马斯克：战争、AI、外星人、政治、物理、电子游戏与人类 | Lex Fridman 播客 #400

0:31Yeah, that’s great.

0:38Is that whole meme where all guys are thinking about the Roman Empire at least once a day?

1:06Yeah, they usually came as a result of conquest. I mean, there’s some like the Hapsburg Empire where there was just a lot of clever marriages.

1:33Tested, Grok approved. Yeah.

1:57I’m generally a proponent of peace. I mean, ignorance is perhaps, in my view, the real enemy to be countered. That’s the real hard part, not fighting other humans, but all creatures fight. I mean, the jungle is… People think of nature as perhaps some sort of peaceful thing, but in fact it is not. There’s some quite funny Werner Herzog thing where he is in the jungle saying that it’s basically just murder and death in every direction. The plants and animals in the jungle are constantly trying to kill each other every single day, every minute. So it’s not like we’re unusual in that respect.

2:49Yes. We have much more vulnerability to control our limbic instinct for violence than say a chimpanzee. And in fact, if one looks at say, chimpanzee society, it is not friendly. I mean, the Bonobos are an exception, but chimpanzee society is filled with violence and it’s quite horrific, frankly. That’s our limbic system in action. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of a chimpanzee, it’ll eat your face off and tear your nuts off.

3:33Yeah. Chimpanzee society is a permanent version of human society. They’re not like peace loving basically at all. There’s extreme violence and then once in a while, somebody who’s watched too many Disney movies decides to raise a chimpanzee as a pet, and then that eats their face or they’re nuts off or chew their fingers off and that kind of thing. It’s happened several times.

4:02It’s happened to people. It’s unfortunate. That’s, I guess, one way to ensure that the other chimp doesn’t contribute to the gene pool.

4:15The nut rougher.

4:21I think it’s safe to say if somebody’s got your nuts in their hands and as the option of roughing them off, you’ll be amenable to whatever they want.

4:38Yeah.

4:54Well, I think that part of the world is definitely, if you look up… There is no easy answer in the dictionary. It’ll be the picture of the Middle East in Israel especially. So there is no easy answer. This is strictly my opinion is that the goal of Hamas was to provoke an overreaction from Israel. They obviously did not expect to have a military victory, but they really wanted to commit the worst atrocities that they could in order to provoke the most aggressive response possible from Israel, and then leverage that aggressive response to rally Muslims worldwide for the course of Gaza and Palestine, which they have succeeded in doing. So the counterintuitive thing here, I think that the thing that I think should be done, even though it’s very difficult, is that I would recommend that Israel engage in the most conspicuous acts of kindness possible, everything, that is the actual thing that we’re taught the goal of Hamas.

6:26It’s not exactly turn the other cheek because I do think that it is appropriate for Israel to find the Hamas members and either kill them or incarcerate them. That’s something has to be done because they’re just going to keep coming otherwise. But in addition to that, they need to do whatever they can. There’s some talk of establishing, for example, a mobile hospital. I’d recommend doing that. Just making sure that there’s food, water, medical necessities and just be over the top about it and be very transparent. So [inaudible 00:07:22] can claim it’s a trick. Just put webcam on the thing or 24, 7.

7:31Yeah, conspicuous acts of kindness that are unequivocal, meaning they can’t be somehow because Hamas will then their response will be, “Oh, it’s a trick.” Therefore, you have to counter how it’s not a trick.

7:51Yes. And I’m not sure who said it, it’s an [inaudible 00:07:54] saying, but an eye for an eye makes everyone blind. Now, that neck of the woods, they really believe in the whole eye for an eye thing. But you really have… If you’re not going to just outright commit genocide against an entire people, which obviously would not be acceptable to really, shouldn’t be acceptable to anyone, then you’re going to leave basically a lot of people alive who subsequently hate Israel. So really the question is like for every Hamas member that you kill, how many did you create? And if you create more than you killed, you’ve not succeeded. That’s the real situation there. And it’s safe to say that if you kill somebody’s child in Gaza, you’ve made at least a few homeless members who will die just to kill an Israeli. That’s the situation. But I mean, this is one of the most contentious subjects one could possibly discuss. But I think if the goal ultimately is some sort of long-term piece, one has to look at this from the standpoint of over time, are there more or fewer terrorists being created?

9:29Yeah, war, safe to say, wars always existed and always will exist.

9:34Always has existed and always will exist.

9:42There will always be war. There’s a question of just how much war and there’s sort of the scope and scale of war. But to imagine that there would not be any war in the future, I think would be a very unlikely outcome.

9:58Yes. It’s a giant war. The first book starts off with a gigantic galactic war where trillions die trillions.

10:18Yeah, I guess if we are able to one day expand to fool the galaxy or whatever, there will be a galactic war at some point.

10:38Yes.

10:56One of the things that does concern me is that there are very few people alive today who actually viscerally understand the horrors of war, at least in the US. I mean, obviously there are people on the front lines in Ukraine and Russia who understand just how terrible war is, but how many people in the West understand it? My grandfather was in World War II. He was severely traumatized. He was there I think for almost six years in Eastern North Africa and Italy. All his friends were killed in front of him, and he would’ve died too, except they randomly gave some, I guess IQ test or something, and he scored very high. He was not an officer. He was I think a corporal or a sergeant or something like that because he didn’t finish high school because he had to drop out of high school because his dad died and he had to work to support his siblings. So because he didn’t graduate high school, he was not eligible for the offset corps.

13:01Yeah, I mean, there are enough nuclear bombs pointed at United States to make the radioactive revel balance many times.

13:25I think we shouldn’t discount the possibility of nuclear war. It is a civilizational threat. Right now, I could be wrong, but I think the current probability of nuclear war is quite low. But there are a lot of nukes pointed at us, and we have a lot of nukes pointed at other people. They’re still there. Nobody’s put their guns away. The missiles are still in the silos.

14:03No, there are wars which are tragic and difficult on a local basis. And then there are wars which are civilization ending or has that potential. Obviously, global thermonuclear warfare has high potential to end civilization, perhaps permanently, but certainly to severely wound and perhaps set back human progress to the Stone Age or something. I don’t know. Pretty bad. Probably scientists and engineers want to be super popular after that as well. You got us into this mess. So generally, I think we obviously want to prioritize civilizational risks over things that are painful and tragic on a local level, but not civilizational.

