Speaker 1: I wanted to try to build something useful, but I
didn't think I would build anything particularly great. You've said,
probabilistically it seemed unlikely, but I wouldn't to at least try.
Speaker 2: So you're talking to a room full of people who
are all technical engineers, often some of the most eminent
AI researchers coming up in the game.
Speaker 3: Okay, I I think we should. I think I like
the term engineer better than researcher.
Speaker 1: I suppose that if there's some fundamental algorithmic breakthrough, it's
a research Otherwise it's engineering.
Speaker 2: Maybe let's start way back when you were This is
a room full of eighteen to twenty five year olds.
Excuse younger, because the founder set is younger and younger.
Speaker 4: Can you put yourself back into their shoes?
Speaker 2: When you were eighteen nineteen learning to code, even coming
up with a first idea for ZIP too, What was
that like for you?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Back in ninety five, I was basically choice of either
do Grass studies PhD a Stanford and material science actually
working on ultra capacities for potentially use in electric vehicles,
essentially trying to solve the range problem for electric vehicles,
or try to do something in this thing that most
people have never heard of called the Internet. And I
talked to my professor, was Bill Nicks in the material
science problement, and I said, can I defer for a
quarter because this will probably fail and then I'll need
to come back to college. And then he said, this
is probably the last conversation we'll have, and he was right.
But I thought things would most likely failed, not that
they would most likely succeed.
Speaker 3: And then in.
Speaker 1: Ninety five I wrote, basically, I think the first or
close to the first maps, directions, Internet, white pages and
yellow pages on the Internet. I just wrote that personally,
and I didn't even use website, but I just read
the boot directly because I couldn't afford and I could
afford a t one. The original office was on Firman
Avenue in Palelto. There was like an ISP on the
floor below. I rolled a hole through the floor and
just ran a land cable directly to the ISP, and
my brother joined me and another co founder of Greg Curry,
who passed away. And at the time we couldn't even
afford a place to stay, so we just The office
was five hunred bucks a months, so we just left
in the office and then shouted the YMCA on page
mill and al communo and yeah, and I guess we
ended up doing a little bit of a useful company
was up to in the beginning, and I did build
a lot of really really good software technology, but were
somewhat captured by the legacy media companies and that night
rout or New York Times, the host whatnot were investors
and customers and also on the board. So I kept
wanting to use software in ways that made no sense.
So I wanted to go direct to consumers anyway. As
long story dwelling too much on z up too, But
I really just wanted to do something useful on the
Internet because I had two choices, do I PhD and
watch people build the internet or help build the internet
in some small way. And I was like, I guess
I can always try and fail and then go back
to grass Studies and away.
Speaker 3: That ended up being like reasonably successful.
Speaker 1: It sold for like three hundred million dollars, which is
a lot at the time these days, that's I think
the minimum impulse, but for an AI startup is like
a billion dollars.
Speaker 3: It's like.
Speaker 1: There's so many freaking unicorns. It's like heard of unicorns
at this point is a billion dollar situation.
Speaker 4: There's been inflation since, so quite a bit more money.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like could probably buy a burger for a nickel.
Not quite, but yeah, there has been a lot of inflation.
But at the high level in AI is pretty intense.
As you've seen companies that are I don't know, less
than a year old getting sometimes a billion dollar, multi
billion dollar valuations, which I guess could pan out and
probably will pan out in some cases, but it is
I wordering to see some of these valuations.
Speaker 4: Yeah, what do you think, I'm pretty bullish. I'm pretty bullish, honestly, so.
Speaker 2: I think the people in this room are going to
create a lot of the value that a billion people
in the world should be using this stuff, and we're
not even we're scratching the surface of it. I love
the Internet story in that, even back then, you are
a lot like the people in this room back then,
in that you know, the heads of all the CEOs
of all the legacy media companies look to you as
the person who understood the Internet, and a lot of
the world, the corporate world, like the world out large,
that does not understand what's happening with AI, they're going
to look to the people in this room for exactly that.
Speaker 4: It sounds like, what are some of the tangible lessons.
Speaker 2: It sounds like one of them is don't give up
board control or be careful about have a really good lawyer.
