Chairman of Stagwell here with Linda Yakarino and an assembled group of about twenty five cmos of major corporations here at Cees during the CEES to really see the latest in technology. And we're graced with Elon Musk who has contented to give us some of his time to answer some of these really burning questions about technology's going to develop and change our lives, and some of his interactions with the government may also change.
Our lives as well.
Yeah, and so if I might start off with kind of a big overall question and I'll do some questions and then we'll get some questions in from the group. You know, I have to say that I've been actually a Tesla owner for many years.
Thank you.
Clearly you're clearly someone of a great taste.
Well, I will say that I drove from Miami to Fort Laurida Vale to meet my brother for dinner, about forty.
Miles and I did not touch I touched the wheel. But let me tell you that the test.
The Chaudrove itself is what you're saying, and you do not need to intervene.
It did not need me for this entire ride.
Yeah, it's pretty magical. It's like like when you tell people that they have not experienced it, they don't believe you.
You know, yeah, yes, And I didn't believe me either because I've been a skeptic about how far it would go. And your latest releases of software are you know, really incredible, So thank you for people to try them. As a big question, and in that thing coming in the next decade, what do you think is going to be the greatest advances in technology that will affect people's lives? What should they be affecting to see here from technology in their lives?
Okay, well, I don't want to blow your minds, but AI is going to be big. I feel confident for that prediction. But you know, the funny thing is, if you go back even five years ago, certainly ten years ago, if ten years ago, even fifteen years ago, I was saying, is can be like this massive thing that has deep super intelligence, smarter than the smartest human People thought I was kidding, and I thought that that's ridiculous. There's no
way computer's going to be smarter than a human. I'd be able to do all these complicated things.
And now.
You know the it's it's the latest AIS are able to pass complicated tests better than most humans. Like they can pass the medical tests better than than like eighty percent of doctors or something. Know they can AI can diagnose radiography better than most people who have been doing it their whole life. So that that's that's just accelerating obviously, I think probably if you haven't seen Jensen's talk, it's it's excellent and it really shows how much AI is advancing, and it's advancing on the.
Hardware fronts on the software front.
In terms of data, this is like the new sort of thing is synthetic data because we've actually run out of all the books and literally run out of you take the entire Internet and all books ever written, and all interesting videos, like like you don't need a thousand cat videos that are exactly the same, but all the interesting videos and and you sort of just strole that down into tokens essentially bits of information, and you've we've now exhausted all of the but basically that the cumulative
some of human knowledge has been.
Exhausted in AI training.
That happened basically last last year, and so the only way to then supplement that is with synthetic data, where the AI creates, it'll sort of write an essay or we'll come up with the thesis, and then and then and then it will grade itself and and and and sort of go through this process of self learning with synthetic data, which is which is always challenging because how do you know it? How do you know if hallucinated the answer or it's a real answer. So it's challenging
to find the ground truth. But but it is pretty well that AI at this point has run out of all human knowledge to train on.
Crazy.
I know that you're building for for the largest AI center on the planet we already have. Yeah, it's an operation Microsoft.
Is planning eighty billion dollars or I used to work.
For But there's a lot of money by anyone's standards.
Really, you know, I mean, you know, I did a poll and we asked, there's AI making a difference in your life today? Thirteen percent said yes, and they said in five years from now, will AI make a difference in your life? Eighty seven percent expect in five years who will make a difference?
What is a gigantic difference?
Okay, what is it going to do for people?
Is it going to be anything?
You want to work right A I will do anything you want and even suggest things you never even thought of. So I mean, I really within the next few years will be able to do any cognitive task like it obviously begs the question what are we all going to do? You know, but pretty much any cognitive task that doesn't involve atoms AI will be able to do within i'd say max. Three or four years maximum. And then now then the another elements of it is the robotics is
that you need, so you can't just be thinking. I can't just be thinking in it's in in a data center. It's going to do things. That's where you need the robots. So and you need you know, self driving cars, which obviously you've experienced, and and and that that rate of improvement is exponential in how good the self driving cars are. You know, we feel confident in passing the basically being better than human driving in about three months basically the
Q two of this year. We feel confident of passing having a probability of accident that is better than the average experienced driver.
And then and then it'll keep going from there.
Ultimately, I think it's going to be ten times safer than a human driver and then one hundred times safer, like it's to.
The point where really it just won't crash.
Yeah. So and that's so, and that's happening this year with with Tesla. So Tesla and and and this is a software update to you know, our cars. So as you experienced yourself, it's the same car, it's got a software update, and suddenly it's way smarter at driving.