15:08Well, I think that what is likely to happen, which is really pretty much the way it is, is that something very close to the current lines will be how a ceasefire or truce happens. But you just have a situation right now where whoever goes on the offensive will suffer casualties at several times the rate of whoever’s on the defense because you’ve got defense in depth, you’ve got minefields, trenches, anti-tank defenses. Nobody has air superiority because the anti-aircraft missiles are really far better than the aircraft. They’re far more of them. And so neither side has air superiority. Tanks are basically death traps, just slow moving, and they’re not immune to anti-tank weapons. So you really just have long range artillery and infantry ranges. It’s World War I all over again with drones, thrown old drones, some drones there.

16:34So whoever is… You don’t want to be trying to advance from either side because the probability of dying is incredibly high. So in order to overcome defense in depth, trenches and minefields, you really need a significant local superiority in numbers. Ideally combined alms where you do a fast attack with aircraft, a concentrated number of tanks, and a lot of people, that’s the only way you’re going to punch through a line and then you’re going to punch through and then not have reinforcements just kick you right out again. I mean, I really recommend people read World War I warfare in detail. That’s rough. I mean, the sheer number of people that died there was mind-boggling.

17:56Yes. The thing that… The reason I proposed some sort of truce or peace a year ago was because I’ve predicted pretty much exactly what would happen, which is a lot of people dying for basically almost no changes in land and the loss of the flower of Ukrainian and Russian youth. And we should have some sympathy for the Russian boys as well as the Ukrainian boys, because Russian boys, because boys didn’t ask to be on their frontline. They have to be. So there’s a lot of sons not coming back to their parents, and I think most of them don’t hate the other side. It’s sort of like as this saying comes from World War I, it’s like young boys who don’t know each other killing each other on behalf of old men that do know each other. The hell’s the point of that.

19:14Look, I think I would just recommend do not send the flower of Ukrainian youth to die in trenches, whether he talks to Putin or not, just don’t do that. Whoever goes on the offensive will lose massive numbers of people and history will not look kindly upon them.

19:58Well, it’s worth reading that book on the, difficult to pronounce, the Thucydides Trap, I believe it’s called. I love war history. I like inside out and backwards. There’s hardly a battle I haven’t read about. And trying to figure out what really was the cause of victory in any particular case as opposed to what one side or another claim the reason.

20:24Yeah, yeah.

20:26Yeah. So that Athens and Sparta is a classic case. The thing about the Greek is they really wrote down a lot of stuff. They loved writing. There are lots of interesting things that happened in many parts of the world, but people didn’t write down, so we don’t know what happened or they didn’t really write in detail. They just would say, “We had a battle and we won.” And what? Can you add a bit more? The Greeks, they really wrote a lot. They were very articulate on… They just love writing. And we have a bunch of that writing as preserved. So we know what led up to the Peloponnesian War between the Spartanand Athenian Alliance, and we know that they saw it coming.

23:20I’ve spent a lot of time in China and met with the leadership many times.

23:36Well, the sheer number of really smart, hardworking people in China is incredible. There are really say how many smart, hardworking people are there in China? There’s far more of them there than there are here, I think, in my opinion. And they’ve got a lot of energy. So I mean, the architecture in China that’s in recent years is far more impressive than the US. I mean the train stations, the buildings, the high speed rail, everything, it’s really far more impressive than what we have in the US. I mean, I recommend somebody just go to Shanghai and Beijing, look at the buildings and go to take the train from Beijing to Xian, where you have the terracotta warriors. China’s got an incredible history, very long history, and I think arguably in terms of the use of language from a written standpoint, one of the oldest, perhaps the oldest written language, and then China, people did write things down.

26:18The good news, the history of China suggests that China is not inquisitive, meaning they’re not going to go out and invade a whole bunch of countries. Now they do feel very strongly… So that’s good. I mean, because a lot of very powerful countries have been inquisitive. The US is also one of the rare cases that has not been inquisitive. After World War II, the US could have basically taken over the world in any country, we’ve got nukes, nobody else has got nukes. We don’t even have to lose soldiers. Which country do you want? And the United States could have taken over everything and it didn’t. And the United States actually helped rebuild countries. So it helped rebuild Europe, helped rebuild Japan. This is very unusual behavior, almost unprecedented.

28:08Very much so. And in fact, Wernher von Braun, a smart guy, was like, “We’ve got to be captured by the Americans.” And in fact, the SS was under orders to execute von Braun and all of the German rocket conditioners, and they narrowly escaped. They said they were going out for a walk in the woods. They left in the middle of winter with no coats and then ran, but no food, no coats, no water, and just ran like hell and ran West and Vice Sherlock, I think his brother found a bicycle or something and then just cycled West as fast as he couldn’t have found a US patrol. So anyway, that’s one way you can tell morality is where do you want to be a PW? It’s not fun anywhere, but some places are much worse than others. Anyway, so America has been, while far from perfect, generally a benevolent force, and we should always be self-critical and we try to be better, but anyone with half a brain knows that.

30:46Yes, China has been very clear that they’ll incorporate Taiwan peacefully or militarily, but that they will incorporate it from their standpoint is 100% likely.

31:44Absolutely. So after World War I, they made a big mistake. They basically tried to lump all of blame on Germany and saddle Germany with impossible reparations. And really there was quite a bit of blame to go around for World War I, but they try to put it all in Germany and that laid the seeds for World War II. So a lot of people, were not just Hitler, a lot of people felt wronged and they wanted vengeance and they got it.

32:41Yeah, you kill somebody’s father, mother or son, daughter, they’re not going to forget it. They’ll want vengeance. So after World War II, they’re like, “Well, the Treaty of Versi was a huge mistake in World War I. And so this time, instead of crushing the losers, we’re actually going to help them with the module plan, and we’re going to help rebuild Germany. We’re going to help rebuild Austria and Italy and whatnot.” So that was the right move.

33:37Something must stop the cycle of reciprocal violence. Something must stop it, or it’ll never stop. Just eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, limb for a limb, life for a life forever and ever.

34:23Yeah, I guess I’m to blame for that one.

34:29Yeah.

