Elon Musk: Ukraine, X, the creator economy, China, AI, & more | All-In Summit 2023
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (4)
Transcript
0:09Jason CalacanisOkay, wait. I'll just read off all of your companies. Elon. I know them, but I'm just going to read them to make sure I don't miss one, because there's so many now.
0:18Jason CalacanisFounder, CEO, Chief Engineer of SpaceX, CEO, Product Architect and Chairman of Tesla, Owner, Chairman, CTO of X, of X.com, founder of Boring Company, co founder of Neuralink and Open AI and president of the Musk Foundation.
0:35Jason CalacanisDid I get everything?
0:40Chamath PalihapitiyaRain Man David.
0:44Elon MuskAnd instead we open sourced it to
0:46Jason Calacanisthe fans and they've just gone crazy.
0:48Chamath PalihapitiyaLove you.
0:53Chamath PalihapitiyaWhere are you?
0:55Elon MuskIt is going.
0:57Chamath PalihapitiyaSo it's kind of absurd. Where are you at Starbase?
1:01Elon MuskI'm in flight currently. So this is. This is a Starlink and flight connection.
1:07Chamath PalihapitiyaAre you kidding me?
1:07David SacksThat's.
1:08Chamath PalihapitiyaOh yeah, that works pretty well, huh? I think there's only one. Wait, I think it's one test of
1:16Elon Muskhow Starlink works in an airplane at altitude.
1:21Chamath PalihapitiyaThere's only one of those in existence, right? It's on your plane. That's it. 101.
1:25Elon MuskThere are a number of airliners that have Starlink and there'll be a lot more in the future. The Starlink connection, when you're assuming it's working properly, is you won't even be able to tell you you're on the ground or in the air because unlike geosynchronous satellites, the latency is, you know, really to be less than 20 milliseconds.
1:46Elon MuskSo.
1:52Elon MuskI think for some people, the sonic connection on the plane will be better than their connection at their house.
1:56Chamath PalihapitiyaThat would be pretty great. How is the starship doing? It was incredible to see the first launch, but I understand you're closing in on the second. I know you've been working really hard on that and the team's working hard on it.
2:10Chamath PalihapitiyaWhen do you think you're going to get the next one up and what are the chances it makes it to orbit?
2:15Elon MuskWell, we have the second one stacked at Starbase, so it's ready to go and we just finished that up in the last week. We believe we've completed the remaining items requested by the faa.
2:30Elon MuskSo we should get our license hopefully soon. But really the only thing holding back Seclan Starship at this point is rank hosting approval.
2:39Chamath PalihapitiyaWow. What's your expectation or your hope in terms of the probability that it gets to orbit?
2:47Elon MuskIt's just a question of timing. How long does it take to get the approval paperwork and whatnot? So that's really up to the FAA at this point.
2:56Chamath PalihapitiyaYeah, but, but what about making it to orbit. Do you think you got a shot this time?
3:02Elon MuskWe are doing a new staging technique called hot staging where you light the upstage engines or the ship engines while the boost stage is still firing. And this is the kind of the most efficient way to do stage separation of rocket going orbit.
3:21Elon MuskBut we did not try that on the last mission and we're trying it on this mission. We think it will be overall better. But I think this, I think probably, I hope all of us, 50% chance of getting to stage separation and maybe a close to 50% chance of going to orbit if the hot staging, the near separation method is at work.
3:44Elon MuskSo I'd say maybe it's like a, you know, above, I'd say probably above 30% chance of getting to orbit the same whereas previously I said below 50.
3:54Chamath PalihapitiyaIs this in terms of complexity, how complex is this of a problem compared to the other problems you've worked on in your career?
4:04Elon MuskWell, I mean making a rocket that is more than twice the size of a Saturn V, you know, it's in fact with an extra of the rocket, it'll have roughly three times the thrust of Saturn V moon rocket.
4:19Elon MuskMoreover, it's designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. Whereas the, you know, the Saturn fire was completely standard full and with Falcon 9 we still expand the outer stage, but we bring back the boost stage as people have probably seen the rocket lightning videos and we are also able to recover the variant with Falcon 9.
