is 50 minutes or 50 seconds, 40 seconds, 60 seconds, and we're now 35 seconds.
41:52Ron BaronEvery 35 seconds the car rolls off and then you say that we're going to get down to 10 seconds. And you said it's a possibility we can go to 5,5 seconds.
42:04Ron BaronEvery car is rolling off a line. How's that happen?
42:09Elon MuskI certainly see a path to achieving a roughly 5000 millisecond time or 5 seconds, which is only, that's only really walking speed. That's like sort of a fast walk.
42:25Elon Musk1 meter per second is a fast walk. The car is less than 5 meters long. So 5 second cycle time. The cars will be exiting the line at walking speed.
42:34Elon MuskSo it's you, you can run away from them. It's not, it's not going to be like they're coming out like bullets or something. So but as a rough rule of thumb, that's, you know, 10,000 minutes in a week.
42:47Elon MuskIf you run 24, 7 operation and you get, you know, let's say 10 cars per minute, you've got 100,000.
43:01Ron BaronSo but the question is, how come we're able to do this, do other people just not care? Or they think that, gee, if I do something, if I have this idea and we try to implement it and it doesn't work, then I'm not going to get promoted or I can get fired or I'll get blamed.
43:20Ron BaronAnd if it works, then I'm going to have to do a lot of extra work that I wouldn't know how to do if it didn't work. So why don't other people have a mindset of making things better?
43:33Ron BaronThe Chinese, they've been great at copying us and in some instances, probably even done better than us after they've copied for the first time. But how, how come do you think that other people haven't been able to make the advances we have?
43:50Ron BaronAnd even the guy from Ford just recently said, gee, those people in China wouldn't give us compliments. But he said the people in and the Chinese have copied us.
43:59Ron BaronThose people in China are doing great, which is really a compliment to us because the reason they're doing great is because of us. So why don't other people do this?
44:07Ron BaronWhy doesn't he do that?
44:12Elon MuskMost companies are incrementalist. You know, the management team wants to do, I don't know, 5%, maybe 10% better than last year, as opposed to take big risks that could fail.
44:32Elon MuskObviously don't have a problem with taking big risks.
44:37Ron BaronYeah, I say
44:41Elon Muskso that. And I like to use the tools of physics to analyze things. And you know, when I was in the factory one night, I was looking at the factory and I was like, you know, this could be much more efficient, it could be much faster.
45:04Elon MuskJust rough math trying to calculate the volumetric efficiency of the factory. So if you divide the factory into cubic meters and say how many cubic meters are doing something useful?
45:16Elon MuskAnd it's a surprisingly small percentage, the volumetric density is not very good. And then the speed of the cars and the parts moving is quite slow, generally limited by the speed which people can say, attach brake lights or a seat or something like that.
45:38Elon MuskSo if you densify the factor and improve the volumetric efficiency, which is helpful for, for production efficiency because things have less distance to move. Just like a chip, you densify the circuits in a chip to make it more efficient.
45:58Elon MuskThink of a factory is a lot like chip. How do you make your chip faster? Well, you bring circuits closer together, make them smaller, and you increase the clock speed.
46:08Ron BaronSo Robin told me that you told her once that I think of myself as a bit. And if I'm a bit, how Would I like to travel? That makes sense a bit.
46:20Elon MuskOr an atom? If it's the software or if I'm on a ship, I say what's the journey of the bit? What am I doing? And if this journey doesn't make sense, I need to fix it.
46:31Elon MuskAnd if the journey of the atom and the factory doesn't make sense, I need to fix it.
46:35Ron BaronSo when you say you're working on weekends, I spend all my Sundays working on a chip. What does that mean? What do you do?
46:42Elon MuskIt's Saturdays but sometimes Sundays. Usually recent weekends spent Sundays too. Yeah, just the AI5 chip which is going to be a great chip. You know all of Tesla hinges on that chip.
47:05Elon MuskThat's the chip that goes into our next generation of self driving cars. And it's also essential for the Optimus robot. So that chip program was in bad shape. It wasn't closing because it's quite an ambitious chip design and it really wasn't on a path to success.
