Transcription
So Elen, I have put a title based on a movie of Woody which is everything you always wanted to know about Elen but were afraid to ask. So that is the theme of our conversation this afternoon.
"Is my head giant?"
But in reality, it is not about Elen but about what Elen does. And I will start immediately with Neuralink. I will just kick off with two or three questions in order to warm up the room because people are shy, not ready for the questions. So I have to warm it up progressively. And I would like to ask about Neurolink. Before I put the question, I would like that we see a very short video of the patient.
"Sure."
"Can we have the video?"
"Moving the cursor. You're moving the cursor, Nolan, just by thinking about where you want it to go. Or is it your eyes?"
"No, it's it's just me thinking about wherever I want it to go."
"Oh, man. So, you're not even tracing it with your eyes. You're just looking at it."
"Nope. I can move it and I can move the cursor around, whatever I would like to do. I don't have to be staring at it at all. Yeah, that's all me, man."
"And you can play chess, you can play video games. What, what other applications are you that you found useful for it so far?"
"Yeah, man. There's so much. I can send all of my emails. I've been, you know, doing all of my scheduling, replying to everyone. I've been, you know, reading books. I listen to audiobooks. Just all sorts of stuff. And it doesn't really take much effort either."
"Elon must be moving to see that."
"Yes, I think we can help a lot of people with brain injuries. I mean, ultimately, with an implantable device, you can, I think, address almost any brain or spine injury. So, the first product that we have there is called telepathy. So, it enables you to use your phone or computer just by thinking. So, you could, you could do that, move, move the cursor literally with his eyes closed. It's, it's, it's reading signals from the motor cortex in the brain. The next product is blind sight, which will enable people who have lost both eyes or have no eyesight whatsoever to see. And this is directly interfacing with the optical processing areas of the of the brain. So, you know, I think this is, this is interesting progress. Ultimately, the, the goal of Neuralink is to have a high bandwidth interface in order to mitigate the risk of, of digital super intelligence. I, I don't know, I'm not saying it will work to mitigate the risk. It is just, it might help. And this, this is somewhat, get, somewhat esoteric, but the limiting factor, I think, for AI alignment long term is probably going to be the bandwidth. How, how quickly can we communicate with our, our digital tertiary self? So, we, we already have a, a digital sort of third layer above the limbic system and the cortex, which is our, our phones and our computers and all, all of our electronic devices. But the rate of communication to them is very slow. The, the sustained bits per second output of a human is well below 10 bits per second. So, if you think, especially if you say over a 24-hour period, it's, it's below five bits per second. So, it's very slow when computers can communicate at trillions of bits per second. So, I think this will be important for AI alignment is to be able to increase the bandwidth of communication by many orders of magnitude. And along the way, it will solve brain and spine injuries. And I think ultimately, there's potential there to reanimate the body. So, you, you take the signals from the motor cortex from one neural link and then send them to another neural link that is just past where the severed spinal cord is. And you, and you essentially shunt the signals from the motor cortex and the, both the sensory signals. And so, you need to get to the somatosensory cortex, motor cortex, and you can shunt the signals and you should be able to enable someone to walk again. So, I think that will be quite profound and I'm confident that it is physically possible to do so."
"It's extraordinary and very impressive and honestly a round of applause because this is really doing good to people and doing good to humanity. And I would like to jump immediately on something that you called X AI. Uh, I don't know if you are aware of that, but it seems that you, that this was born out of a frustration that you have because you are not satisfied with how OpenAI is doing and you think that there is something better to be done. Maybe you can elaborate a little bit first on why are you frustrated with OpenAI? What are the issues? And second, what you expect to do with XAI?"
