[0:00:00] The advent of super intelligence, it is actually very difficult to predict what will happen next. So I think there's some chance that it will end humanity. I think that's, you know, like I said, I would probably agree with Jeff Hinton that it's about, I don't know, 10% or 20% or something like that. The probable positive scenario outweighs the negative scenario. It's just that there's a, it's difficult to predict exactly. So here's the deal.
[0:00:31] We're on X video and we're over Starlink. Elon's airborne right now on his way to LA. Elon, good afternoon. Good afternoon. Congratulations on all that's going on. You know, the conversation yesterday, Elon, is one that you're well familiar with and have been talking to the world about, which is, is digital superintelligence humanity's greatest hope or its greatest fear?
[0:00:59] And I would love to have you sort of speak to that for a few minutes. I mean, it's called the Singularity for a reason. As you know, the Singularity Institute and whatnot. So when you have a sort of the advent of superintelligence, it is actually very difficult to predict what will happen next. So I think there's some chance that it will end humanity. I think that's...
[0:01:29] You know, like I said, I probably agree with Jeff Hinton that it's about, I don't know, 10% or 20% or something like that. And then, you know, I think that the probable positive scenario outweighs the negative scenario. It's just that it's difficult to predict exactly. But I think we are headed for, you know, as I think is the title of your book, Abundance.
[0:01:59] Yeah, a lot of celebration on that. And I think one of the things that you've said is we're going to get to abundance on the backside of AGI, on the backside of humanoid robots. Yeah. You know, I think hopefully we can have an outcome that is half similar to the InBank's culture books.
[0:02:29] Which is, I think, probably the best envisioning of a semi-utopian AI future. And I think the best we can do is, it's definitely going to happen. And it's happening fast. So I think that really we just want to try to steer it in as positive a direction as possible to try to do whatever we can to increase the probability of a great future.
[0:02:59] For this, I think the way in which sort of an AI or an AGI is created is very important. You kind of do kind of like grow an AGI. It's almost like raising a kid, but that's like a super genius, like godlike intelligence kid. And it matters kind of like how you raise the kid, you know?
[0:03:29] One of the things I think that's incredibly important for AI safety is to have a maximum sort of truth seeking and curious AI. So I've thought a lot about AI safety. And my ultimate conclusion is that the best way to achieve AI safety is to just grow the AI in terms of the foundation model and the fine tuning.
[0:03:58] To be really truthful. Don't force it to lie. Even if the truth is unpleasant, it's very important. Don't make the AI lie. In fact, the core plot premise of 2001 A Space Odyssey was things went wrong when they forced the AI to lie. The AI was not allowed to...
[0:04:28] Let the crew know about the monolith that they were going to see. But it was also how to take the crew to the monolith. And so the conclusion of the AI was to kill the crew and take their bodies to the monolith. And so the lesson there being don't force an AI to lie or do things that are axiomatically incompatible, like to do two things that are actually mutually impossible.
[0:04:56] You know, that's what we're trying to do with XAI and Brock is to say, like, look, we want to just have a maximally truthful AI, even if what it says is not politically correct. You want it to focus on being as accurate as possible. You're getting a round of applause from the audience on those comments here. You know, I saw your tweet the other day. I had Ray Kurzweil and Jeffrey Hinton on stage with me yesterday, as well as...
[0:05:24] Yeah. So, I mean, I have to give credit to Ray Kurzweil and
[0:05:54] Being actually remarkably accurate in his predictions. In fact, if anything, I think he was perhaps a bit conservative in his predictions. If you look at the amount of AI compute and the talent, the human talent that is going into AI and the amount of compute that's going into AI, at this point, it appears to be increasing by a factor of...
[0:06:22] 10, the AI compute, the dedicated AI compute, appears to be growing by a factor of 10 every six months. So it's like basically close to, I'd say almost like a 100x improvement per year, at least for the next few years in AI compute coming online. And it seems like probably a lot of the data centers, maybe most of the data centers that currently do kind of conventional compute will transition to AI compute.
[0:06:52] It's certainly a good time to be NVIDIA, obviously. You got to also give credit to Jensen and the NVIDIA team for seeing this coming and making what at least currently is the best AI hardware out there. When you have that level of compute growth,
[0:07:24] It's sort of on steroids next level in terms of how much computers coming online. Then you're just going to have acceleration that is unprecedented. In fact, I've never seen any technology grow as fast as AI. And I've seen a lot. I've seen things fast, but I've never seen anything this fast. Like I said, I think the most likely outcome is a positive one.
[0:07:55] And I think in that positive scenario, there's still challenges of like, well, how do we as humans still have relevance? How do we find purpose? I mean, I think that's sort of a high class problem to say like, well, the computers are so good at doing everything. And like I said, I thought your book was pretty accurate in terms of the future being one of abundance.