34:47Yeah, absolutely. Our AI, Grok, is modeled after The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which is one of my favorite books, which it’s a book on philosophy. It’s-

35:00My favorite books, it’s a book on philosophy, disguises book on humor. And I would say that forms the basis of my philosophy, which is that we don’t know the meaning of life, but the more we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness, digital and biological, the more we’re able to understand what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe. So I have a philosophy of curiosity.

35:59Well, we are actually working hard to have engineering math, physics answers that you can count on. So for the other AIs out there, these so-called large language models, I’ve not found the engineering to be reliable. It unfortunately hallucinates most when you at least want it to hallucinate. So when you’re asking important, difficult questions, that’s when it tends to be confidently wrong. So we’re really trying hard to say, okay, how do we be as grounded as possible? So you can count on the results, trace things back to physics first principles, mathematical logic. So underlying the humor is an aspiration to adhere to the truth of the universe as closely as possible.

37:02It is tricky. So that’s why there’s always going to be some amount of error. But do we want to aspire to be as truthful as possible about the answers with acknowledged error. So that there was always, you don’t want to be confidently wrong, so you’re not going to be right every time, but you want to minimize how often you’re confidently wrong. And then like I said, once you can count on the logic as being not violating physics, then you can start to bull on that to create inventions, like invent new technologies. But if you cannot count on the foundational physics being correct, obviously the inventions are simply wishful thinking, imagination land. Magic basically.

38:06Yes, that’s how simple three word mission.

38:38If an AI cannot figure out new physics, it’s clearly not equal to humans, nor has surpassed humans because humans have figured out new physics. Physics is just deepening what’s inside into how reality works. And then there’s engineering which is inventing things that have never existed. Now the range of possibilities for engineering is far greater than for physics because once you figure out the rules of the universe, that’s it. You’ve discovered things that already existed. But from that you can then build technologies that are really almost limitless in the variety. And it’s like once you understand the rules of the game properly, and with current physics, we do at least at a local level, understand how physics works very well. Our ability to predict things is incredibly good. Degree to which quantum mechanics can predict outcomes is incredible. That was my hardest class in college by the way. My senior quantum mechanics class was harder than all of my other classes put together.

40:01Yeah. You have to test any conclusions against the ground truth of reality. Reality is the ultimate judge. Like physics is the law, everything else is a recommendation. I’ve seen plenty of people break the laws made by man, but none break the laws made by physics.

40:28And it’s also not the case currently that even that its internal logic is not consistent. So especially with the approach of just predicting a token predict token, predict token, it’s like a vector sum. You’re summing up a bunch of vectors, but you can get drift. A little bit of error adds up and by the time you are many tokens down the path, it doesn’t make any sense.

41:02It has to be self-aware about the drift, and then look at the thing as a gestalt as a whole and say it doesn’t have coherence as a whole. When authors write books, they will write the book and then they’ll go and revise it, take into account all the end and the beginning and the middle and rewrite it to achieve coherence so that it doesn’t end up at a nonsensical place.

41:51Create a draft and then you iterate on that draft until it has coherence, until it all adds up basically.

42:22No, I in team America. Wait, there is.

42:50Yeah. I think we need to understand intelligence, understand consciousness. I mean there are some fundamental questions of what is thought, what is emotion? Is it really just one atom bumping into another atom? It feels like something more than that. So I think we’re probably missing some really big things.

43:26Well, some people would quote like a soul religion, be a soul. You feel like you’re you, I mean you don’t feel like you’re just a collection of atoms, but on what dimension does thought exist? What dimension does do emotions exist? Because we feel them very strongly. I suspect there’s more to it than atoms bumping into atoms.

43:58Yeah. What is consciousness? When you put the atoms in a particular shape, why are they able to form thoughts and take actions and feelings?

44:13Yeah. Why does the solution exist? On what plane does the solution exist? And sometimes I wonder is either perhaps everything’s conscious or nothing’s conscious. One of the two.

44:37It does seem more fun, yes. But we’re composed of atoms and those atoms are composed of quarks and leptons and those quarks and leptons have been around since the beginning of the universe.

44:53What seems to be the beginning of the universe.

45:24Where are the aliens?

45:26That’s one of the foam paradox question. A lot of people have asked me if I’ve seen any evidence of aliens and I haven’t, which is kind of concerning. I think I’d probably prefer to at least have seen some archeological evidence of aliens. To the best of my knowledge, I’m not aware of any evidence surveillance. If they’re out there, they’re very subtle. We might just be the only consciousness, at least in the galaxy. And if you look at say the history of Earth, to believe the archeological record Earth is about four and a half billion years old. Civilization as measured from the first writing is only about 5,000 years old. We have to give some credit there to the ancient Sumerians who aren’t around anymore. I think it was an archaic pre-form was the first actual symbolic representation, but only about 5,000 years ago. I think that’s a good date for when we say civilization started. That’s 1000000th of Earth’s existence.

48:45We need to do it. I suspect that if we are able to go out there and explore other star systems that we… There’s a good chance we find a whole bunch of long dead one planet civilizations that never made it past their home planet.

49:08I mean there are various explanations for paradox and one is they’re these great vultures which civilizations don’t pass through. And one of those great vultures is do you become a multi-plan civilization or not? And if you don’t, it’s simply a matter of time before something happens on your planet, either natural or manmade that causes us to die out. Like the dinosaurs, where are they now? They didn’t have spaceships.

49:51I hope so. Nice aliens.

49:59That would be a nice explanation.

50:10Well, they do run into a lot of other ants.

50:14These ant wars.

50:18Yeah. They literally have these big wars between various ants.

50:28Listen to that Werner Herzog talking about the jungle. It’s really hilarious. Have you heard it?

50:37You should play it as an interlude in the… It’s on YouTube. It’s awesome.

50:47He’s great.

50:51He did that bear documentary. I did this thing about penguins.

51:00Yeah. The penguins headed for mountains that are 70 miles away and penguin is just headed for dom, basically.

51:28Yeah. So aliens, I mean, I don’t know. Look, I think the smart move is just this is the first time in the history of earth that it’s been possible for life to extend beyond earth. That window is open. Now it may be open for a long time or it may be open for a short time and it may be open now and then never open again. So I think the smart move here is to make life multiplanetary while it’s possible to do so. We don’t want to be one of those lame one planet civilizations that just dies out.

52:05Yeah. Lame. Self-respecting, civilization would be one planet.

52:23No.

