Video Transcript:

(00:00) the architecture in China that’s in recent years is far more impressive than the US I mean the the train stations the buildings the highspeed rail everything it’s Wars which are tragic and difficult on a on a local basis and then there are Wars which are civilization ending or has that potential obviously Global ther nuclear warfare has high potential to end civilization where are the aliens that’s one of the like the F Paradox question um a lot of people asked me if I’ve seen any evidence of aliens and I I
(00:33) haven’t which is kind of concerning cuz then I think would I probably preferred at least have seen some archaeological evidence of aliens um to the best of my knowledge there is no Pro I not aware of any evidence of alians the out there they’re very subtle we might just be the only Consciousness at least in the Galaxy um and if if you look at say the history of Earth for to believe the archaeological record Earth is about 4 and2 billion years old civilization as measured from the first writing is only
(01:08) about 5,000 years old we have to give some credit there to the ancient samarians who aren’t around anymore I think it was a archaic pre uniform was the first actual symbolic representation but only about 5,000 years ago I think that’s a good date for when would say civilization started that’s 1 millionth of Earth’s existence so civilization has been around it’s really a flash in the pan mhm so far um but why did it take so long for you know 4 and half billion years um for the vast majority of that time
(01:53) there was no life and and then there was archaic bacteria for a very long time and then mitochondria get captured multicellular life um differentiation into plants and animals life moving from the oceans to land mammals um higher brain functions and the Sun is expanding slowly um but it will it will overheat it will it will heat heat the Earth up it’s some point in the future um boil the oceans and and Earth will become like Venus where no life let Life as we know it is impossible so if we do not become multiplanetary and
(02:40) ultimately go beyond our solar system um annihilation of all life on Earth is a certainty a certainty um and it could be as little as on the galactic time scale uh half a billion years you know long time by human standards but that’s only 10% longer than Earth has been around at all mhm so if if if life had taken 10% longer to evolve on Earth it wouldn’t exist at all if we are able to go out there and explore other star systems that we there’s a good chance we find a whole bunch of long Dead one planet
(03:22) civilizations yeah they never made a past to their home planet I mean there are various explanations for the for Paradox and one is just the sort of there great filters which civilizations don’t pass through and one of those great filters is do you become a multiplet civilization or not and if you don’t it’s simply a matter of time before something happens on your planet um you know either natural man-made that causes us to die out like the dinosaurs where are they now that didn’t have spaceships I I
(03:57) don’t know look I think it’s the smart move uh is just you know this is the first time in the history of Earth that it’s been possible for life to extend beyond Earth um that window is open um now it may be open for a long time or it may be open for a short time and it it may be open now and then never open again so I I think the smart move here is to make life multiplanetary while it is possible to do so we don’t want to be one of those lame One Planet civilizations it just dies out I think
(04:31) it’s helpful the tools of physics are very powerful and can be applied I think to almost any really any arena in life it’s it’s really just a critical thinking but something important you need to reason with from first principles and think about things in the limit One Direction or the other so um in the limit even at the CF scale meaning even if you harness the entire power of the sun you will still care about useful compute Pro what so that’s where I I think probably where things are headed from uh the standpoint
(05:06) 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 you need Transformers to run Transformers we’re have a silicon shortage today um a voltage Step Down Transformer shortage probably in about a year and then just electricity shortages in general in about 2 years I I gave a speech for the sort of world Gathering of utility companies electricity companies um and I I said look you really need to prepare
(05:43) for tribling of electricity demand um because all transport is going to go electric with the ironic exception of rockets and uh and and heating um will also go electric um so energy usage right now is roughly 1/3 very rough terms 1/3 electricity 1/3 transport 1/3 heating um and so in order for everything to go sustainable to go electric um you uh need to trible electricity output so I encourage the utilities to uh build more power plants and and also to probably have well well not probably they should definitely buy more
(06:30) batteries because the the grid currently is sized for Real Time load which is kind of crazy cuz you know that means you got to size for whatever the the peak electricity demand is like the worst second or the worst day of the year or you can have a brown out or blackout and you that that crazy blackout for several days in in in Austin um so uh because there’s almost no buffering of energy in the grid like if you’ve got a Hydro power plant you can buffer energ but otherwise um it’s all real time so with batteries you
(07:07) can you can produce energy at night and use it during the day so you can buffer so I I I expect that there will be very heavy usage of of batteries in the future because the the peak to trough ratio for power plants is anywhere from two to 5 you know so it’s like lowest point to highest point electrification of transport uh and and electric heating will be much bigger than AI um but but even for for AI you really have a growing demand for electricity for electric vehicles and a growing demand for electricity for to