47:30Elon MuskAnd they also had the Dojo program which was doing. It was also doing well. Okay. But not on a path to be competitive with Nvidia. So I collapsed, I collapsed the two programs into just one program is to get everyone focused on AI5 chip which is essential.
47:47Elon MuskContinue to use Nvidia for training. But we need the AI5 inference chip which is, it's a very powerful chip, but that, but it's also a very low power chip.
47:58Elon MuskSo it's, it doesn't use a lot of power. So its performance per watt is extremely good. We think it's probably going to be at least two to three times better than Nvidia.
48:12Elon MuskAnd performance per watt at the inference level in the car and the robot and you know, I don't know 10% of the cost of an Nvidia chip, something like that.
48:25Elon MuskSo these are very important numbers to achieve. And I had to get the chip program back on track. So put immense amount of time into it. And at this point I have the entire physical design of the chip laid out in memory.
48:42Elon MuskI can visualize the whole thing.
48:44Ron BaronBut when you're talking about chip manufacturing you say we might have to build some kind of a giant stabilization. Presumably we would have a partner with TSMC or with Samsung.
48:56Ron BaronWe wouldn't do this by ourselves. And those guys have been doing this for. We would do it by ourselves. And these are things that cost 20 billion, 30, $40 billion.
49:08Ron BaronAnd where the people come from to do this? How could we not have partners? Is your thought to have a partner to do it by ourselves? Ultimately 10 years you don't, there's not going to be enough chips in the world to accomplish what we're trying to do.
49:24Elon MuskYeah, first of all I have immense respect for TSMC and Samsung and we, we've, we've worked with both TSMC and Samsung at Tesla and at SpaceX. So TSMC and Samsung are great companies and, and we want them to make our trip as quickly as they can and scale up to as high as possible volume that they're comfortable doing but it doesn't appear to be fast enough.
50:02Elon MuskAnd you know when I ask how long will it take to from start to finish to get a new chip fab built they tell me five years to get to blind production.
50:12Elon MuskI'm like five years to me is an eternity. My timelines to me too by the way, one year, two year and at year three it reels to infinity so I can't even see past three years.
50:33Elon MuskSo then I'm like damn, okay, this is not going to be fast enough. So if they change their minds and say yeah they're going to go faster and they want to provide us with you know, 100200 billion AI chips a year in the time frame that we need them, that's great.
50:57Ron BaronBut how could they not when they know that we're demand and we are going to use the product in our own product. How could they not want to be our supplier or how could they not want to be partners with us?
51:09Ron BaronI don't understand.
51:12Elon MuskI don't know. They are partners. We're using both tsmc I mean to
51:17Ron Baronreally expand capacity tremendously. Why don't they do that from their standpoint?
51:23Elon MuskThey are because we'll be using TSMC Taiwan TSMC TSMC Taiwan TSMC Arizona Korea Samsung and the Texas back Samsung figure 4 fabs and you know from their standpoint they're moving like lightning.
51:49Elon MuskI'm just saying that nonetheless it would be a limiting factor for us. They're going as fast as they can from this standpoint. There's pedal to the metal. They're just never had someone without sense of a company without sense of urgency.
52:06Elon MuskSo that's it might just be that the only way to get to scale at the rate that we want to get to scale is to build a really big van and or, or be limited in output of optimized and self driving cars by the AI chips.
52:32Ron BaronObviously you're not going to. Those are two choices to go to fsd. We don't have too much more time but FSD full serve, full self Driving the, you know, we're making these tremendous breakthroughs, it seems.
52:52Ron BaronAnd you said recently that you didn't want to expand capacity for making cars until you were convinced that that was the case. You are now convinced that's the case.
53:03Ron BaronAnd again, here we're making these exponential leaps in these cars and you said that a very large percentage of people who actually paid for full self driving don't use it, have never tried it before.
53:18Elon MuskYeah, this is pretty wild.
53:20Ron BaronYeah. How, yeah, how are we doing?
