Elon Musk: Digital Superintelligence, Multiplanetary Life, How to Be Useful

And I talked to my professor, who was Bill Nix in the material science department, and said, like, 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. Um, so, but I thought things would most likely fail, not that they would most likely succeed. Um, and, um, and then in 95, I wrote, uh, basically, I think the first or close to the first, uh, maps, directions, uh, internet, white pages and yellow pages on the internet. Um, I just wrote, I just wrote that personally.

I didn't even use a web server. i just read the port directly because i um couldn't afford uh and i could have couldn't afford a t1 uh the original office was on firman avenue in palo alto uh there was some like an isp on the floor below so i drilled a hole through the floor and just uh ran a land cable directly to the isp um and um yeah uh my brother joined me and another co-founder greg curry who passed away and we at the time we couldn't even afford a place to stay so we just the office was 500 bucks a month so we just slept in the office and and then showered at the YMCA on page mill in El Camino And, yeah, I guess we ended up doing a little bit of a useful company, Zip2, in the beginning.

And we did build a lot of really good software technology, but we were somewhat captured by the legacy media companies, and that night reader new york times and the host whatnot were investors and uh customers and and also on the board uh so they kept wanting to use our software in ways that made no sense um so i wanted to go direct to consumers anyways long story dwelling too much ends up too but the i really just wanted to do something useful on the internet um as because i had two choices like do a do a phd and watch people build the internet or help build the internet in some small way and i was like well i guess i can always try and fail and then go back to grad studies um and uh anyway that ended up being like reasonably successful sold for like 300 million dollars which was a lot at the time now these days that's like i think minimum impulse but for an ai startup is like a billion dollars um it's like uh there's so many freaking unicorns it's It's like a herd of unicorns at this point.

Unicorns, a billion-dollar situation. There's been inflation since, so quite a bit more money, actually. Yeah, I mean, like $9.95, you could probably buy a burger for a nickel. Well, not quite, but I mean, yeah, there has been a lot of inflation. But, I mean, the hype level on AI is pretty intense, as you've seen. You know, you see companies that are, I don't know, less than a year old getting sometimes billion dollar or multi-billion dollar valuations, which I guess could pan out and probably will pan out in some cases. But it is eye-watering to see some of these valuations. Yeah, what do you think?

I mean, well, I'm pretty bullish. personally. I'm pretty bullish, honestly. So I think the people in this room are going to create a lot of the value that, you know, 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 know, you are a lot like the people in this room back then in that, you know, the heads of all the 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 you know the corporate world like the world at large that does not understand what's happening with AI they're going to look to the people in this room uh for exactly that it sounds like well you know what are some of the tangible lessons it sounds like one of them is don't give up board control or be careful about have a really good lawyer uh I guess for my first startup, 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 kind of make you do things that seem sensible to them, but really don't make sense with the new technology.

um I know I should point out that I that I um I didn't actually at first intend to start a company I like I tried to get a job at Netscape um I sent my resume into Netscape and Mark Hendrickson knows about this um and uh but I don't think he ever saw my resume and then nobody responded so uh and then I tried hanging out in the lobby of Netscape to see if I could like bump into someone but I was like too shy to talk and talk to anyone so I'm like man this is ridiculous so I'll just write talk for myself and see how it goes. So it wasn't actually from the standpoint of Like, I want to start a company.

I just want to be part of building, you know, the internet in some way. And since I couldn't get a job at an internet company, I had to start an internet company. Anyway, yeah, I mean, AI will so profoundly change the future, it's difficult to fathom how much. But, you know, the economy, assuming we don't, things don't go awry, and like AI doesn't kill us all and itself, then you'll see ultimately an economy that is not 10 times more than the current economy. ultimately like if we become say or whatever our future machine descendants or but mostly machine descendants become like a kardash of 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 so um yeah i mean i i i did sort of feel a bit like you know when i was in dc taking a lot of flack for like getting rid of waste and fraud which was an interesting side quest uh as side quests go um but uh i got to get back to the main quest yeah i got to get back to the main quest here um so back to the main quest um uh so but i did feel you know a little bit like there's you know it's like fixing the government it's kind of like there's like say the beach is dirty