(07:45) run the computers for AI mhm and so this is obviously going to lead to a electricity shortage it will get solved just the question of how long it takes to solve it so at various points there’s a limit some some kind of limiting factor to progress um and with regard a I’m saying right now the limiting factor is uh silicon chips um and that will we’re going to then have more chips than we can actually plug in and turn on um probably in about a year um the the initial constraint being literally voltage step down Transformers because
(08:20) you’ve got um power coming in at 3 300,000 volts and it’s got to step all the way down eventually to around 7 volt so it’s a very big amount of you know the voltage St down is gigantic um so and and the industry is not used to Rapid growth 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 um I think we want to be very careful in how we develop AI um it’s it’s a it’s a great power and with
(09:03) great power comes great responsibility um I think it it would be wise for us to have at least um 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 should they can at least voice concerns mhm um publicly um you know 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 I think there’s I I I like I you know
(09:46) Tesla gets a lot of regulatory oversight on the automotive front I we’re subject to I think over 100 Regulatory Agencies domestically and internationally it’s a lot you could fill this room with the all the regulations that Tesla has to adhere to for automotive um same is true in you know for rockets and for you know um currently the limiting factor for SpaceX for Starship launch is regulatory approval uh the fa has actually given their approval but we’re waiting for fish and wildlife to uh finish their analysis and give their
(10:20) approval that’s why I posted I want to buy a fish license I mean some of the things like that that it’s I feel like are so absurd that I want to do like comedy sketch and Flash at the bottom this is all real this is actually what happened um you know one of the things that was a bit of a challenge at one point is that they were worried about uh our rocket hitting a shock mhm and um now the ocean’s very big and uh how often do you see shars uh not that often you know as a percentage of ocean surface area shocks basically are zero
(10:57) and and and so then we will then we said well how will we calculate the probability of telling a shark and they’re like we can’t give you that information because they’re worried about shark hunt shark fin Hunters uh going and hunting sharks I say well how are we supposed to we’re on the horns of a dilemma then well there’s another part of Fish Wildlife that can can do this analysis and like well why don’t you give them the data like we don’t they don’t we don’t trust them like excuse me
(11:22) they don’t they’re literally in your department again this is actually what happened um and uh and and and then can you do an NDA or something [Laughter] eventually they managed to solve the internal quandry and indeed uh the probability of of ating shock is essentially zero in order to run uh like really deep intelligence you need a lot of compute so it’s not like you know you can just fire up a PC in your basement and be running AGI at least not yet you know grock was trained on 8,000 A1 100s running at Peak
(11:58) efficiency um and gr’s going to get a lot better by the way we will be more than doubling our compute every couple months for the next several months I think the suar to open sourcing I think perhaps with a slight time delay you know I don’t know six 6 months even um I think I’m I’m generally in favor of open sourcing like bias towards open sourcing um I mean it is a concern to me that you know over you know I was you know AR I think I guess arguably the prime you know Prime move behind open AI
(12:39) in the sense that it was created because of discussions that I had with Larry pagee um back when he and I were were friends and say his house and I talked to about AI safety and and Larry did not care about AI safety or at least at the time he didn’t um you know and at one point he called me a species for being prum and I’m like well what do you you on Larry uh Team robot to be and I’m like okay so at the time you know uh Google Google had acquired deep mind they had uh probably two-thirds of all
(13:13) AI res you know probably two3 of all the AI researchers in the world mhm they had basically in infinite money and compute and the guy in charge you know Larry pagee did not care about safety and even yelled at me um and and and called me a specious as being pro human well I mean the really wild thing about the anti- training is that it like it learns to read like you can read science but we never taught it to read so yeah we never taught it what we never taught it what a car was or what a person was or viice cyclist uh it
(13:57) learned what what those things are what all the objects are on the road um from video just from watching vide just like humans I mean humans are photons in control controls out like the vast majority of information reaching our brain is from our eyes um and you say well what’s the output the output is our motor signals to our sort of fingers and mouth in order to communicate um for on in controls out the same is true of the car now ALB brain is very computer efficient very very energy efficient so think of like what what is our brain
(14:40) able to do um you know there’s only about 10 watts of higher brain function not counting stuff that’s just used to control our body um the thinking part of our brain is less than 10 watts um and that 10 those 10 watts can still produce a much better novel than a 10 10 megawatt GPU cluster so there’s a six order of magnitude difference there um I mean the the AI is thus far gotten to where it is via Brute Force just throwing massive amounts of compute and and massive amounts of power at it so this is not where where it will end