53:22Elon MuskHow buy something when you want to try it type of thing.
53:25Ron BaronIt's amazing.
53:27Elon MuskYeah. So, so we're now kind of insisting with customers for safety reason that we demonstrate full self driving because the numbers are unequivocal at scale, but with now over 10 billion miles driven that it's four times safer on full self driving than not.
53:57Elon MuskSo it's actually a big improvement in safety. And so at this point we're just insisting that we at least demonstrate self driving to customers so they know how to use it and turn it on for safety reasons.
54:12Ron BaronSo it drives full self driving drives just like a person as opposed to having to code to look for every circumstance that would happen. And you had a, you know, this, this is a fire truck in front of us with a bicycle attached to it or someone walking his dog while he's driving along.
54:31Ron BaronYou have to identify everything with a code. What AI does, what we do is we, as I understand it, is to make sure that it's just like us. Is that fair?
54:45Elon MuskYes. The key to achieving full self driving unsupervised, full self driving, much safer than a human, is improving the AI software in the car. We're confident that the AI 4 hardware, that's a chip that we designed, currently made by Samsung, is capable of achieving a safety level unsupervised, meaning if you're asleep in the car, at least two to three times that of the average driver, maybe more.
55:22Elon MuskAnd then with AI5 we think you can achieve probably a 10x improvement in safety. So these are really big deals. I mean I think it's like one of very profound things that I'm saying here and I really encourage people to go out there and try Tesla self driving and see for yourself.
55:44Elon MuskAnd it's, you can just go to any Tesla, they'll show it to you. You know, it's not secret.
55:50Ron BaronSee everyone here, you're benefiting if you try this and then buy it. But once you try it, you're going to buy it, you should try it. And so I want to close on what I mentioned this morning on CNBC was that you're not doing this so you can get enough money to buy a beach house.
56:20Ron BaronYou're doing this. Even mine.
56:23Elon MuskYeah, that's right.
56:27Ron BaronBut you're doing this because, you know, Larry Page was right. You're a species that you think humans should survive.
56:38Elon MuskYes, I'm unabashedly pro human.
56:44Ron BaronI mean, so you're spending actually whether you're worth another trillion dollars or 400 billion, it doesn't really matter. What are you going to do with all this money at the end?
56:56Ron BaronWhat's your plan? How do you want people to think about you?
57:00Elon MuskWell, mostly I need to have enough ownership of the companies to be able to continue to direct their activities. But it's from a personal consumption standpoint. I don't actually own any vacation homes and I just own one sort of, you know, medium sized house in Austin.
57:23Elon MuskSo. And actually I should say a tiny house at Starbase.
57:27Ron BaronAnd I've worked with, I've seen that house. It's tiny.
57:30Elon MuskYeah, yeah. But actually like friends of mine have come to visit. They thought I was kidding. I'm like, no, it's real. I bought him $8,000. But I've done a lot with the place.
57:43Ron BaronArtificial turf in front, little white picket fence.
57:49Elon MuskYeah, so, but like, like I said, with, with AI and robotics there will be abundance brawl. So it's people actually. In fact, in a benign scenario, there's going to be interesting threshold that AI passes and AI robotics pass where it's run out of things to do for humans.
58:18Elon MuskLiterally it's completely satiated all human wants. And then I guess it'll have to start thinking about what to do for itself or I don't know. But overall I want to take the set of actions that expand consciousness into the future so that the scope and scale of consciousness grows tremendously and that we explore other star systems like in Star Trek.
58:54Elon MuskGo places nobody's ever gone before and find out if there are existing alien civilizations or maybe there's a long dead alien civilization and we can look through their ruins and try to understand what they were like and just generally understand the universe.
59:15Ron BaronWhere are you now? Right now
59:18Elon MuskI'm in Sokagami.
59:22Ron BaronThank you very much for today.
59:29Elon MuskWelcome.
59:34Ron BaronThank you for everything you've done for me, for our shareholders and for humanity.
59:41Elon MuskThank you.