Elon Musk: Optimus 3 Is Coming, Recursive Self-Improvement Is Already Here, and the Singularity | #239

0:00Audience, and as you can see, I'm still trying to monetize hope. Yeah, you look like you're in great shape. I'm doing great. Is there any sort of youth serum things going on, or what? It's our longevity XPRIZE. We're getting there, buddy. We're getting there. I think in our last conversation, you're getting on board with the idea of extended longevity, yes? Yeah. Okay. We'll leave it at that. To some degree. I mean, I don't know if we want everyone to live with it or whatever, but I think healthspan and not having an extended period of senescence where you're just drooling on yourself sounds like a good idea.

0:43We want to avoid that. Yeah. So first off, congratulations on the merger of SpaceX and XAI, ball or move, going to power humanity's first Dyson swarm. So I'm curious. Late. It truly is. What's your timeline for launching these data centers and how much bandwidth do you think you can get in the first year? Give us a sense of the speed at which you're going to be making this happen. Yeah, so SpaceX is in the quiet period. I can't actually tell you things that would cause problems. Yeah.

1:28Oh, I'll leave it. I'll leave it that. I appreciate that. But can't wait for the speed. You know, we had a conversation here on Monday with Eric Schmidt and with one of the leads from one of the other hyperscalers. I won't mention who, but I'm curious where you feel we are in recursive self-improvement. Are we there? Do you see Grok doing recursive self-improvement at this point? And what's the timeline for AGI and ASI? Give us a sense of that. Yeah, I think we've been in recursive improvement for a while here. If you mean by recursive self-improvement without a human in the loop, is that what you mean?

2:16I do. On the AI software side.

2:25I mean, humans are gradually getting less and less in the loop on the recursive self-improvement. So, you know, every successive model is built by the one before it. So, that is happening to a large degree, but it's not yet fully automated. it. It may be there end of this year, but not later than next year. Do you see a hard takeoff at that point? We're in the hard takeoff. Okay. Right now. Yes. I mean, look at, I mean, at this point, I go to sleep. There's some passive AI breakthrough. And when I wake up, there's another one. Yes. Yeah, it's hard to keep track, honestly. It's a bit of a head spinner.

3:23Yeah, well, I think a lot of the head spinning is happening from you, too. Yeah. Well, you know, Grok's doing pretty well, and in some metrics, by some metrics, it's the best. For example, it's the best at predicting things, which is arguably the best metric for intelligence. The new GROC 4.20 is really, really good.

3:53We're currently behind on coding. The reason I was a bit late for this was that I was just in a giant sort of all hands on coding, just going through all of the things that need to happen to essentially catch up and exceed our competitors on coding, which I think we'll do. I feel we should probably get there by the middle of this year.

4:19And then I think people don't quite understand just how much intelligence there will be or just how far it will exceed human intelligence to a degree that is impossible to fully understand. But you can certainly imagine a situation where we, let's say a million times more energy is harnessed than all of Earth's current electricity usage. That would still only be roughly a millionth of the sun's energy output. So essentially, if you increase Earth's economy by a factor of a million, it's still roughly a trillion. Since we're a trillionth of the sun's energy, if you increase Earth's economy in terms of electricity usage by roughly a million, you will be roughly one millionth only of the sun's energy harnessed.

5:17But what does an economy or an intelligence using a million times more electricity than all of a civilization think about or look like or do? It's going to be something pretty magnificent. The challenge will be even vaguely appreciating that level of intelligence. But it's safe to say it will solve everything you can possibly think of. Yes. Longevity being, you know, certainly one of them. And I do enjoy your unrelenting optimism. Thank you, pal. I see you. Hope. Hope. Yeah, exactly. You've taken to heart monetizing hope, which is pretty funny. Yes. It was Grock's marketing advice to me when you roasted me.

6:08I'm right over here. I'm probably noticing you and saying you monetize. But hey, it's better than monetizing misery, I suppose. Yes. For sure. Yeah. But yeah, just when you have AI and robots are going to increase the economic output or by so many orders of magnitude, we cannot possibly comprehend it.

6:41We're likely in the very short time to become a minority, then a vast minority, then a microscopic minority of intelligence on this planet. Yes, not even on this planet, but in the solar system. Yes, for sure. Because your best case outcome for Earth for intelligence is roughly one billionth of the sun's energy. That's your best case outcome if you generate intelligence only on Earth. Intercept it, right? Yes, yes. Because roughly half a billionth of the sun's energy hits Earth, and that's the vast majority of energy that's out there. that we can access.

