Elon Musk on DOGE, Optimus, Starlink Smartphones, Evolving with AI, Why the West is Imploding

Which is a great segue. way optimus is i think going to be the greatest product in the history of humanity what's the progress like and how much of your how many of your cycles are going specifically to optimus what's the timeline i think you're on version three maybe four tell us everything uh well yeah i know everything would take a long time we've got time um we're we're finalizing the design of optimus version 3 and uh that really is going to be a very remarkable robot it will have the essentially the manual dexterity of a human so meaning a very complex hand and the a an AI mind that can navigate and comprehend reality and we made in very high volume those are the three things that are missing like if you see any other A robotics company, they're missing those three things. Those are the three really hard things. And I spent actually at this point, it might be more of my mental cycles than anything else, any other single thing, on Optimus.

that's solving for real-world AI, all of the electromechanical issues of Optimus, the supply chain and production challenges of it, because there is no supply chain that exists for humanoid robots. So we have to recreate it from scratch, which requires doing a lot of vertical integration. um none of the actuators in optimus um are available from an existing supply chain um so but i i think it is accurate to say that if successful optimus will be the biggest product ever and the cost of it at scale 20 30 40 000 a robot what do you think the first wave of them will cost, and when will we be able to buy one to work on the ranch?

I think that the marginal cost of production, once you hit a million units per year, is probably around the $20,000 range. It sort of depends on how much you spend on the AI chip in the robot. and you need to achieve a lot of efficiencies in the actuators there are 26 actuators per arm like 26 electric like motors gearboxes and power electronics so so but the the the AI chip will be pretty expensive it like that that might be like five five or six thousand dollars of the of the bill of materials maybe more um and um but but so i but i think at volume at a million units a year the the production cost is probably on the order of twenty thousand dollars maybe 25 something like that and um the price will be as a function of demand ilan um can you maybe explain to everybody why the hand is so important to get right and why you know the actuator design is so unique and you know why it's so difficult why nobody makes it and why you have to start there almost to build the rest of the the robot properly well it turns out the human hands are incredibly that they've evolved to this to be this incredibly sophisticated machine like the your hand is an actually a remarkable thing it's look look closely

at your hands and think of all the things you can do with your hands, which is a lot. I can think of many things. Yeah, I was just thinking about something. You know, your hand's a very versatile instrument. Yeah. You can give him a high five. Very versatile. You know, you can swing a baseball bat. You can thread needles. You can put thread in a needle. you can play the piano with violin you know you could disassemble or assemble a car the hands are incredibly versatile instruments and most of the muscles of the hand are actually in the forearm so your hand is kind of like a like a like it's like a puppet like it's mostly a puppet the muscle the muscles are coming from the forearm and the pulling the tendons uh which are you know also human tendon designing or human tendon evolution is incredibly good um so you've got this web of tendons you've you've got um i think i think the human hand is something like depending on how you count it 27 or 28 degrees of freedom in the hand, it's amazing.

So in order to create a robot that can be a generalized humanoid, you must solve the hands problem. Yeah, we had Aria. It's got hands, knees hands. And so is it like when you were first building Tesla where the supply chain doesn't exist and now you have to go out and find folks to work with and, you know, build all this vertical integration, get support? Is it literally like it's just nowhere to be found and you're going to have to build all of this stuff up? Yes. We could not actually buy the actuators for any amount of money. They simply didn't exist. Even though there are, I don't know, 10,000, 20,000 electric motors out there of various sizes and shapes,

Elon Muskwe've had to design every electric motor gearbox and the controlling electronics from scratch, basically from physics first principles the good news is you've got a lot of experience with

factories over the last couple of decades so yeah how challenging is this versus cybertruck model y model gigafactory you know the yeah the fabergé egg known as the model x yeah right um it's harder than any of those things okay yeah much harder Significantly, yeah. Yes. Harder than Starship? No, not hard. Starship's harder. Okay. So somewhere between a Model X and a Starship. Yeah. What's harder, the hardware or the software? Right now we're struggling with the final design of the hardware. Like I said, it's really primarily the hand. And not to just dismiss the rest of the robot, the rest of it's also important, but the hands are, the hands inclusive of the forearm are a majority of the engineering difficulty of the entire robot.