Speaker 1: Well, I guess, well, the first my first thought of
the big really the mistake was having too much shareholder
and board control from legacy media companies who then necessarily
see things through the lens of legacy media, and that
they'll make you do things that seems sense full to
them but aren't really don't make sense within your technology.
I know I should point out that I that I
didn't actually first intend to start a company. I try
to get a job at Netscape. I SIMI resume to
Netscape and Mark Kandrison knows about this, but I don't
think you gave us a myristhume. And then nobody responded.
And then I tried hanging out in the lobby of
Netscape see if I could like bump into someone, but
I was like too shy to talk to anyone. So
I'm like, man, this is ridiculous. So I'll just write
sof for myself and see how it goes. So it
wasn't actually from the stand point, if I want to
start a company, I just want to be part of
building the Internet in some way. And since I couldn't
get a job at an area company, I had to
start a in area company anyway. The AI will so
profoundly change the future, it's difficult to fathom how much.
But at the economy is, assuming we don't things don't
go awry, and like AI doesn't kill us all in itself,
then you'll see ultimately an economy that is not ten
times more than the current economy. Ultimately, if we become
say or whatever, our future machine descendants, or but mostly
machine descendants become like a ship scale to civilization or beyond,
we're talking about an economy that is thousands of times,
maybe millions of times bigger than the economy today. Yeah,
I did feel a bit like when I was in
DC taking a lot of flag from getting rid of
waste and fraud, which is an interesting side quest as
side quests go.
Speaker 4: But I've got to get back to the main quest.
Speaker 1: Yeah, i gotta get back to the main quest here,
So back to the main quest. But I did feel
a little bit like this. It's like fixing the government.
It's kind of say, the beach is dirty and there's
some needles and vcs and like trash, and you want
to clean up the beach. But then there's also this
like thousand foot wool of water, which is tsunami of AI.
And how much does cleaning the beach really matter if
you got a thousand foot tsunami about to hit.
Speaker 3: Not that much.
Speaker 2: Oh well, we're glad you're back on the main quest.
It's very important.
Speaker 1: Yeah, back to the may quest. Building technology, which is
what I like doing. It's just so much noise like this.
The single noise ratio in politics is terrible.
Speaker 4: I live in San Francisco, so you don't need to
tell me twice.
Speaker 3: Yeah, DC's I guess it's all politics in DC.
Speaker 1: But the if you're trying to build a rocket or cars,
or you're trying to have software that compiles and runs reliably,
then you have to be maximally true seeking or your
software or your hardware won't work like you can't full
like math and physics are rigorous judges. So I'm used
to being in a maximally true seeking environment and that's
definitely not politics. So I'm good, glad to be back
in technology.
Speaker 2: I guess I'm curious going back to the zip to moment,
you had hundreds of millions of dollars or you had
to exit a worth millions of dollars.
Speaker 3: I got twenty million dollars, right.
Speaker 2: Okay, so you solved the money problem at least, and
you basically took it and you rolled. You kept rolling
with X dot Com, which in PayPal and Confinity.
Speaker 3: Yes, I kept the chips on the table.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so not everyone does that.
Speaker 2: A lot of the people in this room will have
to make that decision. Actually, what drove you to jump
back into the ring?
Speaker 3: O Thay?
Speaker 1: I felt for Up too. We'd both like incredible technology
but never really got used. I think, at least from
my perspective, we had better technology than say Yahoo or
anyone else, but it was constrained by our customers. And
so I wanted to do something that where okay, we
wouldn't be constrained by our customers, go direct consumer. And
that's what ended up being like X dot Com PayPal,
essentially X dot Com merging with Confinity, which together created PayPal,
and then that actually the sort of PayPal Diespora has it.
It might have created more companies then so more companies
than probaly any anything in the twenty first century, so
many talented people were at the combination of Confinity X
dot com. So I just wanted to, like I felt,
we got our wings clift somewhat with ZIP two, and
it's okay, what if our wings are clipped and we
go direct to consumer and that's what PayPal ended up being.
But yeah, with I got that twenty million dollar check
for my share of ZIP two. At the time, I
was living in a house with four housemates, and I
had a ten grand in the bank, and then this
check arrived in the mail, of all places in the mail,
and then now then my bank bounce went from ten
to twenty million and ten thousand. Okay, seluck to pay
taxes on that at all. But then I ended up
putting almost all of that into x dot com and
as you said, just keeping almost all the chips on
the table.