(15:24) up um you know in general with any given technology you first try to make it work and then you make it efficient so I think we’ll find over time that these models get smaller are able to produce uh sensible output with far less compute far less power um Tesla is arguably ahead of the game on that front because um it is we’ve just been forced to try to understand the world with 100 Wat of compute um and there are a bunch of sort of fundamental functions that we kind of forgot to include so we have to run them
(16:08) a bunch of things in emulation um we fix fix a bunch of those with hard rare 4 and then hard rare 5 will be even better um but it does appear at this point uh that the car will be able to drive better than a human even with Hardware 3 and and 100 wats of power and really if we really optimize it could be probably less than 50 wats well uh the the sheer number of really smart hardworking people in China is um incredible uh there are believe you say like how many smart hardworking people are there in China there’s far
(16:52) more of them there than there are here I think in my in my opinion um the uh and they’ve got a lot of energy so I mean the architecture in China that’s in recent years is far more impressive than the US I mean the the train stations the buildings the highspeed rail everything it’s um really far more impressive than what we have in the US I I mean I recommend somebody just go to Shanghai and Beijing look at the buildings and go to you take the from Beijing to Shion where you have the Terra Cotta Warriors um
(17:32) China’s got incredible history very long history and um you know I think arguably the in terms of the use of language from from a written standpoint um sort of one of one of the oldest Perhaps Perhaps the oldest written language and and then China people did write things down so um now China um historically has always been with rare exception been internally focused um they’ve not been acquisitive uh they’ve theyve fought each other there been many many Civil Wars um in the Three Kingdoms War I believe they lost about 70% of their
(18:16) population so and that so the they’ve had brutal internal Wars like civil wars that make the US Civil War look small by comparison um so I think it’s important to appreciate that China is not uh monolithic M um we sort of think of like China as a sort of one entity of one mind and this is definitely not the case um from what I’ve seen and I think most people who understand China would agree people in China think about China 10 times more than they think about anything outside of China so it’s like
(18:57) 90% of their consideration is uh you know our is is internal our AI Gro is modeled after the Hedgehog is got to the Galaxy uh which is one of my favorite books uh which is it’s a book on philosophy disguised as a book on humor um and um I would say that is that forms the basis of My Philosophy uh which is that we don’t know the meaning of life but the more we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness digital and biological the more we are able to understand what questions to ask about the answer that is the
(19:38) universe so I have a philosophy of curiosity we are actually working hard to have uh engineering math and physics answers that you can count on mhm um so for the other sort of AIS out there that these so-called large language models um I’ve not found the uh engineering to be reliable um and the hallucination it it unfortunately hallucinates Mo most when you least want it to hallucinate yeah so when you ask important diffic difficult questions it that’s when it tends to be confidently wrong um so we’re really trying hard to
(20:22) say okay how do we be as grounded as possible so you can count on the results um Trace things back to physics first principles U mathematical logic um so underlying the humor is an aspiration to adhere to the truth of the universe as closely as possible so that’s why you know you there’s always going to be some amount of error but do we want to um aspire to be as truthful as possible about the answers uh with ackn error um so that there was always you don’t want to be confidently wrong so you’re not going to
(21:05) be right every time but you want you want to minimize how often you’re confidently uh wrong and then like I said once you can count on the logic as being um not violating physics then you can start to build on that to create uh inventions like invent new technologies but if if you can’t if you if you cannot count on the foundational physics being correct obviously the inventions are simply wishful thinking you know imagination land magic basically if an AI cannot figure out new physics um it’s clearly
(21:44) not equal to humans let Al nor has surpass humans because humans have figured out new physics they just you know physics is just understanding you know deing one’s insight into how reality works and then uh then than this engineering which is inventing things that have never existed mhm now the the range of possibilities for engineering is far greater than for physics because you know once you figure out the rules of the universe uh that that’s that’s it you’ve discovered things that already existed but from
(22:15) that you can then build Technologies with that are really almost Limitless in the uh variety and C you know it’s like once you understand the rules of the game properly and we do with current physics we do at least at a local level understand how physics works very well with our ability to predict things is incredibly good like quantum mechanics is the degree to which quantum mechanics can predict outcomes is incredible um that was my that’s my hardest class in college by the way my my my senior quantum mechanics class was
