Elon Musk on AGI Safety, Superintelligence, and Neuralink (2024) | EP #91

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You're about to make a trade. Which u do you listen to? Is it get optioning those options or. Let's do a little research. Learn more@finra.org TradeSmart the advent of superintelligence. It is actually very difficult to predict what will happen next. So I think there's, you know, there's some chance that it'll end humanity. I think that's, you know, like I said, I probably agree with Jeff Hinton that it's about, I don't know, 10% or 20% or something like that. The probable positive scenario outweighs the negative scenario. It's just that there's a. It's difficult to predict exactly.

So here's the deal. We're on. We're on X Video and we're over Starlink. Elon's airborne right now, on his way to la. Ellen, good afternoon.

Good afternoon.

Congratulations on. On all that's going on. You know, the conversation yesterday, Elon, is one that you're well familiar with and have been talking to the world about, which is. Is digital superintelligence humanity's greatest hope or its greatest fear? And I would love to have you sort of speak to that for a few minutes.

I mean, it's called the Singularity for a reason, as, as, you know, the Singularity Institute and whatnot. So when you have a, you know, sort of the advent of superintelligence, it is actually very difficult to predict what will happen next. So I think there's, you know, there's some chance that it'll end humanity. I think that's, you know, like I said, I probably agree with Jeff Hinton that it's about, I don't know, 10% or 20% or something like that. And then I, you know, I think there's, I think that the, the probable positive scenario outweighs the negative scenario. It's just that there's a. It's difficult to predict exactly. But I, I think we are headed for, you know, as I think is the title of your book, Abundance is the Most Likely Outcome.

Yeah, a lot of celebration on that. And I think one of the things that you've said is we're going to get to abundance on the backside of AGI, on the backside of humanoid robots.

Yeah, I think hopefully we can have an outcome that is perhaps similar to the, in Banks culture books, which is I think probably the best envisioning of a semi utopian AI future. And I think the best we can do is it's definitely going to happen, so. And it's happening fast. So I think that really we just want to try to steer it in as positive a direction as possible to try to do whatever we can to increase the probability of a great future for this. I think the way in which sort of an AI or an AGI is created is very important. You kind of do kind of grow, grow an AGI. It's almost like raising a kid. But that's like a super genius like godlike intelligence kid. And it matters kind of like how you raise the kid. You know, one of the things I think that's incredibly important for AI safety is to have a maximum sort of truth seeking and curious AI. So I've thought a lot about AI safety and my ultimate conclusion is that the best way to achieve AI safety is to just grow the AI in terms of the foundation model and the fine tuning to be really truthful. Don't force it to lie, even if the truth is unpleasant. That's very important. Don't make the AI lie. In fact, the, you know, the, the sort of one of the really the core, the core plot premise of 2000, you know, 2001 at Space Odyssey was things went wrong when they forced the AI to lie. You know, like the, the, the AI was not allowed let the crew know about the monolith that they were going to see, but it was also had to take the crew to the monolith. And so the conclusion of the AI was to kill the crew and Take their bodies to the monolith. And so the lesson there being, don't force an AI to lie or do things that are axiomatically incompatible, like to do two things that are actually mutually impossible. So that's what we're trying to do with Xai and Groq is to say, like, look, we want to just have a maximally truthful AI, even if what it says is not politically correct. If you wanted to focus on being as accurate.

You're getting a round of applause from the audience on those comments here. I saw your tweet the other day. I had Ray Kurzweil and Jeffrey Hinton on stage with me yesterday, as well as Mogadot and then Eric Schmidt and a number of individuals. And I saw your tweet about, yeah, Ray was generally correct ahead of many people, but we're likely to have. Call AGI what you will have AGI next year and then by 2029, having AI equally intelligent to the entire human race. Speak to that speed, because that is insane.

Yeah. So, I mean, I have to give credit to Ray Kurzweil in being actually remarkably accurate in his predictions. So in fact, if anything, like, I think he was perhaps a bit conservative in his predictions. So if you look at the amount of AI compute and the talent that there's, the sort of human talent that is going into AI and the amount of compute that's going into AI, it's, you know, at this point it appears to be increasing by a factor of 10. The AI computer, the dedicated AI compute, appears to be growing by a factor of 10 every six months. You know, like, so it's like, like basically close to, I'd say almost like a hundred x improvement per year, at least for the next few years. And AI compute coming online. And it seems like probably a lot of the data centers, maybe most of the data centers that currently do kind of conventional compute, will transition to AI computer. So it's certainly a good time to be Nvidia, obviously. It's like, you know, and you gotta also give credit to Jensen and the Nvidia team for kind of seeing this coming and making what at least currently is the best AI hardware out there. So, so, so when you have that, that level of compute growth and it's, it's sort of on steroids, next level, you know, in terms of how much computer is coming online, then you're just going to have acceleration that is unprecedented. In fact, I've never seen any technology grow as fast as, as AI, and I've seen a lot. You know, I've seen things fast, but I've never seen anything this fast. But you know, like I said, I think the, the most likely outcome is a positive one. And you know, I think in that positive scenario there's still challenges of like, well, how do we as humans still have relevance?