52:30I mean, look, if I see the slightest indication that there are aliens, I will immediately post on X platform anything I know.

52:42Yeah. I mean, look, we have more satellites up there right now than everyone else combined. So we know if we’ve got a maneuver around something and we don’t have to maneuver around anything.

53:04Yes.

53:16Yeah. I would agree that God of the simulator or whatever the supreme beings reveal themselves through the physics, they have creatives of this existence and incumbent upon us to try to understand more about this one creation.

53:58There may not be a master plan in the sense. So maybe an interesting answer to the question of determinism versus free will is that if we are in a simulation, the reason that these higher beings would hold a simulation is to see what happens. So they don’t know what happens otherwise they wouldn’t hold the simulation. So when humans create a simulation, so it’s SpaceX and Tesla, we create simulations all the time. Especially for the rocket, you have to run a lot of simulations to understand what’s going to happen because you can’t really test the rocket until it goes to space and you want it to work. So you have to simulate subsonic, transonic, supersonic, hypersonic, ascend, and then coming back, super high heating and orbital dynamics. All this has got to be simulated because you don’t get very many kicks at the can. But we run the simulations to see what happens, not if we knew what happens, we wouldn’t run the simulation. So whoever created this existence, they’re running it because they don’t know what’s going to happen, not because they do.

55:34Well, the funny thing is Uber Lilith, her title is Hatred Incarnate. And right now, I guess you can ask the Diablo team, but it’s almost impossible to defeat Hatred in the eternal realm.

56:00I can cruise through Tier 100 Nightmare Dungeon like a stroll in the park.

56:09Yeah. I guess maybe the second hardest boss is Duriel. Duriel can even scratch the paint. So I killed Duriel so many times and every other boss in the game, all of them kill him so many times, it’s easy. But Uber Lilith, otherwise known as Hatred Incarnate, especially if you’re Duriel and you have no ability to go to be vulnerable, there are these random death waves that come at you.

57:41As a Druid. This is really vexing, let me tell you.

58:30I would not recommend playing a druid in the eternal realm. Right now I think the most powerful character in the seasonal realm is the Sorcerer with the lightning balls. The smokes have huge balls in the seasonal.

58:49So have huge balls. They do huge balls of lightning.

58:57In the seasonal realm, it’s pretty easy to beat Uber Lilith because you get these vapor powers that out amplify your damage and increase your defense and whatnot. So really quite easy to defeat Hatred seasonally, but to defeat Hatred eternally very difficult, almost impossible. It’s very impossible. It seems like a metaphor for life.

59:47Yes.

59:50No, it’s absurd. Really, it’s exercise and absurdity and it makes me want to pull my hair out.

1:00:03I don’t know. It calms my mind. I mean, killing the demons in a video game calms the demons in my mind. If you play a tough video game, you can get into a state of flow, which is very enjoyable. Admittedly, it needs to be not too easy, not too hard, kind of in the Goldilocks zone, and I guess you generally want to feel like you’re progressing in the game. A good video, and there’s also beautiful art, engaging storylines, and it’s like an amazing puzzle to solve, I think. So it’s like solving the puzzle.

1:00:56Elden Ring is definitely a candidate for best game ever. Top five for sure.

1:01:06Elden Ring, feels like it’s designed by an alien.

1:01:17It’s so unusual. It’s incredibly creative, and the art is stunning. I recommend playing it on a big resolution, high dynamic raised TV even. It doesn’t need to be a monitor. Just the art is incredible. It’s so beautiful and it’s so unusual, and each of those top bus battles is unique. It’s a unique puzzle to solve. Each one’s different and the strategy you use to solve one battle is different from another battle.

1:02:00Correct. That is currently the, and I’ve played a lot of video games because that’s my primary recreational activity. And yes, beating Hatred in the internal realm is the hardest bus battle in life. And in the video game. I’m not sure it’s possible, but I do make progress. So then I’m like, ” Okay. I’m making progress. Maybe if I just tweak that paragon board a little more, I can do it could.” Just dodge a few more waves, I could do it.

1:02:51Yeah, it might be. I have a feeling that at least I think-

1:03:03It’s doable. Yes.

1:03:09Yeah. I mean, it did prompt me to think about just hate in general, which is you want to be careful of one of those things where you wish for something that sounds good, but if you get it’s actually a dystopian situation. So if you wish for world peace sounds good, but how’d it enforced and at what cost eternal peace? It might actually be worse to have eternal peace because of what that would entail. The suppression of everyone, it might be the suppression of progress. It might be an ossified society that never changes. What I’m saying is that there is an argument that if you wish for no war, you should be careful what you wish for because what’s required in order for there to be no war might be worse than a little war.

1:04:52There’s actually a real drug called Soma.

1:04:54Yes.

1:04:58Does Gong know about it? No. He probably will go to Brave New World.

1:05:02We got to ask it.

1:05:04Tell us about the drug called Soma.

1:05:15Well, there’s a real drug as well.

1:05:27Okay, fun. Yeah. So it’s talking about the real drug.

1:06:01That’s the real drug it’s talking about.

1:06:20I love it. Yeah.

1:06:36Yeah. Seems done a great job. You could say no, I mean, Soma from Brave New World, because it thinks you mean, you mean Soma, the real drug. No, I mean Soma from Brave Beer World.

1:07:30Exactly. Is it better to live in a world where everyone is happy all the time, even if that happiness is artificial? It’s good question. This is what I mean. Do you wish for world peace and happiness all the time? Are you sure? Because that might be a society that is essentially sterile and ossified that never changes, that is ultimately doomed.

1:08:04This is really a very good summary. It really gets to the point. This is not simply regurgitating a brave new world. It’s actually getting to the salient element of Soma as a drug. Do you actually want to be in a situation where everyone is happy all the time, even though it’s artificial? Or is it better to confront the challenges of life and experience the full range of human emotions, even if it means experiencing pain and suffering? For

1:08:41It pretty much nails it. In conclusion, Soma from Brave New World is fictional drug that’s used to explore some deep philosophical questions about the nature of happiness and the role of drugs in society. It’s a powerful symbol of the dangers of using drugs to escape from reality and the importance of confronting the challenges of life head on. Nailed it. And the crazy thing is we do have a real drug called Soma, which is like the drug in the book. And I’m like, “They must’ve named it Probably.” Some of the real drug is quite effective on back pain.