and there's like some needles and feces and like trash and you want to clean up the beach but then there's also this like thousand foot wall of water which is a tsunami of ai like and how much does cleaning the beach really matter if you've got a thousand foot tsunami about to hit not that much oh we're glad you're back on the main quest it's very important yeah back to the make with um building technology which is uh what i like doing um it's just so much noise like this the signal to noise ratio in politics is terrible so um i mean i live in san francisco so you don't need to tell me twice yeah dc is like you know kind of i guess it's all politics in dc but um 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 truth-seeking, or your software or your hardware won't work. You can't fool math. Math and physics are rigorous judges. So I'm used to being in a maximally truth-seeking environment, and that's definitely not politics. So I'm glad to be back in technology. I guess I'm kind of curious, going back to the Zip2 moment, you had hundreds of millions of dollars, or you had an exit worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

I mean, I got $20 million. Right. Okay, so you solved the money problem, at least. And you basically took it, and you kept rolling with X.com, which became PayPal and Confinity. Yes. I kept the chips on the table. Yeah. Not everyone does that. A lot of the people in this room will have to make that decision, actually. What drove you to jump back into the ring? Well, I think I felt with Zip2, we built like incredible technology, but it never really got used.

Elon MuskYou know, 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 to consumer. um and that's what ended up being like x.com paypal uh essentially x.com merging with infinity which we together created paypal and and then uh that actually the sort of paypal diaspora uh has it might have created more companies than so more companies than probably any anything in the 21st century you know uh so so many talented people were at the combination of of confinity and x.com um so i just wanted to like i felt like uh we kind of got our wings clipped somewhat with zip2 and it's like okay what if our wings aren't clipped and we go direct to consumer and that's that's what um paypal ended up being um but uh yeah with uh i got that like 20 million dollar check for um for my share of zip2 at the time i was living with in a house with four housemates um and um had like 10 grand in the bank and then the this check arrives in the mail of all places like in the mail um and then and then my bank balance went from 10 000 to 20 million and 10 000 um you know like well okay um just like to pay taxes on that and all but uh then i ended up putting um almost all of that into x.com and as you said like just kind

of keeping almost all the chips on the table um and um yeah and then after paypal i was like well Well, I was kind of curious as to why we had not sent anyone to Mars. And I went on the NASA website to find out when we're sending people to Mars, and there was no date. I thought maybe it was just hard to find on the website. But in fact, there was no real plan to send people to Mars. So then, you know, this is such a long story, so I don't want to take up too much time here. I think we're all listening with rapt attention. so i was actually i was on the long island expressway with my friend adair resi we're like housemates in college and and they was asking me what i'm what we're gonna do what am i gonna do after paypal and i was like it's 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 commercial in space because that seemed like the purview of nations um so um but you know i'm kind of curious as to we're going to send people to mars and and that's when i was like oh it's on the website and i started digging on not there's nothing on the nasa website so then i started digging in and um and uh and i'm i'm definitely summarizing a lot here but um i i i uh my first idea was to do a philanthropic

mission to mars called life to mars where it would send a a small greenhouse with season dehydrated nutrient gel land land that on mars and grow you know hydrate the gel and then you'd have this this great sort of money shot of green plants on a red background um for the longest time i by the way i didn't realize money shot i think is a porn reference but uh but anyway the point is that that would be the great shot of green plants on a red background and to try to inspire uh you know nasa and the public to to send astronauts to to mars As I learned more, I came to realize, and along the way, by the way, I went to Russia in like 2001 and 2002 to buy ICBMs, which is like, that's an adventure.

You know, you go and meet with Russian high command and say, I'd like to buy some ICBMs. This was to get to space as a rocket. Not to nuke anyone, but they had to, as a result of arms reduction talks, they had to actually destroy a bunch of their big nuclear missiles. So I was like, well, how about if we take two of those, you know, minus the nuke, add an additional upper stage for Mars? But it was kind of trippy, you know, being in Moscow. what of 2001 negotiating with like the Russian military to buy ICVMs like that's crazy um and but they kept also like raising the price on me so that so like literally it's kind of like the opposite of what a negotiation should should do so I was like man these things are getting

Elon Muskreally expensive and 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 so without breaking the budget,

even breaking the NASA budget. So that's where I decided to start SpaceX to advance rocket technology to the point where we could send people to Mars. And that was in 2002. So that wasn't, you know, 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 sort of you know like a cat pulling on you know a string it just sort of the ball sort of unravels and it turns out this is yeah could be a very profitable business I mean it is now but it there there have been no prior example of really a rocket startup succeeding there have been various attempts to do commercial rocket companies and that all failed so um again with spacex starting spacex was uh really from the standpoint of like i think there's like a less than 10 chance of being successful maybe one percent i don't know um but um but if if if a startup doesn't do something to advance uh rocket technology it's definitely not coming from from the big defense contractors is because they just impedance match to the government and the government just wants to do very conventional things.