4:43Elon MuskBut these things do land typically out to sea. So it takes a while to bring them back to port and get them ready to play the game. The thing that you know, so there's a scale of starship, but then also the fact that it is designed for full and rapid reusability.
4:57Elon MuskSo both the booster and the ship come back to launch site, they get caught by these giant mechanical arms. We've seen Conquest since Godzilla. It's basically bad. Catches this giant rocket out of mid air and puts it back on the launch stand and gets ready for launch.
5:16Elon MuskSo it will be capable of basically aircraft level flight rates, but it's much bigger than say a 747 or an A380.
5:29David SacksElon, can we talk about the events of was it last weekend, the whole Ukraine Starlink thing. Can you give us like the tick tock of like what's going on and like how you're being forced to decide but like what is it like in that decision room if there was one or wherever you were where you're trying to figure out am I keeping this on Do I turn it off?
5:53David SacksWhat is going on? People must have been bombarding you. Whatever you can share about what that was like, how you made the decision.
6:00Elon MuskYeah, so I was actually mistaken a little bit in his understanding of the situation. You know obviously we SpaceX have provided Starlink connectivity for you know to Ukraine really since the beginning of the war.
6:18Elon MuskWe're really taking attentive having a few days of the war starting and as the Ukrainian government said the Stalin Express was instrumental in the defense of Ukraine. So you know they've said this really many times although the media forgets to mention that so and in fact they've said it on Twitter X fully known as Twitter.
6:43David SacksIt's going to take a while to get that right.
6:45Chamath PalihapitiyaYeah.
6:55Elon MuskSo you know, you don't have to take my word for it, you can just read what they posted, you know. So solely has been incredibly helpful to the Ukraine world war effort.
7:08Elon MuskWe've got a bun out of pocket very significantly to help them. And at the time this happened the region around Crimea was actually turned off. Now the reason it was turned off was actually originally was because the United States has sanctions against Russia and we're not allowed to actually that includes Crimea in the sanctions and we're not allowed to actually turn on connectivity to a sanction the country without explicit government approval.
7:44Elon MuskWe did not have the US government so basically Ukraine didn't give us any advanced warning or heads up or anything but we just got these sort of urgent calls from the Ukrainian government saying that we needed to turn on Crimea.
8:03Elon MuskIt's like in the middle of the night basically and we're like what are you talking about? You know, you lost, what's it for? You know and that you know, we basically figured out that this was kind of like a bulh type attack on, on the Russian festival.
8:27Elon MuskSo they're really asking us for, to, to really proactively take part in a major act war. And you know, while we certainly have huge support for the Ukrainian government, the Ukrainian government is not in charge of US people or companies.
8:48Elon MuskThat's not how it works.
8:52Jason CalacanisAnd Elon, if I could just.
8:54Elon MuskBut I should say that, you know, although I'm not President Biden to big extent, if, if I had received a presidential directive to turn it on I would have done so because I do regard the President as the chief executive officer of the country.
9:08Elon MuskWhether I want that the President or not, I still respect the office. And so if you know, if I got a request from the president type of thing from the American president to be Clear then I would have turned it on, you know, so.
9:27Elon MuskBut no such request came through.
9:30Jason CalacanisThat's a really, that's a really interesting point. And you're, I mean, the, what Chamath is referring to is you're now being attacked. I saw there was a, you know, there was Jake Tapper the other day on cnn interviewing our Secretary of State was just, he was all lathered up, basically attacking you for this.
9:47Elon MuskDavid, David, I mean, to his credit, Secretary Blinken was actually quite supportive despite the absurd, you know, accusations and leading questions of the Jake Tapper on cnn.
10:01Jason CalacanisYeah, he didn't take the bait.
10:02Elon MuskTo his credit, Secretary Blinken in this regard for not, you know, taking the bait at all.
10:10Jason CalacanisYeah, well, to me, this is an example of no good deed goes unpunished. Because if you had never given, I
10:17Elon Muskhope so, I hope some grippies.
10:22Jason CalacanisI mean, if you, if you had never given Starlink just as far as that, you know. But yeah, I mean, my point is just if you had never given Starlink to the Ukrainian government for free, voluntarily, you just volunteered it, then no one would be attacking you right now for not turning it on so they could do their attack on Crimea.
