Elon Musk: War, AI, Aliens, Politics, Physics, Video Games, and Humanity

Elon Musk and Lex Fridman discuss introduction.

The following is a conversation with Elon Musk, his fourth time on this, the Lex Fridman Podcast. I thought you were going to finish it. It's one of the greatest themes in all of film history. Yeah, that's great.

Yeah. Safe to say. So, like I said, somehow controversially, you've been a proponent of peace on Twitter on X. Yeah.

A lot of people seem to be using this tragedy to beat the drums of war and feed the military industrial complex. Do you worry about this, the people who are rooting for escalation and how can it be stopped? One 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.

How do you hope the war in Ukraine comes to an end? And what's the path, once again to minimizing human suffering there? Well, 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.

You've spoken honestly about the possibility of war between US and China in the longterm if no diplomatic solution is found, for example, on the question of Taiwan and One China policy, how do we avoid the trajectory where these two superpowers clash? Well, 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.

To escape briefly the darkness, was some incredible engineering work, xAI just released Grok AI assistant that I've gotten a chance to play with. It's amazing on many levels. First of all, it's amazing that a relatively small team in a relatively short amount of time was able to develop this close to state-of-the-art system. Another incredible thing is there's a regular mode and there's a fun mode. Yeah, I guess I'm to blame for that one.

The first time we talked, you said, which is surreal to think that this discussion was happening is becoming a reality. I asked you what question would you ask an AGI system once you create it? And you said, "What's outside the simulation," is the question. Good question. But it seems like with Grok you started literally the system's goal is to be able to answer such questions and to ask such questions. Where are the aliens?

If we go to the big questions once again, you said you're with Einstein, that you believe in the goddess Spinoza. Yes.

So maybe we both played Diablo. Maybe Diablo was created to see if Druid, your character, could defeat Uber Lilith at the end. They didn't know. Well, 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.

Yeah. The things we'll consider to be flaws of human civilization might be a necessary components for whatever optimal looks like. I mean this, do you worry about AI, AGI enabling a dystopian state of this nature, whether it's 1984 with surveillance and fear or brave new world with pleasure and what is it? Lots of sex, but no deep human experience. There's actually a real drug called Soma.

[inaudible 01:10:38]. It seems that training LLMs efficiently is a big focus for xAI. First of all, what's the limit of what's possible in terms of efficiency? There's this terminology of useful productivity per watt. What have you learned from pushing the limits of that? Well, 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.

Okay. Let's talk about the competition here. You've shown concern about Google and Microsoft with OpenAI developing AGI. How can you help ensure with xAI and Tesla AI work that it doesn't become a competitive race to AGI, but that is a collaborative development of safe AGI? Well, 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.

Yes. What are the pros and cons of open sourcing AI to you as another way to combat a company running away with AGI?

So a lot of that, I got the sense, so a lot of the X algorithm has been open sourced and been written up about, and it seems there to be some machine learning. It's disparate, but there's some machine. It'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.

I'm going to look this up later. So Twitter has been instrumental in American politics and elections. What role do you think X will play in the 2024 US elections? Well, 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.

Okay. Over the past year or so since purchasing X, you've become more political, is there a part of you that regrets that? Have I?

You're one of, if not the, most famous, wealthy and powerful people in the world, and your position is difficult to find people you can trust. Trust no one, not even yourself. Not trusting yourself.

Our old friend, Tesla autopilot, is probably one of the most intelligent real world AI systems in the world. You followed it from the beginning.

As the saying goes, be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Yeah, it's true.