And then let's assume you get past the hardware challenges. How much do you sort of get for free based on all the progress that's happening with LLMs? Will, you know, will consumers just be able to interact with this, talk to the robot, ask it to do things, it'll understand and sort of... Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no problem. You're spending a lot of time with Annie, I noticed, online. Not that long. Maybe I went a little over the top from wanting Grok Imagine. Well, but in all seriousness, those characters and these robots, that seems to be, you know, like maybe they... You could get the embodiments of Annie, I suppose.

Yeah. Why the human form factor, Elon? You could make something that's maybe better than a human or maybe simpler than a human to do specific tasks And maybe better than a human to do more things than a human can do. How'd you decide to make it just like a human? Well, if you wanted to do all the things that a human can do, it turns out you need a humanoid robot So if you wanted to do a subset That's much easier But But it turns out humans evolved to the shape and capabilities that we have for good reasons. Actually there is value to having four fingers and a thumb. And even the pinky actually is quite useful.

will. Um. Toes are much more of a question mark, but the fingers... Well, also, humans have designed the world as well, so we designed it for us. For us, exactly. If you can make a humanoid robot, it'll be immediately backwards compatible with what we've built the world for. Precisely. Elon, there's another part of the robot. So there's the LLMs, there's the actuation, the hands, but also there's the silicon that runs it. And there was, you know, Dojo, I think you posted on X, AI5 and AI6, and it just seemed like you were incredibly excited about the direction in which the silicon layer was also going. Can you tell us about that and what that is? And what are we building here? What is being built? Is it a complement to everything that exists in the world? Is it a potential long-term competitor what is it um yeah so at tesla we basically had two different chip programs one dojo and one uh dojo on the training side and then what we call you know ai4 it's just our inference chip um uh that the ai4 is currently shipping in all vehicles and we're finalizing the design of AI5, which will be an immense jump from

Elon MuskAI4. By some metrics, the improvement in AI5 will be 40 times better than AI4.

Wow. So 40%, 40 times. And this is because we work so closely at a very fine-grained level on the AI software and the AI hardware. So we know exactly where the limiting factors are. And so effectively, the AI hardware and software teams are co-designing the chip. So a 40x improvement in the silicon, I think then as everybody here in the audience experiences it, is that just almost like an order of magnitude increase in the quality of FSD and the safety that you experience as a Tesla driver and then the quality of the robot? Where does it all manifest when you bring it up and actually get it into production?

Yeah, to be precise, the 40X is on, if you say, compared to the worst limitation on AI4, which is running the Softmax operation. We currently have to run Softmax in around 40 steps in emulation mode, whereas that'll just be done in a few steps natively in AI5. um ai5 chip will also be uh easily handle mixed precision uh models so you don't have it'll dynamically handle mixed precision there's a bunch of sort of technical stuff that ai5 will do a lot better um in terms of of nominal sort of uh raw compute it's it's eight times more compute um about nine times more memory uh roughly five times more memory bandwidth So, but because we're addressing some core limitations in AI4, you multiply that by that 8x compute improvement by another 5x improvement because of optimization at a very fine-grained silicon level of things that are currently suboptimal in AI4.

That's where you get the 40x improvement. You had, oh, keep going. So now that said, I am confident that the current chips, AI4 chips that are in the cars, will achieve self-driving safety that is at least two to three times that of human and maybe even 10x. And the software that will be released for that is coming out over the next few months. months so version 14 will be the biggest uh upgrade in tesla software since version 12. we are increasing the parameter count by an order of magnitude um the there's this there's a lot of uh reinforcement learning that's been used as um you can think of AI as a way of compressing reality and some of those compression steps were too lossy and we addressed the lossiness in the compression steps so these are all software updates that'll go out so just over there are updates your car is going to feel like it is sentient by the end of the year it feels that way already to be honest um i saw in the trades that you spent about 17 billion dollars on some spectrum and that um yeah um so some couch change um to enable your satellites and the starlink network to connect directly with phones what will that look like in a year or two are we going to drop

our Verizon account and just expand our Starlink account? We're kind of hoping because Verizon kind of sucks. How many of you want a Starlink phone? Who wants a Starlink phone? Is it technically possible? Elon, I know you can't see it, but it's everyone. Yeah, it's everyone. All right, cool. So this is kind of a long-term thing. It will allow SpaceX to deliver high bandwidth connectivity directly from the satellites to the phones, but there are hardware changes that need to happen in the phone. So since these frequencies are not supported in current phones, the chipset has to be modified to add these frequencies.