Speaker 3: And yeah, and then after PayPal was like, I was
curious as to.
Speaker 1: Why we had not sent anyone to Mars, and I
went on the NASA website to find out when we're
sending people tomorrow, and there was no date. I thought,
maybe it's just hard to find on the website, but
in fact, there was no real plan to send people
to Mars. So then I've come to this is such
a long story, so I don't want to take up
too much time here, but I.
Speaker 4: Think we're all listening with rapt attention.
Speaker 3: So I was.
Speaker 1: Actually I was on the long end of Expressway with
my friend day O Ressi. We were like housemates in college,
and Daa was asking me what I'm what we're gonna do?
What am I gonna do after a PayPal and I
was like, I don't know. I guess maybe I'd like
to do something philanthropic in space, because I didn't think
I could actually do anything commotional in space because that
seemed like the purview of nations. But I'm curious as
to when we're gonna send people to Mars. And that's
when I was like, oh, it's not on the website,
and I started digging. There's nothing on the NAST website.
So then I started digging in and I'm definitely summarizing.
Speaker 3: A lot here.
Speaker 1: But my first idea was to do a philanthropic mission
to Mars, Cooled Life to Mars, where would send a
small greenhouse with CS and dehydrated nutrient gael Land out
our mosque and grow hydrate the jel and then you
have this great sort of money shot of green plants
on a red background. For the longest time, I by
the way, I didn't realize money shot. I think is
a porn reference. But anyway, the point is that would
be the great shot of green plants on a red background,
and to try to inspire a NASA and the public
to Santa astronauts to Mars. As I learned more, I
came to realize along the way. By the way, I
went to Russia in two thousand and one and two
thousand and two to buy ICBMs, which is that's an
adventure where you go and meet with Russian high command
and say I'd like to buy some ICBMs.
Speaker 4: This was to get to space, yeah, as a rocket, not.
Speaker 1: To nuke anyone, but they had to as a result
of armstroduction talks. They had to actually destroy a bunch
of their big nuclear missiles. So I was like, how
about if we take two of those minus the luke
added an additional opper stage for Mars.
Speaker 3: But it was trippy.
Speaker 1: Being in Moscow in one of two thousand and one
negotiating with the Russian military to buy icvms, like that's crazy,
but the kept also raising the price on me, so
that so literally it's like the opposite of what a
negotiation to do. So I was like, man, these things
are getting really expensive. And then I came to realize
that actually the problem was not that there was insufficient
will to go to Mars, but there was no way
to do without breaking the budget, or even breaking the
NASA budget. So that's where I decided to start SpaceX's
SpaceX to advance rocket technology to the point where we
could send people to Mars.
Speaker 3: And that was in two thousand and two.
Speaker 2: So that wasn't But you didn't start out wanting to
start a business. You wanted to start just something that
was interesting to you that you thought humanity needed, and
then as you kat pulling on a string, it just
the ball sort of unravels and it turns out this
is could be a very profitable business.
Speaker 1: It is now, but it there had been no prior
example of really a rocket startup succeeding, but there have
been various attempts to do commercial rocket companies, and the
whole failed again with SpaceX starting. SpaceX was really from
the standpoint of I think there's a less than ten
percent chance of being successful, maybe one percent, I don't know.
But if a startup doesn't do something to advance rocket technology,
it's definitely not coming from the big defense contractors because
they just impedance smashed to the government, and the government
just wants to do very conventional things. So it's either
coming from a startup where it's not happening at all.
So like a small chance of success is better than
no chance of success, and so that yeah, so SpaceX
start that in mid two thousand and two expecting to fail,
like I said, probably ninety percent chance of failing. And
even like when recruiting people, I didn't try to make
out that it would I said, we're probably going to die,
but a small.
Speaker 3: Chance we might not die.
Speaker 1: But this is the only way to get people to
Mars and advanced the state of the art. And then
I ended up being chief engineer of the rocket, not
because I wanted to, but because I couldn't hire anyone
who was good, So like none of the good sort
of chief engineers would join because it's like this is
too risky, you were going to die. And so then
I ended up being chief engineer of the rocket, and
the first three flights did fail, so it's a bit
of a learning exercise there, and fourth one fortunately worked.