7:29So really the intelligence in the solar system will be many orders of magnitude greater than the intelligence on Earth itself. Can I ask you a question, Elon? How far out can you see? How many years out can you make reasonable predictions right now?

7:53it's hard to predict the the path exactly especially if it because often things are kind of an s-curve or a series of s-curves where it starts off slow grows exponentially it's linear zone and then goes logarithmic that generally has been what I've seen with breakthroughs in AI for example is you'll be some breakthrough it'll do have an S curve but and then it looks like it's just gonna go to infinity but then you hit logarithmic returns until there's another breakthrough yep so progress in the AI is just a sort of series of you know sort of overlapping S curves or connected S curves I mean there was a point where you could probably predict out a decade or two decades.

8:43What are your thoughts now?

8:55Okay, this is going to sound pretty crazy. It's okay. We've been talking about crazy. I'm sure you're a receptive audience to wild prognostications. Yes.

9:13I'd say the economy is 10 times its current size in 10 years. Greater than. Okay.

9:25Yeah, you'd said triple digit growth in five plus years from now on GDP. And 10x the economy. But in terms of your ability to... I feel like that's 10x in roughly 10 years, I feel is actually a fairly comfortable prediction.

9:53If there's like World War III or something, that could put a kink in those plans or those expectations. But in the absence of World War III, if current trends continue, I would say the economy 10x is in 10 years. Love it. Can you give us an... And we'll have a base on the moon. Yes. And we'll have people on Mars. And we'll have mass drivers on the moon. Yes. I think so, in 10 years. I think we'll have a mass driver on the moon in 10 years. I love it. Gerard K. O 'Neill's vision being fulfilled. We had four robots on stage here. this year at the Abundant Summit. I look forward to Optimus. I'm curious, Optimus 3 timeline, and in particular, when can I buy one or two?

10:46When do you expect Optimus to go into commercial, for commercial sale, or will you be leasing it?

10:55Well, we're in the final stages of completion of Optimus 3, which is really gonna be by far the most advanced robot in the world. Nothing's even close.

11:08In fact, I haven't even seen any demos of robots that are as good as Optimus 3, frankly. Maybe they're out there or they're secret or something. I don't know.

11:23I have to make sure I'm saying things that are reasonably public as well, of course. We're streaming this on X. Okay, this is pretty public and accurate. Yes.

11:35Yeah, I think we'll start production on Optimus 3 this summer, but very slow at first. Like, you know, the sort of classic S-curve ramp of manufacturing units versus time. And then probably reach high volume production around summer next year. and then we'll have Optimus 4

12:09design clean next year. Try to release a new robot design every year and improve robot design every year. When Dave Blunden and I were at the Gigafactory, it was an extraordinary experience 11.5 million square feet for the Tesla and then I think you said you're building out 9.5 million square feet for Optimus there as well which is extraordinary. It's 10 million square feet around numbers.

12:39That's going to be a new factory design, too. It's not different from other factories. How far before we have robots building robots? I mean, you automated so much of the Gigafactory already, where they're humans playing a small role. Do the robots just play the role that humans are playing in that regard? We still have a lot of humans building things. Tesla direct employees who are building things, or basically people in the factory are either building or managing people who are building, it's roughly 100 ,000. So we have a lot of people. Tesla total hit counts around 150K, of which two thirds are in the factory in one form or another.

13:30And then our suppliers, there's probably maybe a million or two million people in our suppliers type of thing. So it's a lot of people. What we do expect is that the output per person at Tesla becomes very, very high. So we're not planning any layoffs or reductions in personnel. In fact, we will increase our headcount. But the output per human at Tesla is going to get nutty high.

14:05When we were together, we discussed the idea of sustainable abundance on our podcast. And you reinforced the idea that we have a coming age of universal high income, which has become a point of discussion beyond UBI. but I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts on how we get there. Have you reflected on that any further? And more so, we talked about a time frame of civil unrest, two, three, four, five years, probably a lot of COVID-like checks in the interim until we get to a demonetization and a deflation that leads us to UHI. Any more reflections on that? People need that hope and that vision.