(22:50) harder than all of my other classes put together maybe an interesting answer to the question of determinism versus free will is that if we are in a simulation the reason that the the these higher beings would hold a simulation is to see what happens mhm so it’s not um they don’t know what happens uh otherwise they wouldn’t hold the simulation mhm so when when humans create a simulation so it’s SpaceX and Tesla we create simulations all the time um especially for the rocket you you uh you know you have to run a lot of
(23:26) simulations to understand what’s going to happen because you can’t really test the rocket until it goes to space and you want it to work so you have to you have to simulate subsonic transonic hyp supersonic Hypersonic um ascent and then coming back super high Heating and um overal Dynamics all this has got to be simulated so uh cuz you don’t get very many kicks at the can but we run the simulations to see what happens not if we knew what happens we wouldn’t run the simulation mhm so if if there’s so whoever created
(24:01) this existence um is they’re running it because they don’t know what’s going to happen not because they do ignorance is perhaps in my view the Real Enemy to be countered that’s the real hard part not you know fighting other humans um but all All Creatures fight I mean the the the jungle is a you look at the people think of of this nature as perhaps some sort of peaceful thing but in fact it is is not there’s some quite funny W when H hog thing where he’s like in the jungle like saying that it’s like
(24:36) basically just murder and death in every direction I mean the plants animals in the jungle are constantly trying to killing each other every single day every minute so it’s not like uh you know we’re unusual in that respect well I think that that part of the world is is definitely like if you look up the there is no easy answer in the dictionary it’ll be that like the picture of uh the Middle East um in Israel especially so there is no easy answer um what my this strictly my opinion of you know is that
(25:15) uh the the goal of Hamas was to provoke an overreaction from Israel um they obviously did not expect to uh you know have a military Victory um but they they expect they really wanted to commit the worst atrocities that they could in order to provoke the the most aggressive response possible from Israel um and then leverage that aggressive response to um rally Muslims worldwide uh for the cause of uh Gaza and Palestine which they have succeeded in doing um so the the the cter intuitive thing here I think that the the thing
(26:00) that I think should be done even though it is very difficult uh is that um I I would recommend that Israel engage in the most cons conspicuous acts of kindness possible every everything that is the actual thing that would thought the goal of humas one of the things that does concerned me is that there are very few people alive today who actually Vis really understand the horrors of War at least in the US I mean obviously there people in on the front lines in Ukraine and Russia who are understand just how terrible war is um but how many people
(26:31) in the west understand it um you my grandfather was in World War II uh he was severely traumatized I mean he was there I think in for almost 6 years in the in East North Africa and Italy uh all his friends were killed uh in front of him and uh he would have died too um except they randomly gave some I guess IQ test or something and uh he scored very high um now he was not an officer he was a I think a Corporal or Sergeant or something like that um because he didn’t finish High School um he had to drop out of high school because his his
(27:07) his dad died and he had to work to support his um siblings um so because he didn’t graduate high school he was not eligible for the officer Corp um so you know kind of got put into the cannon fighter category basically um but then randomly they gave him this test he was transferred to British intelligence in London that’s where he met my grandmother um but uh he he had PTSD next level like next level I mean just didn’t talk just didn’t talk and if you tried talking to him he’d just tell you to shut up and he woron a bunch of
(27:45) medals never never bragged about it once not even they hinted nothing I like found out about it because I his military records were online that’s a how I know so he would say like no way in hell do you want to do you want to do that again but how many people um now he he obviously he died you know 20 years ago or longer actually 30 years ago um how many people are alive that remember World War II not many I think we shouldn’t discount the possibility of nuclear war um it is a civilizational threat um right now I could be wrong but I
(28:27) think the the current probability of nuclear war is quite low um but there are a lot of nukes pointed at us so and we have a lot of nukes pointed at other people they still there nobody’s put their uh their guns away the missiles are still in the silos there are Wars which are tragic and difficult on a on a local basis and then there are Wars which are civilization ending or has that potential obviously Global Theron nuclear warfare has high potential to end Civ ization perhaps permanently but certainly you know to
(29:04) severely uh wound and and perhaps uh set back uh human progress by you know to the Stone Age or something I don’t know pretty bad um probably scientist and Engineers w’t be super popular after that as well they’re like you got us into this mess MH so generally I think we we obviously want to prioritize civilizational risks over things that are um painful and tragic on on a local level but not civilizational uh well I think the what what is likely to happen uh which is really pretty much the the way it is is
(29:49) that um something very close to the current lines uh will be how a ceasefire or truce happens but you know you just have a situation right now where whoever goes on the offensive um will suffer casualties at several times the rate of whoever’s on the defense um cuz you’ve got uh defense and death you got minefields uh trenches anti-tank defenses um nobody has air superiority um cuz the the anti-aircraft missiles are really far better than the the aircraft like they’re far more of them um and uh so neither side has air
