Elon’s Predictions For the Future: AI, Free Energy, and More | EP #129

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare for a fun conversation with a very special guest and someone I'm proud to call a friend. Welcome, Elon Musk. Elon, welcome to Riyadh. It's been quite an incredible 90 days for you, my friend.

Yeah.

Xai colossus came online. 122 days. You're about to double in size again. Extraordinary success of the fifth mission of starship and the booster capture. Amazing. The launch of cybercab Starlink helping in disaster relief progress with Optimus the second neuralink human patient new record users on X. And that's in 90 days. I'm sure I've missed a few things. Welcome.

Yeah, I've been playing a significant role in this election.

I think I saw you someplace on X dealing with election issues. Let's talk a little bit about AI, which is on the tips of everybody's conversations here. When we spoke last in March at the Abundance Summit, your prediction was that AI was increasing at a rate as fast as 100 times per year, and that by 2029 or 2030, we might see AI as capable as 8 billion humans. Are you still seeing that pace?

Yeah, it's a difficult thing to quantify exactly. But I certainly feel comfortable saying that it's getting 10 times better per year, which is, you know, let's say it's, you know, four years from now. That would mean 10,000 times better. So maybe 100,000. Yeah. And it's. I think it will be able to do anything that any human can do possibly within. Within the next year, year or two. And then. Then what? What can. How long. How much longer than that does it take to be able to do what. What all humans can do combined? I think not. Not long. Probably only, I don't know, three years from that point. So 2029 is 28. Something like that.

The other conversation we've had, and you came out in the same side as Geoffrey Hinton in this was 80% probability it's going to be awesome. 20% probability we're screwed. Are you still on those odds? Yeah.

I mean, one could say it's most likely going to be great and there's some chance, which could be 10 to 20%, that it goes bad. The chance is not zero that it goes bad, but overall, we could say the cup is 80% full is one positive way to look at it. Maybe 90%. I like that.

Increasing odds.

What keeps you up?

Yeah, what keeps you up at night besides running six companies?

Well, waking up early to participate in talks like this one.

I felt very guilty asking you to do this. But thank you for joining me nonetheless.

In terms of worrying about the future. Well, I think AI is a significant existential threat and something we should be paying close attention to. It's probably the most significant near term threat. The longer term than that is the global population collapse. You know, growth rates have been collapsing pretty much worldwide and we're headed to, you know, a situation where, for example, based on current birth rates, South Korea would have about a third of its current population, perhaps much less. Europe would have about half of its current current population, perhaps much less. And I should say those numbers are if the birth rate were suddenly to return to stable to, to 2.1 per woman, which is a stability point, which is not doing so. If the, if the current compounding effect continues, you would see really many countries become 5% of their current size or less within three generations.

I know you've been doing your.

I would consider that to be a very big problem and I think for most countries they should view the birth rate as, as the single biggest problem they need to solve. If you don't make new humans, there's no humanity and all the policies in the world don't matter.

I know you've been doing your part to maintain the birth rate in the us.

Yes, I am. I mean you've got to walk the talk. So I do have a lot of kids and I encourage others to have lots of kids.

But on the AI and I'm sorry to go negative on this, but what are you doing right now that's most important for countering that 10% probability of dystopian outcomes? Is there something or do you, is there a regulation that you're promoting? How do you think about the upside will take care of itself? How do you protect against the downside?

Well, my, my thing with respect to AI safety is that you have to be create a maximally truth seeking AI, which may sound obvious, but that's what I'm seeing being produced is, is not maximally truth seeking. It tends to be trained to be politically correct. And for a lot of the AIs that are being trained in, in the San Francisco Bay Area, they are, that they have, they have taken on the philosophy of the people around them which kind of makes sense. So you know, you have sort of a woke nihilistic in my opinion philosophy that is being built into these AIs and they're being put to say crazy things in some cases that are, that are very troubling. So you really want to have a maximally truth seeking AI And I can't emphasize that enough. That's incredibly important. And obviously build an AI that loves humanity and you know, and I think these. So I'm a little concerned. That's why I created xai, which is to have an AI that is maximally truth seeking, that aspirationally does love humanity and will seek the best interests of humanity going forward.

