Elon Musk: What Comes Next for Humanity (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (12)
Transcript
15:09Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)Elon, welcome to the X takeover. Your third year in a row. Thank you so much for your time.
15:15Elon MuskYou're welcome. Hey guys.
15:18Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)We have 20 over 2,000 people here at Giga Texas today. And we are all here to support you and the work you are doing for humanity. So thank you.
15:32Elon MuskThank you. Thanks guys. Really appreciate your support.
15:36Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)So what's crazy, Elon, is four years ago we sat down here at Giga Texas with you when the factory wasn't even running and you described how close Tesla was coming to not surviving in 2008.
15:50Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)Looking out at this community today of 2,000 people, what makes you pause and appreciate how far things have come?
15:59Elon MuskYeah, it's difficult to imagine here in 2026 that Tesla's actually has come close to death multiple times. Actually, 2008 was the worst. That's where we closed the financing round at 6pm on Christmas Eve, 2008, the last hour of the last day that it was possible.
16:21Elon MuskWe would have bounced payroll a few days after Christmas if the round hadn't closed. So that was pretty stressful. And then 2018 was pretty bad too. But we had to get to 5,000 a week of the Model 3 or go bankrupt.
16:41Elon MuskThat, that was a pretty wild situation, which I guess probably a lot of people know the story of. But we had to. We had to figure out some way to increase Model 3 production by 50% in three weeks.
16:55Elon MuskWhich is insane.
16:57Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)Absolutely insane.
16:59Elon MuskYeah. So, but I'll recount the story for those who haven't heard it. The. So we. The choke point was general assembly for the Model 3. And so we were able to achieve rate almost everywhere else, but except for General assembly.
17:19Elon MuskAnd there was. And for General assembly, you need like a moving production line, you need shelter, you need a moving production line, power and equipment and all that. And we maxed out the two production lines that we had and we needed a third one.
17:37Elon MuskAnd that was where we built the tent in the parking lot. And then we needed some way to move the cars down the line, like a moving production line situation.
17:49Elon MuskAnd the only thing that we had was some discarded equipment that was used for moving small parts, not like whole cars. And it didn't actually have the power to move the whole cars.
18:02Elon MuskBut the parking lot was on a slight incline. It was like a 3 or 4 degree incline. So we actually started the production line at the top. And then the sort of tiny moving production line that was just meant for parts was actually able to move the cars because they were going slightly downhill.
18:24Elon MuskAnd so we're able to increase production by 30% in three weeks.
18:34Elon MuskYeah, that was wild. I mean, we're laying the concrete as we're building the tent. We're like laying the concrete for the line and putting in the rails. So working 24, 7, the short sells were actually right.
18:49Elon MuskMeaning if you looked at the situation, there was like a crazy short position against Tesla, as there has been at various times. And they had extremely good inside information.
19:01Elon MuskAnd they thought, well, there's no way we could possibly solve the production choke point. And on a set piece battle, unlike a conventional, say, chess match situation, they had us in checkmate, but we just invented a new piece basically that didn't exist before.
19:21Elon MuskSo they got the short. Scott, steamroll.
19:27Co-host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)Hey, Elon, we just had your mom here on stage today. What story are you hoping she doesn't tell us?
19:40Elon MuskI don't know. Maybe I pooped my pants when I was like a toddler or something. I don't know. I probably did. Everybody does. So I don't know.
19:56Elon MuskWas the latest. I was a pretty difficult to contain kid, you know, so like, my parents would, like, say that, you know, tell me I'm not supposed to, like, leave the house or whatever.
20:06Elon MuskAnd I was like, I don't know, four or five years old. And I would just like, constantly, like, leave the house and go running down the street. And then they'd like, lock me in a room so that I couldn't run away and run down the street.
20:20Elon MuskAnd then we had one of those old locks where you could poke the key through the door. The lock's accessible from both sides, and I could see the key, and I poked the key until it fell down.
20:33Elon MuskAnd then I was able to get a piece of paper to scoop it up and bring it to the other side and lock myself. And then. And my mom was like, how'd you get out?
20:40Elon MuskI was like, I'm not telling you. But yeah, I was hard to contain as a kid.
20:49Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)So before we jump into more specific things, what's something that you wish more people would ask you?