So it's either coming from a startup or it's not happening at all. So like a small chance of success is better than no chance of success. And so, yeah, so SpaceX started that in mid-2002, expecting to fail. Like I said, probably 90% chance of failing. And even like when recruiting people, So I didn't like try to, you know, make out that it would, well, I said, we're probably going to die. But a small chance we might not die. And if, but this is the only way to get people to Mars and advance the state of the art. And, 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're going to die and uh so then i ended up being chief engineer of the rocket and you know the first three flights did fail so it's a bit of a learning exercise there and um fourth one

Elon Muskfortunately worked but if the fourth one hadn't worked uh i had no money left and that would have been it would have been curtains so it was a pretty close thing if the fourth launch of falcon

not work it would have been just curtains and we would have just been joined the graveyard of prior rocket startups so it was like my estimate of success was not far off we just we made it by the skin of our teeth and tesla was happening sort of simultaneously like 2008 was a rough year because at mid-2008, we're called Summer 2008, the third launch of SpaceX had failed, our third failure in a row. The Tesla financing round had failed, and so Tesla was going bankrupt fast. It was just like, man, this is grim. This is going to be a tale of warning of an exercise in hubris. Probably throughout that period, a lot of people were saying, you know, Elon is a software guy. Why is he working on hardware? Why would he choose to work on this, right?

Yeah, 100%. So you can look at the, like, because it's still, you know, the press of that time is still online, you can just search it. And they kept calling me internet guy. So like, internet guy, aka fool, is attempting to build a rocket company. um so um you know um that we got ridiculed quite a lot um 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 it against him i was like yeah you know admittedly it does sound improbable and i agree that it's improbable um but fortunately the fourth launch worked and um and uh and nasa awarded us uh a contract to resupply the space station uh and i think that was like maybe i don't know december 22nd or it was like right before christmas um because even the fourth launch working wasn't enough to succeed you know nasa also needed we also needed a big contract to keep us alive so um so i got i got that call from like the the nasa nasa team and i literally we're rewarding you one of the contracts to resupply the space station i like literally blurted out i love you guys which is not normally you know what they hear um because it's usually pretty you know sober but i was like man this is a company saver and then uh we closed the

The Tesla financing round on the last hour of the last day that it was possible, which was 6 p.m. December 24th, 2008. We would have bounced payroll two days after Christmas if that round hadn't closed. So that was a nerve-wracking end of 2008, that's for sure. I guess from your PayPal and Zip2 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. I mean, the people in this room, 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? I generally think to try to be as useful as possible. It may sound trite, but it's so hard to be useful, especially to be useful to a lot of people. Where you say the area under the curve of total utility is like, how useful have you been to your fellow human beings times how many people? It's almost like the physics definition of true work. It's incredibly difficult to do that.

Elon MuskAnd I think if you aspire to do true work, your probability of success is much higher.

Like don't aspire to glory, aspire to work. How can you tell that it's true work? Like, 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 to come work for you, like what's the salient thing that you look for? Or if there are a few. That's a good question, I guess. I mean, in terms of your end product, you just have to say like, well, if this thing is successful, how useful will it be to how many people? and um that that's that's what i mean and and then you do you do whatever you know whether you're a ceo or any role in a startup you do whatever it takes to succeed like and just and just always be smash smashing your ego like like internalize responsibility um like a major failure mode is when uh ego to ability ratio um is double greater than sign one you know So...

Like, if your ego to ability ratio gets too high, then you're going to basically break the feedback loop to reality. And in AI terms, you'll break your RL loop. So you don't want to break your RL. You want to have a strong RL loop, which means internalizing responsibility and minimizing ego. And you do whatever the task is, no matter whether it's grand or humble. so i mean that's kind of like why actually i prefer the term like engineering as opposed to research i prefer the term and i don't i actually don't want it to call xai a lab i just want to be a company um i like it's like whatever the one of the simplest um most straightforward uh ideally lowest ego terms are those are generally a good way to go um So you want to just close the loop on reality hard.