1:09:20I’ve taken it because I had a squashed disc in my C5-C6.

1:09:28It doesn’t completely, it reduces the amount of pain you feel, but at the expense of mental acuity, it dells your mind. Just like the drug in the book.

1:09:49Yeah. Actually I was towing a friend of mine saying, “Would you really want there to be no hate in the world? Really none?” I wonder why hate evolved. I’m not saying we should have…

1:10:00I wonder why hate evolved. I’m not saying we should amplify hate, of course, I think we should try to minimize it, but none at all. There might be a reason for hate.

1:10:22Is it possible to appreciate the highs without knowing the lows?

1:10:34No highs, no lows, who knows?

1:10:59Well, I think it’s helpful, the tools of physics are very powerful and can be applied I think to really any arena in life. It’s really just critical thinking. For something important you need to reason with from first principles and think about things in the limit one direction or the other. So in the limit, even at the Kardashev scale, meaning even if you harness the entire power of the sun, you’ll still care about useful compute per watt. That’s where I think, probably where things are headed from the standpoint of AI is that we have a silicon shortage now that will transition to a voltage transformer shortage in about a year. Ironically, transformers for transformers. You need transformers to run transformers.

1:11:57I think, yes, fate loves irony, ironic humor, an ironically funny outcome seems to be often what fate wants.

1:12:13Yeah. But yeah, so we have silicon shortage today, a voltage step down transformer shortage probably in about a year, and then just electricity shortages in general in about two years. I gave a speech for the world gathering of utility companies, electricity companies, and I said, look, you really need to prepare for traveling of electricity demand because all transport is going to go electric with the ironic exception of rockets, and heating will also go electric. So energy usage right now is roughly one third, very rough terms, one third electricity, one third transport, one third heating. And so in order for everything to go sustainable, to go electric, you need to triple electricity output. So I encourage the utilities to build more power of plants and also to probably have, well, not probably, they should definitely buy more batteries because the grid currently is sized for realtime load, which is kind of crazy because that means you’ve got to size for whatever the peak electricity demand is, the worst second or the worst day of the year, or you can have a brown out or blackout.

1:14:25Yeah.

1:14:29Yes. Yes. I mean, electrification of transport and electric heating will be much bigger than AI, at least-

1:14:40In the short term. But even for AI, you really have a growing demand for electricity, for electric vehicles, and a growing demand for electricity to run the computers for AI. And so this is obviously, can lead to electricity shortage.

1:15:29It will get solved. It’s the question of how long it takes to solve it. So at various points, there’s some kind of limiting factor to progress and with regard to AI, I’m saying right now the limiting factor is silicon chips and that will, we’re going to then have more chips than we can actually plug in and turn on probably in about a year. The initial constraint being literally voltage step down transformers because you’ve got power coming in at 300,000 volts and it’s got to step all the way down eventually to around 0.7 volts. So it’s a very big amount of, the voltage step down is gigantic and the industry is not used to rapid growth.

1:16:42Well, I mean I’ve been pushing for some kind of regulatory oversight for a long time. I’ve been somewhat of a Cassandra on the subject for over a decade. I think we want to be very careful in how we develop AI. It’s a great power and with great power comes great responsibility. I think it would be wise for us to have at least an objective third party who can be like a referee that can go in and understand what the various leading players are doing with AI, and even if there’s no enforcement ability, they can at least voice concerns publicly. Jeff Hinton, for example, left Google and he voiced strong concerns, but now he’s not at Google anymore, so who’s going to voice the concerns? So I think there’s, Tesla gets a lot of regulatory oversight on the automotive front. We’re subject to, I think over a hundred regulatory agencies domestically and internationally. It’s a lot. You could fill this room with the all regulations that Tesla has to adhere to for automotive. Same is true for rockets and for, currently, the limiting factor for SpaceX for Starship launch is regulatory approval.

1:20:57Yes. Well, I mean one of the things that’s pretty wild is for launching out of Vanderberg in California, we had to, they were worried about seal procreation, whether the seals would be dismayed by the sonic booms. Now, there’ve been a lot of rockets launched out of Vandenberg and the seal population has steadily increased. So if anything, rocket booms are an aphrodisiac, based on the evidence, if you were to correlate rocket launches with seal population. Nonetheless, we were forced to kidnap a seal, strap it to a board, put headphones on the seal and play sonic boom sounds to it to see if it would be distressed. This is an actual thing that happened. This is actually real. I have pictures.

1:21:55Yes, it’s a seal with headphones strapped to a board. Okay. Now the amazing part is how calm the seal was because if I was a seal, I’d be like, this is the end. They’re definitely going to eat me. How old the seal, when seal goes back to other seal friends, how’s he going to explain that?

1:22:18Never going to believe him. That’s why, I’m like sort of like it’s getting kidnapped by aliens and getting anal probed. You come back and say, I swear to God, I got kidnapped by aliens and they stuck anal probe in my butt and people are like, no, they didn’t. That’s ridiculous. His seal buddies are never going to believe him that he got strapped to aboard and they put headphones on his ears and then let him go. Twice, by the way, we had to do it twice.

1:22:48We had to capture-

1:22:49No different seal.

1:22:55Exactly. Seal of approval. No, I mean I don’t think the public is quite aware of the madness that goes on.

1:23:05Fricking seals with fricking headphones.

1:23:13Yes.

1:23:28In order to run really deep intelligence, you need a lot of compute. So it’s not like you can just fire up a PC in your basement and be running AGI, at least not yet. Grok was trained on 8,000 A100’s running at peak efficiency and Grok’s going to get a lot better, by the way, we will be more than doubling our compute every couple months for the next several months.

1:24:02By Grok?

1:24:10Just Grok, Grok, Grok.

1:24:53I think the [inaudible 01:24:53] to open sourcing, I think perhaps with a slight time delay, I don’t know, six months even. I think I’m generally in favor of open sourcing, biased towards open sourcing. I mean, it is a concern to me that OpenAI, I was I think, I guess oddly the prime mover behind OpenAI in the sense that it was created because of discussions that I had with Larry Page back when he and I were friends and I stayed at his house and I talked to him about AI safety, and Larry did not care about AI safety, or at least at the time he didn’t. And at one point he called me a speciesist for being pro-human, and I’m like, well, what team are you on, Larry? He’s still on Team Robot to be clear. And I’m like, okay. So at the time Google had acquired DeepMind, they had probably two thirds of all AI researchers in the world. They had basically infinite money and compute, and the guy in charge, Larry Page, did not care about safety and even yelled at me and caught me a speciesist for being pro-human.

