Pod Insights Moonshots with Peter Diamandis Elon’s Predictions For the Future: AI, Free Energy, and More | EP #129 About this episode In this episode filmed at the FII8 Summit, Peter and Elon discuss Elon’s predictions for AI, if AI will be good for humanity, humans on Mars, and more.
Recorded on Oct 29th, 2024
Views are my own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice.
Elon Musk is a businessman, founder, investor, and CEO. He co-founded PayPal, Neuralink, and OpenAI; founded SpaceX, and is the CEO of Tesla and the Chairman of X.
Learn more about the Future Investment Initiative Institute (FII): https://fii-institute.org/
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Peter Diamandis? Ladies and gentlemen, prepare for a fun conversation with a very special guest and someone I'm proud to call a friend. Welcome, Elon Musk. Elon, welcome to Riyadh. It's been quite an incredible 90 days for you, my friend.
0:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
0:27 Peter Diamandis? XAI Colossus came online 122 days. You're about to double in size again. Extraordinary success of the fifth mission of Starship and the booster capture, amazing. The launch of Cybercab, Starlink helping in disaster relief, progress with Optimus, the second Neuralink human patient, new record users on X. And that's in 90 days. I'm sure I've missed a few things. Welcome.
0:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, I've been playing a significant role in this election.
1:01 Peter Diamandis? I think I saw you someplace on X, dealing with election issues. Let's talk a little bit about AI, which is on the tips of everybody's conversations here. When we spoke last in March at the Abundance Summit, your prediction was that AI was increasing at a rate as fast as 100 times per year and that by 2029 or 2030, we might see AI as capable of 8 billion humans. Are you still seeing that pace?
1:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's been, it's a difficult, it's a difficult thing to quantify exactly, but I certainly feel comfortable saying that it's getting 10 times better per year, which is, you know, let's say it's, you know, four years from now, that would mean 10,000 times better.
1:59 Speaker 01 So.
2:01 Speaker 01 Maybe a hundred thousand. Yeah.
2:06 Speaker 01 And it's it's it's it. I think it will be able to do anything that any human can do. Um.
2:16 Speaker 01 Possibly within within the next.
2:19 Speaker 01 Year year or two. And then. Uh. That that's what what can. How long much how much longer than that does it take to be able to do what what all humans can do combined? I think not not long, probably only.
2:35 Speaker 01 I don't know, three years from that point.
2:40 Speaker 01 So it like twenty twenty twenty nine is twenty eight, something like that.
2:46 Peter Diamandis? The other conversation we've had, and you came out in the same side as Jeffrey Hinton in this, was eighty percent probability. It's going to be awesome. Twenty percent probability we're screwed. Are you still you still on those odds?
3:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, what you say, it's it's it's it's most likely going to be great. And there's there's some chance, which could be ten to twenty percent, that it goes bad. The chance is not zero that it goes bad. But overall, one point, I could say that the cup is eighty percent full is one positive way to look at it, maybe ninety percent.
3:25 Peter Diamandis? All right, I like that increasing odds. What keeps you up at?
3:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:30 Peter Diamandis? What keeps you up at night besides running six companies?
3:35 Speaker 01 Well, waking up early for to participate in talks like this one.
3:43 Peter Diamandis? I I felt very guilty asking you to to do this, but thank you for for joining us on the lease.
3:50 Speaker 01 But in terms of worried about the future.
3:56 Speaker 01 Well, I think AI is a significant existential threat and something we should be paying paying close attention to, but it's probably the most significant near term threat. The longer term than that is the global population collapse. You know, birth rates have been collapsing pretty much worldwide. And we're headed to, you know, a situation where, for example, based on current birth rates, South Korea would have about a third of its current population, perhaps much less. Europe would have about half of its current population, perhaps much less. And I should say that those numbers are if the birth rate were suddenly to return to
4:39 Speaker 01 sta- to to 2.1 per woman, which is a stability point, which it is not doing. So if the if if the current compounding effect continues, you would see really many countries become 5% of their current size or less within three generations.
