(upon starting his first company zip 2) at the time we couldn't even afford a place to stay, the office was 500 bucks a month, so we just slept in the office and then showered at the YMCA [3:50]
I had like two choices like do a do a PhD and watch people build the internet or help build the internet in some small way [4:55]
The hype level on AI is pretty intense as you've seen um you know you see uh companies that are I don't know less than a year old getting sometimes billion dollar or multi-billion-dollar valuations [5:45]
(with the onslaught of AI) we're talking about an economy that is thousands of times maybe millions of times bigger than the economy today [8:42]
If you're trying to build a rocket or cars or you're trying to have software that compiles and runs reliably then you have to be uh maximally truth seeking or your software or your hardware won't work um like math and physics are rigorous judges um so I'm used to being in like a maximally truth seeking environment and that's definitely not politics um so anyway I'm glad to be back in you know technology [10:40]
Starting SpaceX was uh really from the standpoint of like I think there's like a less than 10% chance of being successful maybe 1% I don't know um but um but if a startup doesn't do something to advance uh rocket technology it's definitely not coming from the big defense contractors because they just impeded match to the government and the government just wants to do very conventional things so there's it's either coming from a startup or it's not happening at all so like a small chance of success is better than no chance of success [17:21]
Do whatever you know whether you're CEO or any role in a startup you do whatever it takes to succeed like and just and just always be smash smashing your ego like internalize responsibility [22:34]
If you if your ego to ability ratio is gets too high, then you're going to basically break the feedback loop to reality [23:55]
(talking about building the Memphis data center for x.ai) I was like sleeping in the data center and also doing cabling myself um and there were a lot of other issues to solve um you know nobody had done a training run with 100,000 um H100s training coherently last year [31:12]
Something that's going to be very important in the future is um combining deep AI uh in the data center or supercluster with robotics uh so that uh you know things like the Optimus humanoid robot and Optimus is awesome there's going to be so many humanoid robots and robots of all robots of all sizes and shapes but my prediction is that there will be more humanoid robots by far than all other robots combined by maybe an order of magnitude [34:17]
100 years jeez 100 years man I hope civilization's around in 100 years if it is around it's going to look very different from civilization today um I mean I'd predict that there's going to be at least five times as many humanoid robots as there are humans maybe 10 times [36:42]
I hope we're on the in terms of being multiplanetary like I think I think we'll have enough mass transferred to Mars within like roughly 30 years to make Mars self- sustaining such that Mars can continue to grow and prosper even if the resupply ships from Earth stop coming um and that that greatly increases the probable lifespan of civilization or consciousness or intelligence both biological and digital [37:51]
Being a multiplanet species or making consciousness multiplanetary uh greatly improves the probable lifespan of civilization and it's the next step before going to other star systems um once you once you at least have two planets then you've got a forcing function for the improvement of space travel um and um and that that ultimately is what will lead to uh consciousness expanding to the stars [38:49]
My intuition for what could make AI very dangerous is if um if you force AI to believe things that are not true [40:14]
I think I think we're quite close to digital super intelligence it may happen this year and if it doesn't happen this year next year for sure a digital super intelligence defined as smarter than any human at anything [42:04]
Not that far future the percentage of intelligence that is human will be quite small at some point the collective sum of human intelligence will be less than 1% of all intelligence [46:54]
Hopefully we can understand the nature of the universe that that's really I guess what AI can hopefully tell us maybe AI AI can maybe tell us where are the aliens and what you know how did the universe really start how will it end what are the questions that we don't know that we should ask and um are we in a simulation or what level of simulation are we in well I think we're going to find [45:58]
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