And that probably is a two-year time frame.

Elon MuskSo the phones that are able to use the spectrum that was acquired probably start shipping in around two years.

And then we also need to pull the satellites that are going to communicate on those frequencies. So in parallel, we're building the satellites and working with the handset makers to add these frequencies to the phones. And then the satellites and the phones will then handshake very well to achieve high bandwidth connectivity. But the net effect is that you should be able to watch videos anywhere on your phone. Wow. That's going to be crazy. And do these frequencies, would they work indoors inside buildings, you know, like your phone currently does? Okay. and so will you be able to have basically like if you if you're in a building with it with a like a thick metal roof then no but no the same the same types of yeah yeah normal normal homes yes yes elon is your vision for this that instead of you know having an at&t account or and then roaming when you're in the uk or you're in india it's just we could have one direct deal with starlink it works all over the world eventually not today but at some point is that the end goal that basically, we don't need a regional carrier, we have a global carrier, and that would be you?

That would be one of the options. To be clear, we're not going to put the other carriers out of business. They're still going to be around, because they own a lot of Spectrum. But yes, you should be able to have a Starlink, like you have an AT&T or P-Mobile or Verizon or whatever, you could have an account with Starlink that works with your Starlink antenna at home with Wi-Fi as well as on your phone. And, yeah, it would be a comprehensive solution for high bandwidth at home and for high bandwidth direct to sell. Could you buy some carriers to have more spectrum? Maybe you could buy Verizon? Not out of the question, I suppose, if that may happen.

Let's talk about Starship. You just had a really, what appeared to be a phenomenal launch. how close is it to you know being predictable and ready to go in a commercial setting I think we'll recover the ship next year we've got one more launch of the Starlink version 2 as a stack but there's only one one booster and ship left that's in the version 2 design and then thereafter it's version 3 which is a gigantic upgrade because that's got Raptor 3 and pretty much everything changes on the rocket with version 3 so version 3 might have some initial teething pains because it's such a radical redesign but it's capable of over 100 tons to orbit fully reusable And I think unless we have some very major setbacks, SpaceX will demonstrate full reusability next year, catching both the booster and the ship, and being able to deliver over 100 tons to a useful orbit.

What does the best rocket in the world do now in terms of tonnage to space? uh well in terms of uh sort of commercial rockets there's falcon heavy yeah uh which we'll do uh in um with with side booster reuse uh we'll do about 40 tons so this is five times bigger yeah well two and a half times bigger but starship would be full reuse full reusability got it okay So everything comes back. Elon, after the explosion that happened with the failed launch, there was a lot of... Which one? Sorry? Which failed one? Oh, the more recent one. The more recent with the Starship head. The big boom. The big boom on the base.

And there was a lot of proclamations that there's going to be environmental and FAA and all these other sorts. The recovery back to the launch pad again was incredibly fast. How did you get back so fast, not just technically and work-wise, but just regulatory clearance-wise? Because they said there were going to be all these questions and reviews and so on. How did you guys manage that? Well, there were a lot of questions and reviews. We got through them all. And credit to the SpaceX team. They worked incredibly hard, and they got the next driven booster tested and on the pad and flown. And huge credit to the SpaceX team.

Very proud of them for doing such a job, a great job recovering. I mean, creating a fully reusable orbital rocket is one of the hottest engineering problems ever. it's certainly you know a candidate for most difficult engineering project ever you know it's on the podium at least um so it's a that that's been the goal of spacex from the beginning from 2002 um and here we are 23 years later so it's it's a long journey and um with with a super talent like by far the i think the most talented group of rocket of engineers that's ever been assembled. And we're finally, next year, I think we'll be able to achieve full reusability.