But if the fourth one hadn't worked, I had no
money left and that would have been it would have
been curtained. So it was a pretty close thing. If
the fourth launch of a Falcon not work, it would
have been just curtains and we would have just been
joined the graveyard of prior rocket startups. So it's like
my estimate of success was not far off. We'd just
be made it by the skin of our teeth. And
Tesla was happening simultaneously, Like two thousand and eight was
a rough year because at mid two thousand and eight
were called Summer two thousand and eight, the third launch
of Spacexit failed, a third failure in a row. The
Tesla financing round had failed, and so Telsa was going
bankrupt fast. It was just, man, this is a grim.
This is going to be a tale of warning of
an exercise in hubris.
Speaker 2: Probably throughout that period a lot of people were saying,
Elon is a software guy, Why are you working on hardware?
Speaker 4: Why would you yeah, why would he choose to work
on this.
Speaker 1: Harp said, so you can look at the because they're
still the press of that time is still online. You
could just search it. And they kept calling the Internet guy.
So Internet Guy aka.
Speaker 3: Fool is attempting to build a rocket company that we
got ridiculed quite a lot.
Speaker 1: And it does sound pretty absurd, like internet guy starts
rocket company doesn't sound like a recipe for success, frankly,
so I didn't hold against them. I was like, yeah,
admittedly it does sound improbable, and I agree that it's improbable.
But fortunately the fourth launch worked and a NASSA ordered
us a contract supply the space station. And I think
that was like maybe December twenty second or it was
it like right before Christmas. Because even the fourth launch
working wasn't enough to succeed, NASA also needed we also
needed a big contract to keep us life. So I
got that call from like the NASA team and I
literally they said, we're rewarding you one of the contracts
to re supply the space station. I like literally blurred
it out, I love you guys, which is not normally
what they hear because it's usually pretty sober. But I
was like, man, this is a company saver and then
we closed the Tesla financing round on the last hour
of the last day that it was possible, which was
six pm December twenty fourth, two thousand and eight. We
would have bounced payroll two days after Christmas if that
round hadn't closed. So that was a nerve racking end
of two thousand and eight, that's for sure.
Speaker 2: I guess from your PayPal and zip two experience jumping
into these hardcore hardware startups, it feels like one of
the through lines was being able to find and eventually
attract the smartest possible people in those particular fields. What
would the people in this room like some of the
most of the people here I don't think have even
managed a single person yet, they're just starting their careers.
What would you tell to the elon who's never had
to do that yet.
Speaker 1: I generally think to try to be as useful as possible.
It may sound try, but it's so hard to be useful,
especially to be useful to a lot of people. Where
you say, the area under the cove of total utility
is like how much how useful have you been to
your fela human beings? Times how many people? It's almost
like the physics definition of true work. It's incredibly difficult
to do that. And I think if you're aspire to
do true work, your probably success is much higher. Don't
aspire to glory, aspire to work.
Speaker 2: How can you tell that it's true work? Is it external?
Is it like what happens with other people or what
the product does for people? Like what is that for you?
When you're looking for people come work for you? What's
the salient thing that you look for or if they're
certain question?
Speaker 1: I guess it's in terms of if you're in product,
you just have to say, if this thing is successful,
how useful will it be to how many people? And
that's what I mean. And then you do you do whatever,
whether you're CEO or any role in a startup, you
do whatever it takes to succeed, and just always be
smash smashing your ego like internalized responsibility like a major
failure mode is when ego to ability ratio is double
graded than sign one. If you if your ego to
ability ratio is it gets too high, then you're going
to basically break the feedback loop to reality. And in
in a it terms, your your er you'll have you'll
break your RL loop so you want you want to
don't want to break your art. You want to have
a strong r L loop, which means internalizing responsibility and
minimizing ego, and you do whatever the task is, no
matter whether it's grand or humble. That's like what I
actually I prefer the term like engineering as opposed to research.
I prefer the term and I don't actually don't want
it to call XAI lab.
Speaker 3: I just want to be a company.