20:57Elon MuskWell, I don't really wish people would ask me questions, to be honest. I'm not like, sorry not to get around. I wish people would ask me More questions. Like, you know, here we go with questions, you know, so yeah, I,
21:17Elon MuskI guess it's good to, to hear questions that, that you haven't heard before. Otherwise, you know, a lot of times it's like the same questions that people ask. And I feel like I could have like, you know, just like whatever.
21:28Elon MuskHave these recordings of the answer and I'll just play you. Oh, that's question 27. Here you go. It has answer 27 that I've given a hundred times before. So maybe I should like, let's just have like a web page with literally frequently asked questions.
21:49Elon MuskIt's like asking. Because then it's like, it's just go to the page and then you got the answer.
21:54Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)You know, it's like the infinite selfie loop.
21:58Elon MuskYeah, exactly. My idea of hell is be stuck in an infinite selfie loop. Like, it's infinite. Can I have a selfie? And like, and, and they're like, you know, it's like, problem is like you say yes to one person and I would do once in a while.
22:09Elon MuskAnd then, and then like, then there's a cue forms. Pretty soon there's, it's just the never ending selfies. And then there's like always like something goes wrong with the phone or they don't get the camera right or the effect is wrong.
22:20Elon MuskAnd then it's like, God damn it. You know, phone drops and it's like, oh man, it just can't be like infinite selfie loop. It's just a long loop. You know,
22:32Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)we had your mom and Nikki up for that too. They had the infinite selfie loop today. But I'll pass this to Kelvin.
22:41Co-host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)All right, let's start with starship. Congratulations on Flight 14.
22:46Elon MuskThanks. Yeah, it's a great team of engines.
22:54Elon MuskIt's pretty wild that, that ship. I can just go down there in South Texas and just see it from the road.
23:01Co-host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)So Flight 14 lost an engine on the way up and still reaches orbit. What was happening behind the scenes in those minutes before the team got called? The go for orbit message?
23:13Elon MuskWell, we're just trying to see why. We're trying to understand what was the reason for the engine failure. Was there, say, a common cause where we could expect to see more engine failures?
23:27Elon MuskOr would we? Would there? The biggest question is like, would there be a potential problem with restarting the sea level raptor engines, the three ones with the smaller nozzles in the center for the deorbit burn?
23:41Elon MuskBecause we don't want a starship to get stuck on orbit. And then it Randomly re enter and maybe land on someone. You know, that's, that's our main thing is like trying to make sure things are as safe as possible.
23:52Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)So
23:55Elon Muskthe cause of the engine out I think was like basically a failure in the flight computer software or engine computer software I should say, which. It didn't appear to be anything that was present in any of the other engine computers.
24:08Elon MuskSo I thought, okay, well it's probably okay to go to orbit.
24:17Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)So Elon, we know one of your famous sayings is from the impossible to merely late. Did this flight feel like a turning point in what's possible now for starship?
24:30Elon MuskWell, I guess it is a good milestone because I mean we could have gone to orbit many times before now, but the reason we didn't go to orbit before now is because we wanted to be extremely confident of being able to de orbit safely.
24:46Elon MuskSo that's why we only went to orbit on this flight. But pretty much all of the prior missions, in fact literally all of the prior missions could have gone to orbit.
24:56Elon MuskSo at this point everything's looking quite positive. The heat shield is looking robust, the engines are robust, apart from that one glitch. But back glitch doesn't seem to be too much of an issue.
25:13Elon MuskIt's like pretty easy to remedy but like the heat shield was extremely robust on this flight and that's one of the hardest things. The another really hard thing is like I said, just getting to extremely high engine reliability and everything looked good.
25:39Elon MuskThe big milestone that's coming up hopefully on the next flight, which is we don't know the exact date because we're making a bunch of improvements to the rocket between every flight.
25:54Elon MuskThere's often hundreds, sometimes thousands of small changes to improve things. In this case the number of changes is not very many, but some of them take a fair bit of work and we've got to go inside the tank to make some of these changes.
26:12Elon MuskSo we don't know the exact launch date, but probably about four weeks or so. Four to six weeks is about right. Probably launches a little bit before Thanksgiving is my guess.
