突发：陪审团驳回对奥尔特曼 OpenAI 的指控后，马斯克首次受访

Oh, yeah.

You do like ranking things. It’s true.

Yes. Oh, that one. I was like, what are you talking about? Yeah, I guess. Well, they basically just decided that the statute limitations have passed . They did not actually render an opinion on whether, you know, there have been unjust enrichment or the chatbot has been stolen, which I think is obviously the case. But I do think it’s somewhat of an ambiguous situation because, you know, what happened was by degrees, meaning it wasn’t stolen all at once, it was stolen one piece at a time. And so we have to say like, well, was there really even a basis for legal action before, you know, Proposals Go? And I don’t think there is actually. So, you know, like the first step, I don’t want to belabor this point, but the first step into adding a for-profit thing had a cap for profit and was at a small scale. And also that all stock would revert to the charity upon the invention of artificial general intelligence. That clause has now been removed, so it will continue to be a for-profit after developing artificial general intelligence. That removal was quite recent, just in the last few weeks. So, it is, at this point, it is whatever, an $800 billion for-profit company somehow from a nonprofit. And I think this is a dangerous precedent to set because if it means that someone can start, take money as a nonprofit, convert that to a for-profit when it’s successful, it undermines all charitable giving in America.

Yeah, exactly. What do you got to lose?

Yeah, I think we necessarily have to appeal because this will become precedent, you know, which people can actually then essentially loot charities and use this case as a basis for doing so, which I think would be wrong.

More or less just happened. I mean, well, let’s just say that when I was in college, I wanted to be part of things that would change the world in a significant way. I didn’t originally think I wanted to be doing things in AI because AI was somewhat of a double-edged sword. But I did want to accelerate the transition to a sustainable energy economy, which is the sort of electric cars, solar and batteries. And, you know, I think some kind of brain-machine interface that can give you cybernetic superpowers, I think is probably good. It could, you know, help people that have brain or spine injuries, you know, restore— enable people who’ve never spoken for years to speak again, which is— which we’ve done. Give people eyesight who have lost both eyes or the optic nerve or maybe have never even seen at all, blind from birth. By direct interface to the optical centers in the brain, you can actually restore eyesight or give people eyesight that they’ve never had before. And you can enable people to walk again, which I think is profound. I mean, these are kind of Jesus-level things, you know, like I say, like when technologies are hitting like Jesus-level miracles, you know, like, that’s pretty good.

Jesus-level, you’re like, okay, that’s pretty good. So, and then SpaceX is about making life multi-planetary, expanding consciousness to the stars. And hopefully we will make a fundamental breakthrough later this year, which is to have the first fully reusable orbital rocket, which is necessary in order to transport enough tonnage to the Moon or Mars to create a self-growing city, basically to extend civilization to other planets. I mean, I think probably you need to move a rough order of magnitude of about 1 million tons to the moon or to Mars to create enough of an industrial base to have the civilization there be self-growing, meaning like, the acid test being if the resupply ships from Earth stop coming for any reason, does the civilization on the Moon or Mars continue to grow or does it die out? And I do want to emphasize, like, being a multi-planet civilization doesn’t mean like we leave Earth and go somewhere else, because that would just be a single-planet civilization somewhere else.

Yeah. And a tougher place to live than here, by far. Earth is extremely easy and comfortable compared to the Moon, Mars, or pretty much anywhere else. But, you know, I think at some point we want to be a spacefaring civilization. We want to be out there among the stars and be, yeah.

Well, I guess I don’t really get up and say, “Hey, what shall I innovate today?” You know, type of thing. It’s really just building the technologies necessary to extend life beyond Earth. You know, there’s the Starlink internet, which is rebuilding the entire internet in space, but better, you know? I guess that’s kind of pretty cool. There’s, yeah, the Optimus robot that we’re developing at Tesla, the self-driving cars, solar power at scale, you know?

Well, it’d be difficult for me to sort of comment on that, you know, because, you know, there’s publicly traded companies and one’s publicly traded and one’s, you know, about to be. So it would be like difficult to, you know.

I’m not, I think I’m not allowed to comment on these things. That’s like a quiet period or something to that effect.

Well, no, I mean, I’m not really going to say that’s like, what’s your favorite kid type of thing, you know? I think you can’t really say that, you know.

Well, I guess, you know, I’m obviously a big fan of Nikola Tesla since named the company after him. But I also like, you know, I don’t know, Edison is great too. Some people don’t like Edison, but I think he did some pretty impressive stuff. And like General Electric is like Edison’s company. I mean, I certainly admire like great scientists, engineers, but like anyone, I mean, you know, Ben Franklin, Shakespeare, Newton, Einstein, you know, the usual suspects.

It was like actually more awesome than people realize because I mean, he basically invented mass manufacturing of complex objects. Like people didn’t really know how to do that before Ford.

And like Ford actually created the automotive industry of Earth, really. And ’cause he pretty much started what became General Motors, and then he kinda got, I don’t know, kicked out of that or something, and then started Ford Motor Company, and really developed mass manufacturing of complex objects. It’s quite a tricky thing. And then everyone just pretty much copied him.