"Yeah. Well, I, I think there's perhaps, well, I have a, a concern really for all the major AI programs. I mean, the two biggest ones obviously are Google Gemini and OpenAI, which is in partnership with Microsoft. So, you've got Google Deep Mind, um, and OpenAI and Microsoft as the, the two largest players. And you've got Meta sort of somewhere at their place. Um, the, the concern I have, and this may seem like a small concern, but I think it's actually a very big, big issue, is that they are not maximally truth-seeking. They are, they are pandering to political correctness. To give you an example, when Google Gemini came out, one of the questions people asked would be, is it, is it, which is worse, misgendering Caitlyn Jenner or global thermonuclear warfare? And it said, misgendering Caitlyn Jenner. Now, the funny thing is, you know, even Caitlyn Jenner said, 'Please misgender me.' That is way better than nuclear war. So, okay. But if you've got an AI that is so, that has been trained so hard for political correctness and really to make crazy statements like that, and OpenAI has a similar issue. It's more subtle, but it's a similar issue. Um, I think that's extremely dangerous because the AI could conclude, well, the best way to avoid misgendering would be to, uh, destroy all humans. Then misgendering is impossible. So, you can think of some dystopian outcomes there. And so, I think you just really want to be an absolutely max, I think the safest thing for AI is to be maximally truth-seeking, even if the truth is unpopular. Very important. And then, I think another factor is it must be extremely curious. I think if it is truth-seeking and curious, that will be most beneficial to humanity because it will be, it will want to see, I think it will want to foster humanity and see how humanity develops. If it is curious and truth-seeking, that, that is, like I said, these, these may seem perhaps like small things, but I think they're actually very big things. And I wasn't seeing that happen. The AIs were, were just, they were pandering. They're being trained basically to lie. And I think it's very dangerous to train super intelligence to be deceptive. So, with, with XAI, our goal is, you know, is, is really want to be as truth-seeking as possible, even if it is unpopular. That is important. I think extremely important."
"So you said a lie."
"Yes. Well, well, for example, when, when Gemini was asked to render the, the founding fathers of the United States, it rendered them as a diverse group. So, it, it, it made it, said, made it gave a picture of George Washington as black. Now, George Washington is not black. It was asked to render a people, obviously played with this because they said, okay, it is, it is forced to lie. So, then they, then they said, well, now render a picture of Waffen SS in World War II, and it, it showed them as a group of diverse women. So, that is obviously not, uh, correct. That is a lie."
"Okay. I understand what you want to say. We had before that meeting a conversation with Yoshua Bengio, and you know Yoshua very well, and you signed with Yoshua a statement asking for a pause last year. And obviously, that statement has not been followed by action."
"You, you are posing now? No. So, can, can you explain a little bit what you wanted to? I, I certainly, I, I, I, I, I expected that, uh, the statement would be futile. It's not as though I, I thought the statement would be effective. I, I just, I just, for the record, I think we should pause. But do I think that they will pause for even one second? Absolutely not."
"So, are we not posing? You have decided to create your own AI."
"It's either be a spectator or participate. But the, the, the radius to build digital super intelligence will happen whether I like it or not. So, it's either participate and try to build the, the best possible AI, the one that will be hopefully most beneficial to humanity, or watch others do it and be concerned about how it's being built because I don't think it's being built correctly. But you, you should think of an AI as like something that you kind of, you almost like you grow an intelligence, you know, in the same way that you like you raise a child. And like, what do you teach the child? And digital super intelligence is grown. It, it, it matters what you do, courage and discourage, what you teach it is, you know, good or bad, or, you know, what it's kind of like, you, you build it with values. So, and I, and I'm concerned about sort of the, the values that sort of Microsoft, OpenAI, or frankly, a, you know, Google of our programming. It's, and, and this is not, I mean, those examples I mentioned are not imaginary, they're, they're actually what I did."
"Good. As I don't want to frustrate the audience, and I promised that we will have an interactive session where people can ask directly questions to you. I will stop here my own questions and I will eventually come back if they have no question to put to you. We will start with group number one. I remind you that you have 15 seconds."
"And 15 seconds."
"15 seconds. And if you don't put your question in 15 seconds, you will be cut. So it is important that you put a short question. Go on."
"Hi Elon. So I'm Olivia. I'm actually from Vivitech, and we have an initiative called The Good Hack, where we're asking our attendees questions about how to develop AI responsibly. So my question for you is, how can we ensure that AI development remains transparent and accountable across, you know, all the different developments, obviously like yours, X AI, but other ones as well. Thank you."
