‘Tesla AI Is Actually Very Advanced:’ Elon Musk on AI, China, Twitter and More | WSJ

Elon hello welcome are you in Palo Alto I understand yeah first well a Global Engineering headquarters in Palo Alto great well thank you so much for joining us um I'm actually going to start somewhere a little bit differently than I expected um because I just saw on Twitter on Twitter um a little announcement um I would love to get your your thoughts on it I see your uh interviewing Rhonda santis tomorrow morning is that right on Twitter spaces I see yes it's uh I need like the exact time but oh tomorrow morning your time I think it would be probably correct okay um so uh yes I um will be interviewing um Ron Santos and he has quite an announcement to make um and we'll be we're the first time that's something like this is happening on social media and with the real-time questions and answers uh no not scripted uh so it's Gonna Be Live and Let Let let's see what happens foreign and you've been tweeting some Tim Scott stuff in the last few days um what should we be thinking about who you're backing obviously this interview tells us something can you give us a sense of where your thinking is at the moment yes I mean I'm not at this time um planning to endorse any particular cancer um but I am interested in uh you know X slash Twitter being somewhat of a public town square and uh where more and more organizations host content and make announcements on Twitter um it's the it's the only place on the internet to really get uh real-time like down to the minute and second news and it's uh yeah so I think it's it's quite groundbreaking that there'd be um a major announcement of this type on social media um and should we expect um sorry I don't want to go on too long about this but um in your new role as interviewer rather than interviewee uh should we expect um uh should we expect more of this I mean if it's the Town Square are you going to be interviewing other candidates Democrats what's your what's your thought of this are people willing to come are you going to be there to execute the Town Square across the Spectrum yes absolutely um so just as I as I promised when I do a series of media interviews I did a range of interviews um and uh I guess this would be also a media interview um so ranging from sort of on the you know left moderate to what's considered right um and I do think it's important that Twitter be uh have both the reality and the procession of uh Level Playing Field of uh a place where uh all voices are heard and where uh as the kind of dynamic interaction that is you don't really see anywhere else um I'll meet you today on Twitter for example um uh AOC got into an and Ted Cruz got into an argument on Twitter which was um yeah independent of which side do you agree with um it's still very entertaining so what um and I'm sure tomorrow will be entertaining we're all going to be tuned into that but um when you when you approach an interview like that and and obviously a really important election like the one that is coming up you can you just talk a little bit about what are the key issues that really matter for you at this pivotal moment you can matter for me as an individual or matter for you as an individual um in terms of who leads the country but also you know more broadly than that you know for the country and for for your businesses I mean can you give your sense of of where the real issues lie here well I've said publicly that um my preference and I think would be the preference of most Americans is really to have someone fairly normal in office I think we'd all be quite uh quite happy with that actually um you know I think someone that uh is representative of the moderate views that I think most the country holds in reality um and um but but the way things are set up is that we we do have a system that seems to push things towards the edges because of the primaries so in order to win the primary you've got to win obviously majority of your parties vote in both cases that tends to cause a swing to the left and the right although I think things are more complex than simply left and right during the primaries and then uh and then let's shift towards the center for the Journal election um as far uh what what I think is yeah so I would really just like someone you know fairly normal accessible to be the president that would be great so if we go through the if we go through the four names in the frame at the moment can you just give a sort of yes no whether they're normal and sensible um so um we've got Joe Biden I I think you know be careful about these statements um so I uh we'd maybe have to have a few drinks before I would give you the answers I will um I will look forward to that and I look forward to the uh to the conversation tomorrow and obviously a lot more of those to come over the coming months so um that's great thank you very much um so what I wanted to start with you've just flown in I think in the last 20 minutes um you live a pretty hectic lifestyle um but you've said that the only true currency is time can you give a sense to the people in this room who are scheduled within an inch of their lives sort of how you you what is a day in the life of Elon Musk what does that look like well weddings are very long and complicated as you might imagine yeah um and um and there's a great there's a great deal of context switching so um doesn't mean my life called like relating to Doom where it's like fear is not the mind killer context switching is uh so switching context is is quite painful but um I do generally try to divide uh companies that's predominantly one company on one day so today is a Tesla day for example um although I might end up at Twitter late tonight um and then tomorrow would be partly a Tesla day as well have Twitter and um and then Thursday would be sort of a half SpaceX have Tesla day but these things are somewhat intertwined so the time management is extremely difficult um and this is going to sound pretty strange but I um I only have one uh part-time assistant um how many days a week is that the part-time I mean I suppose I suppose how she works who were technically full-time but as such I I do most of the scheduling uh myself um and the reason I do that is because it's impossible for someone else to know what the priorities are um so the and since the most valuable thing I have is time I schedule it myself for the most part so if you come into Tesla today do you have a series of meetings set up or do you um come in with you know something on your mind and you go in and see people I mean how structured is this or if you shop at Twitter in terms of the people working for you how do they how do they handle that um yeah so today I have several hours of scheduled meetings at Twitter um so there are a number of of things that are operated on a weekly Cadence um and so those meetings are already set up and then I have supplemental meetings at the end of the day um particularly I I I I won't be going to sleep until probably 2 A.M or something like that and be working almost the entire time and if you're shaking this yourself is AI going to be helpful over