Elon, what are the big technical blockers that you're focused on there between now and that full reusability? Are there some showstoppers where you're just kind of literally just obsessing over trying to figure out still, or is it more about getting through a laundry list of your learnings and just integrating it into the next launch? Well, for full reusability of the ship,

Elon Muskthere's still a lot of work that remains on the heat shield.

So no one's ever made a fully reusable orbital heat shield. Like the shuttle heat shield had to go through nine months of repair after every flight. Right. So no one's ever made a fully reusable orbital heat shield. shield and is that a material science problem or is that an engineering problem or both uh yeah i mean it's a material science engineering problem so it's but we really are uh looking at the fundamental physics here um again physics first principles and trying to figure out how do we to make something that is, you know, it can withstand the heat, is very light, doesn't transmit the heat to the primary structure, and all the tiles stay on and they don't crack, and then as you ascend if you hit some rain the tiles don't dissolve in rain there's a lot of different issues and then you really need to know that these tiles are working, you can't go through this laborious inspection so it really needs to be these tens of thousands of tiles all work and don't need to be republished or checked one by one.

That was the case with the shuttle. Can we maybe switch now? I mean, who else were you talking about Tesla? Then you go to SpaceX. Yeah. Now, I'd like to ask you some questions about Grok and XAI. You want to just give us an update? I think you kind of talked about where the next-gen model is, and you said something incredible. I still don't think people really understand it, which is there's going to be a next training run where you expect not to start from the common web and common crawl, where you expected an enormous amount of synthetic data. Just tell us about how the evolution of Grok is going and this innovation and why it's so important.

Yeah, so we're using a lot of inference compute and reasoning to look at all of the source data, which is really the corpus of human knowledge. And then thinking about each piece of information and then adding what's missing and correcting mistakes and removing falsehoods from that training data. So if you take, say, Wikipedia as an example, but this really applies to books, PDFs, uh the websites uh every form of information um the grok is using um heavy amounts of inference compute let's say to look at as an example a wikipedia page and say uh what is true partially true or false or missing in this page. Now rewrite.

Elon Muskthe page to correct, remove the falsehoods, correct the half-truths, and add the missing context.

Elon, by the way, could you just publish that? Could we create like a Grokipedia? Yeah, especially for our bio pages, which are a disaster. Wikipedia is so biased, and it's a constant war. If something gets corrected five minutes later, there'll be an army of people trying to... I mean, it's become hyper-partisan, and there's activists all over it. So if you do fix, for example, Wikipedia as a source of truth, it'd be great to publish that just so the world has it. All right, I'll talk to you about that. So talk to the team about that, like Grokpedia or whatever. Here's the Grokpedia version. It'd be interesting, yeah.

And then just have it out there for a few minutes. In terms of, people here like it, in terms of training Grok5, you're scaling up your supercluster in Colossus in Memphis. Colossus 2 now, yeah. We have a second one. Yeah, could you give us an update on that? And then also, as part of that, where are we in the scaling laws? If you scale a bigger cluster, do you get a more powerful AI model? Is there a point of diminishing returns? or like how much more compute, if you throw twice as much compute at it, do you get a 10% better model? Do you get a 100% better model? Like, is it log linear? What, I guess, how much more juice is there left in scaling hardware, do you think?

I think there's a natural logarithmic function associated with the amount of compute.

Elon MuskSo then like say for argument's sake, like 10x more compute will double the intelligence.

Maybe that might be a rough rule of thumb. But, you know, that still means that, you know, you go from 100 IQ to 200 IQ. It's still a pretty big deal. So, and I think we'll see intelligence continue to scale all the way up to where, you know, most of the power of the sun is fondest for compute and then ultimately most of the power of the galaxy. You know, sort of Kardashev-2, Kardashev-3 scale compute. So I guess once you think about artificial intelligence not as sort of this, you know, a destination that you reach, but really as part of the overall escalation of intelligence that we are aware of.

um you know human intelligence has also scaled as you have as the population has increased um and we've been able to store more and more information uh human intelligence has scaled now human because of population declines and low birth rate human intelligence is is somewhat plateauing and will actually decline and my guess is that i i i think that we might have AI smarter than any single human at anything as soon as next year. Wow. And then probably within five like say 2030 probably AI is smarter than the sum of all humans. Do you think humans are on the decline because the AI is evolving? Do you think there's this evolution of the ecosystem on Earth that's underway that we don't really understand the structure of what's going on but yeah maybe we implicitly know that it's coming yeah I mean, I hope the birth rates turn around. I'm a big proponent of increased birth rate, obviously.