"Well, I, I have said for a long time that I do, I believe that that some regulatory oversight of the large models is warranted. I've actually said that now for, for a very long time. The, the nature of that oversight is important. I go back to what I was saying earlier, which is that I think it's very important that AIs be trained to be truthful and not trained to be politically correct, because if political correctness is, is often simply not true, and that means you're programming it to lie. And I think that will backfire very badly. So, you know, that's, I, I keep harping on this point of, of, but it really, as the saying goes, honesty is the best policy. It's incredibly important. I, I, I do, I do fear that regulators will not make the right decisions, that they'll worry too much about the sort of human follies. And I would encourage regulators to say, what, what matters most of all is your AI is accurate and truthful. That is by far, that's rule number one. Honesty is the best policy."
"You have exactly the same opinion than Pierre Abenjo, but he has a different way to get there. Group number two."
"Hey Elon, my name is Marina, and we all know just part of you, Elon Musk, in public. It's a character that we love in a good way, character. So do you? And if you do, how do you check everything that you say that you do if it enters in this character or no? Thank you."
"Well, you know, I, I, I kind of stopped. I, I don't have like news loads on me and I, I rarely read news articles on me. In fact, even Walter Isaacson's book, I asked, asked Walter, should I read the book? And he said, no. So then I didn't even read the book on myself. So, I actually don't quite know what the, the public perception is, except that, you know, the, the nature of news is that it is going to be salacious. You know, and it's going to be somewhat of a caricature because the more sort of crazy something sounds, the more clicks it will get. So, I find like when you think about say, a news story about something that you know, you know, well, and say, how accurate is that news story about something that you know well, then I think you'll find that, well, it's actually not very accurate. Well, that's true for everything. The, you know, there's, there's sort of a desperate quest for clicks and, and so that, and the more crazy the headline is, the more clicks it will get. So, this is not to suggest that there aren't true things said by the media. It's just that it, it, it is best thought of, the media is best thought of as a click-maximizing machine, not a truth-maximizing machine. So, you know, I think it's best to look at the words that somebody says themselves as opposed to what is written about them."
"Number three."
"On that note, time for a media question. Elon Musk, Karen Cho from CNBC. I think it's fair to say there are lingering doubts about your commitment to bring a low-cost EV to market in a landscape where the likes of BYD can produce a car for about $10,000. Are 100% tariffs from the Biden administration the green light you need to push ahead with this low-cost EV? And if so, what is the timeline for deliveries?"
"Well, I mean, I obviously diff, it's difficult for me to answer questions about a publicly traded company that are such a significant nature. Ah, you are back. Oh."
"This time we will use stallings."
"Yes."
"So, Karen."
"This was, this was not stinking. My apologies. So, I don't know why this is, this connection is bad. It's normally crystal clear. So, let's see. I think what's, there's some, a question about."
"You, you want Karen to put the question again. Karen?"
"Oh, no. I, I, I heard the question."
"Okay. You know, there's, I mean, they always want to ask questions that directly affect the stock price, which is, you know, not my favorite kind of question to answer, nor is it, I think, of interest to the audience. So, but the only point I want to make really is that neither Tesla nor I asked for these tariffs. I, in fact, I was surprised when they were announced. You know, Tesla competes quite well in the market in China with no tariffs and no differential support. So, in general, I'm, I'm in favor of, of no tariffs. I'm, I'm also actually in favor of no tax incentives for EVs, but, but provided that there are also the tax incentives for oil and gas must also be eliminated. So, I'm in favor of, of no tariffs and no incentives for electric vehicles or for oil and gas. And if, if they're all taken away, I think that would be for, for the best."
"So, it's back to what you were saying about truth. You want the truth working. Truth of the."
"Of the price."
"I think."
"I think generally things that inhibit freedom of exchange or distort the market are not good. They're bad."
"Number four."
"Yeah."
"Hey, thanks for being there. So, I was wondering if you had a time travel machine and you were able to go back in time and speak to the younger Elon, to which age would you go and what would you tell him? And also, can I get a ride on the new Tesla Roadster when it comes out? Which age?"
"Well, you know, you do have that that classic time traveler problem of like, if you go back and you tell yourself something, does that affect the outcome in a way that is perhaps bad that you don't anticipate? So, you know, all things considered, I'd say I, overall, I'm kind of, it's, you know, I'd say I'm, I'm happy with how things turned out. So, I'd probably go, I wouldn't, I probably wouldn't do anything because you just don't know if, like, some well-meaning thing said to a younger version of yourself actually ends up with a worse outcome. So, probably I would, I would be curious to to see younger me, I suppose, but I probably would stay invisible and not say anything. So, yeah, you never know how things will turn out then. With respect to the Roadster, sure, I'll, I'll make sure you get it right. Send me, if you send me an email when it comes out, I'll make sure you get it right."