the next few years to help you um do this and you're going to be using technology to help you manage that I guess we'll all be using technology I don't use a lot of AI myself day-to-day I mean Tesla AI is actually very Advanced for real world AI it's the most advanced remote World AI um by far um and in fact if positions were swapped and it would say up to Microsoft and open AI to create uh who could create the best large language model basically if the tests were swapped Tesla was given that the task of making the most competitive large language model and Microsoft open AI were tasked with self-driving Tesla would win okay I don't think people understand the degree of depict the capability of Tesla's AI system so while I don't use AI a lot personally Tesla uses a trans mount we'll get on to that in a second if that's okay but one final thing in terms of just the management of what you do with your life you're running three very big companies you have very big stakes and you know ownership control of of two of those at least um what is your succession plan if you suddenly call and execute what you're doing both in terms of who runs the companies but as importantly who votes those shares in terms of um you know what happens longer term and strategically what have you got a plan for all of those yeah um succession is one of the toughest age-old problems um you know it's it's a it's plagued um you know countries Kings Prime Ministers and presidents for and CEOs for you know since the dawn of History um there is no obvious solution I I mean there are particular individuals identified as that that I've told people would look if something happens to me unexpectedly this is who my this is my recommendation for taking over so in all cases the board is aware of of who my recommendation is which they may choose to it's up to them of course they they may choose to go a different direction but I they there is a in in worst case scenario this is who should run a company uh the control question is a much more it's a much tougher question um and something that I'm wrestling with and I'm frankly open to ideas because it certainly is true that the companies that I have created and are creating um collectively possess uh immense capability and so the stewardship of them is incredibly important um I want to make sure that the stewardship is ultimately uh accrues the benefit of humanity that's the idea is the tolerance of civilization um but they're not that we're always successful in that but that is aspirationally our goal um so um I I have one one idea which is sort of partly in place which is to create kind of a an a sort of a educational institution that that would control um most of my vote um but this is this is not a case of um automatically I I'm definitely not not of the school of automatically giving my kids a you know some share of the companies even if they are not even if they have no interest or inclination you know or ability to to manage the companies I think that's a mistake um so but but it's a very hard problem to solve right so and then who should be on the board of directors of the educational institution is also a very very hard job to solve um so I think probably some disaggregation of control would make sense I'm really just kind of thinking out loud creatively here but it sounds like it's something that you I mean you need to get planning of who those people are going to be because as you've said whether when you look at SpaceX you look at Tesla you look at Twitter these these matter to society a lot and having the right people to take those votes on the future of where they go and where money gets spent is is fairly important yes absolutely now the goals of the companies they're the achievement of those goals varies considerably in difficulty um you know the the original goal of Tesla was to accelerate the Advent of sustainable energy which actually I think we've done done that to a significant degree um and have actually it's kind of of uh it's kind of it's kind of a order industry CEOs too often acknowledge Tesla's role in accelerating electric vehicles um and um yeah so so that that I feel has a lot of momentum um they're still solving self-driving which were you know aspirationally hoping to do this year uh and um and so it has got a long way to go but but the execution plan is relatively clear um and uh the next that execution plan will generate a lot of positive cash flow for the company so it's like if it's a fairly obvious thing to do with SpaceX it's a harder problem because uh the long-term objective is to make life multi-planetary with a self-sustaining City on Mars which is likely to be very casual or negative uh at first a long term let's just say the target market on Mars is small you got to think long term yeah you're also going to have to get on very well with those you go with I would imagine uh yes definitely um you know sanity will be a prime requirement for uh and stability for traveling to Mars you don't want someone going nuts and opening the airlock in the middle of the night um right so SpaceX is a harder problem because it's it's uh much a long-term goal and and with uh a lot more money less along the way so gotta make sure that that happens um and is that the sort of thing just to stay on SpaceX and we'll go to Twitter and tell us in a second but um is that the sort of thing that you'd like to lock in to the goals of SpaceX that Mars Remains the ultimate um ambition of this come what may is that is that that important to you yeah I mean it's to make light multi-planetary such that um and the key threshold for multi-planatory is that if the supply ships from Earth stop coming for any reason that a Mars does not die out that's that's the that's the critical great filter if you talk about things in terms of the Fermi Paradox the great filter is um Mars being self-sustaining without any resupply shows from Earth until we reach that point we're really just a one planet civilization with uh an extension but the point in which the planets are self-sustaining Oman is self-sustaining then even in a worst case scenario of of Earth civilization either dying with a bang or a whimper um then Mars would have a much better chance of surviving um so the intent here overall is to ensure the light of Consciousness which appears to be just a tiny candle and a vast Darkness um I frequently I frequently get asked have I seen any evidence of aliens and I I I'm not um you know apart from the fact that I didn't at one point have an alien registration card when I was getting my uh green green card uh it's an alien registration um indeed possibly a slightly different type of alien but um so do you think you'll will you live to see Mars happen I I hope to love to see the first humans on Mars um but I think it'll take some period of time beyond that to make my self-sustaining so it's at least 20 years from the first visit to make my sustain as my guess and it may be 40 or 50. and that's assuming you really go for it right so that's a tough one um but like so I think important for improving the survivability of civilization and who's going to pay for that I mean are