10:43Jason CalacanisAlso, one other thing I'll note is that your reason for not turning it on, which is you don't be part of what could be a major escalation, was exactly, was exactly the reason the Biden administration did not give atacms, ATACM missiles to Ukraine at that point in the war.
10:59Jason CalacanisNow, they may be changing their minds, but they were very worried about an attack. The administration was an attack on Crimea triggering some huge escalation in this war. So not only did you not receive a directive from President Biden, your thinking was very much in line with theirs at the time.
11:18Jason CalacanisAnd yet. And you're being attacked for that.
11:21David SacksNow, there, there's something you mentioned, which is that you did this at a lot of economic cost to SpaceX. Can you, can you just talk about that for a second?
11:30David SacksBecause I'm not sure people understand who's paying for what right now and who hasn't been paid and, you know, et cetera.
11:36Elon MuskYeah, well, as you said, like a lot of you are contributing to the effort. Starting is the fundamental communication backbone of the Ukrainian government and essential services like first responders and that kind of thing and you know, is used, we hope, peacefully, relatively peacefully on the war front.
11:56Elon MuskIt is the only thing that works on the warfront. Everything else is being jammed by the Russians. So it's the only thing that works. Not one of the things.
12:12Elon MuskBut I think you have to sort of think of say taking the actual example of Pearl harbor and say like, well, how did that work out for Japan? It didn't work out well at all because it was a tactical victory, a strategic defeat.
12:31Elon MuskIt enraged the American public who sort of naturally wanted vengeance for the sack. You know, the sack. And I think that, that, you know, while I don't think it's on the same scale that there was certainly that potential of sort of a mini Pearl harbor with thoughts going to mass escalation of hostilities, but not this would, this would not, this would not defeat Russia.
12:56Elon MuskIt would enrage Russia.
12:58David SacksDo you donate, do you donate the network or do they pay you for it?
13:03Elon MuskSorry. Yeah, so I'm actually not sure what the final accounting is at this point, but I think at one point you calculated our sort of cost of supporting things at roughly $100 million.
13:17Elon MuskNow the $100 million does not count the massive risk to the entire Starlink constellation because Russia would like to have the entire thing deleted. So, you know, nobody compensating us for that.
13:34Elon MuskAnd so if we were to get, say our control center were taken down in cyber attack, they, you know, they command all the satellites to the orbit and destroy the entire system or use anti satellite weapons.
13:51Elon MuskSo you know, these are, those are pretty significant risk for which we have not received any compensation and obviously would recastruct the entire Starlink system which is, you know, approaching $10 billion.
14:08David FriedbergElon, do you think the current government
14:10Elon Muskadministration, hey, $10 million. And then actually I'd say one of the rather interesting things was as you've seen this, there's a very large amount of money that's been appropriated for Ukraine.
14:23Elon MuskYou know, I'm not sure what the total is at this point, but it must be 100, close to 100 billion or somewhere between 80 and 100 billion. You know, now all of the, you know, other sort of providers and US providers of support to Ukraine are being paid.
14:42Elon MuskSo then why should SpaceX be excluded? That doesn't make sense. We're doing one of the most valuable things and yet are getting the least money that says sir. But you know, despite that, we're still happy to keep going.
14:57Elon MuskAnd
15:00David FriedbergElon, does the Biden administration have it out for you? And why?
15:05Elon MuskWhat if we gave you that idea?
15:10David FriedbergBut let me ask you own and control.
15:13Elon MuskI think the whole administration has it out, right? I think there's probably aspects of the administration, is it not or you know, aspects of, you know, interests aligned with President Biden who probably do not wish good things for me.
15:36Elon MuskI don't know, you know, really what their issue is. But there does seem to be a significant increase in the weaponization of government and I think really sort of misuse of prosecutorial discretion in many areas where, and I think this is really a dangerous thing for, you know, for, I don't know, for there to be partisan politics with government agencies.
16:10Elon MuskIt's just really. And then I think from, you know, from say, you know, Democratic Party standpoint or say Biden administration standpoint, I think this is the danger here is that it is a significant misuse of prosecutorial discretion.
16:31Elon MuskLet's say one says, okay, everyone's equal under the law, yes, but who are you trusting? Who are you choosing to pursue? And if you're pursuing what appeared to independent voters to be trivial cases while ignoring serious crimes, it's hard to imagine that a lot of independent voters that's going to win over thoughtful independent voters.