Well, let me let me try a few timelines then, because you know, look, I'm not the youngest guy around, so I want to.
Technology stand up for what he is young.
Uh get older every year as I get older.
I used to build computers and kids right when when you couldn't buy them yet, And I don't have to do that anymore. And so self driving some timeline self driving cars, certified government certified self drive you think will be within a year.
Well, I mean there already are autonomous you know, in small in some regions, like Wemo has autonomous vehicles with no one in it, but they're limited to like if you sait Is in the U s that the Tesla solution, which is a much more difficult path to go but ultimately much more.
Powerful, is a general solution to self driving.
So the Tesla software is just purely AI and vision doesn't rely on any expensive sensor's, no light oars, no radars.
Or or it doesn't require it doesn't even require knowing the area beforehand. Like you could put.
You could have a drive someplace has never been before and no tests has ever been before. It couldn't be an alien planet, I mean it and the call will still work, still drive, so and and.
So that's that's that's this year, you know, And when can I get a home robot?
Okay?
Right?
H Well, so that's that's the other element is our humanoid humanoid robots. So I think probably most people, if not everyone, would like to have their own personal C three p O R T D two And I think I actually think humanoid robust will be the biggest product ever in history by far.
I agree.
Yeah, it's just it's as wild.
But because you can just say, well every human is going to want one most likely, and someone want to and then they'll be all of the industry in terms of making providing products and services. So that you have, say, what's the ratio of humanoid robots to humans? My guess is it's least at least three to one, four to one,
maybe five to one. So we're talking about twenty thirty billion humanoid robots, and you know, the it's it's not even clear what money means at that point, or if there's any meaningful cap on the economy.
I think at that point, assuming that things haven't.
Gone awry, you know, in the in the good AI scenario, I think we will have we won't have universal basic income, we'll have universal high income.
So do you think five years for my first robot, or.
Well for for Tesla where you know, Optimus robot really is it's and then somebody's got something secret we don't know about. The Optimus robot is the most sophisticated human robot in the world. It's got a hand that has twenty two degrees of freedom. It looks and feels like a human hand. And you know, we're aiming to have several thousand of those built this year. Initially we'll we'll test them out at Tesla factories, but then assuming things go well, we will will ten x that that output
next year. So we'll aim to do maybe fifty to one hundred thousand humorid robots next year and then ten x at again the following year. It's like five hundred thousand robots in three years.
That's a lot.
Yeah, So I guess, well, maybe we should think of this in terms of Roman legions. How many legions of robot so we have, Like a Roman legion.
Is five thousand.
When will we have a colony on Mars?
Well, I think we'll be able to send the first uncrewed spacecraft to Mars in two years. So Earth and Mars synchronize every two years, and so we're at a synchronous point right now, So then the next one will be roughly two years from now, and then there'll be two years from then there w another one. So for the first trip, obviously we want to make sure that we can land starship without crashing, Like we need to prove that we can land starship on Mars without incrementing
the creator count. And if those land safely, then maybe on the next trip we would send people and then hopefully that would grow exponentially.
So eventually there will be thousands of starships going to Mars. And I might have this like really cool visual like Battlesaw.
Glack toic Go or something, you know, the sort of colony ships departing altogether with these like bright points of light in space. I think it looked really cool, but I think the goal has to be to get to the point where Mars is self sustaining. So the point of which Mars is self sustaining, which is really defined as a point of which if the resupply ships Earth stopped coming for any reason, that Mars doesn't die out,
that Mars can continue to grow. So if there's something that happens on Earth, like let's say there's World War II or some natural disaster or who knows what, but for whatever reason the resupply ships stopped coming, if Mars can still continue to survive, then.
You know, then the probable lifespan of civilization is dramatically greater.
So you know, if you sort of stand back and say, how would you evaluate any civilization, you'd say, like, well, it's that civilization still stuck on its own planet or a multiplanets civilization, And we don't want to be one of those lame one planet civilizations.
Okay, we're to have a respectable outcome here.
Even if we don't make it beyond our Solar system, were at least got to get to another planet.
Yeah, well, and finally in my list brain to technology. Communication.
Yeah, back to communication, am I am I going to see that also because right now this is looking pretty good for me.
Yeah. So we've got neuralink.