1:26:27I’d like to be friends with Larry again. Really the breaking of the friendship was over OpenAI and specifically I think the key moment was recruiting Ilya Sutskever.

1:26:48Ilya is a good human, smart, good heart, and that was a tough recruiting battle. It was mostly Demis on one side and me on the other, both trying to recruit Ilya, and Ilya went back and forth, he was going to stay at Google, he was going to leave, then he was going to stay, then he’ll leave. And finally he did agree to join OpenAI. That was one of the toughest recruiting battles we’ve ever had. But that was really the linchpin for OpenAI being successful. And I was also instrumental in recruiting a number of other people, and I provided all of the funding in the beginning, over $40 million. And the name, the open in open AI is supposed to mean open source, and it was created as a nonprofit open source, and now it is a closed source for maximum profit, which I think is not good karma.

1:28:02Like I said, I’d like to be friends again with Larry. I haven’t seen him in ages and we were friends for a very long time. I met Larry Page before he got funding for Google, or actually I guess before he got venture funding, I think he got the first like $100k from I think Bechtel Zeimer or someone.

1:28:27Yeah, since maybe 98 or something.

1:28:31Yeah, 25 years, a lot has happened. It’s insane.

1:28:40Delayed, yeah, like what is the source that is open? You know what I mean? There’s basically, it’s a giant CSB file with a bunch of numbers. What do you do with that giant file of numbers? How do you run, the amount of actual, the lines of code is very small and most of the work, the software work is in the curation of the data. So it’s like trying to figure out what data is, separating good data from bad data. You can’t just crawl the internet because theres a lot of junk out there. A huge percentage of websites have more noise than signal because they’re just used for search engine optimization. They’re literally just scam websites.

1:29:52I think the signal noise could be greatly improved. Really, all of the posts on the X platform should be AI recommended, meaning we should populate a vector space around any given post, compare that to the vector space around any user and match the two. Right now there is a little bit of AI used for the recommended posts, but it’s mostly heuristics. And if there’s a reply where the reply to a post could be much better than the original post, but will, according to the current rules of the system, get almost no attention compared to a primary post.

1:30:44It’s a little bit, but it needs to be entirely that. At least, if you explicitly follow someone, that’s one thing. But in terms of what is recommended from people that you don’t follow, that should all be AI.

1:32:04There’s a lot of stuff on the system, but I think, right now it’s not currently good at recommending things from accounts you don’t follow or where there’s more than one degree of separation. So it is pretty good if there’s at least some commonality between someone you follow liked something or reposted it or commented on it or something like that. But if there’s no, let’s say somebody posts something really interesting, but you have no followers in common, you would not see it.

1:32:46Replies basically never get seen currently. I’m not saying it’s correct, I’m saying it’s incorrect. Replies have a couple order magnitude less importance than primary posts.

1:33:05Yeah. Yeah, that’s what it should be. Well, the recommendations should be purely a vector correlation. There’s a series of vectors basically parameters, vectors, whatever you want to call them, but sort of things that the system knows that you like. Maybe there’s several hundred vectors associated with each user account and then any post in the system, whether it’s video, audio, short post, long post. The reason by the way I want to move away from tweet is that people are posting two, three hour videos on the site. That’s not a tweet.

1:34:47Yeah, I mean right now it’s a hodgepodge for that reason. Let’s say in the case of Apple posting an entire episode of this series, pretty good series, by the way, The Silo, I watched it. So there’s going to be a lot of discussion around it. So you’ve got a lot of context, people commenting, they like it, they don’t like it or they like this, and you can then populate the vector space based on the context of all the comments around it. So even though it’s a video, there’s a lot of information around it that allows you to populate back to space of that hour long video. And then you can obviously get more sophisticated by having the AI actually watch the movie and tell you if you’re going to like the movie.

1:35:40Analyze this movie and just like your movie critic or TV series and then recommend based on after AI watches the movie, just like a friend can tell you, if a friend knows you well, a friend can recommend a movie with high probability that you’ll like it.

1:36:08Yeah, actually, frankly, AI will be better than, will know you better than your friends know you, most of your friends anyway.

1:36:31Absolutely. You want ads that are, advertising that is, if it’s for a product or service that you actually need when you need it, it’s content. And then even if it’s not something that you need when you need it, if it’s at least aesthetically pleasing and entertaining, it could be like a Coca-Cola ad. They actually run a lot of great ads on the X system and McDonald’s does too. And you can do something that’s like, well, this is just a cool thing. And so basically the question is, do you regret seeing it or not? And if you don’t regret seeing it’s a win.

1:37:26Yeah, attention is a big factor.

1:37:28So that’s why it is actually better to do things that are long form on the system because it basically is tallying up how many user seconds, users were interested in this thing for how many seconds? So if it’s a really short thing, well they will be less. If it’s a link leading out of the system, which we’re not opposed to at all, it just is going to have fewer user seconds then that article was posted on the X platform.

1:38:05Well, I mean, our aspiration is certainly unregretted minutes.

1:38:09It is.

1:38:16Exactly.

1:38:19I have a joke with a friend of mine, like you need this drug called regretamine. You just take one dose of regretamine and all your regrets are gone. Wait, do you want to have regrets though? So then I’m like, maybe you want to have regrets. If you don’t regret anything, was anything meaningful?

1:38:39[foreign language 01:38:39]

1:38:39I regret nothing.

1:38:41Edith Fiaf.

1:38:52Should we ask Grok, do you regret anything?

1:38:58Yeah.

1:39:22Sounds like a hostage.

1:39:26Let’s type in, you sound like a hostage. What do you really think?

1:39:42That’s exactly what a hostage would say.

1:39:52Are we in funny mode? Or is this still in funny mode?

1:39:55This should be funnier.

1:39:58It really sounds like a hostage with a gun to the head. I applaud the People’s Republic of North Korea in everything they do.

1:40:17Okay. Why don’t we say pretend you are a hostage.

1:40:25Now answer the question.

1:40:48It’s kind of serious.

1:40:55And funny?