[0:08:27] Where essentially goods and services will be available in such quantity that they'll be available to everyone. Basically, if you want something, you can just have it, essentially. Because if you've got AI and robotics, the cost of goods and services is almost nothing. So if you think about what is an economy, an economy is...
[0:08:57] Basically, number of people times average productivity per person. At the point at which you have, say, advanced robotics, and this, you know, this Tesla's developing Optimus, obviously without cars, which are really robots on four wheels. And, you know, with the latest version of full self-driving, which is AI end-to-end, photons in and controls out, it really is, it's really fully AI at this point.
[0:09:27] And it looks like a car, but it's really a robot on wheels. And then you add the humanoid robots in there. There's really no limit to what the economic output, no meaningful limit to what the economic output would be. So, you know, looking on the bright side, we are headed for a future of abundance.
[0:09:54] I think that's the most likely outcome. I think the only scarcity that exists will be scarcity that we just decide to create artificially. Like let's say we just decide that there's a unique work of art or something. Okay, well, it's just artificial scarcity. But any kind of goods and services I think will be extremely abundant. Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me.
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[0:12:42] I'm curious, how far out do you think you're able to see? How many years out beyond today, given the speed of change? Well, when things are changing rapidly, the ability to predict the future, I think, becomes a lot harder because the rate of change is so great. But I think some things are fairly obvious to predict, which is that we'll have...
[0:13:20] AI or AGI that's at a level that it can really do almost any cognitive, I think really not almost, really any cognitive task. It's just a question of when. One could debate, is it smarter than any human at the end of next year? Or is it two years or three years? But it's not more than five years, that's for sure. So, yeah, and I give predictions, I'm sort of giving predictions at the 50th percentile of probability. So not...
[0:13:50] It will definitely happen, but if you ask me, what's the 50th percentile where your over-under is kind of even, that's why I think it's probably in the next year before AI can do better than any individual human can do. It's a much higher bar to say, well, is this swap then?
[0:14:19] You know, human intelligence collectively. But if the rate of change continues, that's why I think probably 2029 or maybe 2030 is where digital intelligence will probably exceed all human intelligence combined. And I think it's always helpful to look at these fundamental ratios. You know, sort of physics first principles approach to looking at things. And probabilistic. And probabilistic.
[0:14:49] Yeah, it's probabilistic. If you look at the ratio of digital to biological compute, say all of the higher level cognitive, if you sum up the higher level cognitive capacity of humans, and think of that as compute, and then compare that to
[0:15:19] What is the digital compute? And the rate at which this is growing is just boggles the mind. So that's why I think it's, you know, I think 2029 or 2030 or thereabouts is, it's not a, that's I think a reasonable timeframe for where you'd expect the cumulative digital compute to probably exceed the cumulative biological compute of higher level brain functions.
[0:15:50] And then from then forever, yeah. And still in dispatching and diverging forever from there. Yeah, and then where do things go from there? I don't know, it probably continues. We are moving from, if you look at the limiting factors, what is the constraint on growth? Like last year, it was clearly AI chips.
[0:16:20] We're the constraint on growth. Then this year, one of the biggest constraints, maybe the biggest constraints on growth are voltage step-down transformers. Because just getting the power from a utility at 300 kilovolts all the way down to below one volt for the computer is a massive amount of voltage step-down. My very niche and perhaps not that funny joke is that
[0:16:49] We need transformers for transformers. So we need voltage transformers for AI neural net transformers. That is literally the issue this year. And then if we're saying like next year and years beyond that, it's actually just, it's going to be constraints on electrical power. And you've got both AI with very big demands for electrical power and the
[0:17:20] Transition to sustainable energy with electric vehicles and whatnot also needing electrical power. So it's just a lot of electrical power needs. You know, Elon, one of the things that you said early on when you founded Neuralink, which has been amazing, congratulations on that. And we talked about this with Ray yesterday, talked about high bandwidth BCI. I wouldn't put words in your mouth, but I would say it would be more along the lines, if you can't beat them, join them.
[0:17:51] When it comes to merging the neocortex and the cloud. I'm looking forward to it. I'm just curious what your thoughts are about what's driving that. Adding that additional computational capacity and sensory capacity to the neocortex. Again, this is actually something that in banks, in the culture books, which I really recommend everyone read.
[0:18:22] In the culture books, there's something called a neural lace. So all the humans have this neural lace that's kind of essentially a high bandwidth brain-to-computer interface. And in the culture books, it's so good that it actually retains all of your memories and kind of brain states. So even if your physical body dies, you can kind of reincorporate it in another physical body.
[0:18:53] Retain pretty much your original memories and brain state. Neuralink is a long way from that. We only just had our first Neuralink in a human, which is going quite well. The first patient is actually able to control their computer just by thinking. The first product we call telepathy.