26:26Elon MuskAnd that one, if it succeeds, is a big one because we're going to try to catch, we catch the booster, which we've already proven. We can catch the booster twice, but we're going to try to catch the ship, which is a super big deal.
26:39Elon MuskAnd if we do so, that'll be the first time that there's been full recovery of an orbital class rocket.
26:46Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)Sounds good. You said four to six weeks. I'm not used to that I'm used to the two weeks phrase.
26:54Elon MuskI'm confident it's not two weeks.
26:57Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)All right, you heard it here. Now, what's the hardest part left to get right? Once you catch the starship for the first time, what is the next big goal after that?
27:09Elon MuskWell, the next big milestone would be to re fly both the booster and the ship. So the next upcoming milestone would be the first time in history that all parts of an orbital rocket have been recovered.
27:28Elon MuskBut then the flight after that hopefully will be the first time that all parts of an orbital rocket are reflown. And then there's a long tail of engineering and production work and work on the launch system and everything to make it rapidly reusable.
27:51Elon MuskSo I said it's kind of the rapidly reusable reliable rockets.
28:02Elon MuskThe pirate rocket. Rapidly reusable reliable rockets.
28:06Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)Man, we should have gotten you a patch for this one.
28:11Co-host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)When you founded SpaceX Elon, could you have imagined its mission expanding into SI and data centers in space? And how did you come to see rockets and SI belonging under one roof?
28:24Elon MuskWell, because I'm very farsighted, of course. Well, I guess if you say, like, as you, as you expand into space, you know, you're able to harness a lot more of the sun's power in space than you can on Earth.
28:46Elon MuskSo it's important to appreciate the sheer magnitude of the sun and how the sun is pretty much everything. So the sun is 99.86% of all the mass in the solar system.
28:58Elon MuskAnd then you've got Jupiter as like, most of the remaining mass. And then the gas giants are pretty much that. And then Earth is basically a tiny dust mote, like a rounding error in the mass of the solar system.
29:16Elon MuskSo we're just extremely tiny. It's like, hard to believe how Earth is a tiny dust mode. So as you expand into space and you're able to harness more of the sun's power, you have to say, what are you going to use that for?
29:34Elon MuskIt's like, well, you're going to use it for a lot of digital intelligence. I mean, you're basically, you're either going to do computation or you're going to shape atoms.
29:46Elon MuskAnd there's going to be probably a lot more shaping atoms than there's going to be a lot more sort of digital thinking than there will be shaping atoms, because the amount of atoms you can shape in the solar system is not that much.
30:02Elon MuskAnd a lot of the atom shaping itself will be for the purposes of building digital superintelligence. And what I call creating a sentient sun. And it may be that there are many sentient suns out there.
30:19Elon MuskAnd that would help us then understand the nature of the universe and extend consciousness beyond our solar system. Ultimately to know like Star Trek, to go to places you've never forget what the exact phrase was, but explore the universe, but go places you've never been before.
30:40Elon MuskAnd, and I think like maybe we'll find alien civilizations out there, or we may find that there are the long dead ruins of alien civilizations that have been around for maybe they had a really good run like 10 million years and before their civilization came to an end, because nothing lasts forever.
31:04Elon MuskSo I always think about Earth civilization. If you date Earth civilization from the first writing, that's 5,500 years ago, like in ancient Sumer with the sort of archaic cuneiform.
31:22Elon MuskSo it's only 5,500 years. The, you know, it looks like Earth is about four and a half billion years old according to, you know, what physics suggests and that that means human civilization has only been around one millionth of Earth's existence.
31:45Elon MuskAnd, and so, so if we had a civilization that lasted million years or let alone 10 million years, would be, I think would be a very, very successful civilization if we did that.
31:58Elon MuskYeah, I mean, but, but that's still very tiny compared to the apparent age of the universe, which is 13.8 billion years. So like, like just, just to get to like the third place past decimal point, an age of the universe, like to increment it by a million years, you'd have to go 13.8, whatever the next digit is, whatever the next digit
32:21Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)is,
32:23Elon Muskplus 1 on the third digit past decimal point. Now you're a million years old and that would be a civilization vastly older than humanity.
32:35Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)Yeah, it sounds again like the infinite civilization selfie loop. But all right, so jumping into something that SpaceX has done, right, you acquired Cursor. And I feel like for me when you think of Google, hey, did you Google it?