16:57David FriedbergDid things change when you bought Twitter?
17:02Elon MuskYeah, I think that it changed somewhat. You know, I'll go with the sort of the X platform is really to be a level playing field, a public square that is supportive of, you know, most of the country.
17:21Elon MuskLet's say that the middle 80% or something like that. Now that has not been the case really for all social media, all social media been really very left leaning, far left leaning.
17:34Elon MuskAnd really Twitter was flawed at bleeding. You know, the suspensions of Republican candidates or interests or voices was really at least 10 times the rate of suppression of left wing voices on, you know, on old Twitter.
17:58Elon MuskSo what I'm trying to do is move it to the middle, which from standpoint of say the left appears it is moving to the right. Everything's relative if you're standing on the left, but it's not.
18:11Elon MuskIt's simply moving to the middle. That's all in an attempt to actually represent the whole country and not just half the country or even maybe less than half the country.
18:25Elon MuskSo that's it really. So I think there's really nothing to be alarmed about here. It's just that it's intended to be a town square inclusive of the whole country and also and the world.
18:38Chamath PalihapitiyaThat's all it's been, I guess you took over X Twitter on Halloween weekend. If I remember correctly, when you got to the building, you got the keys. David and I were lucky to be there with you when you got the keys.
18:54Chamath PalihapitiyaAnd we got to check things out. This is 10 months into the turnaround and it wasn't a high functioning Organization I think when you took it over, where is the company at now and are you pleased with I guess the progress?
19:09Chamath PalihapitiyaBecause it looks like new features are getting launched. The product velocity is great. Obviously advertising has been challenging but it feels like there's some green shoots. So how do you feel about the purchase now?
19:22Elon MuskYeah, well I should say we've recently seen a significant increase in advertising which is great. So that's if that trend continues I think the company will be in very good financial shape on the advertising front.
19:36Elon MuskSo that in terms of positive developments that that seems to be one of them. And from a feature standpoint I think those who are using the system, I think we've, I think we might have a little bit more new features, you know, in the last, I don't know year than in the last, you know all Twitter did in five years.
19:59Elon MuskYou know this really the future. The feature development pace is very rapid and this has been done with really about 15% of the original company pays a little more 15, 20% so it's really efficient.
20:19Elon MuskAt the end of the day you have to say how complicated is a system like the X Twitter platform? How different is it from a group chat? Frankly it's like a group chat at scale.
20:34Elon MuskSo I don't think you need an army to maintain a group chat.
20:40Chamath PalihapitiyaYeah, yeah. I mean it's not the self driving platform and it had maybe 10 times as many people working on it as the self driving platform at Tesla which seems crazy.
20:58Elon MuskThe entire self driving AI software team is 200 people and what they're doing is much more complex than Twitter or you know, much better, a lot more. Now there's other things that obviously need to be done like advertising, sales obviously network operations and how can you talk.
21:22Elon MuskNo, it's really not, it's not a huge like I said, don't even know. I mean for, for what we're doing here and I think you know people that, that are still company RC being very productive in creating and delivering new features and you know we keep seeing sort of record, record usage and the, the most ridiculous number is really the user seconds as reported by the mobile device especially iOS.
21:52Elon MuskThe I the iOS what IRS reports as the screen time is the, is the least gainable metric and those numbers are extremely good. So you know I think of course the optimistic about where things are headed and I feel like the company's turned just you know, just recently turned a corner.
22:17Elon MuskTell us about you know at least moderate prosperity and hopefully significant.
22:23David SacksTell us about the success of sharing revenue. Why did you do it and then just the vision you have for just the creator economy and what you want that to evolve into and build into.
22:35Elon MuskYeah, I mean it stands to reason that if you're a creator and you need to make a living for what you're doing. So there's got to be, you know, fair compensation and competitive compensation for a creator whether they're doing, you know, their writing or pictures, video, whatever the case may be.
23:00Elon MuskAnd so we're not really inventing anything new here. We're just, you know, as YouTube does with creators, they will do rev share with advertising and so we're doing rev share without tasting where also obviously they have enabled direct subscription to accounts where whatever somebody, you know, you could be doing audio, video, long form text, anything and you could subscribe to someone.