That's a super big deal. I think everyone in this room really looks up to everything you've done around being sort of 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. Like other people, people who have never made anything, non-engineers uh 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 you know sort of area under the curve who are in your circle like you know how should people approach that like what has worked for you and what would you pass on like you know to to x to your children like you know what do you tell them when you're like you need to make your way in this world You know, here's how to construct a reality that is predictive from first principles.

Well, the tools of physics are incredibly helpful to understand and make progress in any field. And first principles obviously just means, you know, break things down to the fundamental axiomatic elements that are most likely to be true, and then reason up from there as cautiously as possible, as opposed to reasoning by analysis or metaphor. And then it just simple things like like thinking in the limit, like if you extrapolate, you know, minimize this thing or maximize that thing, thinking in the limit is very, very helpful. I'd use all the tools of physics. They apply to any field. This is like a superpower, actually.

So you can take, say, take, for example, like rockets. You can say, well, how much should a rocket cost? The typical approach that people would take to how much rockets 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 principles approach would be you look at the materials that the rocket is comprised of. So if that's aluminum, copper, carbon fiber, steel, whatever the case may be, and say, 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? And that sets the actual floor on what a rocket can cost. It can asymptotically approach the cost of the raw materials.

Elon MuskAnd then you realize, oh, actually, a rocket, the raw 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 raw material cost is only one or two percent. That would be a first principles analysis of the potential for cost optimization of a rocket. And that's before you get to reusability. You know, to give an AI sort of AI. Example, I guess. Last year, for XCI, when we were trying to build a training supercluster, we went to the various suppliers to ask, this is beginning of last year, that we needed 100,000 H100s to be able to train coherently, and their estimates for how long it would take to complete that were 18 to 24 months. it's like well we need to get that done in six months so then um or we won't be competitive so so then uh if you break that down what well what are the things you need well you need a building you need power you need cooling um we didn't have enough time to build a building from scratch so we've had to find an 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 15 megawatts and we needed 150 megawatts. So we rented 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 U.S. and put the chillers on the other side of the building. That didn't fully solve the problem because the power variations during training are very big. So you can have power can drop by 50% in 100 milliseconds, 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 smooth out the power variation during the training run. And then there were a bunch of networking challenges. The networking cables, if you're trying to make 100,000 GPUs train coherently, are very, very challenging. Almost it sounds like 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 if I don't get an answer that I feel good about, I'm going to not allow that to be, I'm not going to let that know to stand.

And is that, I mean, that feels like something that, you know, everyone, if someone were to try to do what you're doing in hardware, hardware seems to uniquely need this. In software, we have lots of, you know, fluff and things that, you know, it's like we can add more CPUs to that. It'll be fine. But in hardware, it's just not going to work. I think these general principles of first principle thinking apply to software and hardware, apply to anything really. i'm just using kind of a hardware example um of 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 uh we need power smoothing and then and then we could solve those constituent elements um but it was and then we and then we just ran the the networking operation to to do the cabling everything um in four shifts 24 7 and and i was like sleeping in the data center and also doing cabling myself um and and there were a lot of other issues to solve um you know nobody had done a training run with a hundred thousand um h100 training coherently last year maybe it's been done this year i don't know but um and then we ended up doubling that uh to 200

And so now we've got 150,000 H100s, 50K H200s, and 30K GB200s in the Memphis Training Center. And we're about to bring 110,000 GB200s online at a second data center also in the Memphis area. Is it your view that pre-training is still working and large... The scaling laws still hold, and whoever wins this race will have basically the biggest, smartest possible model that you could distill. Well, there's other various elements that decide competitiveness for large AI. There's 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 if they don't then you can't just plug them in so you've got to you've got to get a lot of gpus and have them um trained trained coherently and stably um then it's like 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 factors for if it's going to be like a large foundation model that's competitive um You know, as, as many have said, I, my friend Elias has said, you know, we've kind of run out of pre training data for human generated pre, like human generated data, you run out of tokens pretty fast, certainly of high quality tokens.