You just tweeted that you're doubling the size of the Colossus cluster. What are your thoughts?

We already have with xai, the most powerful training cluster in the world, and we're about to double it.

Energy is a point of conversation here. How concerned are you about providing sufficient energy for the growing hungry clusters globally?

Yeah, I think things are currently chip limited or they're not quite chip limited. They can get to the point where they're limited by voltage, transformers and installation and they will become limited by energy. So there will be a tremendous amount of energy that's needed for digital intelligence and also for electrification of transportation. So those two things are a big deal. Yeah, we're going to need a lot of energy. The long term, almost all the energy that we will get is going to come from the sun. So one way to look at civilization is progress. On the Kardashev scale, we're just barely getting to one. Well, we're far from being. I think we're probably. We might be close. It's not clear to me. We're above 1% on the Kardashev scale 1 because Kardashev scale 1 means you've harnessed all the power of a planet. I think we've probably harnessed less than 1% of the power of Earth. Now, Kardashev Scale 2 is you've harnessed all the power of your sun. The sun is overwhelmingly the largest source of energy in the solar system. Everything else is maybe amounts to about a trillionth of the energy in the solar system compared to the sun. Safely. Less. Less than a trillionth of all the energy is non sun in our solar system.

Yeah. We're using one. 8,000th of the sun's energy hits the Earth's surface.

The Earth. Just that. Just that hits the surface of the Earth. Yeah. Yes. And the percentage of the sun's energy that hits the surface of the Earth is less than a trillion of the energy that the sun produces. So almost all energy long term will be solar. It rounds up to 100%. So it rounds up to 100%. That's how much of the energy in the future will be solar. When you, when you view Things from a Kardashev standpoint.

You know, Elon, we have a number of national leaders, corporate financial leaders from the Middle east here. What's your advice to decision makers here in the room that don't want to miss the AI transformation that will be part of the leadership of that AI transformation? Do they need to build their own clusters here? Are they partnering?

Yeah, well, I think there's probably all countries will have their own AI clusters over time. It's currently very difficult to actually build an AI cluster and have it run. It's not like just pulling a computer out of a box. They are currently very difficult to run. And you have to say, are you going to be training a frontier model? Because if you're training a frontier model, then you need a massive amount of compute and a level of technical skill that is only a few companies possess. So. But. But over time, I think every country will have AI compute clusters. It's just. It's just going to be a normal thing that every country has. So.

Yeah, so basic infrastructure for every nation. Like they have an electrical grid.

Yeah. It'll be something like electricity or, you know, just. Or, you know, having an airline or something like that. It's every. Every country will have AIs or multiple AIs, so. And there will be a lot of robots.

There'll be a lot of robots, but.

We had way more robots than people.

Yeah, let's have that conversation a second. Because people are concerned about, as you said, dwindling populations, AI and robots had potential to help support the GDP. Congratulations on Optimus 2 and soon Optimus 3. Your prediction on the number of robots by 2040. Humanoid robots, to be specific. What order of magnitude.

By 2040. Yeah. So. I think by. If you say like 2040, probably there are more humanoid robots than there are people.

So on the order of 10 billion.

Yes.

And your price point on these humanoid robots, you're pretty good on pricing. Sometimes you're off on timing.

Yeah, I'm often optimistic on timing, but although the press will report when I'm late, but not when I'm early. For example, our Shanghai factory, we thought it would take about a year and a half, and we did it in 11 months. Our Nevada factory, we thought two years, we did it in 18 months. Or the Colossus cluster, Texas factory, two years, we did it in 14 months. So I've been early actually many times. It's just that. It's just not reported. So when I make a prediction, I try to figure out, I try to say what is the 50th percentile likely, which means that half the time I should be wrong. So I'm not sandbagging, essentially. So. But I think that's. Once you get out of 2040, that's a long time from now. Going 25 years, there'll be at least 10 billion humanoid robots. And price point for a class. Yeah, the price point will be, I think, Quite low. Probably 20, $25,000 for a robot that could do anything. We will be in a future, assuming we are on the good path of AI, I think we will be in a future of abundance. Obviously you wrote a book called Abundance, so I think you would agree that that is probably the outcome. Basically, anyone will be able to have any goods and services they want. The actual marginal cost of goods and services will be extremely low in the future.