(30:32) superiority um tanks are basically death dfts um just slow moving and they’re not immune to anti-tank weapons so you you really just have longrange artillery um and uh infantry trenches it’s World War One all over again mhm with drones you know throwing little drone some some drones there who who whoever is you don’t you don’t you don’t want to be trying to advance from either side because the probability of dying is incredibly High um so in order to overcome uh defense and depth trenches and
(31:12) minefields you really need a significant local superiority numbers um ideally combined arms where where you you do a fast attack with aircraft a concentrated number of Tanks um and a lot of people that’s the only way you’re going to punch through a line and then you’re going to punch through and and and then not have reinforcements just kick you right out again I mean I I really recommend people read uh World War I Warfare in detail that’s rough um I mean the sure number of people that died there was mindboggling the good
(31:57) news the history of China suggests that China is not inquisitive meaning they’re not going to go out and invade a whole bunch of countries um they do feel very strongly you know so that’s that’s good I mean cuz a lot of lot of very powerful countries have been inquisitive MH um the US is one of the also one of the rare cases that has not been inquisitive like after World War II the us could have basically taken over the world and any country like we got nukes nobody else got nukes we don’t even have to
(32:25) lose soldiers uh which country do you want mhm and the United States could have taken over everything oh at will and it didn’t um the United States actually helped rebuild countries so it helped rebuild Europe you it helped rebuild Japan um this is very unusual behavior almost unprecedented um you know the US did conspicuous acts of kindness like the berin airlift you know um and and I think you know it’s always like well America’s done bad things well of course America’s done bad things but one needs to look at the the whole track
(33:06) record um and and just generally you know one one sort of test would be how do you treat your prisoners of War there’s a series of vectors you know basically P parameters vectors whatever you want to call them um but but sort of things that the system knows that you like um like maybe there’s like several hundred sort of vectors associated with each user account and then uh any post in the system um whether it’s video audio short post long post the the reason I by the way want to move away from tweet is that you know people are
(33:48) posting like two three hour videos on the site that’s not a tweet like they be like tweet for 2 hours come on do tweet made sense when it was like 14 characters of text mhm cuz it’s like a bunch of TW like little birds tweeting um but when you’ve got long form content it’s no longer a tweet yeah um so a movie is not a tweet and like you know Apple for example posted like the entire episode of The Silo the entire thing on our platform and by the way was it was their number one social media thing ever
(34:22) in engagement of anything on any platform ever so it was a great idea and by the way I don’t I just learned about it afterwards I was like Hey wow they posted an entire hourong episode of Sol no that’s not a tweet you know this a video um but you know like if let’s say in the case of Apple posting like an entire episode of of this series pretty good series by the way thiso um I watched it um so um there’s going to be a lot of discussion around it so you you’ve got a lot of context people commenting they like it
(34:55) they don’t like it or they like this or the you know and and you can then populate the vector space based on the context of of all the comments around it so even though it’s a video uh there’s a lot of information around it that that allows you to populate back to the space of that that hourong video um and you can obviously get more sophisticated by having the AI actually watch the movie yeah right and tell you if you’re going to like the movie mhm and then recommend Bas on after it after air watches the movie
(35:26) just like a friend can tell you if a friend knows you well mhm a friend can recommend a movie and with high probability that you’ll like it mhm advertising that is um if it’s for a product or service that you that you actually need when you need it it’s it’s content um and then even if it’s not something that you need when you need it if it’s at least aesthetically pleasing and entertaining you know it could be like a Coca-Cola ad like you know they they do they actually run a lot of great ads on the on the EX
(35:57) system uh um and um McDonald’s Sayes too and and uh you know so they can do you can do something that’s like well this is this is just a cool thing um and um you know so you’re not basically the question is do you regret seeing it or not and if you don’t regret seeing it it’s a win attention is big a big factor attention so that’s why it’s like it’s it’s it is actually better to do things that are uh long form on the system because it’s basically telling up how many user
(36:30) seconds you know users were interested in this thing for how many seconds so if it’s a really short thing well they will be less like if it’s a link leading out of the system which we’re not opposed to at all it just is going to have fewer user seconds than if that article was posted on the xplatform never trust a cynic the reason is that um cynics excuse their own bad behavior by saying everyone does it mhm because they’re cynical so I always be it’s a red flag if someone’s a cynic a true cynic if if
(37:08) somebody is cynical meaning that they see bad behavior in everyone um it’s easy for them to excuse their own bad behavior by saying that well everyone does it it’s not true I most people are kind of medium good