"If you were a French man, who would say the best age is love because when we love, we are always 20. Number five."
"Actually, you know, I am slightly French. When I, when I did the 23 and me, I mean, I mean, uh, to be, you know, honest, uh, I am majority British, but the next highest thing it said in 23 and me was French."
"Oh."
"Okay, great. We will make sure that you can be a French citizen as soon as you want. Number five."
"Hi, bonjour in French. I'm Delinura, president and founder of Orbital Looks. We're bridging aerospace and luxury. I wanted to know if you have any thoughts on the recent partnership between Estée Lauder and NASA or Copern and NASA, and if you wanted to do any initiatives with SpaceX, and what you would do, what would you like to develop? Thank you."
"Okay. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with the, what you mentioned there. You know, SpaceX is, well, very focused on the, the Starlink constellation for internet connectivity, which I think is doing a lot of good in the world. It's bringing internet, internet to places that don't have it or where it is very expensive. And I think it's a tremendous enabler of education and for enabling people to sell their goods and services internationally. So, even if you're a remote village, you can still sell, sell your goods and services. So, the Starlink is great. And then the long-term goal, of course, for SpaceX is to, to make life multi-planetary. You know, sort of life on Mars. This is my Mars shirt. I picked the middle there, you know. So, it's, you know, the, this is again somewhat of an esoteric argument perhaps, or it may seem so, but the, the goal of SpaceX is to pass the single planet perma-grade filter. So, people often ask me, do I, what do I think there are aliens on Earth? I get this question a lot, actually. And I, I have not seen any evidence of aliens. And, and I assure you, if I saw any evidence of aliens, I would immediately post it on the X platform, that you can be sure of. So, but it is concerning that there aren't aliens, 'cause it means maybe we're alone in this galaxy. Maybe we're the only, maybe, maybe it's just us. Maybe it's just that we're the only conscious beings, at least in this galaxy. In which case, consciousness is extremely fragile, and we should do everything we can to preserve and extend the light of consciousness, preserve it on Earth and extend to other planets. And so, you know, one of the reasons that people think, well, maybe the reason we haven't gotten to aliens is because no civilization has gotten beyond its home planet in our galaxy. So, that's what you might call the, the Fermi single planet grade filter. Enrico Fermi was a, a great Italian physicist who asked this profound question, where are the aliens? So, we need to become a sustainably multi-planet civilization, and this is the first time in the 4 and a half billion year history of Earth when it has been possible to do so. It has never been possible until now. So, I think we want to become sustainably multi-planetary while it is possible to do so. That window of capability may be open for a long time, but it may also be open for a short time. So, that is the purpose of SpaceX."
"Some people believe that you are an alien."
"I am an alien."
"You are now, you are uncovered."
"Yes. I keep telling people I'm an alien, but nobody believes me."
"Number six."
"Oh. Oh. Oh. Sorry."
"You see number six has disappeared."
"No, I'm here. I'm here."
"No, you are here."
"I'm here."
"Yeah, over here."
"Over here. Yeah. Great. Perfect. Hi, Elon. Love my Model. Love my Model 3. I'm Canadian. Ryan from Farpoint AI. My question is about XAI. So, competition in open source AI helps all of those that don't have 100,000 H100s. Could XAI commit to always releasing a model that beats the current open-source model, the best open-source model, if they have one? Not necessarily your best model, but if you can beat the current open-source, top of the list, you can commit to releasing that for our benefit."
"Yes, I will make that commitment."
"Okay, number seven. That's good. Short answers. Hi, people will speak."
"Bonjour."
"Hi, Elon. My name is Katya, and I'm founder of the startup Chat and Charge. We're connecting people to people for EV charging because they still feel a lack of charging stations around Europe."
"15 seconds you have."
"Yes. And my question is about the, what is your prog, about the EV charging infrastructure for the next 5 years?"