Speaker 1: Like It's like, what of the simplest, more straightforward, ideally
lowest that ego terms are that those are generally a
good way to go. You want you want to just
close the loop on reality hard that's a super big deal.
Speaker 2: I think everyone in this room is really looks up
to everything you've done around being a paragon of first
principles and thinking about the stuff you've done. How do
you actually determine your reality because that seems like a
pretty big part of it.
Speaker 4: Like other people who have never made.
Speaker 2: Anything, non engineers, sometimes journalists at time who've never done
anything like they will criticize you. But then clearly you
have another set of people who are builders, who have
very high area under the curve, who are in your
circle how should people approach that? What has worked for you?
And what would you pass on to X to your children?
What do you tell them when you're like, you need
to make your way in this world? Here's how to
construct a reality. It is predictive from first principles.
Speaker 1: The tools of physics are incredibly helpful to understand and
make progress in any field. The first principles means just obviously,
just means breakings down to the fundamental axiomatic elements that
are most likely to be true, and then reason up
from there as cosionally as possible, as opposed to reasoning
by analysis or metaphor. And then it just simple things
like thinking in the limit if you extrapolate, minimize this
thing or maximize that thing. Thinking in the limit is
very helpful. I use all the tools of physics. They
apply to any field. This is like a superpower. Actually,
so you can take, say, take an example like rockets.
You can say how much should a rocket cost? A
typical approach to how to that people would take to
how much rocket should cost is they would look historically
at what the cost of rockets are and assume that
any new rocket must be somewhat similar to the prior
cost of rockets. A first principle's approach would be you
look at the materials that the rocket is comprised of,
so if that's aluminium, copper, combon, fiber, steel, whatever the
case may be, and say what what how much does
that rocket weigh, and what are the constituent elements and
how much do they weigh? What is the material price
per kilogram of those constituent elements. In that sense the
actual floor on what a rocket can cost. It can
asymptotically approach the cost of the row materials and then
you realize, oh, actually a rocket, the row materials of
a rocket are only maybe one or two percent of
the historical cost of a rocket, so the manufacturing must
necessarily be very inefficient if the if the row material
cost is only one or two percent. However, you have
first principles analysis of the potential for the cost for
cost optimization of a rocket.
Speaker 3: And that's before you get to reusability.
Speaker 1: To give an AI sort of AI example last year
went for x CI when we were trying to build
a training supercluster. We went to the various suppliers to
ask said, this is the beginning of last year that
we needed one hundred thousand, eighth one hundreds to be
able to train coherently. And there are estimates for how
long it would take to complete that were eighteen to
twenty four months, so we need to get that done
in six months so then or we won't be competitive.
So then if you break that down, what are the
things you need? We need a building, you need power,
you need cooling. We didn't have enough time to build
a building from scratch, so we've had to find existing building.
So we found a factory that was no longer in
use in Memphis that used to build electrolytes products. But
then the input power was fifteen megawats and we needed
one hundred and fifteen megawats. We read the generators and
had generators on one side of the building, and then
we have to have cooling, so we rented about a
quarter of the mobile cooling capacity of the US and
put the chillers on the other side of the building.
But that didn't fully solve the problem because the volta
the power variations during training are very big, so you
can have power can drop by fifty percent in a
hundred most seconds, which the generators can't keep up with.
So then we added Tesla megapacks and modified the software
in the megapacks to be able to just mooth out
the power variation during the training run. And then there
were a bunch of networking challenges. Is the networking cables.
If you're trying to make one hundred thousand GPUs training
coherently of very challenging.
Speaker 2: Almost it sounds almost any of those things you mentioned.
I could imagine someone telling you very directly, no, you
can't have that, you can't have that power, you can't
have this. And it sounds like one of the salient
pieces of first principles thinking is actually, let's ask why,
let's figure that out, and actually let's challenge the person
across the table and they If I don't get an
answer that I feel good about, I'm going to not
allow that to be.
Speaker 4: I'm not going to let that know to stand. Is
that that feels like.
Speaker 2: Something that everyone, if someone were to try to do
what you're doing in hardware, seems to uniquely need this.
In software, we have lots of fluff things that it's
like we can add more CPUs for that, it'll be fine,
But in hardware it's just not going to work.