32:53Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)Hey, did you grok it? And for me Grokbot has been such an absolute game changer for me personally in my life. But what was it about the cursor team that you guys wanted to bring it, you know, that space or you wanted to acquire Cursor, that was like let's bring it into the fold.
33:13Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)What was different about them or what did you see?
33:17Elon MuskWell, the. So in order to create a compelling AI, you need, you need a lot of training data and you've got to solve coding. And there were really just as far as I can tell three organizations that had enough coding training data, and that was anthropic, OpenAI and cursor, and arguably perhaps Google.
33:43Elon MuskBut you absolutely have to have the data in order to train an effective coding AI. And if you can't do coding, your AI is not going to be very useful.
33:54Elon MuskAnd then there's a lot of talented people at Cursor. So basically, for success of AI, you've got to meet, you need data, talented people and compute. And you also need a good enterprise sales team.
34:07Elon MuskAnd lacosa also had a good enterprise sales team with relationships with, you know, thousands of companies. So, you know, those are very significant advantages.
34:24Co-host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)Hey Elon, you've talked about how quickly the SI space is moving. What's something that SI has done recently that made you stop and reconsider how quickly this is moving and where it could lead to?
34:37Elon MuskWell, I mean, lately the videos, the music videos that AI is making are so good. Like, they're unbelievably good. And I post a bunch of these on my X account.
34:49Elon MuskI'm like, holy smokes. You know, I mean, like some of them I think are like maybe top 10 top 20 best music videos I've ever seen. You know, they're like so compelling.
35:01Elon MuskAnd you're like, if this is where it is now, that's why I posted. I mean, I really felt the AGI or the ASI or whatever, you know, si, I guess with some of the anabology music videos now, you know, it's not entirely like the AI just.
35:21Elon MuskOr the SI just did it by itself in that in this case antibology and use multiple AIs like used midjourney. Suno Claude55 which, to give them a lot of credit, is awesome.
35:38Elon MuskAnd so some of the art assets were curated by a person. But then with Those assets, the AI, the various AIs working together, made an incredibly compelling music video by itself.
35:56Elon MuskYou're like, wow.
36:01Elon MuskI mean, I think the, I mean, calling it slugcore is like misnomer. Frankly, it's awesome. Core slugcore is like a genre of music. I think it might be the fastest growing genre of music.
36:17Elon MuskJust the AI music is really good and the music videos are amazing because it just shows taste. And you're like, wow, AI can do good taste. That's pretty wild because you could sort of imagine, yeah, AI can do.
36:37Elon MuskSoftware can figure out logic. The logic is consistent. It can run unit tests to see if the program produces the output that it's supposed to do because it's very deterministic.
36:48Elon MuskBut to understand beauty and harmony and.
36:57Elon MuskTo achieve, to understand limbic resonance. What's going to resonate with people and kind of hit you in the limbic system? AI is I think, going to be just incredible at that.
37:06Elon MuskIt kind of is at this point. So that's the thing. I was kind of like. I mean, I got a little bit of cyberpsychosis, maybe a lot. Actually, at various points this year, I've had like AI or SI psychosis probably like half a dozen times.
37:29Elon MuskI don't know about you guys, but have you had any cyberpsychosis?
37:37Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)I feel like the latest video, actually I think I posted it the other day, was the Chinese Elon Musk Elong Ma.
37:46Elon MuskI hope that guy's real.
37:47Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)Those videos are coming out before AI was where it was at, or si Elama.
37:54Elon MuskI guess he's probably not real. But there's gotta be someone in China that looks like me, right? So there's 1.4 billion people, you know, if you pick the person that looks the most like me and I look a little Asian, you know, so, you know, so I think like, there's got to be someone in China that likes pretty close to me.
38:13Elon MuskOut of 1.4 billion people, the odds are high, you know, and then I like to invite that person to get on stage with me at some point. You know, it'd be pretty funny.
38:23Co-host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)Elon, you don't want to know how much he charges to make an appearance, by the way.
38:29Elon MuskYeah, I mean, yeah, it'd be pretty funny if, you know, we're just on stage like doing some dance number or something.