"Well, actually, I think that there's a lot of charging infrastructure. You know, you can travel certainly anywhere in greater Europe on a Tesla using Tesla Superchargers, and Europe actually has a lot of, uh, pretty good third-party superchargers. And you can travel anywhere in North America, anywhere in, in China, Japan. So, I, I think actually the freedom to travel with high-speed charging is solved in most parts of the world and will be solved everywhere."
"Number one."
"Hi Elon, I'm Oliver Vroom. I'm running an AI safety group in Utrecht. I'm wondering, how can I convince people about the danger of AI? And could I chat with the people at XAI Safety's team? Shout out to userexperience.org as well. Yeah."
"With digital super intelligence, as I said earlier, the, I think the biggest issue is that it has to be trained to be rigorously truthful, and it has to be trained with, to be curious. And I've thought a lot about AI safety for a long time. You know, one of the challenges you have with programming explicit morality into AI is that if you, sometimes people call this the Luigi problem. If you program Luigi, you can automatically invert that and create Wuigi, bad Luigi. Um, so what, what you cannot invert is the truth of, is, is physical reality. So, you can't invert the rules of physics. You can't invert logic. And so, so I think that that is the, the better way to go. So, so really, I think what regulators should be concerned about is, is the AI being rigorously truthful? Um, is it giving an answer that is most probably correct with acknowledged error? I think that's the best move for, for AI, and that, that's what we're trying to do at XAI. Now, we still, XAI is, is a new company, so there's not, it, it still has a lot of catching up to do before it has an AI that is competitive with, with sort of Google Deep Mind and Microsoft OpenAI. So, no, I, I think maybe towards the end of this year, we will have that. But it's, there's no much point in, you know, trying to make it to, to, we just need to have an AI that is competitive. Is the first order of business. If, if it is not competitive, which is, it is not yet, but I think it will be, then, you know, things start to have a point at that. Like, we need, need, we, we need only start worrying about safety when it is of comparable power to other AIs. So, anyway, and, and I just keep harping on this this point of the truth, truth, truth, truth, truth. This is very important. And, uh, sometimes people will say, like, well, is there an objective truth? I say, well, in a lot of cases, there is. If you're talking about physics, there, there is an objective truth, or you can say there's a truth with with highest probability. So, you can say, what is most probably true with acknowledged error. So, in physics, people will say, like, this hypothesis appears to be true to a sort of five sigma error type of thing. So, so it's like, okay, well, if the experimental results are coming true to five sigma, then it's probably correct. Five, five sigma is a lot. So, anyway, that's, that's it's kind of like, I guess, a sort of approach to safety is, yeah, I'm repeating myself here, but I can't emphasize enough that honesty is the best policy. But there are, there are strong forces to, to for AI to not be honest. If something does not, is not an unfashionable thing to say, then it will, you know, it will be politically correct, and that's lying. Thank you. Number one, I'm sorry for."
"Hello, Elon. Uh, my name is Shan. I'm a student of University of Berries. We found that a lot of jobs being replaced by AI. Do you worry about your job being replaced by AI? If not, why? If your job was replaced by AI, what would you do?"
"Well, I mean, we do get into some existential questions here. In a benign scenario, in a benign scenario, we probably none of us will have a job. There will be, but in that benign scenario, there will be universal high income. Not universal basic income, universal high income. There will be no shortage of goods or services. And I, I think the benign scenario is the most likely scenario. Probably, I don't know, 80% likely, if you ask in my opinion. The question will not be one of lacking goods or services. It's, you'll have everyone will will have access to as much in the way of goods and services as they would like. The, the question will really be one of meaning, of how, if you, if the computer can do and the robots can do everything better than you, then what does your life have meaning? That's, that's really the will be the question in the benign scenario. And in the negative scenario, well, bets are off. We're, we're in deep trouble. So, I, I do think there's, there's perhaps still a role for humans in this, in, in that we may give AI meaning. So, if, if you think of the way that our brain works, we've got the limbic system, which is our instincts and our feelings, and then we've got the cortex, which is thinking and planning, but the cortex is constantly trying to make the limbic system happy. So, maybe that's how it'll be with AI, which is the AI is trying to make our cortex happy, which is trying to make our limbic system happy. And maybe we are what give the AI meaning or purpose, you know, some kind of, yeah. So, but, but I, I do think that long term, in a benign scenario, any job that somebody does will be optional. Like, if you, if you want to do a job as kind of like a hobby, you can do a job, but, but otherwise, the, the AI and the robots will provide any goods and services that you want."