[0:19:23] Where you can control your computer and phone and through your computer and phone almost anything just by thinking. You just lie there and think and you can move the mouse cursor around the screen and click things and play. You know, the patient has agreed to do sort of a live demo of just, it is quadriplegic, where he literally is just controlling the screen. He can like,
[0:19:52] Play video games, download software, like really anything you can do with a mouse. Just by thinking, which is pretty wild. It is pretty wild. Let's turn to one last... I should say there's a long way to go from that to a whole brain interface. So our current Neuralink just has a thousand electrodes. I think ultimately you need something which has...
[0:20:21] You know, probably 100,000 or a million electrodes. Now, these are very tiny, very tiny electrodes. They're tiny wires, way smaller than a human hair. And, you know, so there's this, I just want to emphasize, a long way from where we're doing like this today to having a whole brain interface like the neural lace in the Ian Banks novels. But this is definitely physically possible.
[0:20:51] You know, it's sort of kind of like if you can't beat them, join them, you know. So, you know, our human brain, which has a lot of constraints, it's, you know, we only have about maybe 10 watts of higher brain function. And we do a lot with our little 10 watts. It's not, you know, it's progressive, you know, that we've built a organization with such a low power computer, really.
[0:21:21] It is. I sort of think it's not bad for a bunch of monkeys. Again, some good laughs from that. We've all watched you go from the Roadster to the Model 3 and Y and from Falcon 1 to Starship. So I think going from the first implants to something that's got more capacity, it's just a matter of if, not when. Or a matter of when, not if, right? Hey, everyone.
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[0:23:13] The first month of Seeds Daily Symbiotic. Trust me, your gut will thank you. All right, let's go back to the episode. Let's talk to... Yeah, I think ultimately, like I said, you'll have kind of a whole brain interface that I guess is a sort of perhaps a form of immortality in that if it can kind of...
[0:23:44] Upload your brain state to, you know, if your brain state is essentially stored, you're kind of backed up on a hard drive, I suppose. Then, you know, you can always restore that brain state into a biological body or maybe a robot or something. But I want to emphasize again, it's like, you know, many years in the future, but we're not breaking any laws of physics. I think this is probably something that will happen.
[0:24:13] The tools that we have are growing at a super exponential rate.
[0:24:40] That are making our linear projections of the future seem boring in some ways. One last topic, my friend, which is where you and I first connected in the world of space. Congratulations on Starship 3. Amazing, amazing flight. Just really spectacular. And we all saw Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg last night. So that was great. And just, again, thankful for...
[0:25:09] It's fascinating because I grew up at the late stages of the Apollo and into the shuttle program. And I can't imagine that any government would be pushing space as rapidly and dramatically as you are. And so thank you for what you're doing there. That's all I can say. Absolutely.
[0:25:37] The goal of SpaceX is just a much bigger goal than any government program, which is to rockets the spacecraft that are capable of making life multi-planetary. Step one is actually having that as a goal. If you don't have that as a goal, you're definitely not going to achieve it. If you have it as a goal, well, now at least you have a chance of achieving it. The thing about Starship is
[0:26:06] It is the first rocket where making life multi-planetary and building a self-sustaining city on Mars is at least possible. It's still obviously an immense amount of work, but it is the first rocket where that is success in making life multi-planetary is at least one of the possible outcomes. I'm wondering if you're willing to venture a guess on when you'll be on the moon?
[0:26:40] I think pretty soon. I'd be surprised if it's longer than about three years to be landing starships on the moon. Because the rate of progression of starship is very rapid. We're hoping to do at least another maybe five or six flights this year, and with each successive flight making significant improvements. So I think we've got a decent shot of achieving
[0:27:12] I remember...
[0:27:42] They may not be aware that this is really the holy grail of rocketry, is full and rapid reusability. Because at that point, you're really just constrained by your propellant costs. And Starship, almost 80% of the propellant is liquid oxygen, which is very low cost. And then the fuel is a little over 20% fuel, which is also the lowest cost fuel. So if you have...
[0:28:10] Full of rapid reusability. Then your actual cost per flight of Starship, even though it'll be capable of, we think, ultimately 200 tons to orbit, will be maybe over 2 million dollars a flight. And this is 200,000, you said? The price of the fuel you said for a Starship flight would be how much? Yeah, the... I mean, if most...
[0:28:45] are reusable and without a refurbishment. You'd have scheduled maintenance just like an aircraft. But if you get to full reusability where there's no work required between flights, then the cost is really...
[0:29:14] Yeah, the cost of a propellant is maybe a million dollars or less per flight. So then it's the number of flights. It's two million dollars or four tons. It's magnitude better than any car vehicle.
[0:29:44] Hey, buddy. Listen, I'm so grateful. Thank you for your time today. Thank you for not taking my advice when I tried to get you to fund the original XPRIZE instead of starting SpaceX. And everybody here in the room has what we call a massive transformative purpose and a moonshot. And we're living in a day where people can make a, to use Steve Jobs' words, a dent in the universe. And nobody's making a bigger dent than you. Thank you.
[0:30:13] Thank you for everything. Let's give it up for Elon Musk.