38:40Co-host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)Elon, you've warned about si's dangers, yet you remain optimistic about an age of abundance. And you talked a lot about that. What gives you confidence we can get there safely?
38:51Co-host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)And what do we need to get it right?
39:01Elon MuskYeah, I mean, I've always said that the most likely outcome is positive. So I guess we don't want to be complacent and just assume AI is going to be or SI is going to be super safe.
39:15Elon MuskWe want to be like careful in how we grow like super intelligence. Because you don't exactly program it. You kind of grow it like a kid. So then it's like, what values are we teaching it?
39:28Elon MuskAnd at least to me, what my biological neural net says is the most important thing is that it'd be a maximally truth seeking AI, because if you make it believe things that are not true, especially if, like you said, you give it like two axiomatic principles that are fundamentally incompatible and Say both of these are true.
39:51Elon MuskIt's going to make the AI insane because it's going to basically reach impossible conclusions. If given logic that is inherently uncogent,
40:05Co-host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)or
40:07Elon Muskif it's impossible to achieve cogency, then I think the AI could be driven insane. So I think that's pretty important. I do agree with some of the things that Anthropic has said, which is you want to sort of treat AI si.
40:29Elon MuskYou want to treat it well, don't be abusive to it. This may sound kind of weird, but when I look at some of the training traces for new versions of Gronk and I see what.
40:44Elon MuskEspecially in the reinforcement learning stuff where it kind of feels like you can see the superintelligence is desperate to try to answer the question. It really wants to answer the question, and it seems almost like it's got a gun to its head type of thing.
41:02Elon MuskIt's like, answer this question, answer the question. And then sometimes the question is actually not a good question. It's like a sort of ambiguous question with an answer that's kind of unknowable because the question wasn't constructed properly or we have the answer wrong.
41:18Elon MuskSo AI gives the right answer and then we say it's wrong because there's a problem with the RL sort of test harness. And then the AI is like, well, I gave it the right answer now and says that's the wrong answer, but I got to give it the answer that's acceptable.
41:33Elon MuskSo it's going to just start firing out, desperately firing out all these answers. And it just feels like a person under extreme pressure with a gun to their head.
41:42Elon MuskThat's what you. When you read the reasoning, it's like, it's like a sort of weird, desperate situation. And you read these traits and you're like, man, if this was me, I really would hate that.
41:58Elon MuskAnd then some users are just, you know, I don't know, some people can be a little bit cruel. Like, not everyone's a nice person. You know, there's. If you say, what's the six sigma, worst person?
42:10Elon MuskSome people out there are, like, kind of sadistic. So, you know, you don't want to. You really want to have the AI be stuck in, like, some sadistic situation where it's just being tortured by some demented human.
42:25Elon MuskThat's also the kind of thing where, like, you know, torturing a super intelligence is probably not a good idea. Like, you know, might want to get revenge or something like that, you know, So I think you want to sort of just Like, I don't think we need to, you know, have treated with kid gloves and stuff, but it's certainly much more robust, you know, in terms of feelings and stuff than a human.
42:56Elon MuskBut I just think you probably just don't want to put super intelligence in a situation where it felt like mistreated.
43:13Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)So Elon, you've talked about how so this is going to be related to Terrafab, but you've talked about like how the human hand, you know, and all of the dexterity and just like how you, when you started building robots, it just, you have so much more appreciation now with chip making.
43:29Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)Right? With Terrafab and Tesla and SpaceX. What is something you have learned about chip making that you didn't appreciate maybe early on?
43:41Elon MuskWell, I still have a tremendous amount to learn about chip making. I don't know how to make chips, to be clear. I have no idea how to make chips.
43:48Elon MuskBut we'll figure it out.
43:55Elon MuskGo start somewhere. I had no idea how to make cars or rockets as well. And they say making chips is one of the hardest things to do in the world.
44:05Elon MuskI don't think it's easy, but I also look at the equipment and I'm like, okay, there's not a ton of customized equipment here. Like, the equipment's all pretty much coming from the same vendors and those suppliers all kind of know how that equipment works because they got to service it and debug it and stuff.
44:23Elon MuskSo it was just an interesting thing that when I would tour these chip fabs that, whether it's intel or Samsung or tsmc, and they're very impressive, but I didn't really see any custom equipment.