23:27Elon MuskAnd that's, you know, obviously that's the way for a subscriber to make a living as well, you know, or for a creator to make a living. So the intent is for the X platform to be the best home for creators where if you've got interesting content then you'd want to put it on our platform.
23:45Elon MuskAnd you know, there's a lot of questions about like sort of the algorithm and whatnot. I should mention like the algorithm is, I think almost all of it is open sourced and we will I think quite soon have the entire thing open source.
24:00Elon MuskThe only reason it really hasn't been done entirely open source yet is because for somewhat vouchable to code and each just clean it up before putting something extremely embarrassing out there.
24:11Elon MuskBut the point is that we want transparency, builds trust and if you've got, if you can recreate the results on the X platform of how viral a post is going to be independently using the public algorithm, the open source algorithm.
24:31Elon MuskThat's really where we want to get to. So you kind of know what to expect and why something happened. Now I should say we are trying to optimize for user time on the platform.
24:51Elon MuskWhat this naturally means is that posting content that someone looks at longer is going to get higher priority than content that is short. So just because the system is trying to max it's aspiring to maximize unrepreted user remittance is what I call it.
25:15Elon MuskSo like basically how do we if we're succeeding, you want to spend more time on the platform and you want to and after having spent that time, you don't want to regret it.
25:26Elon MuskI mean, speaking of TikTok, you know, I've heard a lot of people tell me they spend a lot of time on Tik tok and they regret it. We don't want to be, we want it to be that you spent a lot of time on the X platform and you learned a lot.
25:42Elon MuskYou, you're entertained and you don't regret it. So when you're optimizing for, you know, user minutes and like I said, aspirationally unregretted user minutes, the more content that you post on the system, the more reach that thing will get because the system is saying, oh, user is spending more time on the platform because they're seeing say your podcast or reading a long form article or watching some video.
26:15Elon MuskThat's going to get a lot more time than say if you link to a video elsewhere or you link to an article elsewhere, that means you'll see people be on that post for a very short period of time.
26:28Elon MuskAnd so the system will be like, okay, that did not increase user time, so it won't be excluded. It will get less attention than actually posting content natively on the system.
26:40David SacksDo you want to talk about the ADL and you sort of where what the status of that is, whether you're pursuing a lawsuit or not or where that stands?
26:53Elon MuskI think we'll see about that. I mean, yeah, I mean the fact of the matter is that ADL did initiate a boycott. They don't call it a boycott, they call it a pause.
27:05Elon MuskBut you know, pause that is never ending.
27:13Elon MuskSo, and we just, we saw a massive drop in US Advertising. We saw basically no change in advertising in Asia. But domestically ADL is strong. We saw 60% drop in advertising.
27:28Elon MuskSo, you know, that's pretty intense. And this is despite, you know, showing repeated analyses of the system, including third party analysis of the system, which actually showed that the number of views of paper content declined.
27:50Elon MuskSo, you know, the third parties who have all the data analyzed and said actually there's less hate speech. The issue I think with the ADL is not a question of hate speech, it's not a question of anti social Semitism.
28:05Elon MuskObviously the ADL and a lot of other organizations have become activist organizations which are acting far beyond their stated mandate or their original mandate and I think far beyond what donors to those organizations think they are doing.
28:24Elon MuskYou know, one of the things that the ADL was extremely opposed to and in fact was instrumental in happening was the ADL was instrumental in getting Donald Trump deplatformed.
28:36Elon MuskAnd then when we, you know, we restored the account, they made it super clear that they regarded simply restoring his account on, you know, Twitter now X that constituted hateful speech.
28:52Elon MuskHe hasn't even said anything. You know, he has to at least say something or post something for there to be incremental painful content. This is absurd. And what's this got to do with antisemitism?
29:07Elon MuskDonald Trump's son in law is Jewish and he's Jewish grandchildren. I'm pretty sure he's not anti Semitic. Okay. He's at the wedding. So the problem is that a lot of these organizations, like they've really been captured by the work agenda and they're pushing, you know, series of beliefs and values that I think are often contrary to what they're done as belief.
29:34Elon MuskAnd that's, that's what we have in this situation.