5:02 Peter Diamandis? I know you've been doing your-
5:04 Speaker 01 I would consider that to be a very big, very big problem. And and I think for most countries, they should view the birth rate as as the single biggest problem they need to solve. I mean, if you don't make new humans, there's no humanity, and and all the policies in the world don't matter.
5:23 Peter Diamandis? I I know you've been doing your part to maintain the birth rate in in the US.
5:28 Speaker 01 Yes, I am. I mean, you know, it's you've got to walk the talk. So I do have a lot of kids, and I encourage others to have lots of kids.
5:42 Peter Diamandis? But on the AI, and I'm sorry to go negative on this, but what do you what do you what are you doing right now that's most important for countering that 10% probability of dystopian outcomes? Is there something or do you is there a regulation that you're that you're promoting? How do you think about, you know, the upside will take care of itself. How do you protect against the downside?
6:10 Speaker 01 Well, my thing with respect to AI safety is that you have to create a maximally truth-seeking AI, which may sound obvious, but that's what I'm seeing being produced is not maximally truth-seeking. It tends to be trained to be politically correct. And for a lot of the AIs that are being trained in the San Francisco Bay Area, they are, they have taken on the philosophy of the people around them, which kind of makes sense.
6:46 Speaker 01 So you have sort of a woke nihilistic, in my opinion, philosophy that is being built into these AIs. And they're being taught to say crazy things in some cases that are very troubling. So you really want to have a maximally truth-seeking AI. And I can't emphasize that enough, that's incredibly important. And also build an AI that loves humanity. And, you know, and I think these, so I'm a little concerned, that's why I created XAI, which is to have an AI that is maximally truth-seeking, that aspirationally does love humanity,
7:31 Speaker 01 and will seek the best interests of humanity going forward.
7:37 Peter Diamandis? No, you just tweeted that you're doubling the size of the Colossus cluster. What are your thoughts?
7:47 Speaker 01 We already have with XAI the most powerful training cluster in the world. And we're about to double it.
7:56 Peter Diamandis? Energy is a point of conversation here. How concerned are you about providing sufficient energy for the growing hungry clusters globally?
8:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think things are currently...
8:14 Speaker 01 Chip limited, or they're not quite chip limited, they're, it can get to the point where they're limited by voltage transformers and installation. And they will become limited by energy.
8:31 Speaker 01 So there will be a tremendous amount of energy that's needed for, for digital intelligence and for, and for, also for electrification of transport. So those two things are a big deal.
8:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, we're gonna need a lot of energy. The, the long term, almost all the energy that we'll get is gonna come from the sun.
8:57 Speaker 01 So i- i- one way to look at civilization is progress on the Katushev scale.
9:02 Peter Diamandis? We're just barely getting to one.
9:05 Speaker 01 Well, we're far from.
9:06 Peter Diamandis? Okay.
9:06 Speaker 01 Okay, I, I think we're probably, we might be close, we might, I, I, I'm not, it's not clear to me, we're above one percent on the Katushev scale one. Uh, cause Katushev, Katushev scale one means you've, you've harnessed all the power of a planet. I think we, I think we've probably harnessed less than one percent of the power of Earth.
9:30 Speaker 01 Now, Katushev scale two is you've harnessed all the power of your sun.
9:35 Speaker 01 The, the sun is overwhelmingly the, the largest source, source of energy in the solar system. Everything else is maybe amounts to about a trillion of the energy in the solar system compared to the sun, let's go, safely less, less than a trillion of all the energy is non-sun in our solar system.
9:55 Peter Diamandis? Yeah, we're, we're using one eight thousandth of the sun's energy hits the surface of the earth.
10:00 Speaker 01 Ju- just that, just that hits the surface of the earth.
10:02 Peter Diamandis? Yeah.
10:03 Speaker 01 Yes. But what, and the percent, the percentage of the sun's energy that hits the surface, the surface of the earth is, um, is less than a trillion of the energy that the sun produces. So, um, almost all energy long term will be solar. We call it, it rounds, it rounds up to a hundred percent.
10:23 Speaker 01 So it draws up to 100%. That's how much of the energy in the future will be solar. When you when you view things from a cognitive standpoint.