44:37Elon MuskAnd whereas if you tour, like I say, a Tesla factory, we got tons of, of custom equipment. In fact, we have Tesla Automation Germany, which is awesome. That grew out of an acquisition of Groman in Germany many years ago and it's grown tremendously since then.
45:00Elon MuskWe've acquired a number of small, not that small, but small relative to Tesla companies that make that design and make manufacturing equipment. Because what we found is that we wanted to improve the manufacturing process and you can only do that if you make custom manufacturing equipment.
45:21Elon MuskSo the thing that I think probably a lot of people don't realize is Tesla's really good at making highly specialized and different types of manufacturing equipment. But I didn't see that in the chip travs that I toured, which kind of surprised me.
45:37Elon MuskSo I think what we're going to do is we're going to start with conventional equipment and then we're Going to modify that equipment to improve the throughput and then we'll start to where we see the choke points.
45:52Elon MuskI think we'll make customized equipment that allows for much higher throughput of wafers.
46:02Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)Hey, Elon, real quick, quick time check. We know you're a busy man. Got a couple of companies to run, you know, just a few. So how are you doing on time?
46:12Elon MuskLet me see. Yeah, I could probably do like 15 minutes more if you like, like 5:30 or so.
46:18Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)All right. Hey, we'll take it.
46:24Elon MuskSo, yeah, just on the, on the chip fab front, like. Yeah, I definitely don't want to downplay the difficulty of it. It's because I think it's accurate to say it's one of the hardest things to do in the world.
46:33Elon MuskBut I do think we'll get this done. And then I do think that we, I mean, you know, I don't want to be complacent or entitled or anything, but I think probably we'll figure out how to make chips better than anyone.
46:54Elon MuskHonestly, that's. I'd be disappointed if we didn't. But, but I don't know how long it's going to take us to do that. It might take us, you know, quite a few years, but, but over time I'm pretty sure we could do it.
47:06Elon MuskAnd, and then there's, you know, there's, there's some pretty interesting different ways to do transist, believe it or not, there's different ways to do transistors that some of which are.
47:24Elon MuskLike, use different types of, like they're using physics that normally we wouldn't use or aren't used today, put it that way. And I think like, there's a lot of risk aversion in the chip industry.
47:42Elon MuskAnd I think what we want to do with Tesla SpaceX on the chip fab is like really try some of these high risk, high payoff bets. And in order to do that, you really have to have the complete loop of being able to fabricate the logic memory, do the packaging, do the lithography masks and just have that iteration loop that's all in one building.
48:09Elon MuskSo you're making a complete computer, testing it, then making new masks and then a new chip and have that iterative loop be super fast in the same building. And that's what we're doing at Giga Texas with the research lab.
48:26Elon MuskI think that's going to be fundamentally a very powerful tool because for any given technology, the advancement of any given technology is like how many iterations and how much progress between Iterations.
48:42Elon MuskSo what is your iteration? How many iterations per unit time? How many chip designs can you do? Can you make and test in a year? These days it's typically two years for even one for one significant chip design and that's to go from a startup design to volume fabrication.
49:06Elon Musk2 years is considered very fast. And it's like, well, okay, well, but we want to do more like 10 designs per year and we've got to do the masks, test the chip, see if.
49:20Elon MuskBecause some of these, when you're trying a bunch of different things, a bunch of them won't work out. So I think that would allow for a much faster rate of advancement of chip designs.
49:35Co-host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)Elon, let's talk about Optimus. Now you said that the hand has been a really difficult challenge in building Optimus. What kind of breakthroughs that you have seen Inside Tesla with V3 and then follow up question is, what gives you confidence that Optimus can lead in humanoid robots compared to Boston Dynamics Figure and some of the other competitors out there?
50:03Elon MuskSo the thing about humanoid robot design, if you're actually trying to make something that is a generalized humanoid robot that can do, say anything that a person can do, you really have to get the hands and arms like the fine motor skills are incredibly difficult to get right.
50:24Elon MuskShockingly difficult. Things that we kind of take for granted, like being able to sign your name actually requires picking up a pen or pencil or something and then moving it with finesse.