Speaker 3: I think these general principles of first principle thinking apply
to software and hardware apply to anything. Really.
Speaker 1: I'm just using a hardware example of how we were
told something is impossible. But once we broke it down
into the constituent elements of we need a building, we
need power, we need cooling, we need we need power smoothing,
and then we could solve those constituent elements. But and
then we just ran the networking operation to do all
the cabling everything in four shifts twenty four to seven,
and I was like sleeping the data center and also
doing cabling myself, and there were a lot of other
issues to solve. Nobody had done a training runt with
one hundred thousand, h one hundreds training coherently last year.
Speaker 3: I mean maybe it's been done this year. I don't know.
And then we ended up doubling that.
Speaker 1: To two hundred thousand, and so now we've got one
hundred and fifty thousand, h one hundred fifty k H
two hundreds and thirty k GB two hundreds in the
Memphis training cent and we're about to bring one hundred
and ten thousand GB two hundreds online at a second
data center, also in Memphis.
Speaker 3: Area.
Speaker 2: Is it your view that pre training is still working
and larger the scaling laws still hold, and whoever wins
this race will have basically the biggest, smartest possible model
that you could distill.
Speaker 1: There's other various elements that side competitiveness for large AI
is for sure, the talent of the people matter. The
scale of the hardware matters, and how well you're able
to bring that hardware to bear. So you can't just
order a whole bunch of GPUs and they don't. You
can't just plug them in, So you've got to get
a lot of gps and have them training coherently and stably.
Then it's what unique access to data do you have.
I guess distribution matters to some degree as well, like
how do people get exposed to your AI? Those are
those are critical pactores for if it's going to be
like a large foundation model as competitive as many have said.
I think my friend eliasit Skier said, we would run
out of pre training data of human generated Like human
generated data, you run out of tokens pretty fast, certainly
of high quality tokens, and then you have to do
a lot of You need to essentially create synthetic data
and be able to accurately judge the synthetic data that
you're creating to like, is this real synthetic data? Well,
is it an hallucination that doesn't actually mash reality? So
achieving grounding and reality is tricky, but we are at
the stage where there's more effort put into synthetic data.
Right now, we're training Grock three point five, which is
a heavy focus on reasoning.
Speaker 2: Going back to your physics point, what I heard for
reasoning is that hard science, particularly physics textbooks, are very
useful for reasoning, whereas I think researchers have told me
that social science is totally useless for reasoning.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's probably true.
Speaker 1: So yeah, there's something that's going to be very important
in the future is combining deep AI in the data
center of Supercluster with robotics. So that's things like the
Optimius humanoid robot, and yeah, Optimist is awesome. There's going
to be so many humanoid robots and robots of all
sizes and shapes. But my prediction is that there will
be more humanoid robots by far than all other robots
combined by maybe an order of magnitude, like a big difference,
and is it true that.
Speaker 4: You we're planning a robot army of.
Speaker 1: The sort, whether we do it or whether the Tesla
does it, because it works closely with XAI. You've seen
how many humanoid robot startups are there. It's I think
Jensen bongs on stage with a lot with a massive
number of robots, robots from different companies. I think it
was like a dozen different humanoid robots. I guess part
of what I've been fighting and maybe what has slowed
me down somewhat that I'm a little I don't want
to make Terminator real, you know, So I I guess,
at least until recent years, dragging my feet on on
AI and humanoid robotics, and then I come to realize
that realization it's happening.
Speaker 3: Whether I do it or not. So you got really
two choices participate.
Speaker 1: You could either be a spectator or a participant, And
so I guess I'd rather be a participant than a spectator.
So now it's pedal to the metal on humanoid robots
and digital superintelligence.
Speaker 2: So I guess there's a third thing that everyone has
heard you talk a lot about that I'm really a
big fan of becoming a multiplanetary species.
Speaker 4: Where does this fit?
Speaker 2: This is all not just a ten or twenty year thing,
maybe one hundred year thing, like it's a multi many
generations for humanity kind of thing.
Speaker 4: How do you think about it?
Speaker 2: There's AI obviously, there's embodied robotics, and then there's being
a multiplant, multiplanetary species. Does everything feed into that last
point or what are you driven by right now for
the next ten to twenty one hundred years?