your investors gonna put the money up to do that are you going to expect government to fund that where does that money come from because as you say you can make a return on starlink you can make a return on launching satellites for other people and space tourism but I mean that's a that's a tougher return Isn't it yeah I think I think long term uh the value of it will be incredibly high I would just it's just beyond the planning Horizon of most people or most investors so um I mean obviously if um if there's a thriving um City on Mars and there's a lot of interplanetary Commerce and SpaceX is the primary provider of that it would be immensely valuable um so um but but you know the one thing is that at the be this self-sustaining you know Colony um and um I think we we I think we uh generally operate with too much of an assumption that Civilization is robust um and nothing could really take it down uh a sentiment that has been common throughout history among Empires shortly before they called it so and you know I have to say that you know there's a little bit of late stage Empire Vibes going on right now um uh yeah for sure are you um yeah um uh is is AI something that in your view accelerates the risk of that or increases the risk of that at that outcome I think it does yeah um I mean we could definitely make a city of Mars self-sustaining without without AI or without sort of AGI which is generally artificial general intelligence or super intelligence I have so I think that that is uh it's not necessary for anything we're doing um but it is happening and happening very quickly so uh there is a risk that uh Advanced AI um either eliminates or constrains Humanities growth I was more thinking the opposite does it increase the chance that plant the planet self input implodes and those things come true you I mean how concerned are you about these developments right now sort of accelerating your your bad case scenario here well uh I mean the development of artificial digital sort of super intelligence uh is very much a double-edged sword so it's if you have if you have a genie that can grant you anything they can also do anything um that necessarily is presents a danger and I expect the first uses of AI to be or certainly the first government uses of AI to be weapons technology so just having um more advanced weapons on the battle if you go back that can react uh faster than any human could that's that's really what AI will be capable of I mean future Wars between Advanced countries or at least countries that have significant drone capability will be very much the Drone Wars so I want to get back to AI because this is this is big stuff and I'd like to to talk about in more detail but I do want to come just come back to the present from a long way in the future um you've just hired a new CEO uh Linda yacarino an ad veteran um into Twitter you usually focus on hiring Engineers you know Linda is a very different person can you just quickly tell us about your courtship how did that go down well um we had conversations over a number of months uh just relating to advertising um and then uh Linda felt that um it would be very helpful for the advertisers to see me in person so invited me down to a conference in Miami um which was very helpful and met with a number of advertisers personally to assure their you know assure them that that Twitter is a good place to advertise in a and generally that in fact that that hate speech is declined which it has and that the quality of the system especially with respect to scammas and spammas is dramatically better than it used to be um we've gotten rid of at this point well over 90 percent of those the scams and scams the scams and spam on Twitter it should be quite rare at this point at UCS camp um so um we've also rolled out uh sort of so just to be clear when you say you've got rid of 90 of the scams is it but is that the same thing as the Bots or is this scams in general and Bots is a different animal here they were typically used Bots for scan but you haven't taken the Bots down 90 percent no I think we we have actually I think you have okay yeah yeah I think we have yeah maybe more than 19. now you've said at least um is now much much harder to operate a platform on Twitter and have it uh yield any any uh advantage um so uh dramatic Improvement in Bots dramatic Improvement and ability to detect uh sort of trial armies which is a little different that's where you've got say oh you know um a hundred people in a warehouse in a low-wage country Each of which are sitting at a desk with 100 phones so you've got 10 000 actual people and they will then act together to Brigade a particular subject or make something seem very popular when it is not um and we've been able to defeat almost all of them we think very few of them are actually still able to to operate so quality of the system has gotten a lot better okay so um if you said to Linda that you are going to keep speaking your mind whatever the commercial impact of that and has she agreed to that is she happy with that you aligned uh yeah okay and in her role as CEO does she have any say over moderation or is that under you or you do you do that together well the general principle is that um we were we were here close to the law so for any given country we will try to adhere as closer to the low as possible our law is very between countries and we can't simply fight the law in in um in another country because they will simply cut us off um so the general principle is do whatever we can to enable free and open Communications with between people um provided they're not like I said breaking she's aligned on on that that plan yeah that Focus um yeah there is an important thing which is like that that obviously doesn't mean that say advertisers should be forced to appear next to any content so we've also developed adjacency controls that ensure that if what you're advertising is um like Disney Disney for example is a big Advertiser it doesn't use advertising a children's movie they you know it won't want the the contents nearby to be sort of family friendly that's totally understandable um so uh so it's it's not like advertisers have to appear next to content that they that they don't agree with and can you um so some people say you're you can't be a little erratic with your Tweeting or at least um tweet a broad range of of content um does anybody say I don't want to be adjacent to Elon Musk is that is that something that's happened on the on the platform I've never heard that yet um but uh um and did it did that come up with Linda at all sort of what you tweet and and whether that was something that could affect advertisers did she did she ask you about that uh she did it in fact at the conference that we did in Miami so we speech is Paramount fine um I wanted to ask you a little bit about your vision for Twitter as a as a community and as a as a conversation um you've talked about your desire to maximize unregretted time can you just could you explain what that means and how you measure that uh yeah so uh previously Twitter was mostly uh focused on this number called uh they called mdow monetizable