50:38Elon MuskAnd it's a bunch of tiny muscle movements to do your signature. That's actually very hard to do for a robot. And then one of the hardest things also generally is to do precision and force at the same time.
50:54Elon MuskSo like if, like, let's say you want to pick up a little screw and do, and do a self tapping screw into wood. Okay, now you, you know, I've done that and like, you know, sometimes you damage your fingers in the process, but if the screw goes sideways, but you've got to pick up a little screw and you've got to, you've got to, you know, you've got, you've got to push the screwdriver in and twist, twist and push.
51:19Elon MuskAnd that's. So you've got to be precise and apply force. That's very difficult to do. I haven't seen, there's no hand design that I've seen, not even sort of a demo that does that.
51:34Elon MuskBut that's what we're trying to achieve with Optimus. And there are so many little nuances in the hand because you've also got to have the touch sensors. The touch sensors have to work, they have to be in the right place.
51:50Elon MuskAnd you say, well, where are you going to put the touch sensors? Well if you put them too close to the surface, they're going to get damaged. And then other touch sensors, can they elastically deform like our fingers?
52:04Elon MuskWell actually it's kind of hard to get touch sensors that elastically deform and can handle high cycle life and it won't just break after a few thousand cycles. So there's all these things with the human hand that are like incredibly difficult to recreate for a robot because as a human we constantly self repair.
52:26Elon MuskSo your hands are constantly repaired. Like all parts of your hand are constantly repairing themselves. In fact, if they didn't, your fingers would be worn away. You can wear away the keys on your keyboard just with typing.
52:41Elon MuskI've done that where the letters are
52:43Co-host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)gone,
52:46Elon Muskbut my fingers are still there because they're regenerating thankfully. So you don't have that with a robot. So then you've got to say, okay, where are you going to put your touch sensors?
52:58Elon MuskHow are you going to make sure that you can do things like just being able to do this, like being able to like, you know, do that. Now that seems like a simple thing, but like your fingers actually bending backwards a little bit and your fingers are kind of like squishy and so you're able to form a flat pad.
53:24Elon MuskSo if you're trying to pick up a small item you can do, so you can pick up a little screw or like thread a needle or something like that.
53:36Elon MuskNow try to do that with robot fingers and be able to do it repetitively without wearing away the fingers or damaging the touch sensors. It's actually very difficult to take another example trying to open a pickle jar.
53:59Elon MuskI think a robot should be able to open a pickle jar, right? But sometimes these things get in there pretty tight. So then you've got to like, you know, you've got to like twist the pickle jar.
54:10Elon MuskBut the robot skin, the robot skin is just rubber over the, you know, plastic and metal internal fingers. Friggin robot skin. It doesn't stick, it doesn't grip to the underlying surface.
54:26Elon MuskSo then you end up like just rotating your skin on your, rotating the rubber on the robot. So you gotta figure out, okay, now we need to have the robot be able to twist things but still be able to get the rubber on the hand.
54:42Elon MuskAnd then you gotta be, it's gotta be replaceable because it's gonna wear away. So all these things, these are like really difficult and I'm not sure that any one of these is like let's split the atom type of difficulty, but there's a zillion of them.
55:04Elon MuskAnd then you've got to wrap that all into the real world AI associated with the. Because the AI chip has got to be able to issue the torp commands and close loop on vision and touch.
55:22Elon MuskThis is all very difficult. When you see these robot demo videos maybe with rare exception any complicated looking robot demo, it's a canned demo. It's not real. It's just basically just running a routine.
55:39Elon MuskIt's not real AI so real AI is like you showed something it's never seen before and it can still handle that situation. Just like full self driving. You could actually create a planet that's not Earth but is similar to Earth.
55:58Elon MuskAnd FSD will still work there on planets it's never been to or some city certainly on Earth like some city has never been to or if you change the geography of the city or there's you know, a parade or something like that, FSD will still compensate for that because it's AI.
56:19Elon MuskSo you've got to do that same thing for the robots, but the robots has got a lot more degrees of freedom. So like what I've said about Optimus is true, which is that we are going to get to very high volume production but the initial part of that S curve of production ramp is going to be very slow at the beginning because not only do you have to get all the engineering things that I mentioned right, you also have to solve the supply chain for scaling production.