29:37Jason CalacanisYeah, I'll note that the, the two positions that you've taken that have brought the most heat on you. Number one, defending free speech. Number two, advocating peace. And how dare you, Elon Musk.
29:51Jason CalacanisYeah, how dare you.
29:52Elon MuskHow dare you.
29:53Jason CalacanisAnd there's an article. Yeah, well, we're living in upside down world. There's an article in today's New Yorker calling you a super villain because you're advocating peace and protecting the First Amendment.
30:06Jason CalacanisI mean, it's like completely upside down.
30:11David SacksDo you want people to eat their
30:13Elon Muskvegetables at this point? You literally cannot tell actual press from parody. No, like if that was a Babylon V or Onion. No, literally. And change the banner to, you know, Babylon B or whatever.
30:31Elon MuskOnion or something like that. Have some parody thing and be like, oh, that's a good joke. Yeah, Superphones normally advocate for peace. That's of course
30:43David Friedbergwe want to get
30:44Chamath Palihapitiyarid of all the nuclear weapons.
30:46David FriedbergHey, hold on, hold on.
30:50Elon MuskThat's what
30:54Chamath Palihapitiyathe funniest skit that didn't make it on SNL that we were workshopping was probably woke James Bond. And we wanted to do like this woke James Bond. And Elon will tell you some of the jokes.
31:08Chamath PalihapitiyaIt was pretty hilarious. But then we were just talking about a story that broke in the Guardian about the new James Bond novel and short story is too woke.
31:17Chamath PalihapitiyaAnd it's literally the parody we did two years ago.
31:22David FriedbergElon, speaking of peace, we had, we had Graham Allison.
31:26Elon MuskReality and also like the, you know, the conspiracy theories that haven't come true list is, you know, quite short conspiracy that the 200 is quite short. And we really need more conspiracies generated because we're running out of to find the truth.
31:50David FriedbergOkay.
31:54Elon MuskSo I don't know who's responsible for these conspiracy theories, but we just need some more material.
32:02Chamath PalihapitiyaPaging Alex Jones.
32:04David FriedbergElon, we had Graham Allison here today. I know you've talked about his book. We had Ray Dalio here, we had Ro Khanna and we talked a lot about China, the US relationship with China.
32:14David FriedbergYou are, you have several businesses that have deep supplier and customer relationships in China, given what's going on. And clearly the tenor has changed, the mood has changed with respect to US policy towards China.
32:28David FriedbergWhat it's like in dc, what it's like in Silicon Valley and how everyone talks about the relationship with China today. It's pretty crazy how quick things have changed. As a business leader with all these business relationships with China, how do you make decisions and how things are changing and how do you think about where this is headed?
32:46Elon MuskSure. Well, I mean, let's just clarify here. You know, SpaceX has no. SpaceX and Starlink have no. In China whatsoever, but they're not allowed. SpaceX is launched China satellites and Starlink is banned in China.
33:04Elon MuskSo to be fair, SpaceX, Starlink Zero Business China. In the case of Tesla, one of our about four vehicle factories, one is in China. So, you know, it's a, it's a significant car market, but it is, you know, so what I'm trying to say is like, by far the bulk of my business interests, if I were purely mercantile, which I aspire not to be, are outside of China.
33:37Elon MuskLet's just be clear about that then with respect to now. That said, I think I understand China well. I've been there many times. I've met with senior leadership at many levels of China for many years.
33:52Elon MuskAnd so I think I've got a pretty good understanding, at least as an outsider of China. So. And Tesla has been very successful domestically in China. So, you know, the fundamental thing here is really Taiwan.
34:10Elon MuskThe China has, well, really since, for like half a century or so, maybe longer. At this point. Longer at this point, their policy has been to sort of reunite Taiwan with China from this standpoint, you know, maybe it's analogous to like Hawaii or something like that, like an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China, mostly because of the US Stopped aspect.
34:42Elon MuskUS Pacific Fleet has stopped any, any sort of reunification effort force. So now really things getting to the point increasingly year over year where China's military strength is increasing and ours is more or less static and strategically, you know, you can imagine trying to defend Taiwan, it's not, not easy because it's, it's very close to the coast of China.