We've got now three patients with three three humans with neural links implanet and no working well. And we've upgraded devices that were the devices will have more more electrodes basically higher bandwidth, longer battery life and everything. And so we expect to you know, hopefully do twenty or thirty patients next year or this year, I should say, with
the upgraded neuralink devices. And this our first product is we're trying to enable people who have lost their brain body connection so they're a tetroplegic or paraphlegic or uh basically like you can imagine like say Stephen Hawking. If Stephen Hawking could communicate as fast or even faster than
a normal human, that would be transformational. Yeah, So that that's sort of our first product is being able to read the motor cortex of the brain and say that if you think about moving your hand, it will move the cursor on the screen. And it enables enables people to control their computer or their phone just by thinking.
And then our next part will be blind sites that even if somebody has lost both eyes or has lost the optic nerve, or if they've never they've been blind from birth, we can interface directly with the visual cortex in the brain and enable them to see.
And we already have that working in monkeys.
I actually have a monkey who's now had that for I think two years, and so enabling sort of basically enabling people to control devices, and ultimately we think if you have a second neuralink device that is past the point where the spinal damage occurred, we can actually transmit the signals from the brain past the where essentially the wires is.
Broken and enabled someone to walk again.
So that that would really be profound obviously, but I'm confident that that is physically possible. And then the long term goalf in neural link is to be able to improve the bandwidth. So right right now when we're speaking, our bandwidth and po second is quite low, and the sustained bandwidth of a human is less than one but per second over twenty four hour period, So this eighty six four hundred seconds in a day, and the average human put outputs.
Much less than eighty six four hundred bits today.
If someone's a writer, they might all exceed that, but most people do not output more than the number of seconds in the day. And with a neural link, you could increase that output capably by a thousand or maybe a million, So it would be profoundly different experience that could be super human essentially.
Well, put me down for all of this so far early as after.
Yeah, and trust me, really you really like the chip, I can guarantee.
It, And let's kind of bring us down to earth for a question on DOGE.
Yeah, I mean I worked very closely actually with President Clinton in the nineties where we did have reinventing government.
We did balance the budget in two years.
Actually, that's awesome. Oh those were the days.
Well, it didn't last very long because it's got blown up very quickly. Have you identified some cuts that you're really that you're really looking at, that you think will be successful. Do you think the two trillion is is a realistic number now that you're looking more closely at it.
Yeah, Well, I think I think we'll try and for two trillion. I think that's like the best case outcome. But I do think that you kind of have to have some overage. I think if we try for two trillion, we've got a good shot at getting one. And if we can get drop the budget deficit from two trillion to one trillion and.
Kind of free up the economy.
To you know, have additional growth such that the output of goods and services it keeps pace with the increase in the money supply, then there will be no inflation.
So that that I think would be an epic outcome.
And in terms of saving money in the government, well, as you as you know, it's it's a it's a very target rich environment for saving money. Like if you if you look at any direction, it's like it was like, where will you find places to save money? I'm like, it's like being in a room full oft targets, Like
you could close your eyes and you can't miss. So there's just a lot of waste in government because especially the federal government, you just got a situation where that the checks never bounce, like they've got like the infinite money computer and uh and and then the the people that spend the money are not the people. It's it's not their money, you know, it's it's it's very very hard for people to care about spending someone else's money.
And and then even if you you know, actually I know people in the government who do care about on just as a matter of principles, spending money effectively, and they try to do so and they can't. The system prevents them from doing so. And then and they even get told to do crazy things as against probably sounds familiar, where you get towards the end of the budget cycle and and they're they're told to spend up to their budget and even on on nonsense stuff because if they
don't spend their budget, the budget gets reduced. So it's actually sort of sort of a perverse incentive to waste money, and and and then they kind of get punished for not wasting money. So it's totally bananas.
Well, well, I agree, you will find.
You know, I did a mathematical analysis in terms of how government used to do things. So if you take the Brooklyn Bridge or the Lincoln Tunnel, and you yeah, inflation, the infrastructure bill should actually get you four thousand adjusted breakage Lincoln Tunnels, which, of course, of course it's not because government is right, does it used to be?
No, exactly Essentially that we've got had an accumulation of laws and regulations that may basically any large project essentially illegal and uh and uh and and even if you've tried to do you've better satisfied. You better to spend way more money on the paperwork than on the thing itself.
So and and then it gets gets laid and so this there's there's an element of like dose, which is very important, which is looking at regulations and and getting rid of ones that where the the the harm is worse than the good, like you say, like, well, any given regulations like okay, there's some.
Amount of good, some amount of harm, but you know what's that ratio? Is it?
Like you know, and there's a lot of regulations where frankly it just completely nonsensical. And we want to get rid of nonsensical regulations that do not serve the public good.