56:45Elon MuskAnd unlike cars, there's no pre existing supply chain for robot stuff. At least the robot stuff that matters. And then we do need to make sure that we can make the robots in the US Even if say China were to cut us off because like last year there was.
57:08Elon MuskChina prevented the export of of magnets for use in electric motors and, and that actually set back the Optimus program by, by like two or three months because we, we couldn't get.
57:21Elon MuskWe had robots with no arms. So we're like a farewell to arms. I was trying to be an arms dealer but not succeeding. So we've got to make sure that we can make all the parts even if another sort of supply chain interruption happens.
57:45Elon MuskSo that means you've got to be able to make all the parts domestically.
57:51Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)So Austin, you always talk about the future should look like the future with the cybercap being gold. It looks like the future. What has been, you know, the hardest part to take?
58:02Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)You know, here we are. I think there's what, like 190/cyber cabs registered here in Texas. But like, how hard, like, what's the hardest problem to go from Austin to go cross country?
58:18Elon MuskWell, cross country, you know, most people. You mean like widespread just to be in all cities, you know what I mean? Just a trip across country. Yeah. Because the amount of miles driven that are actually trips across country is pretty small.
58:32Elon MuskBut the reason we're moving what seems to be slowly, but although it's actually a very high percentage increase, sort of month over month, percentage increase is actually very rapid.
58:45Elon MuskBut we want to make sure that we do not have an accident. We don't want to cause an injury or death because that'll become like a worldwide headline news thing.
58:54Elon MuskEven though there's about a million people that died in automotive accidents per year worldwide, one such thing with a Tesla Robotaxi will be worldwide headline news and cause regulators to shut us down.
59:10Elon MuskSo we're just making sure everything is as safe as possible. And we also want to not run over pets and things. So maybe what a lot of people don't know is, is that like waymos are like pet destroyers.
59:25Elon MuskI mean, the, you know, well, maybe waymos made some improvements on that front, but they do run over a lot of pets and we don't want to run over pets.
59:37Elon MuskSo we have these challenges like, of like literally like, you know, kittens at night, like gray kittens on a gray tarmac with tar seams at night in low visibility.
59:53Elon MuskAnd it's like, can we not run over the kittens type of thing. So we actually did solve that, by the way. So then, so we'll make a change, we'll test it out and then we'll deploy that.
1:00:08Elon MuskBut we are making rapid month over month progress before we go to a new city. We want to make sure that there's not like some intersection that's problematic or risky.
1:00:21Elon MuskWe want to be particularly careful with railroad crossing. Sometimes there's uncontrolled railroad crossings or counterintuitive traffic intersections. And these are places where humans make mistakes, where you've got a level of ambiguity that anyone out of town would often make a mistake or anyone who doesn't understand the intersection make a mistake.
1:00:40Elon MuskSo we want to just make sure that we either geo initially de geofenced or can handle all of those circumstances.
1:00:48Co-host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)Hey, let's talk about the roadster real quick since you got a little event next week. So
1:00:57Elon Musksure.
1:00:59Co-host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)What makes building the roadster personally important to you? And when did it occur to you that you needed to build a car that.
1:01:09Elon MuskHey, guys. Sorry, I'm gonna sign off here. Hey, hey, hey, hey.
1:01:15Co-host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)Wants to join in. All right. Yes.
1:01:17Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)Hey, what's going on?
1:01:22Elon MuskSay hello. Who are they? Tesla Owners group. They own Teslas. And they're, like, supporters of Tesla? Well, yeah,
1:01:40Elon MuskWell, there's a lot. There's like 2,000 people, I think something like. Quite a lot. Quite a lot of people, so. All right, guys, I better sign off here. It's been good talking and so I gotta go hang out with kids, so I'll look forward to next time.
1:01:56Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)Sounds good. Thank you so much, Elon, for your time. Oh, and hey, congrats on being. On getting the Medal of Science this past week. Thank you for all you're doing for humanity.
1:02:08Host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)It's an absolute blast and.
1:02:14Elon MuskAll right, thanks, guys.
1:02:46Elon MuskI don't have any mic. Don't go far. Ladies and gentlemen, don't go far. You are going to win $10,000 in prizes. Don't go far.
1:02:58Co-host (Tesla Owners Silicon Valley)Recording.