35:14Elon MuskSo there will come a point if you know, probably the not too distant future where China's military strength in that region far exceeds U.S. military strength in that region.
35:26Elon MuskAnd if one is to take China's policy literally, and probably one should, then there will be some forceful of a full force will be used for, you know, to incorporate Taiwan into China.
35:45Elon MuskThis is what they've said that if there's not a diplomatic solution, there will be a solution by force.
35:53David SacksLet me if I can.
35:55Elon MuskAnd so really what's going on here and you're seeing, you know, this in many areas that I think this tempo is going to increase is that, you know, both China and the US are preparing for a potential showdown, you know, in the South China Sea.
36:15Elon MuskSo that's why you're seeing increasing restrictions on export of US technology to China, such as the Nvidia. You know, Nvidia H100 is being banned, you know, ship to China.
36:30Elon MuskAnd I think there'll be more and more also knowledge of advanced chip making equipment in China. So can I expect China's going to respond with some reciprocal sanctions and I think you'll see this kind of a tip for tat reciprocal sanctions increasing in the next few years.
36:50Elon MuskSo I think quite a very hot temperature and then we'll see this. Is there going to be a diplomatic solution to reunification or a non diplomatic solution?
37:06David SacksYou.
37:07Elon MuskBut it has made it clear that there will one way or another be
37:10David Sacksa solution from the standpoint you mentioned Nvidia. So let me just talk about AI and bring it back to that for a second. Can you tell us your regrets but also the positives of the experience you had with OpenAI and then what your goals are with XA AI?
37:34Elon MuskWell, the AI discussion is certainly a long one or could be a long one.
37:47Elon MuskDigital superintelligence might be the most significant technology that humanity ever creates and it has the potential to be more dangerous than nuclear weapons. So.
38:06Elon MuskYou know, in the case of KD OpenAI, it was to have there not be a unipolar world where Google with its subsidiary heatmind, you know, would control an overwhelming amount of AI talent and resources, which then is somewhat dependent on basically how Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt believe things should go.
38:34Elon MuskBecause they between the three of them, two out of three have control over Alphabet because they've got super voting rights. And you know, it's quite absurd. These are some conversations I had with Ari Page where you know, you'd call me a species for being pro humanity.
38:54Elon MuskAnd so I'm like, what side are you on? Not out as you would see, you know, I think. And so I felt like uncomfortable having the entire Future of digital superintelligence be in the hands of someone who called me a specious for being pro humanity.
39:16Elon MuskYou know, how can it not be so? OpenAI was originally created as an open source nonprofit and now is a closed form. It appears to be hiv renamed Closed for maximum profit AI.
39:33Elon MuskIt is, it is closed and they are aiming to, I think they try to make $100 billion, I think according to Sarah, get $100 billion from somewhere for some vast amount of compute to create digital God.
39:49Elon MuskApparently all the weights are stored in a comma separated value file by the way. So our digital God will be a CSV file.
39:56Chamath PalihapitiyaHow do we import it?
39:59Elon MuskFile import God, see what happens. So, so Anyway, so now OpenAI is more. It's also very closely aligned with Microsoft. You know Microsoft is really the OpenAI servers are running on Azure and Microsoft data centers.
40:22Elon MuskYou know, so really what you have is I think at the end of Microsoft having more control than OpenAI. They have access to all the source code, they have access to all the weights of the, you know, GP4 and future versions.
40:35Elon MuskSo they have all rights to this to to think it's not
40:41David Sacksat any
40:41Elon Muskpoint really they could cut off open AI. I don't think OpenAI quite realizes that the dependence on, on Microsoft and even if Microsoft does break some contract, they'll just be tied up in litigation for, you know, for years.
40:55Elon MuskSo really that a contest between kind of like Google and Microsoft. Google as I mentioned are concerned about, you know, Larry not caring enough about AI safety and good reason and then Microsoft just is, I think you know, a profit seeking organization and you know, I think such is great.
41:21Elon MuskBut I can't say like you know that it would difficult to say that Microsoft has a, has an amazing track record in moral decision making. So diplomatic. Anyway, so I was like okay, look, let's just, I think let's try to create a third company that is competitive.