daily active users um but the problem is that when you look closely at that a bunch of those users um never even went to Twitter they would go to um uh there would see a notification on their phone about a tweet but they wouldn't actually click through the site so but what really matters is uh true user seconds of screen time um so that's that's the figure we track right now and that's based on the the screen time as reported To Us by uh uh iOS Android and the browser so um it would be it would have to be the time the amount of time the app is in the foreground right is the most rigorous way to assess this so so when you say unregret it sorry please keep going exactly so in terms of undergraded it's that's a little harder to measure um but we can certainly gather it anecdotally which is to say that if you spent you know half an hour on Twitter yesterday what percentage of the percentage of that time do you regret um and journaling the feedbackup button has been very positive uh that they they find it's the information to be useful entertaining funny um so we seem to be heading the right direction as far as I can tell I'm certainly open to any critiques from the room well let me let me ask you one on that which is um you know you recently tweeted about George Soros you said um let me get back well let me just get the words because I'm kind of interested in what you think about this he wants to erode the very fabric of civilization Soros hates Humanity that obviously generated a huge amount of response on Twitter on both sides lots of different viewpoints is that unregrettable time unregretted time that that debate that you created does that fit into that category do you think well I mean I said like Source reminds me of Magneto you know uh well you know you went a little further than that but again without going into the Soros tweet itself you know you're obviously a big figure on Twitter and you're setting a tone and a name so I'm just curious as to whether that sort of debate which which gets triggered is that does that fit into the definition that you're trying to create in that New Town Square well I mean I think the important thing is that like look what I say is not uh is what I'd say um you know it's sort of a Town Square I'm not going to mitigate what I say because that would be inhibiting for your freedom of speech that doesn't mean you have to agree with what I say in order to mean if somebody says the total opposite that they're that they won't be supported on Twitter they are um the point is to have a diversion set of views and free speech is only relevant um if it's a speech by a speech by someone you don't like who says something you don't like is that allowed if if so you have free speech otherwise you do not and for those who would Advocate censorship I would say it is if if you succeed in that it's only a matter of time before the censorship gets turned on you I agree I mean you can that's your free speech definition which you said but I'm just curious as to on the unregrettable part what what what what type of conversation you're trying to achieve and whether that's something that is acceptable but maybe not where you want the broader conversation to go well I mean I did clarify that you know some of my concerns about Taurus are that he's funded um a very large number of uh small but influential races around the country especially with District Attorneys um and we find that for example the alien uh and and San Francisco district attorney races uh uh with uh chess boarding and um the guy always I always want to call him Gaston from Beauty and the Beast driving um and and the the it's basically he's he's um of course a large number of the ASP elected who are very easy on crime and will often fuse refuse to uh prosecute so you were basically trying to make a deeper point with that short yeah um can I just move on quickly to um because I don't want to go too far down that that rabbit hole because that debate has played out on Twitter a bit is um you know are you back near profitability now Twitter is not quite there but we we're we're not like you know when I first acquisition closed I would say it's analogous to being teleported into a plane that's plunging to the ground with its engines on fire the controls don't work um so it's comforting say the least um now we have to do some pretty heavy-handed uh bus Cutting Company healthy but we're at this point we're training towards if we get lucky we might be casual casual positive next month but it remains to be seen and is the Staffing the level you now want it or are you going to start taking it back up again from this it's gone from I think 8 000 to about 1500 or something like that is that crazy correct yeah um I think there's you know there's um there's definitely we are going to start adding people to the company um and we have started adding some number of people to the company um and um but it's still there's still a lot of change to have to happen so but I I think 1500 is probably a reasonable number and does this show what you can do um in a big tech company in terms of cost reduction I mean when you look around other big tech companies in Silicon Valley um would you say from your experience that there's room for much more significant change at those as well yeah I think Twitter maybe somewhat of an outlier in that um that there were a lot of people doing things that that didn't seem to have a lot of value um and that's I think that's true probably at most the Silicon Valley companies um maybe not to the degree to which it was a Twitter but uh it's still yeah there's a potential for significant Cuts I think out of the companies without affecting their productivity in fact increasing their productivity um so you know um at any given company there are people who help move things forward and and people who've sort of tried to slam the brakes on and Twitter was in a situation where you'd have a meeting of 10 people you know and one person with an accelerator and nine nine with a set of brakes um so you didn't go very far right um and um so now now we're going home about releasing functionality even with a little bit of risk to side stability as soon as it's not too serious and I think this point is probably fair to say we were introduced more functionality in the last uh six months than Twitter has in the last six years and in terms of outages there were some outages early on are you are you confident things are stable now well outages Are Not Unusual Instagram recently had an outage for example it was reported on Twitter ironically um so uh we've had outages but not not massive ones and they've generally been brief and limited in scope okay um do you regret buying it you tried to get out of it or are you now happy you bought it well all's well that ends well has it ended well yet or we still got to wait and see um I think we're on the hopefully on the uh comeback Arc okay so I mean one of the things you have talked about you bought it for 44 billion you've talked about it one day being worth 250 I think in internal meetings can you just talk about how you get there what is the what is the bigger Vision