Speaker 1: Jeez, one hundred years, man. I hope civilizations around in
one hundred years. If it is around, it's going to
look very different from civilization today. Not predict that this
going to be at least five times as many humanoid
robots as there are humans, maybe ten times. One way
to look at the progress of civilization is percentage completion Kardaschev.
So if you're in a kars Chef scale one, you've
you've honessed all the energy of a planet. Now, in
my opinion, we've only honested maybe one or two percent
of Earth's energy, So we've got a long way to
go to be Kardschev scale one. Then Cardship two you've
honest only energy of the Sun, which would be I
don't know a billion times more energy than Oath, maybe
closer to a trillion, and then Karschev three would be
only energy of a galaxy pretty far from that. So
we're at the very early stage of the intelligence big bang.
I hope we're in terms of being multiplanetary, like I think,
I think we'll have enough mass transferred to Mars within
like roughly thirty years to make Mars self sustaining such
that Mars can continue to grow and prosper even if
the resupply shifts from both stuff coming, and that greatly
increases the probable lifespan of civilization or consciousness and intelligence,
both biological and digital. So that's why I think it's
important to become a multiplanet species.
Speaker 3: And I'm so much.
Speaker 1: Troubled by the filmy paradox, like why have we not
seen any aliens? And it could be because intelligence is
incredibly rare, and maybe we're the only ones in this galaxy,
in which case the intelligence of consciousness is just the
tiny candle in a vast dokness, and we should do
everything possible to ensure the tiny candle does not go out.
And being a multiplanet species or making consciousness multiplanetary greatly
improves the probable lifespan of civilization, and it's the next
step before going to other star systems. Once you at
least have two planets, then you've got a forcing function
for the improvement of space travel, and that ultimately is
what will lead to consciousness expanding to the stars.
Speaker 2: It could be that the Fermi paradox dictates once you
get to some level of technology, you destroy yourself.
Speaker 4: How do we see ourselves?
Speaker 2: How do we actually what would you prescribe to a
room full of engineers? What can we do to prevent
that from happening?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: How do we avoid the great filters? One of the
great filtres would obviously be global thom nuclear war, So
we should try to avoid that. I guess building benign
AI robots that AI that loves humanity, and robots that
are helpful. Something that I think is extremely important in
building AI is a very rigorous adherence to truth, even
if that truth is politically incorrect. My intuition for what
could make AI very dangerous is if you force AI
to believe things that are not true.
Speaker 2: How do you think about there's this argument for open
for safety versus closed for competitive edge. I think the
great thing is you have a competitive model. Many other
people also have competitive models, and in that sense we're
off of. Maybe the worst timeline that I'd be worried
about is there's fast takeoff and it's only in one
person's hands that might collapse a lot of things, Whereas
now we have choice, which is great. How do you
think about this?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I do think there will be several deep intelligences,
maybe maybe at least five, maybe as much as ten.
I'm not sure that there's going to be hundreds, but
it's probably close. Like maybe there'll be like ten or
something like that, of which maybe four will be in
the US so.
Speaker 3: And I don't think it's going.
Speaker 1: To be anyone AI that has run away capability. But yeah,
several deep intelligences.
Speaker 2: What will these deep intelligences actually be doing? Will it
be scientific research or trying to hack each other?
Speaker 3: Probably old of the above.
Speaker 1: Hopefully they will discover new physics, and I think they're
very they're definitely going to invent new technologies. I think
we're quite close to digital superintelligence. It may happen this year,
and if it doesn't happen this next year, for sure,
a digital superintelligence to find as smarter than any human
at anything, So.
Speaker 2: How do we direct that to super abundance. We could
have robotic labor, we have cheap energy, intelligence on demand.
Is that sort of the white pill? Like, where do
you sit on the spectrum? And are there tangible things
that you would encourage everyone here to be working on
to make that white pill actually reality?
Speaker 1: I think it most likely will be a good outcome.
I guess I'd agree with Jeff Hinton that maybe it's
a ten to twenty percent chance of annihilation, but look
on the right side, that's eighty to ninety percent probably
of a great outcome. So yeah, I can't emphasize this enough.