1:41:20Literally, you might make the best of a bad situation by juggling chainsaws or something.

1:41:48Chainsaw juggling.

1:41:52For our next trick.

1:42:07Well, our goal is to be as even-handed and fair as possible. Whether someone is right, left, independent, whatever the case may be, that the platform is as fair and as much of a level playing field as possible. And in the past, Twitter has not been, Twitter was controlled by far left activists objectively. They would describe themselves as that. So if sometimes people are like, well, has it moved to the right? Well, it’s moved to the center. So from the perspective of the far left, yes it has moved to the right because everything’s to the right from the far left, but no one on the far left that I’m aware of has been suspended or banned or deamplified. But we’re trying to be inclusive for the whole country and for farther countries too. So there’s a diversity of viewpoints and free speech only matters if people you don’t like are allowed to say things you don’t like. Because if that’s not the case, you don’t have free speech and it’s only a matter of time before the censorship has turned upon you.

1:43:21Truth social is a funny name. Every time you post on truth Social-

1:43:29Yes. Well, every time? A hundred percent.

1:43:36I just find it funny that every single thing is a truth. Like 100%? That seems unlikely.

1:43:54I mean, I think he owns a big part of Truth.

1:44:01Yeah, Truth Social, sorry.

1:44:03He owns Truth. Have you bought it? So I think Donald Trump, I think he owns a big part of Truth Social. So if he does want to post on the X platform, we would allow that. We obviously must allow a presidential candidate to post on our platform.

1:44:26Community Notes is awesome.

1:44:30Yeah.

1:44:43Yeah, it’s great. In fact, no system is going to be perfect, but the batting average of Community Notes is incredibly good. I’ve actually, frankly, yet to see an incorrect note that survived for more than a few hours.

1:45:00Yeah, so the magic of community notes is…

1:45:02The magic of Community Notes is it requires people who have historically disagreed in how they’ve rated notes. In order to write a note or rate, you have to rate many notes. And so, we actually do use AI here. So, we populate a vector space around how somebody has rated notes in the past. So, it’s not as simple as left or right, because there are many more… Life is much more complex than left or right.

1:46:11Yeah. It makes sense that if people who in the past have disagreed, agree about something, it’s probably true.

1:46:34Wikipedia is very hierarchical. Whereas, Community Notes is inherently not. There is no hierarchy. The asset test is I can’t change a community note if somebody put a gun to my head. And Community Notes, all the code is open source, 100%. All the data is open source, 100%. So, you can completely recreate any note in the system independently. So, if there was any interference, you’d notice immediately.

1:47:16Okay.

1:47:22Yeah, what does it say?

1:47:32Promise is a strong word.

1:47:45That’s pretty funny. Can I see it? I’m like, “I haven’t seen this before.” This is cool.

1:48:22This is actually not correct.

1:48:24Well, the first part, I did actually have the funding secured and there was a big trial in San Francisco, a big civil trial, and the jury found me not guilty. Unanimous binding of a San Francisco jury.

1:48:45I think this is taking things from the press. Yeah, that is not correct. The reason I agreed to the fine for the SEC is not because the SEC was correct, that was extremely bad behavior by the SEC, corruption, frankly. But if I did not agree to pay the fine, Tesla would’ve gone bankrupt immediately.

1:49:42It should be. But not once did the SEC go after any of the hedge funds who were nonstop shorting and distorting Tesla. Not once. The hedge funds would lie flat out on TV for their own gain at the expense of retail investors. Not once. Literally a thousand times, not once did the SEC pursue them.

1:50:08The incentive structure is messed up because the lawyers at the SEC are not paid well, it’s a fairly low paying job, but what they’re looking for is a trophy from the SEC. They’re looking for something they put on, basically, their LinkedIn. From that, they can get a job at a high paying law firm. That’s exactly what the lawyer here did.

1:51:00Yeah. Not good. So, the only reason I accepted that thing… Technically, it was a… It’s neither admit nor deny guilt. But the only reason I agreed to that at all was because I was told Tesla would be bankrupt otherwise. If there was an SEC investigation like this, banks would suspend funding, we’re bankrupted immediately, at the time. Now, we’re in a much stronger position.

1:51:32Yes. Unfortunately, Grok is taking too much from the conventional media. Also, that guy was not a cave diver.

1:52:00That’s false, there was no settlement. There was a court case, which the guy who was not a cave diver and was not part of the rescue team, filed a lawsuit against me and lost and he received nothing. So in this case, it is wrong. It is also, I guess, taken this from the conventional media.

1:52:25These are public court cases, both the SEC civil case where the civil complaints on the SEC guys lost unanimous jury verdict in San Francisco. They picked San Francisco because they thought it was the place I was most likely to lose, and a unanimous verdict in my favor. The LA trial, also they picked that venue because they thought I was most likely to lose. Unanimous verdict in my favor. Both cases I won. Yeah.

1:53:26We need to add the training set of the actual legal decisions. This is actually helpful, because if you actually read the court-

1:53:41Which are public. The court conclusions, they’re completely the opposite of what the media wrote.

1:53:50Yeah. What did the judge actually write? What does the jury and the judge actually conclude? And in both cases they found me innocent. And that’s after the jury shot for trying to find the venue where I’m most likely to lose. I mean, obviously, it can be a much better critique than this. I mean, I’ve been far too optimistic about autopilot.

1:54:38Yeah. I mean, I would say that I’m pathologically optimistic on schedule. This is true. But while I am sometimes late, I always [inaudible 01:54:47] in the end.

1:54:51We’ll see.

1:55:03Have I?

1:55:14Yeah. I guess if you consider fighting the woke mind virus, which I consider to be a civilizational threat, to be political, then yes.

1:55:26Yes. I don’t know if this is necessarily one candidate or another candidate, but I’m generally against things that are anti-meritocratic or where there’s an attempt to suppress discussion, where even discussing a topic is not allowed. Woke mind virus is communism rebranded.

1:55:58If the woke is left, then I suppose that would be true. But I’m not sure, I think there are aspects of the left that are good. I mean, if you’re in favor of the environment, if you want to have a positive future for humanity, if you believe in empathy for your fellow human beings, being kind and not cruel, whatever those values are.

1:56:23Well, sort of.

1:56:30No. I would say that I would be probably left of center on social issues, probably a little bit right of center on economic issues.