I mean you want to bring back advertisers now and are they coming back by the way yeah yeah um can you give any idea of the scale of the comeback in terms of who you lost and who's coming back uh well I think it'll be very significant um so the advertising agencies this point of all um lifted their warnings on Twitter so appreciate the fact that that group M for example um removed the sort of uh their concern label over Twitter which is a very big deal um and so I think at this point uh I expect almost all advertisers to attack okay um we've also I've done a lot more to make the advertising uh more relevant to users um so that we show users things that are they're more likely to be interested in buying sounds obvious but right that's what tends to happen yeah not super obvious I mean just just basic stuff like if you do a search on Twitter previously this the search Banner app um that did not take the Search terms into account which is pretty insane um so just show a random ad okay whereas obviously show an ad that is you know matches your search sounds sounds worth doing so just quickly what if you've talked about the sort of single app that does messaging and does finance and other things I mean can you just enlarge a little bit on sort of how you get there and why America wants that obviously it'll be up to people to decide if they want it um it's like do we make something that is useful enough um that you want to use it more frequently um great that's our goal um so we're not going to do anything to stop people leaving the app or try to track them in the app but let's provide enough compiling functionality that over time uh people's usage of the platform growth so in 10 years time is advertising still going to be dominant on Twitter I think advertising will always play a role um at some point take 10 years from now it may not play the largest role but it will play the largest role for at least a few years to come so I want to do a quick um quick far round of questions just you know imagine that you're late at night you're sitting there tweeting a few rapid fire responses to stuff um and I'm just going to ask you a few questions and if you can just give me short answers then I want to go on to AR and talk a little bit about some of the deeper points that you you started making earlier um so first one will Twitter be public again in five years I don't know okay um do you think the HQ will still be in San Francisco okay not good so far let's try a couple more um which decade are we going to crack artificial general intelligence I think this one this one okay so it's that soon okay um are you going to take a SpaceX trip yourself I will at some point yeah not sure when but you'll be nice um which is the most exciting country to build a Tesla plant in right now um well we did make an announcement that Mexico would be our next uh location outside the U.S uh and picked a site and everything so there's that and then um we'll probably pick another location towards the end of this year is India interesting absolutely um are you still a fan of crypto um well I mean I'm not advising anyone to buy a crypto or bet the farm on you know Dogecoin or anything like that okay on Dogecoin might have been thinking maybe you should but let me advise you that would be a have some ways um okay so it does queer is my is my sort of favorite cryptocurrency because uh it has the best humor and uh has dogs um I did however look at the price of it yesterday it's um it's lower than it was I think well I don't know maybe you know it's like friend of mine has a saying that the most ironic explanation is the most likely and the most ironic outcome for currency would be that the thing that was made at uh as a joke to make fun of cryptocurrencies uh most ironic outcome would become that it becomes the Global Currency okay we'll wait and see final one um can you rank the US and China on their development of AI each out of ten um I mean the US says very much has the uh most advanced AI so this is you say like like China's close behind certainly and has the resources to scale and to optimize um the the biggest single advances in AI still come from the US and Europe but um all right so it's hard to give an exact number score because it's more like but there's a big gap still there is a there's a gap um that Gap looks like it's on the order of 12 months right fish a narrowing all expanding it's hard to tell I suspect it will narrow to some degree okay um can you talk a little bit about you've created a new AI company yourself um obviously there's a huge amount of energy and activity in this space or at least it's been talked about I mean what do you want to do yourself in this space beyond Tesla and and the the stuff you talked about earlier what is that new thing well I think there should be a significant third horse in the race here uh we've got open Ai and Microsoft Google deepmind and probably there should be a third horse in the race um so a little bit more on that soon but is it something that will interact with the data of Twitter and the capability of Tesla is it something that tries to bring what you've talked about earlier in terms of capability together and become that third player is that what you're talking about to some degree I don't want to jump a gun here on announcements but uh um you know the opening AI has a relationship with Microsoft that seems to work very well fairly well so it's possible that um xai and Twitter and Tesla would have something similar possible um you've talked about the importance of Regulation and you call for this this moratorium I mean the history of regulating Tech has been checkered it's been very hard for Regulators to keep up with tech let alone get ahead of it what do you think actually needs to happen that practically could in this space to try to change that because obviously the history of this is not encouraging yeah I mean I think there should be you know I've been pushing hard for a long time I met with a number of um centers and Congress people in Congress in the white house uh to advocate for AI regulation uh starting with an Insight committee that is formed of independent parties as well as perhaps participants from the leaders in industry and that uh that that oversight committee uh gains um or should say get that Insight committee gains insight into what various companies are up to um and uh you know to the degree that there's okay competitive Dynamics there you can obviously uh you would um sequester board members who are perhaps have conflicts uh but anyway if you figure out some sort of regulatory board and uh and they start off gaining insight and then I have proposed rulemaking um and then that you know will get comments that are on by industry and uh and then hopefully we have some sort of oversight rules that improve uh safety just as we do with uh aircraft with the FAA and spacecraft and cars with Nitza and Food and Drugs with the Food Drug Administration right and how would that work in such a global thing as we're talking about where Ai and the relative uh Advance between countries is going to be very very important is that something that