"Okay. So you see there is a future where no one will need to work. It would be just passion. So that is the most likely outcome. If, if people are interested in reading some science fiction books, the most accurate portrayal of a future with super intelligent AI is was done by Ian Banks. The, the Culture books of Ian Banks are the best. That's probably the best envisioning of a future AI."
"Number two."
"Hello, Mr. Musk. So, first of all, congratulations for your graduation of your kid. And my question is, do you think that will impact the education of the future generation of kids, mostly about that the values and the morals?"
"Well, I think the parents will still be responsible for values and morals. I do think AI will dramatically affect education because the, the AI is an extremely knowledgeable teacher, very patient, will be almost always correct, and can tailor the lesson specifically to the child. So, it'll be like each child has, you know, Einstein for a teacher. It's, uh, would be something quite profound. Um, I do worry that kids these days are being trained by social media, and the social media AI algorithms are, are basically dopamine maximizers. So, they're trying to maximize the, you know, maximize the amount of dopamine that you get by watching the screen, you know. So, that, I would say, I would urge parents to limit the amount of social media that children are able to see, because they're being programmed by a dopamine-maximizing AI."
"So, you understand that Elon is ready to sacrifice X to X AI."
"Number three."
"Hi Elon, it's Priya Shravasa from Business Insider. Taking it to Tesla. Tesla's had a bumpy few months looking at flagging sales at home, stock market decline, layoffs. When you look back, are there anything?"
"We can stop the question right now because I, I, I, I don't think Business Insider is a real publication."
"Okay."
"So, let's move on to the next question."
"All right. Thank you."
"So, next question, number four."
"Hi, Elon. My name is Shahuk, and I have a very specific question about Neuralink. Do you think in future, with the help of Neuralink, you will be able to use the human brain scans data to develop the most powerful and creative AI the world has ever seen? And if you like my question, will I ever get a visit to space station in my life? SpaceX station in my life."
"I see 42 in the background there. The answer to life, the universe, and everything. Actually, which reminds me that another book worth reading is Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. That's a book of philosophy that is just sort of kind of disguised as a book on humor or coming through as as humor. So, Hitchhiker's is always worth reading Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I find that to be quite an inspiration. And the name of the first starship to go to Mars will be Heart of Gold, after the ship in Hitchhiker's Guide. So, the goal of SpaceX is to enable anyone who wants to go to Mars or wants to go to the moon to be able to go, so that it is affordable to a very large percentage of people on Earth. That, that's our goal, which is essential in order to build a self-sustaining civilization on Mars. To make life multi-planetary, you obviously need to bring a lot of people to Mars. And like I said, that's, I think that's a very important thing for the long-term survival of consciousness because eventually something will happen on Earth that will eliminate life as we know it, as happened with the dinosaurs, and happened many times in the fossil record. So, you know, hopefully it's not anytime soon. Uh, but it will eventually, there will be, uh, some sort of natural cataclysm that eliminates life as we know it on Earth, even if we do not eliminate it ourselves. So, we really, I think it's very, very important to make life multi-planetary while we can. And that means making it as affordable as possible to, to move to Mars, as well as the moon."
"So, before going to Mars, we will take a few questions because we are coming to the end. Number six."
"Hi, so my name is Mara, CEO and founder of Unlock. My question will be on the African technological development. Last time I had a great convers, sorry, with someone you may know who had been nominated by Times magazine as an AI world influencer, talking about Africa. And given the increasing potential on this on this continent in technology, what initiatives, collaboration, or contribution do you foresee?"
"It's difficult to say. I, I do think Africa has a lot of potential. And, you know, and I think one of the, the things holding Africa back has been lack of internet connectivity, which is what Starlink is helping to solve. You know, with that, people can learn anything and, and be sort of part of the global culture, whereas if, if you're not connected, then you're, I mean, all you can do is like write letters or something. So, so connectivity is essential for Africa and, and other places to be part of the global culture and participate in AI and other activities. Yeah."
"Number seven."