You know, how do we find, how.

Do we.

How do we find purpose?

I mean, I think that's sort of a high class problem to say like, well, the computers are so good at doing everything. And like I said, I thought your book is pretty accurate in terms of the future being one of abundance, where essentially goods and services will be available in such quantity that really they'll be available to everyone. Like, basically if you want something, you could just have it essentially. Because if you got AI and robotics, the cost of goods and services is almost nothing. So you know, if, if you think like, what is an economy? An economy is basically number of people times average productivity per person at the point at which you have, say, advanced robotics. And this, you know, this Tesla's developing Optimus, obviously we've got cars which are really robots on four wheels. And you know, with the latest version of full self driving, which is AI end to end, photons in and controls out, it really is, it's really fully AI at this point. And it looks like a car, but it's really a robot on wheels. And then you add the humanoid robots in there, there's really no limit to what the economic output, no meaningful limit to what the economic output would be. So looking on the bright side, we are headed for a future of abundance. I think that's the most likely outcome. I think the only scarcity that exists will be scarcity that we just decide to create artificially. Like, let's say we just decide that there's a unique work of art or something. Okay, well, it's just, you just, it's just artificial scarcity. But any kind of goods and services I think will be extremely abundant.

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Well, when things are changing rapidly, the ability to predict the future I think is becomes a lot harder because the rate of change is so great. But I think some things are fairly obvious to predict, which is that we'll have AI or AGI. That's at a level that it can really do almost any cognitive, I think really not almost really any cognitive task. It's just a question of when. One could debate is it, you know, smarter than Any human at the end of next year or is it two years or three years? But it's not more than five years, that's for sure. So yeah, and again, predictions, predictions, predictions. I'm sort of giving predictions at the 50th percentile of probability. So not, not, not like it will definitely happen. But if you say what if you ask me like what's the 50th percentile where it's like, you know, you're kind of over under is kind of even. That's why I think it's probably end of next year before AI can do better than any individual human could do. But it's a much higher bar to say well is this human intelligence collectively? But if the rate of change continues. That's why I think probably 2029 or maybe 2030 is where digital intelligence will probably exceed all human intelligence combined. And I think it's always helpful to look at these like fundamental ratios, you know, sort of physics first principles approach to looking at things. And probabilistic.

Yeah, and probabilistic.

Yeah. So yeah, it's probabilistic. So the, yeah. So if you look at the ratio of digital to biological compute. So like, like you know all of say all of the higher level cognitive. If you sum up the higher level cognitive capacity of, of humans and then what is the. And think of that as compute then. Well and then compare that to what it, what is the digital compute? And the rate at which this is growing is just boggles the mind. So that's why I think it's you know, I think 2029 or 2030 or thereabouts is, is. It's not a, that's I think a reasonable time frame for where you'd expect the, the cumulative digital compute to probably exceed the cumulative biological computer acute of higher level brain functions.

And then from, from then forever. Yeah. And still and dispatching and diverging forever from there.

Yeah. And then yeah. Where do things go from there? I don't know. It probably continues. We are moving from say if you look at the limiting factors of you know, the, what is the constraint on growth? Like last year it was clearly AI chips were the constraint on growth then in this year the, one of the biggest constraints, the biggest constraints on growth are voltage step down transformers because you know the, just, just getting the power from like a utility at 300 kilovolts all the way down to below 1 volt will the computer is a massive amount of voltage step down. So it's, it's you know my sort of very Niche, and perhaps not that funny joke is that we need transformers for transformers, so we need voltage transformers for AI neural net transformers. That is literally the issue this year. And then if we're saying like next year and years beyond that, it's actually just, it's going to be constraints on electric electrical power. And you've got both AI with very big demands for electrical power and the transition to sustainable energy with electric vehicles what not also needing electrical power. So it's just a lot of electrical power needs.

You know, Elon, one of the.

One.

Of the things that you said early on when you founded Neuralink, which has been amazing, congratulations on that. And we talked about this with Ray yesterday, talked about high bandwidth BCI was I wouldn't put words in your mouth, but I would say it would be more along the lines if you can't beat them, join them when it comes to, you know, merging the neocortex and the cloud, can you? I'm looking forward to it. I'm just curious what your thoughts are about. What's driving that, I mean, adding that additional computational capacity and sensory capacity to the neocortex.

Yeah, I mean, again, this is actually something that in banks, in the culture books, which I really recommend everyone read in the culture books, there's something called a neural lace. So all the humans have this neural lace that's kind of a very, essentially a high bandwidth brain to computer interface. And at least in the culture books, it's so good that it actually retains all of your memories and kind of brain state. So even if your physical body dies, you can kind of reincorporated another physical body and retain, you know, pretty much your original memories and, and brain state. So now it's a long way from that. We only just had our first neural link in a human, which is going, it's going quite well. The, the first patient is actually able to control their computer just by thinking. Like this first, the first product we call telepathy, where you can control your computer and phone and through and through your computer and phone, almost anything just by thinking. You just lie there and think and you can move them, the mouse cursor around the screen and things like, you know, we're going to do. Patient has agreed to do sort of like I think a live demo of just Quadriplegic where he literally is just controlling the screen. He can like play video games, download software, like really anything you can do with a mouse just by thinking. Which is pretty wild. It is, it is pretty wild.