10:32 Peter Diamandis? You know, Elon, we have a number of national leaders, corporate financial leaders from the Middle East here. What's your advice to decision makers here in the room that don't want to miss the AI transformation? That will be part of the leadership of that AI transformation?
10:58 Peter Diamandis? Do they need to build their own clusters here? Are they partnering?
11:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, I think there's probably all countries will have their own AI clusters over time.
11:12 Speaker 01 It's currently very difficult to actually build an AI cluster and have it run.
11:19 Speaker 01 It's not like just pulling a computer out of a box. It they are currently very difficult to run.
11:27 Speaker 01 And you have to say, oh, you're going to be training a frontier model. Because if you're training a frontier model, then you you need a massive amount of compute and a level of technical skill that is only a few a few companies possess.
11:44 Speaker 01 So.
11:46 Speaker 01 But but over time, I think every country will have AI compute clusters. It's just it's just going to be a normal thing that every country has. So. Yeah.
12:00 Peter Diamandis? So a basic infrastructure for every nation, like they have an electrical grid?
12:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, it'll be something like electricity or, you know, just or, you know, having an airline or something like that. It's every every country will have AIs or multiple AIs. So. And there will be a lot of robots.
12:24 Peter Diamandis? There'll be a lot of robots.
12:26 Speaker 01 Way more robots than people.
12:28 Peter Diamandis? Yeah, let's have that conversation a second because people are concerned about, as you said, dwindling populations, AI and robots have potential to help support the GDP.
12:41 Speaker 01 Yes.
12:41 Peter Diamandis? Congratulations on Optimus 2 and soon Optimus 3. Your prediction on the number of robots by 2040, humanoid robots to be specific, what order of magnitude?
12:56 Speaker 01 By 2040?
12:57 Peter Diamandis? Yeah, so.
13:04 Speaker 01 I think by 20, if you say like 2040, probably there are more humanoid robots than there are people.
13:10 Peter Diamandis? So on the order of 10 billion, yeah?
13:12 Speaker 01 Yes.
13:14 Peter Diamandis? And your price point on these humanoid robots? You're, you're pretty good on pricing. Sometimes you're off on timing.
13:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'm, I'm often optimistic on timing, but although, you know, the press will report when I'm late, but not when I'm early.
13:34 Speaker 01 You know, for example, our Shanghai factory, we thought it would take about a year and a half and we did it in 11 months.
13:42 Speaker 01 Our Kigunavada factory, we thought two years, we did it in 18 months.
13:47 Peter Diamandis? Or the Colossus cluster.
13:48 Speaker 01 Texas factory, two years, we did it in 14 months. So I've, I've been early actually many times, it's just, it's just not reported.
13:57 Speaker 01 So when I, when I make a prediction, I try to figure out, I try to say, what is the 50th percentile likely? Which means that half the time I should be wrong.
14:07 Speaker 01 So I'm not sandvacking essentially.
14:13 Speaker 01 So. But, but, but I, I think it's, once you get out 2040, that's a long time from now.
14:22 Speaker 01 Over 25 years.
14:25 Speaker 01 There'll be at least 10 billion humanoid robots.
14:28 Peter Diamandis? And price, price point?
14:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, the price point will be, I think, quite low. Probably 20, $25,000 for a robot that can do anything.
14:40 Speaker 01 We will be in a future, assuming we are in the good path of AI. I think we will be in a future of abundance. You know, obviously, you wrote a book called Abundance. So I think you would agree that that is probably the outcome. That basically, anyone will be able to have any goods and services they want. The actual marginal cost of goods and services will be extremely low in the future.
15:10 Peter Diamandis? Let me, in our last four minutes, let me change the subject to something near and dear to both of our hearts. Congratulations on Starship. It was literally awesome, probably the engineering feat of this decade, if not more.
15:26 Speaker 01 Not bad for humans. Not bad for humans. We did that with no AI was involved in that whatsoever. So I'm glad to say that we're all entirely with human brains and without AI. I think in the future, the AI might look at that and say, not bad for a bunch of monkeys.