A rigorous adherence to truth. It is the most important
thing for AI safety safety obviously, empathy for humanity and
life as we know it.
Speaker 2: We haven't talked about neuralink at all yet, but I'm curious.
You're working on closing the input and output gap between
humans and genes. How critical is that to AI ASI?
And once that link is made, can we not only
read but also write?
Speaker 1: The neuralink is not necessary to solve digital superintelligence. That'll
happen before neuralink is at scale, But nor neuralink can
effectively do is solve the input output bandwidth constraints.
Speaker 3: Especially our output bandwidth is very low. The out the
sustained output.
Speaker 1: Of a human over the course of a day is
less than one but per second, so there's eighty six
four hundred seconds in a day, and it's extremely rare
for a human to output more than that number of
symbols per day, simainly for several days in a row.
So you really within your link interface you can massively
increase your output bandwidth and your input band with input
being right to you have to do right operations to
the brain. We have now five humans who have received
the kind of the read input where it's reading signals,
and you've got people with als who really have their tetraplegics,
but they can now communicate at with a similar bandwidth
to a human with a fully functioning body and control
their computer and the phone, which is pretty cool. And
then I think in the next six to twel months
we will be doing our first implants for vision where
even if somebody is completely blind, we can write directly
to the visual cortex, and we've had that working in monkeys. Actually,
I think one of our monkeys now has had a
visual implant for three years, and at first it'll be
relatively fairly low resolution, but long term you would have
very high resolution and be able to see multi spectral wavelengths.
You could see an infrared ultra violet radar like a
superpower situation, but like at some point the cybernetic implants
would not simply be correcting things that went wrong, but
augmenting human capabilities dramatically, augmenting intelligence and sensors and bandwidth dramatically.
And that's going to happen at some point, but digital
superintelligence will happen well before that. At least if we're
a neur link, we'll be able to appreciate the AI better.
Speaker 2: I guess one of the limits reagents to all of
your efforts across all of these different domains is access to.
Speaker 4: The smartest possible people.
Speaker 2: Yes, simultaneous to that, we have the rocks can talk
and reason, and they're maybe one hundred and thirty IQ now,
and they're probably going to be super intelligent soon. How
do you reconcile those two things. What's going to happen
in five ten years? And what should the people in
this room do to make sure that they're the ones
who are creating instead of maybe below the API line.
Speaker 1: They called it the singularity for a reason, because we
don't know what's going to happen in the not that
far future. The percentage of intelligence that is human will
be quite small. At some point, the collective some of
human intelligence will be less than one percent of all intelligence.
And if things get to a clot a ship level two,
we're talking about human intelligence. Even assuming a significant increase
in human population and intelligence augmentation like massive intelligence augmentation
where everyone has an IQ of one thousand type of thing.
Even in that circumstance, collective human intelligence will be probably
one billion that of digital intelligence. Anyway, we're the biological
boot bootloader for digital superintelligence.
Speaker 4: I guess just to end off, was I?
Speaker 3: It was like, was I a good bootload?
Speaker 4: Where do we go? How do we go from here?
Speaker 2: All of this is pretty wild sci fi stuff that
also could be built by the people in this room.
But if you do, you have a closing thought for
the smartest technical people of this generation right now? What
should they be doing, what should they be working on?
What should they be thinking about tonight as they go
to dinner?
Speaker 1: As I saw a rope with I think if you're
doing something useful, that's great. If you just try to
be as useful as possible to your fellow human beings
and that then you're doing something good. I keep harping
on this, like focus on truthful AI. That's the most
important thing for AI safety. Obviously, if anyone's interested in
working at xailet mean, please let us know. We're aiming
to make GROT the maximumly truth seeking AI, and I
think that's a very important thing. Hopefully we can understand
the nature of the universe, that's really what AI can
hopefully tell us. Maybe AI can maybe tell us where
are the aliens, and how did the universe really start?
Speaker 3: How will it end?
Speaker 1: What are the questions that we don't know that we
should ask, And are we in a simulation or what
level of.
Speaker 3: Similation are we in?
Speaker 2: I think we're going to find out. APC, Elon, thank
you so much for joining us. Everyone please give it
up for Elon Mott