is is globalizable is that is that well really the key question is uh we'll China uh you know cooperate with the West that remains to be seen um but I would still Advocate like some degree of of oversight I mean we have a regulatory oversight of aircraft for example and yet the the US is still very much doing great on the aircraft so it makes more effort than the rest than any in any other place so just because you have you know FAA regulations doesn't mean that uh it's necessarily slowed down very much okay um does so so your view would be that the AI changes today lock in the tech Giants the microsofts and the Googles of this world does it also is there also a scenario where it actually helps to bring in new players and and and and and change that dynamic or is that a much more unlikely outcome well that there are um a lot of AI startups the thing that's becoming tricky is that in order you really need three things to compete you need uh Talent talented people um you need um a lot of compute expensive compute and you need to access the data so whoever's got whoever's succeeding on those three will win um so now that the cost of compute has gotten astronomical so it's now you know kind of sort of minimum ante I would say uh minimum would be 250 million dollars of silver Hardware minimum that's like just two right relevant in any way so the startups are more likely to piggyback off what the others are doing rather than compete directly themselves is what you're saying yeah to train a big one um are you going to take a SpaceX trip yourself to train a model of probably gbt five size I wouldn't be surprised if they use at least 30 30 000 maybe 50 000 h100s which are the latest uh gpus are not sure it's not quite the right word but the latest technology from Nvidia um so and then you need to run inference as well um so there's a lot of the the G fuser um this point considerably harder to get than drugs actually that's really not a high bar in San Francisco you can tell us more about that later but yes okay okay um so um a couple of things I just wanted to go into on on AI which I love your perspective on um is this gonna what does it mean for society in terms of is this going to embed wealth and power in a very small subset and create a big widening of inequality is it going to democratize and create the opposite what is your sense of of where this heads terms of access to goods and services I think AI will be ushering an age of abundance assuming that we're in a benign AI scenario I think the AI will be able to make goods and services um very inexpensively and so in anything that is a product or a service where there's not artificial scarcity created such as like I want to live exactly in and this you know neighborhood houses it's like okay well there's only 100 houses there so you know that that would still have scarcity um or a unique artwork would have scarcity but anything that does not have scarcity that we def that we deliberately designed to be scarce will be plentiful for everyone in a benign scenario and in the unbeline scenario well there's a wide range of but what's the thing that you're most worried about when you look at you know when you've been talking for years about the need for regulation what is the scenario that really keeps you up at night well I don't I don't think the AI is going to try to destroy all Humanity but it might put us under strict controls um I mean and there's no non-zero chance of of it going Terminator it's not zero percent but it's it's I think it's it's a small likelihood of of annihilating humanity but it's not zero we wanted at all going to be zero close to zero as possible and then like I said the uh of AI assuming control or the safety of all the humans and taking over all the Computing systems and weapon systems of Earth and effectively being like some sort of uber nanny but isn't isn't another scenario if you say you say that yeah like what you know like let's say you're uh you know I must well contact consent contestant hypothetically um it's unlikely let's face it um and and you know you say what what do you want and so I want World Peace um and uh it's like okay well the you know one way to achieve well peace is to take all the weapons away from the humans so they can no longer use them and and to punish any humans that engage in um you know extra territorial activity but isn't the more isn't the more likely nasty outcome that rather than AI taking over and being the ultimate naddy that keeps us all doing stuff that is super safe and it wants us to that actually somebody nefariously harnesses that power to achieve societal control stroke military superiority um and that actually some country around the world decides to use it in a different way uh yes that that's what I mean by like AI uses as a weapon right um and the pen is mightier than the sword so one of the first places we have to be careful of AI being used is in social media to manipulate public opinion so the reason that uh Twitter is going to a primarily uh subscriber based system is because it is dramatically harder to create it's like or 10 000 times harder uh to create a an account that has a verified phone number from a credible carrier that has a a credit card and that pays a small amount of money per month um and have those credit cards and phone numbers be highly distributed not clustered incredibly difficult um so whereas in the past uh someone could create a million fake accounts for a penny a piece and then manipulates have have something appear to be very very much liked by the public when in fact it is not or promoted and retweeted when in fact it is not is popularity is is not real essentially gain the system so the device towards uh a is a subscription-based verification I think is is very powerful and that really you won't be able to trust any social media company that does not do this uh because it will simply be overrun with Bots to such an extreme extreme degree so if we take it back to where we started if you look at the election that's coming up how big a role will this big shift in AI capability over the last few months which will obviously continue through the next year how big an impact is this going to play do you think in the messaging and the way that people get told the different pictures of of the candidates I think that's something we need to go and look at for in a big way is to make sure that this we're minimizing the impact of AI manipulation um we're certainly pretty much taking it Taking that seriously at XX Twitter you know Twitter and um and I think we're putting in place all of the protections to minimize and certainly detect when we see large-scale manipulation of the system okay but beyond Twitter are you worried about this for the election in general yeah um there probably will be attempts to use AI to manipulate the public and some of it will be successful um and if not the selection for sure the next one okay I've got two more questions on AI if you've got the time and then just a little bit on China and Tesla if that's okay um the first thing is um we talk a lot in terms of AI about the next five to ten years and what the