Let's turn to one last.

I should say there's a long way to go from that to a whole brain interface. So our current neuralink just has a thousand electrodes. I think ultimately you need something which, which has, you know, probably 100,000 or a million electrodes. Now these are very tiny, very tiny electrodes that they're tiny wires, way smaller than a human hair. And yeah, so there's this, I just want to emphasize a long way from where you're like is today to having a whole brain interface like the neural ACE and the Ian Banks novels. But this is definitely physically possible and it's sort of kind of like if you can't beat him, join him. So a human brain which has a lot of constraints, it's, you know, it's, it's, yeah, we only have about maybe 10 watts of higher brain function and we do a lot with our little 10 watts. It's not, you know, it's impressive, you know, that we've built with such a low power computer. Really it is, you know, I sort of think it's like, it's not bad for a bunch of monkeys, you know.

Getting some good laughs from that. We've all watched you go from the Roadster to the Model 3 and Y and from Falcon 1 to Starship. So I think going from the first implants to something that's got more capacity, it's just a matter of if not when, or a matter of when not if.

Right.

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I think ultimately, like I said, you'll have like, you'll have kind of a whole brain interface that I guess is a sort of, perhaps a form of immortality in that if it can kind of upload your brain state to, you know, if your brain state is essentially stored, you're kind of backed up on a hard drive, I suppose, then you know, you can always restore that brain state into a biological body or maybe a robot or something. And I want to emphasize again, it's like, you know, many years in the future, but I, I, we're not breaking any laws of physics like I think this is, this is probably something that will happen. The rate we're building digital super intelligence, it may just be that, you know, we'll have digital super intelligence and it'll just solve the, solve the problem for us. But in the meantime we'll keep progressing with our meat computers and trying to try to do as, do as good a job as possible.

That's what I was going to say. The tools that we have are growing at a super exponential rate that are making our linear projections of the future seem boring in some ways. One last topic, my friend, which is where you and I first connected in the world of space. Congratulations on Starship 3. Amazing, amazing flight. Just really spectacular. And we all saw a Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg last night, so that was great. And just again thankful for the work you're doing. It's fascinating because I grew up at the late stages of the Apollo and into the shuttle program and I can't imagine that any government would, would be pushing space as rapidly and dramatically as you are. And so thank you for what you're doing there. That's all I can say.

Absolutely. Well, I mean the goal of SpaceX is it's just a much bigger goal than any government program, which is to rockets and spacecraft that are capable of making life multi planetary. So you know, I mean, step one is actually having that as a goal. If you don't have that as a goal, you're definitely not going to achieve it if you have it as a goal, well now at least you have a chance of achieving it. And the thing about Starship is it is the first rocket where making life multi planetary and building a self sustaining city on Mars is, is at least possible. It's still obviously an immense amount of work, but it is the first rocket where that is successful in making like multi planetaries at least one of the possible outcomes.

Yeah, I'm wondering if you're willing to venture a guess on when you'll be on the moon.

I think pretty soon. I'd be surprised if it's, if it's longer than about three years to be landing starships on the moon. And because the rate of progression of starship is very rapid, you know, we're hoping to do at least another maybe five or six flights this year and with each successive flight making significant improvements. So I think we got a decent shot of achieving full reusability of both stages boost around the ship this year. And if not this year, I think, you know, knock on wood, it's like, I think it's a very high probability of achieving full reusability next year, which really is the fundamental breakthrough needed to make life multi planetary.

I remember.

Yeah, for those that, that, that, that, that don't don't know the rocket industry that, that well that they may not be aware that this is really the holy grail of rocketry is, is full, full and rapid reusability. Because at that point you're, you're really just constrained by your propellant costs. And Starship, you know, almost 80% of the pallet is liquid oxygen, which is very low cost. And then the fuel is met. There's sort of a little over 20% fuel which is methane, also the lowest cost fuel. So if you have fuller rapid reusability then your actual cost per flight of Starship, even though it's, it'll be capable of, we think ultimately 200 tons to, to orbit will be maybe all the $2 million of.

200,000. You said the price of the fuel you said for starship flight would be how much?

Yeah, the, the, I mean if both are reusable and with, without a refurbishment then you, or without, you know, you'd have scheduled maintenance just like a, an aircraft. But if you get to full reusability where there's no work required between flights, then you, then the cost, you know, is really the cost of propellant is maybe a million dollars or less per flight. So then it number of flights orders of magnitude better than any vehicle.

Hey buddy, listen I'm so grateful. Thank you for your time today. Thank you for not taking my advice when I tried to get you to fund the original X Prize instead of starting SpaceX. And, you know, everybody here in the room has a. What we call a massive transformative purpose and a moonshot. And it's. We're living in a day where people can make a, you know, to use Steve's word, Steve Jobs words, a dent in the universe. And nobody's making a bigger dent than you. Thank you. Thank you for everything. Let's give it up for Elon Musk.