In our last four minutes, let me change the subject to something near and dear to both of our hearts. Congratulations on Starship. It was literally awesome. Probably the engineering feat of this decade, if not more.

Not bad for humans. Not bad for humans. We did that with no AI was involved in that whatsoever. So amazing. I'm glad to say that we all did that entirely with human brains and without AI. I think in the future the AI might look at that and say, not bad for a bunch of monkeys.

When are we on Mars? When is Starship on Mars?

I think we'll be able to launch some starships to Mars in two years. So the next Mars window, which is in about 26, 27 months, we're just about to start. We're at the beginning of a Mars transit window now, and they occur every 26 months. So just over two years, we'll be sending our first uncrewed starships to Mars. And then if those work out well and we don't increment the crater count on Mars, then we'll send humans two years out of that.

So a challenge to be on the surface of Mars before the end of the decade sounds like a reasonable proclamation for either, for either side of the White House. Hopefully.

Yeah, I will go. I feel more optimistic about it with a Trump White House than a non Trump White House because the biggest impediment to progress that we're experiencing is regulatory. Is over regulation.

Got to keep those whales and sharks safe.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It just takes us, I mean, it takes longer to get the permit to launch than to build a giant rocket. And the bureaucracy in the US has been growing every year and has particularly grown under the Biden administration. And unless we do something to scale back the over regulation I call it sort of. America is getting a, a lot of countries are getting slow strangulation from overregulation. Unless something is done to push back on that, it'll eventually become illegal to do almost any large project and we won't be able to get to Mars.

Last subject. Congrats on the Cyber Cab rollout. Pretty extraordinary. Cathie woods predicted it to be multiple trillions of dollars of potential GDP growth and impact. Yeah, give us, give us some predictions on when we'll see Cyber Cab, when we'll be ordering a Cyber Cab.

Yeah, well, Tesla unsupervised full self driving. We expect to be working in the US next year with the Model 3 and Y. So you don't have to wait for the Robo Taxi or Cybercap to, for, for Tesla to release Autonomy. We're currently expecting to exceed human safety levels in Q2 next year and then substantially go beyond that thereafter. And, and so really it's just a software update to the cars to be able to do launch our self driving network. We, so we expect to unsupervised full self driving and start that in California and Texas, you know, around the middle of next year. And then you know, we have seven million cars on the road. We'll have nine, nine and a half million cars by the end of next year so and eventually we'll have a fleet of 100 million plus vehicles and they'll all be autonomous, the cybercap with no steering wheel or pedals. We're expecting to reach volume production in 2026. So that's certainly interesting. But like I said, the actual launch of a robotic taxi unsupiased full self driving is actually next year. And at the event, the Tesla Autonomy event, we had 50 cars, 30 Model Ys that were driverless and 20 of the cyber Cabs. And so Autonomy is here is what I'm saying. And yeah, and all cars will drive themselves. This is a no brainer and they'll get to where they're 10 times safer than human driven cars which will save I don't know, past a million lives a year globally. And then Optimus starts limited production next year, 2025 and then should be in volume production in 26 and then we'll grow to I think ultimately be the biggest product of any kind ever. So and I kind of see, I kind of agree with Ark Invest and Cathie Wood that Autonomy like sort of robotic taxis makes Tesla kind of like about a $5 trillion company. The Optimus robot I think makes Tesla a 25 trillion dollar company. It's not even clear what money means in that future.

We end up in a post capitalist society at some point. Elon, you make it look.

Yeah, we do sort of end up. It does become kind of post capitalist. And like I said, and I know you agree with us, that we're looking at the most likely bright side, we're headed for an age of abundance where anyone can have any goods and services they want. It won't be a case of universal basic income, it'll be a case of universal high income is the most likely outcome.

You make it look easy, my friend. Thank you for making some time available. I know it isn't easy. Let's give it up for Elon Musk, everybody.

Thank you, Peter.

Thank you, my friend.