Well, are you doing anything about it or no? Yeah, I'm trying to set a good example. You know, we had a big conversation at this conference we didn't expect, which is suicidal empathy, the West, this declining birth rate. I noticed you've been pretty active about it. and open borders and open borders like let the invaders in tucker talk could all three of those be the same thing it seems like there's a number of symptoms of the west being suicidal the most obvious one being the birth rate is not a replacement level so obviously if that continues indefinitely then the west will literally not reproduce enough to replace itself but there's other things too there's the fact that the borders were totally opened to the point where western culture the social fabric started to come apart and you see this especially in europe where they're you know the indigenous cultures of the uk or france or germany are starting to potentially be taken over by by cultures of people who are brought in and aren't assimilating you have crime where you know we have this case on social media right now this young woman irena who's just killed in a senseless way on a subway which is horrific enough in and of itself but then

in addition to that the elite media just for whatever reason just refused to cover it like it didn't exist so you have this issue of crime that's not being addressed or even acknowledged and no acknowledgement of this like it's almost like we're trying to deny the reality of the spiral and this yeah so you have the you have all these data points um that seem to suggest that um the west uh is suicidal or doesn't you know doesn't seem to want to defend itself or propagate itself um look i think everyone in this room thinks that um life is awesome right i mean it's pretty great and i think worth living yeah and when i when alex carp was here earlier today defending the west that got some of the loudest applause at the conference so uh i guess we probably don't really understand what's going on we don't really yeah what's your take elon because you know what's your take on the suicide of the west yeah what's what's i'm very worried about it yeah i'm very worried about it um you know i think there's uh there's let's just say that the actions of the West are indistinguishable from suicide so it's at least in America there's generally a sense of optimism but when's the last time you talked to someone from Europe who lives in Europe

who's optimistic not for a while decades even one it's rare so I think unless people have a sense of optimism and purpose about the future they suicide might be just what happens like like like having a child is an act of optimism about the future so if you're not optimistic this yeah so so I think we need to maybe give people a sense of optimism and excitement about the future and I believe that the future will be better than the past um and they'll be more interested in having kids did did religion play a role in the past elon to kind of placate and make folks feel that way when they yeah i think so uh nature abhors a vacuum and if you take away religion then i think you actually you you you get something in its place which is actually worse than what was there before i mean it's like destructive basically you get you get like the white work Mindvirus, filling the hole that religion used to have, taking the place of religion. You get these dystopian de facto religions that are very self-destructive.

um so i i think perhaps some some sort of revival of religion or at least what we need is is um some coherent philosophy that people can get excited about um you know i mean for me it's a philosophy of curiosity i'm curious about the nature of the universe and i want to go out there and I want humanity to be out there exploring the stars maybe meeting alien civilizations maybe in some cases we see the ruins of a long dead alien civilization but they were very strong for 10 million years you know the kind of stuff that you see in Star Trek in a non-dystopian sci-fi book or movie or show and so I'm just out of the philosophy of curiosity of like I just want to know what's going on and in order to know what's going on we must have an increase in the scope and scale of consciousness we must expand consciousness we must grow humanity and we must extend humanity in order to comprehend to understand the universe or even what questions we should ask about the answer that is the universe Douglas Adams John's book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is actually a deep book on philosophy disguised as humor. And the point he was trying to make in that book was that the questions are really the hard part. The answer is the universe. The answer is everything you see

around you. But what are the questions that we don't know to ask? Now, some of the questions I guess I do know, I'd like to know, is the standard model of physics correct about the origins of the universe? Are we actually 13.8 billion years old? How does the universe end? Does it end in a heat death or in some other way? Are we in a black hole? We might be. Elon, can you talk about the whole sort of simulation question? Are we a simulation? Maybe. Where do you think we find the answer first? In AI or in the stars? Because you're pursuing both, obviously. Yeah, I don't know if, I hope more people can get behind a philosophy of curiosity, because I think it's very exciting, and inherently optimistic.

