How Elon Musk Became Consumed with AI Safety

0:00Today on the AI Breakdown, we're looking at a Time Magazine cover story about Elon Musk and artificial intelligence. The AI Breakdown is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Go to breakdown.network for more information about our newsletter, our YouTube, and our Discord.

0:24Welcome back to the AI Breakdown. For this weekend episode, I wanted to explore this interesting cover story from Time magazine. The piece was called Elon Musk's fight for the future of AI. And I think that whatever one thinks about Elon Musk, and frankly, he just never stops seeming to make himself more controversial, he is undeniably influential. At least in the sense that he ends up dominating such a big part of the cultural conversation. Now, we could write entire master psychological theses on why that might be. Is it our fascination with wealth? Is it some other deep-seated cultural thing happening right now?

1:02For the purposes of this conversation, I don't think it really matters. What does matter is the extent to which Elon Musk is in the public's eye. Now, Elon Musk has a new biography coming out by Walter Isaacson. You may remember Walter Isaacson from the Steve Jobs book, particularly because the book was written at the request of Jobs. Isaacson is arguably the highest profile biography writer in the world right now. And so obviously a new book from Isaacson on Elon Musk both makes sense, but is also likely to get a lot of attention. What I found interesting is that as part of his promotional efforts, where Isaacson decided to focus and what Time wanted to print was about Elon's interaction with artificial intelligence.

1:42Given the huge plethora of things that they could have made this cover story about, I think that that's fairly notable. Now, we're not going to read the whole piece, but we are going to excerpt a few parts of it. The first interesting anecdote comes from a meeting between Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis. The two had met at a conference in 2012, not long after Demis had founded DeepMind, and Hassabis recounts a story of after that conference visiting Elon at the SpaceX rocket factory and having a conversation about why he was dedicated to that mission. Isaacson writes, while sitting in the canteen overlooking the assembly lines, Musk explained that his reason for building rockets that could go to Mars was that it might be a way to preserve human consciousness in the event of a world war, asteroid strike, or civilizational collapse.

2:24Hassabis told him to add another potential threat to the list, artificial intelligence. Machines could become super intelligent and surpass us mere mortals, perhaps even decide to dispose of us. Musk paused silently for almost a minute as he processed this possibility. He decided that Hassabis might be right about the danger of AI and promptly invested$5 million in DeepMind as a way to monitor what it was doing. Now, the second anecdote in this foundational story is one that Elon has told himself before as well. Basically, it was about a number of conversations between Musk and Google founder Larry Page.

2:55Isaacson writes, The potential dangers of artificial intelligence became a topic that Musk would raise almost obsessively during their late-night conversations, but Page was dismissive. This came to a head at a birthday party for Elon in Napa Valley in 2013, where Page ultimately asked something to the effect of, would it really be all that bad if machines someday surpass us in intelligence and consciousness? Wouldn't it just be the next stage of evolution? From the Isaacson again,

3:37Now, one part of the story that Elon hasn't talked about as much was that apparently, after this conversation, it made him very worried when he discovered that Google were planning to buy Demis Hassabis' Deep Mind. Apparently at a party in LA, they did an hour-long Skype call with Hassabis trying to convince him not to do the deal. Musk said the future of AI should not be controlled by Larry. Of course, they couldn't talk him off the ledge, and they also couldn't, it sounds like, raise their own money to make a credible counteroffer, but they did win Larry's agreement to create a quote-unquote safety council with Musk as a member that ultimately only had one meeting.

4:09Writes Isaacson, Page, Hassabis, and Google chair Eric Schmidt attended along with Reid Hoffman and a few others. Musk concluded that the council was basically BS. This triggered another set of actions by Elon. One was a series of dinner discussions on ways to promote AI safety and explicitly to counter Google. Another was a one-on-one conversation in May 2015 with President Obama, of which Musk said, Obama got it, but I realized that it was not going to rise to the level of something he would do anything about. But the most consequential action was what would come next. Here's how Isaacson described it.

4:39Musk then turned to Sam Altman, a tightly bundled software entrepreneur, sports car enthusiast, and survivalist who, behind his polished veneer, had a Musk-like intensity. At a small dinner in Palo Alto, they decided to co-found a non-profit artificial intelligence research lab, which they named OpenAI. It would make its software open source and try to counter Google's growing dominance of the field. One question they discussed at dinner was what would be safer, a small number of AI systems that were controlled by big corporations or a large number of independent systems. They concluded that a large number of competing systems providing checks and balances on one another was better.

5:11For Musk, this was the reason to make OpenAI truly open, so that lots of people could build systems based on its source code. Of course, we know that the relationship with OpenAI didn't last. Of that, Isaacson says, Musk's determination to develop AI capabilities at his own companies caused a break with OpenAI in 2018. He tried to convince Altman that OpenAI should be folded into Tesla. The OpenAI team rejected that idea, and Altman stepped in as president of the lab, starting a for-profit arm that was able to raise equity funding, including a major investment from Microsoft. In response, Isaacson said that Musk decided to forge ahead with building rival AI teams to work on an array of related projects.