impact is going to be on jobs and some of these things if you look out on a much longer time frame given the speed and scale of the change and you look to your grandkids and great grandkids can you just give us a sense of what what it's going to be like to be human how much is this going to change the fundamental nature of how we operate as as a race at this point I think it's gonna change a lot um especially if you go further out into the future I mean there will be everything will be automatic I mean they'll they'll be household robots that you can fully talk to as though there are people um that can help you around the house or be a companion or whatever the case may be uh there will be humanoid robots throughout you know factories um and um ours will also be all automatic and anything that that we're intelligence can be applied um even modest intelligence will be automated say like so if you say like 10 20 years from now and we will we be connected to that technology through a neuralink type Divine I mean is that is that where this in your view obviously is that why this heads well A high bandwidth interface from cortex to the so you're sort of computing or AI tertiary layer which already exists uh you know it's just that we don't have a high bandwidth connection um we've got a um limbic system which is a sort of foundational element that's sort of our instincts and desires and whatnot uh they're not cortex on top of that which is a thinking part of our brain and about a tertiary digital layer which is currently in the form of our phones and computers and laptops and whatnot and all the applications and the the constraint on better a better merging or the construct you know the constraint on on on um having human interests and machine interests be aligned is the bandwidth especially the output so if you select at what speed can you output to a computer it's using Voice or your fingers which will move very slowly so you're talking about maybe 10 bits per second or some some fairly small data rate um so with with the neural link you can increase that by you know increase that by a million probably um so everything just speeds up it's up yeah okay um I mean this is obviously in a relatively benign scenario because there's a question of not just uh let's say it's a Brian scenario um how do we even appreciate or understand what the computer is doing right um how do we how do we go how do we go along for the ride um and if we have a better if you have a brain machine interface that's I don't know a million times faster than or more like we'll go along for the ride a lot better that then if we're interfacing with a phone using two slow-moving meat sticks um if you put it like that um and in terms of you have a lot of kids many in this room have kids you know what do they need to what skills do they need to have what are the three skills that you think are most important for them that you're trying to give them to be prepared and well positioned for this new world well I think it's it's important to have a broad range of of understanding in many different subjects so I think general knowledge is important um so you at least have some clue of what you don't know in different areas and then go deep in areas where your child is has a strong interest and ability so finding that that overlap of where is my child what interested in this and has some ability to be successful then uh you know Finding if you can find that Venn diagram overlap then obviously encouraging that is a good thing um and we are obviously headed to a high-tech world so some basic understanding of computers and software and artificial intelligence is probably a good idea okay but the actual broad thrust of um I mean jobs will change but it'll be more AI enabling and making it better and easier rather than wholesale complete change of the skills you need Which principle what time frame we're talking about here so if you say like over 20 30 year time frame I think things will be transformed beyond belief what you probably think you probably won't recognize Society in 30 years um like I do think we're fairly close you asked me about artificial general intelligence I think we're perhaps only three years maybe six years away from it this this decade um so the impact arguably we are on the Event Horizon of the black hole that is social super intelligence okay so I'm going to ask one final question I'm going to see if you've got two minutes to take a couple of questions from the floor and it's it comes back to China which you talked about a little bit you have a very big business in China in Tesla um and obviously you know you're on that geopolitical fault line that's getting um potentially interesting it to what extent is this affecting your decision making around sort of how you put assets and and stuff on the ground and how concerned are you about that as a business person and a lot of people in this room have business in China about that getting very very difficult for us well there is fundamentally um an issue that's coming to a head with Taiwan um and it's unclear when exactly Bush will come to show but it seems that there's a good chance push will come to shove it's trending in that direction um I'd rather think what what that would happen the results would be for the global economy would be absolutely catastrophic um but um you know China has been very clear about its goal on China and uh sort of um including Taiwan um as part of China so one does not need to read between the lines one can simply read the lines they were bracelet and they're not getting and is the biggest concern despite you know the the the the prospect of conflict itself um obviously a lot of the world's high-end chips come out of Taiwan I mean how catastrophic would that be if that was cut off well there's even more that comes out of China so the transit is a lot so much of of the world's heavy lifting on manufacturing especially if the manufacturing is you know simply hard work and say not not particularly glamorous um charges does an immense amount of hard work that people most people have no idea how much hard work they do so um you kind of from Taiwan was much less less of a concern than being covered from time from China now China would reciprocally suffer of course um because I would say that the economy of the economies of China and Taiwan are they're like conjoined twins with the what the Western economy with the rest of the world so China China the West the rest of the world being Conjuring twins from an economic standpoint will mean that the separation is going to be dire indeed okay that happens I hope it does not happen so um and there's no easy solution here but if there's any if there's any path to diplomatic solution we should really take that seriously great do you have time to take a few questions from the floor Elon sure does anybody have a question they'd like to pose we'll go here and then here Mike behind you thanks Elon thanks for joining us um I'm the founder of a real estate business in Newcastle in the northeast of England um we export manufacture and Export more cars from the Northeast than the whole of Italy uh