because there's this amazing sense of wonder about the nature of the universe and when you uncover some secrets of the universe that's amazing and you're like, a whole world of understanding has opened up I mean we used to not even know where all the continents were you know it used to be like, just the map would be there'd be dragons, and all we know is that When they sailed in that direction, they didn't come back. I mean, the moon base. That's all they knew. I kind of feel like the moon base or just going to the moon for real this time would be a big step in the right direction. You still have the moon planned?

What's the status of that? Is that still on the agenda? Yeah, I think we want to try to reach new heights as a civilization. So I think it's fine to go to the moon, But we should go to the moon in order to establish a lunar base, like a lunar. research base yeah um i mean there are parts of the moon that are perhaps older than parts of of earth um and we might understand more about the nature of the universe if we had a science base on the moon that would be very cool and then we obviously want to go beyond the moon to mars and uh will they self-sustaining city on mars the i i do think that uh that there is a fork in the road of human destiny where if we can establish a self-sustaining city on mars

Elon Muskwith the the key test being if the resupply shifts from earth stop coming for any reason does mars continue to to prosper or does it die out at the point at which mars is able to

prosper and grow on its own the probable lifespan of consciousness is dramatically greater because we are no longer dependent on everything going right on earth you know there's there's always some possibility of self-annihilation on earth with the world war three or or super virus or um or or a meteor like extinct but you know that destroyed the dinosaurs we know from the fossil record that there have been many mass mass extinction events so uh the question that i sort of i'm always wondering about is will civilization in will the civilizational arc continue to ascend such that we can make mars self-sustaining before the civil civilizational arc descends because the the window of opportunity to make life multi-planetary exists now for the first time in the four and a half billion year history of earth yeah ilan let's assume that we get there and you're there, you know, you'd be the elder statesman, you'd have the moral authority of Mars.

How do you run Mars? But there's a point that I think I want to just emphasize again that it's more important than the form of governance on Mars or who's there in the early days. What really matters is that Mars is self-sustaining, that we are truly a multi-planet species, and such that we've achieved planetary redundancy. And obviously, we should do everything possible to make sure life on Earth is great, but there's always some risk of an annihilation event on Earth. Like I said, self-annihilation or some natural disaster. and uh and so the the probable lifespan of consciousness increases dramatically as soon as uh as soon as we are multi-planet species with the key test being can mars survive if the resupply ships stop coming so it's so getting like the first missions to mars are not that important the what matters is can you get sufficient tonnage tonnage to mars such that that Mars can prosper on its own.

And that means it has to have all of the ingredients of civilization. It's not just that you need to build, for example, a chip factory on Mars or ship fab on Mars, but you need the ability to build chip fabs. Do you have a sense of the time scale? Like, let's assume Starship is out of state starting in, you know, 2026, then there's gonna be a bunch of testing, obviously. There's gonna be a bunch of early testing. We only have certain launch windows. So there's a bunch of time constraints. Is this a 50-year thing in your mind? Is it a 150-year thing? Is it something that is for our generation?

Or is it our children's generation? Where do you see that point if it's optimally possible? You know, if things go and break our way. I think it can be done in 30 years. Wow. Provided there's an exponential increase in the tonnage to Mars with each successive Mars transfer windows, which is every two years. So every two years, the planets align and you can transfer to Mars. So I think in roughly 15, but maybe as few as 10, but 10 to 15-ish Mars transfer windows, if you're seeing exponential increases in the tonnage to Mars with each MOS transfer window, then it should be possible to make MOS self-sustaining in about, quote, roughly 25 years.

Amazing. That's incredible. All right, ladies and gentlemen, Elon Musk. We'll see you when we're back in town. We miss you. See you in person next time. Thank you, brother. Thank you, Elon.