And, and then you and you have to do a lot of you need to essentially create synthetic data um and and be able to accurately judge the synthetic data that you're creating to verify like is this real synthetic data or is it an hallucination that doesn't actually match reality

Elon Muskum so achieving grounding in reality is is is tricky but but we're at the stage where there's more effort put into synthetic data um and like right now we're training grok 3.5 which is

a heavy focus on reasoning going back to your physics point uh what i heard for reasoning is that uh hard science particularly physics textbooks are very useful for reasoning whereas um i think researchers have told me that uh social science is totally useless for reasoning uh yes that's probably true um so yeah um there's something that's going to be very important in the future is combining deep AI in the data center or super cluster with robotics. So that, you know, things like, like the Optimus humanoid robot. Yeah, Optimus is awesome. There's gonna be so many humanoid robots and robots of all, 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 um and um is it true that you you're planning a robot army of a sort whether we do it or or you know whether tesla does it you know tesla works closely with xai um like you've seen how many humanoid robot startups are there like it's like i think jensen bong was on stage with a lot with a massive number of robots you know robots from different companies i think there was like a dozen different humanoid robots

so i mean i guess you know part of what i've been fighting and maybe what has slowed me down somewhat is that i'm a i'm a little i don't want i don't want to make terminator real you know so i've been sort of i guess at least until recent years dragging my feet on on ai and and humanoid robotics and then i sort of come to realize that realization it's happening whether i do it or not so you got really two choices participate you can either be a spectator or a participant it's like well i guess i'd rather be a participant than a spectator. So now it's, you know, pedal to the metal on humanoid robots and digital superintelligence. So I guess, you know, there's a third thing that everyone has heard you talk a lot about that I'm really a big fan of, you know, becoming a multi-planetary species.

Where does this fit? You know, this is all, you know, not just a 10 or 20 year thing, maybe a hundred year thing. Like it's a multi, you know, many, many generations for humanity kind of thing you know how do you think about it there's you know ai obviously there's embodied robotics and then there's being a multi-plant multi-planetary species does everything sort of feed into that last point or you know what what are you driven by right now for the next 10 20 and 100 years geez 100 years man i hope civilization's around in 100 years if if it is around it's going to look very different from civilization today um i mean i'd predict that there's going to be at least five times as many humanoid robots as there are humans maybe 10 times um and one way to look at the progress of civilization is percentage completion kardashev so if you're in a kardashev scale one you've um you've harnessed all the energy of a planet In my opinion, we've only harnessed maybe 1% or 2% of Earth's energy.

So we've got a long way to go to the Karshev scale 1. Then Karshev 2, you've harnessed all the energy of a sun, which would be, I don't know, a billion times more energy than Earth, maybe closer to a trillion. And then Karshev 3 would be all the energy of a galaxy. Pretty far from that. So we're at the very, very early stage of the intelligence Big Bang. I hope we're, in terms of being multi-planetary,

Elon MuskI think we'll have enough mass transferred to Mars within roughly 30 years to make Mars self-sustaining

such that Mars can continue to grow and prosper even if the resupply shifts from Earth stop coming. um and that that greatly increases the probable lifespan of civilization or consciousness and intelligence both biological and digital um so that's why i think it's important to become a multi-planet species and i'm somewhat troubled by the foamy paradox like why have we not seen any aliens and it could be because intelligence is incredibly rare um and maybe we're the only ones in this galaxy in which case the intelligence of consciousness is this tiny candle in a vast darkness and we should do everything possible to ensure the tiny candles candle does not go out and being a multi-planet species or making consciousness multi-planetary greatly improves the probable lifespan of civilization and it's it's 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. It could be that the Fermi paradox dictates once you get to some level of technology, you destroy yourself. How do we stay ourselves? How do we actually, what would you prescribe to, i mean a room full of engineers like what can we do to prevent that from happening yeah how do we avoid the great filters one of the great filters would obviously be global thermonuclear war uh so we should try to avoid that um i guess building benign ai robots that A.I. that loves humanity and.