Well, Linda Acarino and her keynote here mentioned the dose thing, and she got enormous applause.
So I think the country is really waiting to see this effort. There. They're behind it, they're they're optimistic.
Let me try to get in one more topic here before I get one or two other questions out there, which is obviously Mark Zuckerberg made an amazing one.
An eighty degree term.
Yeah cool.
What's your reaction to what he did and his acknowledgment frankly that the government was in fact censoring things, or he was censoring things, or the government or some combination thereof.
Yeah, I mean there's there's there's no question. I mean one percent the government was was censoring things. We know that for a fact from from the Twitter files. I mean some of the stuff was like, like pretty illegal, frankly. I mean, the FBI had this portal into Twitter where they could spy on anything and and censor anything and had a two week auto delete.
So we don't even know what they did.
Except that they had immense power to do whatever they wanted, which doesn't sound legal.
And you know that sounds pretty pretty crazy.
And you know, there's also a lot of self censoring, and I don't know, there was just a lot of censoring going on. And I think you I feel very strongly that the you have to have freedom of speech to have a functioning democracy. You know, if you don't have freedom of speech, freedom expression, then how do you know what's really going on? And and if you can't make an inform vote then you don't have you don't have a real democracy. So it's you know, just that's
incredibly important too. I think listen to the wisdom of the founders of the country and say, why why did they make that the first amendment? You know, and and it's what they did it for a reason. It's because they came from places where, uh that where there was massive censorship and the penalties for speaking your mind would be, you know, find imprisonment or death. And they're like, we really don't like that. We want that to not be the case in America. So then they you know, freedom speech.
So you've just posted you are the media citizen.
Citizen journalism, I mean, really becoming more and more important in the States of media.
And you see it with the with the wildfires here.
Yeah, exactly.
It really takes the citizens to report and tell people.
Yes, yeah, actually, you think of it like before there was before the Internet, you kind of had to have the what I call legacy media, of which which is you have to have some aggregation points where you know that you know, have reporters going and go and find things out. Then they would come to they would go to to to their office, they would write up articles.
They would then print those articles on paper. That paper would then be distributed and it was kind of the only it was the only way to know what was going on. But it was very slow, especially in the old days.
You know.
I think when.
Like when when Lincoln Lincoln was assassinated, I think it took like three weeks for the that needs to reach Asio or something like that.
You know.
And in fact, in the old days, like you wouldn't even know that your country had gone to war because it would take like a month for the fact, hey where or to reach your village.
We learned about Perrel Harbor because we decoded the Japanese. I didn't know that we decoded their their their cyber system, right, I mean, that's how we actually learned about about it. Yeah, and and you know we have just if I can squeeze in, I just got three minutes here.
It's fine if you got a little longer if you want, Okay.
Thank you.
I uh so, just I got three questions in from the audience that Dan Gardner and Toby Daniels avon Discourse Head want to know do you think the Internet sucks?
And what do you think we need to.
I mean, the content on the Internet or your Internet connection, because that starlink can help you on the Internet connection. Starling is very for Internet connectivity, so you know, especially for like places that have bad connectivity impact. I think stollic Is is really having a significant effect in terms
of lifting people out of poverty. In fact, in many parts of the world where people have a product that they want to sell but if they don't have an Internet connection, they can't do it, or if they want to learn things like basically you can learn anything on the Internet for free, like mi T has all these lectures that are available for free on the Internet, which you need an Internet interet connection. And so once you have an Internet connection, you've you've got access to education,
you've got access to a golden market. So I think it's it's very significant how connectivity makes difference in people's lives, you know, with with respect to maybe a question was geared at like is there too much negativity on the Internet.
The I think at times there is there is too much negativity, and.
You know, actually on the X platform, I propose like, well, we were going to tweak the algorithm to be a bit more positive, and then people got to upset about me for that, I'm like.
Like, okay, like what do you guys want? You know?
Well, actually the second question from exact Moffitts or Target victory was how do you make pessimism uncool again? So I think it's maybe exactly what you're saying, which is that, you know, it's become people people are afraid. You know, this used to be a can do nation. Yeah, always very positive, and now now the country when I ask if we're on the right track or the wrong track, they never say that we're on the right track anymore.
Okay, well, I hope hopefully, you know, hopefully with this. You know, I'm actually pretty optimistic about the next four or five years. I think we're actually gonna I think we have the potential for a golden age. So we need to It's very important to get rid of of of the mountain of regulations that are holding things back. And I don't mean there's there's some good regulations, but there's just so much that we just can't get anything done.