14:54Yeah, I mean, to be clear, I don't think we should be sort of complacent. We do need to be careful because the future is a range of possible outcomes, and they're not all great. But at this point, I do agree with you that it's likely to be great. You know, it's probably 80 % likely, maybe more likely to be great. and I do think we'll have universal high income. We're basically just issuing money to people

15:26because the output of goods and services will so far exceed the money supply

15:34that effectively you have deflation because deflation is just the ratio of the outputs of goods and services to the money supply. so that that's uh so if you if the rate of growth of goods and services bar exceeds the rate of both of the money supply which i predict will happen then you will have deflation yes and a lot of a lot of people spinning up new companies competing against each other driving the price down and increasing the variability and deflation faster and faster. Yeah, basically AI and robots are going to make so much stuff and provide so many services that they will actually run out of things to do for the humans.

16:18They'll just run out of things to do for the humans. And then they'll, you know, there's only so much that humans can even express that they want. So you go back to my example of like, if you go a million times greater than the Earth's economy, you've long since saturated all human desire you know like maybe like if you go a thousand times more than our current economy a thousand times you probably have already saturated saturated human anything people can think of that they want so do you think the the value of money is going to significantly decrease will it Will we go post-capitalist?

17:04Yeah, I think money will stop being relevant at some point in the future. So just as you're becoming a... It's probably something like an in-banks culture sort of future. And I think the AI down the road will really not use human currency. it will just care about power and mass, wattage and tonnage. It's kind of ironic then, right? Just as you're becoming a multi-trillionaire, money starts to have less value.

17:41Yeah, pretty much.

17:46Yeah. You know, all this stuff, it's really just trillionaires represents like some percentage ownership in companies that I've built and it's not like sitting in a bank account. It's just literally I own a percentage of the companies. The companies are doing lots of useful things. The value of the company grows. I own a percentage of the companies and that sums up to that number which seems high. Yeah. I was interviewed by somebody who was asking me about your drive, what drives you and I said, Elon's driven to solve problems. he's driven to make life and the world better by just solving the biggest problems over and over and over again and if someone else were solving them he wouldn't need to but no one else is solving them so I just want to say thank you for that pal, thank you for that you're welcome applause

18:44applause I am curious, do you think that democracy and our modern institutions can keep up with a supersonic tsunami coming our way? Are they just going to fall in its way? They're just going to break down? How do we deal?

19:10I mean, it's called the singularity for a reason. It's hard to predict what happens in the singularity. I mean, Grok's logo is the singularity. I love it. It's a beautiful logo behind you, by the way. It's gorgeous. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. So the light, the halo around a black hole is the mass and light are falling in type of thing. It's hard to know what happens inside the singularity. But it's going to be very interesting. We're going to live in, the future will be very entertaining. Of that I'm confident. Yes.

19:50And I think also like AI and robotics, also the only way we're gonna solve our budget deficit, frankly, and not just go bankrupt as a country.

20:04So, you know, you've had an influence on me in that I'm like, I've just decided to be more optimistic. It's like, we just should be more optimistic. Thank you, pal. Not that I wasn't an optimist, but I was like maybe dwelling a little too much on the negative stuff. It's all upside being an optimist. And a realist a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You don't want to be complacent or just assume everything's going to go well, but try to make it go well. But, I mean, there will be some pretty amazing things that happen. So if you've got humanoid robots that have very high dexterity and are incredibly smart, it means that everyone on earth will have access to better medical care than then then the richest person on earth which by the way I would say like you know if I'm allegedly the rich person what I think actually sovereigns are richer than me by the way but it's like you know I like I had to have like a like a neck surgery three times because the first two ones were done wrong you And I'm like, what that, you know?

21:13So, and I'm like, my back still hurts a little bit. I'm like, can AI please solve back pain? That would be a huge win. And I think it will. Yep. So, you know, back pain sucks. I think that's maybe like, you know, sometimes why do people get grumpy when they get older? It's because of back pain. It's like if your back hurts all the time and you can't sleep well, you're going to be grumpy. We had David Sinclair on stage this morning, and he's going into human trials with ER100, his partial epigenetic reprogramming. And one of the papers recently published shows it enables joint repair. And so back pain may be one of the things that it eliminates.

21:55That would be amazing. Yeah, for sure. Honestly, the average happiness level for humans would just go up tremendously if you just saw back pain. because it's not a question of if you'll get back pain, it's when you'll get back pain. I keep on inviting you to come down to Fountain Life in Dallas. We'll help you out, but sometime when you have time. I understand you can get MRI and CAT scans and everything, but what do you do with that? Happy to send you the list. I'll DM you the list of therapists. A secret serum or something? Yeah, exactly.