you know, 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. How do you think about, you know, there's sort of this argument for open for safety versus closed for competitive edge. I mean, I think the great thing is you have a competitive model. Many other people also have competitive models. And in that sense, we're sort of 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 sort of collapse a lot of things. Whereas now we have choice, which is great. How do you think about this yeah i do think there will be several deep intelligences maybe at least five um maybe as much as 10 um i'm not sure that there's going to be hundreds but it's probably close like maybe there'll be like 10 or something like that um of which maybe four will be in the u.s I don't think it's going to be any one AI that has runaway capability but yeah, several deep intelligences What will these deep intelligences actually

be doing? Will it be scientific research or trying to hack each other? Probably all of the above um i mean hopefully they will discover new physics and i think they will very they're definitely going to invent new technologies um like i think i think we're quite close to digital super intelligence it may happen this year and if it doesn't happen this year next year for sure a digital super intelligence defined as smarter than any human at anything. Well, so how do we direct that to sort of super abundance? We could have robotic labor, we have cheap energy, intelligence on demand. Is that sort of the white pill? 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? I think it most likely will be a good outcome. I guess I'd sort of agree with Jeff Hinton that maybe it's a 10 to 20% chance of annihilation. But look on the bright side, that's 80 to 90% probability of a great outcome. So yeah, I can't emphasize this enough. A rigorous adherence to truth uh is is the most important thing for ai safety safety um and obviously empathy for humanity and life as we know it we haven't talked about neural link and uh at all

yet but i'm curious you know you're working on closing the input and output gap between humans and machines uh how critical is that to agi asi and you know once that link is made Can we not only read, but also write? The Neuralink is not necessary to solve digital superintelligence. That'll happen before Neuralink is at scale. But what Neuralink can effectively do is solve the input-output bandwidth constraints, especially our output bandwidth is very low.

Elon MuskThe sustained output of a human over the course of a day is less than one bit per second.

So there's 86,400 seconds in a day, and it's extremely rare for a human to output more than that number of symbols per day. So certainly for several days in a row. So you really, with a Neuralink interface, you can massively increase your output bandwidth and your input bandwidth. um input being right to you have to do right operations to the brain um we we have now five humans who have received the uh the kind of the read uh input where it's reading signals and you've got people with with als who um really have no they're tetraplegics but they they can now communicate at with similar bandwidth to a human with a fully functioning body and control their computer and phone which is pretty cool and then i think in the next six to 12 months we'll be doing our first implants for vision where even if somebody's completely blind we can write directly to um the uh the visual cortex um and 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 um 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 so you could see an infrared ultraviolet radar like a superpower

power situation. But like, at some point, the cybernetic implants wouldn't would not simply be correcting things that went wrong, but augmenting human capabilities dramatically. augmenting, augmenting intelligence and senses, and bandwidth dramatically. And that's, that's going to happen at some point. But digital superintelligence will happen well before that. At least if we have a neural link, we met we'll be able to appreciate the AI better. I guess one of the limiting reagents to all of your efforts across all of these different domains is access to the smartest possible people. But, you know, sort of simultaneous to that, we have, you know, the rocks can talk and reason and, you know, there may be 130 IQ now and they're probably going to be super intelligent soon.

How do you reconcile those two things? Like, what's going to happen in, you know, five, ten years, and what should the people in this room do to make sure that, you know, they're the ones who are creating instead of maybe below the API line? Well, they call 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 sum of human intelligence will be less than 1% of all intelligence. And if things get to leadership level two, we're talking about human intelligence, even assuming a significant increase in human population and intelligence augmentation, like massive intelligence augmentation, where like everyone has an IQ of a thousand type of thing.

Even in that circumstance, collective human intelligence will be probably one billionth that of digital intelligence. Anyway, where's the biological bootloader for digital superintelligence? I guess just to end off. Was I a good bootloader? Where do we go? How do we go from here? I mean, all of this is pretty wild sci-fi stuff that also could be built. by the people in this room, 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?

Well, as I started off with, I think if you're doing something useful, that's great. Just try to be as useful as possible to your fellow human beings. and that that then you're doing something good um i keep harping on this like focus on super truthful ai that that's the most important thing for ai safety um you know obviously if you know um anyone's interested in working at xai please please let us know um we're aiming to make grok um the maximally truth-seeking ai um and uh i think that's a very important thing um hopefully we can understand the nature of the universe that's really i guess what ai can hopefully tell us maybe ai can maybe tell us where are the aliens and what you know how did the universe really start how will it end what are the questions that we don't know that we should ask and um are we in a simulation or what level of simulation are we in well i think