I mean, you take sort of.
The California wildfires for example. We really need to have fire breaks, and we need to clear the brush back away from houses and uh, and we need to make sure the reservoirs are full. These are all kind of obvious things. But but but due to a bunch of environmental rulings, you can't actually do that in California. So they're not allowed to do the five breaks, and they're not allowed to push the brush back away from houses because it might it might hurt some like red legged
frog or something like that. You know, it's like some sort of creature that usually a creature you've never heard of,
that is preventing this from occurring. You know, there's this is there's like this fish called the smelt, for example, and so there's so we have far more fresh water run off into the ocean than than we should really be on the theory that it helps this one little fish that likes a slightly briny freshwater sold water mix, and if if we if we, if we keep more fresh water than the smelled fish will will not be happy.
But there's no actual evidence that that the smells fish is going to be unhappy if we if we keep a bit more fresh water.
In fact, so we should we should.
Keep more fresh water, keep the reservoirs full, and and and just have some sensible fire breaks and move the rush away from houses. That's just an example of like we've saved a lot of trouble and a lot of tragedy in l A if we've done that.
So you know, and and yeah, I think.
I think AI and robotics is going to lead to a higher standard of living for for people beyond what they can imagine. So AI doctors and medicine that are pretty incredible.
So that's the fin the final question, she says from from uh.
Catherine heritage heritage, I got there right, Uh, if if all the robots and everything freeze up time for humans, what is it they will do with that time? Or what can we ask them to do with that time? And I think that's it. Yes, grounds out the circle of technology.
Yeah, I guess it would be a bit like being retired. Yeah, I mean this that does will take a few years, but at some point if this, if as AI gets as AI and roboties get better, eventually a I will be able to do everything that humans can do. So any task you do will be optional, like it'll be like a hobby or you know. So now it just big question like well, this will our lives lives have meaning? If the computers and the robots can do everything better than we can.
And.
That is that a real question.
I do wonder about that myself myself, and that's maybe that's why we need the new link so we can enhance you in capability so we can keep up with.
Yeah.
Well, I just want to thank you for well, it's obviously incredibly optimistic view about technology and where it's going. I feel reassured that the kind of leaps that that are going to be made, particular what you're working on, are just incredible in the next few years, not not decades away, but right really very closely talked in terms
of years consistently, and very thankful for that. And uh and I think that that's you know, absolutely tremendous message here at the you know, where we are in Las Vegas kind of studying what what technology is going to be available to people and UH and really again, thank you for the tremendous role in opening up free speech.
Uh and for the role that that X and you know, Linda is playing in terms of that.
I know that we're we're working to get full recognition by everyone of the of the platform as it should be, because free speech is is I think the proper the proper way to go.
Yeah, I think it unbalanced is good.
And you know, one of the things that create conceptually with the X platform is like it's like a global consciousness. It's like collective conscious consciousness of humanity. Now, if you have a collective consciousness of humanity, well you're going to get every aspect of humanity, good and bad. That's just naturally what happens. So but I, you know, I do want it to be a good and productive thing. And you know that aspiration is to maximize unregretted user minutes.
So like you spend time on the platform, it's like, well, did you regret it.
Or not regret it? And we want to maximize unregretted user time.
Well, and I always go back, you know, I always say that everything in technology was either in the jet sense.
Likely justice. You know, it's either in Star Trek or the Jetsons more or less right.
But the one thing that was never predicted in any book that I could find is social media. So uh, it's the one thing that they really is no book built around how social media would develop, how it would really impact society, how we move political movements and so forth. And it's interesting that everybody missed that in their in their projections, and so I guess the last closest cause the question maybe.
Is is what do you want X to be and where is that platform going to go?
And I think that well, I mean, I do want XP force for good. That exactly, so I do want XP a force for good. And and I do view it as as sort of like the group mind humanity, and we want to have a sort of a healthy, happy, insane group mind versus the opposite. And I mean or yeah, so, and and I want it to be just like the best source of truth, like if you're trying to understand what's going on in the world, that it has the most most accurate, the most up to date information about
anything large or small. So so it gives you the best understanding of what's going on in the world, you know, anywhere, anytime.
Yeah, perfect, Thank you. Any any closing thought you want to leave us with other rise I've brother.
Thank you for being so generous with your high they welcome.
I think I would encourage people to be optimistic about the future. I think it is much more likely to be good than bad. So that's my prediction. Thank you, all right, Thanks guys,