Well, I mean, I guess I mean, I don’t really think about these things that much, but I— well, I mean, I guess, you know, Jensen Huang at NVIDIA is like doing pretty great in terms of inventing, you know, developing AI computers.

Well, I think I’m like simultaneously both, honestly. It’s like, I mean, at this point, like, when I go to sleep, there’s like some AI breakthrough. When I wake up, there’s some AI breakthrough. And by lunchtime, there’s another AI breakthrough. So it’s like a head spinner at this point. It’s pretty obvious that we’re going to have AI that is vastly smarter than humans. And already, in some ways, it already is. I mean, it seems like AI unequivocally smarter than humans in every way, including in innovation, is probably not more than a year or two away, I would say.

This is kind of worrying. I hope it’s nice to us, you know.

In 5 years, we’ll have probably— so 5 years being, say, 2031. I think digital intelligence will exceed the sum of all human intelligence. That there will be in 5 years, probably there might be a, let’s say, at least 100 million humanoid robots, but maybe a billion. Yeah.

And I predict that the economy is probably twice its current size in 5, maybe 6 years. 5 to 7 years. Because you’re going to hit a doubling period, you know, where the economic output is increasing so, so fast that, you know, plus minus a few years, you will see giant changes.

Space is much easier than people may think. I mean, SpaceX at this point has 10,000 satellites in orbit right now. And in the future with Starship, we’ll be launching over 10,000 communication satellites per year, each one of which is much more capable than our current satellites. So you can expect that’s probably 10 to 100 times more communications capability than currently exists from space. But that will pale in comparison to the tonnage of AI satellites. It’s always helpful to use the physics tools of thinking in the limit. If you think of the limit, what is the most amount of AI compute you could possibly bring to bear? And the way to access power that’s far beyond anything on Earth is in space. So these are some humbling ways to maybe frame the problem and see how tiny we are. Here on Earth, we are like microbes on a dust mote compared to the Sun. All of human civilization currently uses less than a trillionth of the energy, of the power emitted by the Sun. Much less than a trillionth. All human energy counted as generously as you could possibly imagine is much less than a trillionth of the Sun’s energy. So that means if you were to increase civilizational energy harnessed by a million, you would still be much less than a millionth of the Sun’s energy harnessed. Another way to think about it is, because people sometimes say, “What about this form of power generation or that form of power generation?” I’m like, everything is irrelevant compared to the Sun. The Sun is 99.8% of mass in the solar system. If all mass that was not the Sun was burnt and you extracted the absolute maximum amount of energy from all mass that is not the Sun, the amount of energy produced by the Sun would still round up to 100% of the energy produced in the solar system. And then if you teleported 2 more Jupiters from other— somehow teleported 2 more Jupiters into our solar system and burnt them too, the Sun would still be 100% of power, rounding up. So really everything is just extremely tiny compared to the Sun. Therefore when you go to space, if you want to climb the Kardashev scale in any meaningful way whatsoever, you have to go to space. Our rough estimate is that you could probably do a terawatt a year of AI-powered, solar-powered AI satellites launched from Earth. That would require something like 10 million tons a year of payload to orbit at 100 kilowatts per ton, and that would be a terawatt per year. The average power usage in the United States is half a terawatt. That would mean you’d be launching twice the amount of AI power than the entire electricity consumption in the United States per year. This is not breaking any physics here. This is all achievable. Now, if you want to take that up several more orders of magnitude, then the thing to do is to build a base on the moon and construct a mass driver. Build the solar panels and radiators on the moon. Chips you could probably bring from Earth, but build those on the moon too. And that would enable you to do about a petawatt per year of solar-powered AI. Now I’m not sure how much AI we need at the end of the day, but that’s a lot.

It would be vastly greater than the Earth’s economy. Earth’s economy would be really inconsequential by comparison with that.

Well, I did say for the longest time that people ought to build tunnels, and then everyone thought I was joking. And then I was like, “Fine, well, let’s just create a company, The Boring Company, to build tunnels.” Because this is an obvious way to reduce traffic to zero by going 3D with your transport system. Just as we go 3D with the buildings, it’s obviously illogical to expect that you won’t have traffic if you have buildings that are 3D and a transport system that is 2D, and everyone tries to go in and out of the 3D buildings at the same time. But if you have a transport network that is 3-dimensional with tunnels going all over the place, then you can address any arbitrary level of traffic. Now, I encourage other people to start tunneling companies because The Boring Company is the only one, as far as I can tell, that’s taking this seriously.

Yeah, honestly, there’s a lot of opportunity in tunnels. There really is. And it’s quite hard work building these things. So I hope other people do it too. And I guess there’s probably a lot of opportunity in synthetic medicine. These days, you can basically create custom RNA. I think we’re going from a situation where medicine has been analog, where we kind of just find drugs kind of by accident most of the time, like finding sticks in the forest that seem like a useful club. It’s quite primitive how we found medication in the past. But once you can— and since we can now construct synthetic RNA, you can effectively think of the future of medicine as being digital. If you just know what to program into that synthetic RNA strand, you can basically, I think, cure almost anything.

Electric aircraft are probably an opportunity there. I think there’s some startups in that field.

Electric aircraft. Electric aircraft.

“You played a useful role in the advancement of civilization.”

Thank you for human. That’s what the AI will say. Fair.