would you let me build you a Tesla Factory in the northeast of England thanks for the offer so probably consider uh England uh for a future location of a geiger Factory thank you I'll get you so you will you will consider it are you actively considering it uh we we we we're not currently uh looking at new locations but we will pull towards the end of this year I'll send you some plans okay um uh David here please thank you for your time uh Fusion lots of scientists say it could change the world Planet it's the sun all live on this planet and on Mars depends on Fusion the sun itself can I ask you why a man of your brilliant brain resources and talent it's not actually focusing on Fusion which I think could be a game changer for society and rather than on Twitter where there are many media decent companies that can do it and I would say it almost in a trivial way well I'm I think we already have a giant Fusion reactor in the sky that called the Sun that shows up every day so um which always said like if you want to know what's standing in front of a future Fusion reactor feels like just go out go and stand in front of the sun you know just walk outside that's what that's what a giant Fusion reactor feels like because that's what the sun is um it converts about four and a half million towns four and a half million tons of Mass to energy every second and requires no maintenance it's amazing um you don't have to you don't have to refuel it you don't have to maintain it just there so my recommendation for Fusion is solar power and batteries and we can easily power all of Earth with uh just with photovoltaics and batteries not I mean not easily but there's just a very clear path to do so um and and uh no Miracles are quiet just work interesting I've also an advocate of wind and of of nuclear fission uh geothermal hydro and whatnot uh we'll take a couple more one here and then the lady at the back thank you as you're considering exposure to China and particularly um in the EV space and with the battery supply chain what's your process for evaluating political risk in the near and Midterm I guess I just talked to my team you know read the news uh I don't know assess assess the opinion on Twitter I suppose um there's a very deep analysis you can get on Twitter from people that are World experts on a particular subject so um I don't know I think we just we try to prepare for the worst hope for the best um and um you know make sure we have factories and uh geographically Diversified regions of the world where the supply chain is as localized as possible but this is important uh also for forced Azure situations so if there are earthquakes wildfires riots revolutions uh ice storms uh heat waves uh you name it uh I think I've seen it all at this point so you want to have you you want to have a supply chain that does not inherit Force Major from all of Earth um because something that's going to happen somewhere it's Big Planet so so that's why I think it's important to have um localized Supply chains with factories in in many geographies uh last question from the lady at the back thank you yeah you famously tweeted that you thought the population collapse was a much bigger risk to humanity than climate change what do you think States families even companies can do to ensure that more of us want to have more children well yeah I mean I think it's it's very telling if you look at the birth rates which are just you know publicly available um you can look at uh say the birth rate last year for every country um it's available online um and you can look at the trend in both rates and it's just very clear that the trend has been strongly downward um and that we've recently hit all-time lows so um you think if you know during covert you know what else you got to do you might as well have a kid but um it didn't happen actually we had a big drop in birth rate during during covert an increase in divorces too since make a lot of time with their significant other um so I think generally um so it's simply changing people's mind about the goodness of having kids it's like very important to have kids in order to to continue civilization um and I think sometimes it's viewed as uh you know kids are viewed as an imposition on the world I don't think that's the case at all or that people sometimes think there are too many people in the world that's that's certainly not the case you can you can fit all of the humans on Earth on one floor in the city of New York you know it would be uncomfortable but but just to give you a sense of the cross-sectional area of earth that is human is very tiny it just seems big if you're in a big city um but for the vast majority of the earth if if you're given a task of from front plane of dropping a bowling ball and and and you have to hit someone you'd you'd Miss I almost never hit anyone um so uh what is that you very rarely go over a person um in an aircraft you fly from LA to New York the vast areas of land with no one at all so anyway the I think we want to just generally have it be socially encouraged to have kids I think certainly companies need to support uh employees that have kids um I think in terms of government incentives uh there should be uh some I think tax breaks for having kids you know or make it just financially not burdensome to have children um and it's always worth bearing in mind like autonomy aside um if someone doesn't have kids what you're actually asking is that uh someone else's kids take care of you when you're old and that that doesn't seem like quite right you know um because because that's that's the world before they'll be forced to do absent automation is is that someone else the kids will have to take care of you when you're old and um you know so I think anyway one way or another we need to solve this birth rate issue or civilization will go a little to nothing isn't that where AI comes in it'll do all the jobs for us so we can we can handle a uh potentially lower population or what you're talking about I think there will be robot nannies that are very confident so that will help

Channel: Wall Street Journal

Views: 916,033

Keywords: elon musk, wsj, ai, china news, tesla, spacex, twitter, succesion planning, musk interview, elon musk wsj interview, musk ai, the future of ai, succession planning elon musk, twitter new ceo, tesla cfo, tesla future ceo, elon musk on ai, musk on twitter, 2024 election, elon musk news, musk news, elon interview, tesla stock, tesla news, elon musk interview, tesla stock today, what are teslas goals, electric cars, evs, ev new, battery, spacex starship, musk history, china, usnews

Id: PDy7s1SDDn4

Length: 70min 54sec (4254 seconds)

Published: Tue May 23 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/just_thisGuy]

Good interview and there was nothing wrong with his answers or anything political that was bad like some people alluded to yesterday on here.

[u/Harryhodl]

It was a solid interview and Elon seemed really grounded and balanced.

[u/ShaidarHaran2]

"Is India interesting (in the context of the next Gigafactory)?"

Elon: "Absolutely."

[u/TeslaFanBoy8]

Looks more healthy and lost weight too.