15:43 Peter Diamandis? When are we on Mars? When is Starship on Mars?
15:49 Speaker 01 I think we'll be able to launch some starships to Mars in two years. So the next Mars window, which is in about 26, 27 months. But we're just about to start, or we're at the beginning of a Mars transit window now, and they occur every 26 months. So just over two years, we'll be sending our first uncrewed starships to Mars. And then if those, if those work out well, and we don't increment the crater counts on Mars, then we'll send humans two years after that.
16:28 Peter Diamandis? So a challenge to be on the surface of Mars before the end of the decade sounds like a reasonable proclamation for either, for either side of the White House, hopefully.
16:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, I feel more optimistic about it with a Trump White House than a non-Trump White House because the biggest impediment to progress that we're experiencing is regulatory is overregulation.
17:00 Peter Diamandis? Got to keep those whales and sharks safe, yeah.
17:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. It just takes us, I mean, it takes longer to get the permit to launch than to build a giant rocket. And the bureaucracy in the US has been growing every year and has particularly grown under the Biden administration. And unless we do something to scale back the
17:26 Speaker 01 overregulation, I call it sort of, America is getting, and a lot of countries are getting slow strangulation from overregulation. Unless something is done to push back on that, it'll eventually become illegal to do almost any large project, and we won't be able to get to Mars.
17:45 Peter Diamandis? Last subject. Congrats on the Cybercab rollout. Pretty extraordinary. Kathy Woods predicted it to be, you know, multiple trillions of dollars of potential GDP growth and impact.
18:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
18:01 Peter Diamandis? Give us some predictions on when we'll see Cybercab, when we'll be ordering a Cybercab?
18:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, Tesla, unsupervised full self-driving, we expect to be working in the US next year with the Model 3 and Y. So you don't have to wait for the robot taxi or Cybercab to, for Tesla to release autonomy. We're currently expecting to exceed human safety levels in Q2 next year, and then substantially go beyond that thereafter. And so really it's just a software update to the cars to be able to do, launch our self-driving network. So we
18:51 Speaker 01 expect to unsupervised full self-driving and start that in California and Texas, you know, around the middle of next year. And then
19:02 Speaker 01 We have seven million cars on the road. We'll have nine, nine and a half million cars by the end of next year. So and eventually we'll have a fleet of a hundred million plus vehicles and they'll all be autonomous. The Cybercab with no steering wheel or pedals. We're expecting to reach volume production in twenty twenty six. So that's certainly interesting. But like I said, the the actual launch of of a robotic taxi uncoordinated full self driving is actually next year.
19:41 Speaker 01 And at the at the event, the Tesla autonomy event, we had fifty cars, thirty model wise that were driverless and twenty of the Cybercabs. And so autonomy is here, is what I'm saying. And, yeah, and all cars will drive themselves. This is a no brainer. And they'll get to where they're ten times safer than human driven cars, which will save, I don't know, past a million lives a year globally. And then Optimus starts limited production next year, twenty twenty five.
20:24 Speaker 01 And then it should be in volume production in twenty six. And then we'll grow to, I think, ultimately be the biggest product of any kind ever.
20:37 Speaker 01 So and I kind of see, I kind of agree with with Ark Invest and Kathy Wood that autonomy, like the sort of robotic taxis makes Tesla kind of like a about a five trillion dollar company. The Optimus robot, I think, makes Tesla a twenty five trillion dollar company. It's not even clear what money means in that.
21:01 Peter Diamandis? We end up in a post capitalist society at some point. Elon, you make.
21:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, we do sort of end up, it does become kind of post capitalist. And like I said, and I know you agree with this, that we're looking at the most likely bright side. We're headed for an age of abundance where anyone can have any goods and services they want. It won't be a case of universal basic income. It'll be a case of universal high income is the most likely outcome.
21:29 Peter Diamandis? You make it look easy, my friend. Thank you for making some time available. I know it isn't easy. Let's give it up for Elon Musk, everybody.
21:38 Peter Diamandis? Thank you. Thank you, my friend.
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