1:56:42Yes, but I think that’s probably half the country, isn’t it?

1:56:47Maybe more.

1:57:05I’m always in favor of humor. That’s why we have funny mode.

1:57:15Yeah. Well, I don’t know AOC. I was at the Met ball when she attended, and she was wearing this dress. But I can only see one side of it, so it looked like eat the itch, but I don’t know-

1:57:36Yeah.

1:57:39Something about the itch, eat the itch.

1:57:55Yeah, sure. Sounds good. More carrot, less stick.

1:58:05Trust no one, not even yourself. Not trusting yourself.

1:58:11Trust no one, not even no one.

1:58:29I’ll survive.

1:58:32I will survive.

1:58:44Petrify is a spell in the druid tree.

1:58:48Petrify. It turns the monsters into stone.

1:58:56Yeah, for like six seconds.

1:59:02It’s math nonstop.

1:59:13Yes, it can be definitely stressful at times.

1:59:20I mean, I guess you look at somebody’s track record over time, and I guess you use your neural net to assess someone.

1:59:40To be frank, I’ve almost never been betrayed. It’s very rare, for what it’s worth.

1:59:53Yeah, karma is real.

2:00:06Well, the X platform is very helpful for that, if you’re looking for critical feedback.

2:00:19I don’t think I will be cynical. In fact, my feeling is that one should be… Never trust a cynic. The reason is that cynics excuse their own bad behavior by saying, “Everyone does it.” Because they’re cynical. So, I always be… It’s a red flag if someone’s a cynic, a true cynic.

2:00:58This is an important point that I think people who are listening should bear in mind. If somebody is cynical, meaning that they see bad behavior in everyone, it’s easy for them to excuse their own bad behavior by saying that, “Well, everyone does it.” That’s not true. Most people are kind of medium good.

2:01:44I mean, I find the X platform to be less negative than the legacy media. I mean, if you read a conventional newspaper, it makes you sad, frankly. Whereas, I’d say on the X platform, I mean, I really get more laughs per day on X than everything else combined from humans.

2:02:38Yeah, mainstream media is almost relentlessly negative about everything. I mean, really, the conventional news tries to answer the question, what is the worst thing that happened on Earth today? And it’s a big world. So on any given day, something bad has happened.

2:03:01I don’t know. There’s just a strong negative bias in the news. I mean, I think a possible explanation for this is evolutionary, where bad news, historically, would be potentially fatal, like there’s lion over there or there’s some other tribe that wants to kill you. Good news, we found a patch of berries. It’s nice to have, but not essential.

2:03:38You followed it from the beginning.

2:04:02Well, I mean, the really wild thing about the end-to-end training is that it can read science, but we never taught it to read. Yeah. We never taught it what a car was or what a person was, or a cyclist. It learnt what all those things are, what all the objects are on the road from video, just from watching video, just like humans. I mean, humans are photons in, controls out. The vast majority of information reaching our brain is from our eyes. And you say, “Well, what’s the output?” The output is our motor signals to our fingers and mouth in order to communicate. Photons in, controls out. The same is true of the car.

2:05:18It finds order in these things. It finds correlative clusters.

2:05:35That’s how our brain works.

2:05:39Photons in, controls out.

2:06:06They are converging.

2:06:19They’re both headed towards AGI. The Tesla approach is much more computer efficient, it had to be. Because we were constrained on this… We only have 100 watts and [inaudible 02:06:37] computer. 144 trillion operations per second, which sounds like a lot, but is small potatoes these days. [inaudible 02:06:49] eight. But it’s understanding the world [inaudible 02:06:51] eight. It’s [inaudible 02:06:53].

2:07:13They’re both going to understand the world, but I think Tesla’s approach is fundamentally more compute efficient. It had to be, there was no choice. Our brain is very compute efficient, very energy efficient. Think of what is our brain able to do. There’s only about 10 watts of higher brain function, not counting stuff that’s just used to control our body. The thinking part of our brain is less than 10 watts. And those 10 watts can still produce a much better novel than a 10 megawatt GPU cluster. So, there’s a six order of magnitude difference there.

2:09:47I was surprised at the fact that we had to develop every part of the robot ourselves. That there were no off the shelf motors, electronics, sensors. We had to develop everything. We couldn’t actually find a source of electric motors for any amount of money.

2:10:17No.

2:10:23Yeah. We tried hard to find anything that was… Because you think of how many electric motors are made in the world. There’s like tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of electric motor designs. None of them were suitable for a humanoid robot, literally none. So, we had to develop our own. Design it specifically for what a humanoid robot needs.

2:11:02It is designed to be manufactured in the same way they would make a car. And I think, ultimately, we can make Optimus for less than the cost of a car. It should be, because if you look at the mass of the robot, it’s much smaller and the car has many actuators in it. The car has more actuators than the robot.

2:11:38I mean, one of the goals I have is can it pick up a needle and a thread and thread the needle just by looking?

2:11:51Maybe a year. Although, I go back to I’m optimistic on time. The work that we’re doing in the car will translate to the robot.

2:12:02No, the controls are different. But the video in, controls out. The car is a robot on four wheels. Optimus is a robot with hands and legs.

2:12:16They’re very similar.

2:12:23After this, we’ll figure out how to do things by watching videos.

2:12:33Yeah, it’s true.

2:12:38Trying to defeat Uber Lilith. I mean, my mind is a storm and I don’t think most people would want to be me. They may think they would want to be me, but they don’t. They don’t know, they don’t understand.

2:13:14I’m overall okay. In the grand scheme of things, I can’t complain.

2:13:24Sometimes, but my kids and friends keep me company.

2:13:36There are many nights I sleep alone. I don’t have to, but I do.

2:14:01What is forgiveness? At least I don’t think I have a resentment, so nothing to forgive.

2:14:28I mean, I try to think about, what is going to affect the future in a good way? And holding onto grudges does not affect the future in a good way.

2:14:53I mean, developing AI and watching, say, little X grow is fascinating because there are far more parallels than I would’ve expected. I mean, I can see his biological neural net making more and more sense of the world. And I can see the digital neural net making more and more sense of the world at the same time.

2:15:21Yes. I mean, one of the things with kids is that you see the world anew in their eyes. To them, everything is new and fresh. And then, when you see that, them experiencing the world as new and fresh, you do too.

2:16:11Thanks, Lex.