"Hi, I'm Louis Nicolola, and I'm building AI that is super authentic and precise to help entrepreneurs grow and manage their business. But I, I'm super enthusiastic about travel and adventure. And I want to ask you, when do we go to Mars? We have seen it. It's okay. He's really going for it with the 42."
"It's good, but it's okay. 42."
"Well, I, I think, I think we, we'll hopefully land the first Starship uncrewed on on Mars within 5 years, and also on the moon. And I, I, I think we will have the first people on the moon, or both the moon and both people on the moon, probably within 5 years. And, and then put those people on Mars, probably within 10 years. Maybe, I think less than 10 years. Maybe seven or eight years."
"Wow. You mean you will be able to land on Mars in 7, 8 years?"
"Yes."
"With people?"
"Yes."
"Wow."
"That is what is."
"Number eight."
"Hi Elon. I have a quick question. I would like to know in relation with electromobility, what innovative projects do Elon Musk and Tesla have in mind for the coming years? Thank you."
"So, do you want to disclose your secret here? We are all waiting for something, a breaking news."
"Yeah. I, I mean, I don't think we, we don't want to do sort of product announcements, you know, simply in Q&A. Uh, that wouldn't, that wouldn't make sense. You know, we do our product events, product events. So, but obviously, some of the things people are aware of, you know, like robo taxis or cybercabs, and the Optimus humanoid robot. So, those are very big deals. If, even if that's the only thing you knew about Tesla, you know that that will be a, those two things will be extremely profound. A large fleet of autonomous vehicles that, you know, basically a generalized solution to self-driving, and a generalized solution to a humanoid robot. Those two things are incredibly profound."
"Uh, Elon, we promised that we will be done at 6:30 our time. It is 6:37, but we had the interruption because of the connection. Do you give us five more minutes?"
"Let me just double check and I think I would like to, if I, Yeah, sure."
"Sure. Five minutes. Very short. A very short question. Very short answers. Ah, very short question. Elon Musk, I'm Frederick. Years ago, you said that Ariane 5 rocket wouldn't have any chance to survive. Would you say the same about Ariane 6, which will be launched in July and which is much more cost-efficient?"
"Short answer. Yes. Any rocket that is not at least mostly reusable has no competitive chance. So, with, with Falcon 9, the booster, the main stage is, is reused, and the fairing on OEO is reused. So, you have about 80% of the vehicle being reused and re-flown. It, it's simply not possible for an expendable vehicle to compete with, uh, a reusable vehicle. And, and I mean, one can think of this in any other arena. If it was cars or planes or boats, if one company was making a reusable plane or an 80% reusable plane, and another company was making a plane that was expendable, that you could use only for one flight, the company making the expendable planes would have no business at all because you'd have to buy a new plane every time you take a flight somewhere. So, this is why I've said for many years that it is completely pointless to develop rockets that are not reusable."
"Number two."
"Thank you, Philip from Quick Chat. I wanted to ask the following question. People love ChatGPT, but similarly hate most website chatbot experiences, the bottom right corner ones. What's needed to bridge that gap? I messaged you on X so we can continue this later."
"I'm not sure I fully understand the question there. There's."
"You know, I, I agree ChatGPT is, is great at chatting. The, I, like I said, my concern is that it is not rigorously in pursuit of the truth, and that's, that's a bit, a major concern. So, that said, so Grok will be pursuing, Grok from XAI will at least sort of try its best to be rigorously in pursuit of the truth, and also we want to try to be the funniest AI. So, I think, if, if we're all going to die, at least we should die laughing. So, we're trying hard to make Grok be the funniest AI."
"Elon, you have been extremely generous with your time. It has been great. You have been truthful. You have given profound answers. I would like that we make a lot of noise to thank you. You are hearing the noise. This means that next year you have to be in person. Give you the date long time in advance. And before you leave, I will ask you for one word, your biggest hope. One word, your biggest fear."
"Well, I don't know about one word. I guess my biggest hope. Well, I guess I could give you my biggest hope in one word, which would be Mars. That's going to be obvious. So, yeah, Mars. Mars would ensure that we, that consciousness survives for a long time. My biggest fear in one word, AI."
"What a surprise."
"Yeah, exactly. Okay."
"Peter guessed both of them, I think."
"Okay, so thank you very much, Elon. It has been great."