5:45Those included Neuralink, a brain-computer interface, Optimus, which is a human-like robot, Dojo, which is a supercomputer project, and of course, Tesla's fully self-driving efforts. Isaacson writes, at first, these endeavors were rather independent, but eventually Musk would tie them all together along with a new company he founded called XAI to pursue the goal of artificial general intelligence. Now, in the wake of Chachi GPT being released, Isaacson pointed out some of Elon's new concerns about AI. One was that they could become politically indoctrinated. Two, and much more immediate, was a concern that chatbots could be trained to flood Twitter with disinformation, biased reporting, and financial scams.

6:18And as Isaacson put it, quote, his compulsion to ride to the rescue kicked in. He was resentful that he had founded and funded OpenAI, but was now left out of the fray. AI was the biggest storm brewing, and there was no one more attracted to a storm than Musk. Isaacson continued,

7:00computational. He felt that Musk had not drilled down enough into the complexity of the issue of AI safety. However, he did feel that Musk's criticism came from a sincere concern. He's a jerk, Altman told Kara Swisher. He has a style that is not a style that I'd want to have for myself. But I think he really does care, and he is feeling stressed out about what the future is going to look like for humanity. Now, the next part of the piece gets into something that has been widely speculated, which is that part of the motivation for Elon to buy Twitter was getting access to an incredibly rich training set for artificial intelligence.

7:29According to Isaacson, Elon didn't really think about this before buying Twitter. Elon claims it was a side benefit, actually, that I realized only after the purchase. Still, realize it, he did. And a lot of Twitter's next moves were considered not only in the context of their monetization opportunity, but also in the way that they could restrict Google and Microsoft from using data to improve their AI models. Now, as part of his research, Walter Isaacson was shadowing Elon for going on two years. Isaac said that in March, Musk asked Isaacson to come to meet him in Austin to discuss his concerns around artificial intelligence.

7:59What can be done to make AI safe, Musk asked. I keep wrestling with that. What actions can we take to minimize AI danger and assure that human consciousness survives? Musk reported being concerned that human intelligence was leveling off because people weren't having enough children, especially compared to the amount of computer intelligence going up exponentially. Elon also argued that machine self-learning and machine self-upgrades could, quote, happen sooner than we expected. The conversation took place at the home of Siobhan Zillis, who has twins with Elon and who is also an executive at Neuralink.

8:28Isaacson writes, For a moment I was struck by the oddness of the scene. We were sitting on a suburban patio by a tranquil backyard swimming pool on a sunny spring day, with two bright-eyed twins learning to toddle, as Musk somberly speculated about the window of opportunity for building a sustainable human colony on Mars before an AI apocalypse destroyed earthly civilization. Musk lapsed into one of his long silences. He finally said softly, I can't just sit around and do nothing. With AI coming, I'm sort of wondering whether it's worth spending that much time thinking about Twitter. Sure, I could probably make it the biggest financial institution in the world, but I only have so many brain cycles and hours in the day.

9:01I mean, it's not like I need to be richer or something. So what should my time be spent on, he said? Getting Starship launched. Getting to Mars is now far more pressing. He paused again, then added, Also, I need to focus on making AI safe. That's why I'm starting an AI company. Now, about XAI, Isaacson wrote, Elon admitted that he was starting off way behind OpenAI in creating a chatbot that could give natural language responses to questions. But Tesla's work on self-driving cars and Optimus the Robot put it way ahead in creating the type of AI needed to navigate in the physical world. This meant that his engineers were actually ahead of OpenAI in creating full-fledged artificial general intelligence, which requires both abilities.

9:36Tesla's real-world AI is underrated, he said. Imagine if Tesla and OpenAI had to swap tasks. They would have to make self-driving and we would have to make large language model chatbots. Who wins? We do. Isaacson writes, In April, Musk assigned his team three major goals. The first was to make an AI bot that could write computer code. The second product would be a chatbot competitor to OpenAI's GPT series, one that used algorithms and trained on datasets that would ensure its political neutrality. And the third goal, Isaacson wrote, was even grander. His overriding mission had always been to assure that AI developed in a way that helped guarantee that human consciousness endured.

10:08That was best achieved, he thought, by creating a form of artificial general intelligence that could reason and think and pursue truth as its guiding principle. You should be able to give it big tasks like build a better rocket engine.

10:27Now the piece concludes with Isaacson writing, That sounded vaguely familiar, and then I realized why. He was embarking on a mission similar to the one chronicled in his formative, perhaps too formative, Bible of his childhood years, the one that pulled him out of his adolescent existential depression, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which featured a supercomputer designed to figure out the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. Now, I think why I wanted to share this and why I think it is significant, outside of just what I said at the beginning about how big a footprint Elon has in business and culture right now, is that I think many of you who listen to this or who read this excerpt in Isaacson's book will relate to that statement and that sense of asking, with AI coming, I'm sort of wondering whether it's worth spending that much time thinking about X and not X being Elon's new Twitter, but X being whatever it is that you're spending your professional time on now.

11:18I certainly know that part of the reason that I felt so compelled to create an AI version of the breakdown, even though it meant doing another daily podcast on top of the crypto breakdown, was exactly that. That it just feels like one of the, if not the most important thing to be thinking about and talking about right now. In that, I am very happy to have you guys on this journey with me. And so until next time, peace.

11:44Thank you.