41:48Elon MuskI do think Tesla is underrated from an AI standpoint terms of real world AI. Tesla has the best real world AI. So you know, hopefully between XAI and Tesla there's kind of a third contender for Visual Super.
42:06David SacksWould you look, you've got you open source your patents at Tesla. You are very pro open source your source coded X. Would you ever considering releasing Dojo and FSD more as a platform substrate for everybody else or that's sort of off the table right now?
42:22Elon MuskWell, I don't know that you know in the case of say Dojo or our insurance hardware that's in the car, our computer which is actually a lot, lot more computer than Dojo by the way.
42:39Elon MuskYou know we've got somewhere in the order of 4 million cars that have high speed AI inference computers in them. Like open sourcing chip designs. Doesn't mean you suddenly get that thing.
42:53David SacksYeah.
42:53Elon MuskYou know, so.
43:00Elon MuskYou can open source the software. But I think chip designs, it's. They'll need one thing to actually use those chips or really kind of. Yeah. Would be someone that's willing to spend many billions of dollars on computer development.
43:19Elon MuskSo anyway, I think in the case of you know, Dojo is interesting. Optimist is really interesting. Anyway, I think just in general, Tesla is one of the world's leading AI companies and in some respects the leading AI company when it comes to real world AI understanding the real world and actually reacting to that with self driving.
43:49Elon MuskAnd I think that will become part of the solution for AGI or general superintelligence. So in the case of Tesla, I think we've got a sort of a good governance structure and that there's no super voting rights or anything like that.
44:06Elon MuskSo if I'm, you know, go crazy, the shareholders chancellor vote me out. You know, I have enough vote to be, you know, I think moderately influential but not enough to stay in even if I'm doing crazy stuff.
44:21Elon MuskSo I think that's actually good.
44:26Chamath PalihapitiyaGreat.
44:27David FriedbergI was told we have to wrap him.
44:29Chamath PalihapitiyaOh, okay. I just. On the FSD before we wrap. I'll let you go. We were talking earlier this year and you said hey, maybe ChatGPT 4.0 like moment for self driving was coming and I've been playing with the beta and.
44:46Chamath PalihapitiyaYeah, how close does it feel to you? Because some of the rides it's been doing for me are pretty darn impressive.
44:54David SacksThe latest beta is pretty incredible.
44:55Chamath PalihapitiyaYeah, it's pretty, pretty neat. You know, I used to love it on the highways and on the streets I'd be like, okay. But now I'm using it increasingly on the streets.
45:03Chamath PalihapitiyaSo where do you, how do you feel about it right now? And I guess you made a lot of predictions on it over the years, but it does feel like it's getting pretty close.
45:14Elon MuskYeah, I think it's very close to, you know, being in a situation where even if there's no human oversight or intervention, that the probability of a safe journey is higher with FSD and no supervision.
45:28Elon MuskLike even if you're a seat of the car than if the person is driving. They were very close to that. You know those that have the FSD beta, which really anyone can get at this point.
45:41Elon MuskSo the miles we see driven under the FSD Beta currently are much safer than the miles that are driven without it. So that's, you know, that's already a very good milestone.
45:59Elon MuskBut, you know, you can just see that it's getting better and better. Like if you see, if you compare the FSC beta today versus six months ago versus, you know, a year ago versus 18 months ago, it's really, the improvement is dramatic.
46:17Elon MuskAnd, you know, we've got the final piece of the puzzle, which is to have the control part of the car transition from about 300,000 lines of C code to also a neural network.
46:30Elon MuskSo the whole system will be neural net, neural network, photons in to controls out. And that's kind of the final piece of the puzzle for full self driving, being significantly better than human.
46:44Chamath PalihapitiyaAwesome. Thanks for taking the time, buddy. Fly safe and I'll see you shortly. Ladies and gentlemen, Elon Musk.
46:53David SacksThanks, bud.
47:02Elon MuskWe opened sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy.
47:15Elon MuskBesties are. That's my dog. Thinking driveway.
47:25Elon MuskWe should all just get a room
47:26Chamath Palihapitiyaand just have this one big huge
47:28Elon Muskorgy because they're all just useless.
47:29Chamath PalihapitiyaIt's like this, like sexual tension that
47:31Elon Muskthey just need to release them now.
47:37Elon MuskFeet, we need to get merch.