the following is a conversation with Elon Musk DJ sa Matthew McDougall Bliss Chapman and Nolan arbaugh about

neuralink and the future of humanity Elon DJ Matthew and Bliss are of course part of the amazing neuralink

team and Nolan is the first human to have a neuralink device implanted in his brain I speak with each of them

individually so use time stamps to jump around or as I recommend go hardcore and listen to the whole thing this is the

longest podcast I've ever done it's a fascinating super technical and wide- ranging conversation and I loved every

minute of it and now dear friends here's Elon Musk his fifth time on this The Lex fredman

podcast drinking coffee or water water I'm so over caffeinated right now do you want some caffeine I mean sure

there's a there a Nitro drink this supposed to keep you up till like you know tomorrow afternoon

basically yeah I don't so what does Nitro it's just got a lot of caffeine or something don't ask questions it's

called Nitro do you need to know anything else it's got It's got nitrogen in it that's ridiculous I mean what we

breathe is 78% nitrogen anyway what he needs to add more for you're going toat it most most

people think that they're breathing oxygen and they're actually breathing 78% nitrogen you need like a Milk Bar

like from like from cluck orange yeah yeah is that top three kubri film

for you cluck Orange it's pretty good I mean it's demented jarring i'

say okay uh okay so first let's step back and uh big congrats on getting your link

implanted into a human that's a historic step for neur link and yeah there's many more to come yeah we're just um

obviously have a second implant as well how did that go uh so far so good there looks like we've got um I think 400

electrodes that are are providing signals so nice yeah how how quickly do you think the number of human

participants will scale uh it depends somewh on the regulatory approval the rate which we get regulatory approvals

uh so we're hoping to do 10 by the end of this year total of 10 so eight

more and with each one you're going to be learning a lot of lessons about the neurobiology the brain the everything

the the whole chain of the neuralink the decoding this the signal processing all that kind of stuff yeah yeah I think

it's obviously going to get better with with each one um I mean I don't want to jinx it but it it seems to have gone

extremely well with the second uh implant so there's a a lot of signal a lot of elrods it's working very well

what improvements do you think we'll see in neur Link in the coming let's say let's get crazy coming

years I mean in years it's going to be gigantic um because we'll increase the number of electrodes

dramatically um will improve the signal processing so you know we with with uh even with only roughly I don't know 10

15% of the electrodes working with uh with Noland with our first patient we were able to get to achieve a bits per

second that's twice the world record so I think we'll we'll we'll start like vastly exceeding world record by orders

of magnitude in the years to come so it's like getting to I don't know 100 bits per second, you know

maybe maybe if like five years from now we might be at a megabit like faster than any human could

possibly communicate uh by typing or speaking Yeah that BPS is an interesting metric to measure there might be a big

leap in the experience once you reach a certain level of BPS yeah like entire new ways of interacting with a computer

might be unlocked and with humans with other humans provided they have one and Ne link too right otherwise

they won't be able to all the signals fast enough do you think that'll improve the quality of intellectual discourse

well I think you can you could think of it you know if you were to slow it down communication How would how you feel

about that you know if you'd only talk at let's say 1110th of normal speed you would be like wow that's agonizingly

slow yeah uh so now imagine you could speak at communicate clearly um at 10 or 100 or a thousand times faster the

normal listen uh I'm pretty sure nobody in their right mind listens to me at 1X they listen at 2x so I I can only

imagine what 10x would feel like or I could actually understand it I usually default to 1.5x um you can do 2x but

well actually if I'm trying to go if I'm listening somebody to go to in like sort of 15 20 minute segments to go to sleep

then I'll do it 1.5x um if I'm paying attention I'll do 2X right um but actually if you start

actually listen to podcasts or or sort of audiobooks or anything at if you get used to doing it at 1.5 then then one

sounds painfully slow I'm still holding on to one because I'm afraid I'm afraid of myself becoming bored with the

reality with the real world where everyone's speaking in One X well it depends on the person you can

speak very fast like we we can communicate very quickly and also if you use a wide range of if you if your

vocabulary is larger your uh bit rate effective bit rate is higher that's a good way to put it yeah

the effective bit rate I mean that is the question is how much information is actually compressed in the low bit

transfer of language yeah if you if there's if if there's a single word that is able to convey something that would

normally require um I don't know 10 simple words then you've you've got a you know maybe a 10x compression on your

hands that's really like with memes memes are like data data compression um it invades a whole this

you're simultan simultaneously hit with a wide range of symbols that you can interpret um and it's you you kind of

get it um faster than if it were words or or a simple picture and of course you're referring to memes broadly like

ideas yeah that's there's a an entire idea structure that is like a an idea template

and then you can add something to that idea template uh but somebody has that pre-existing idea template in their head

um so when you add that incremental bit of information you're conveying uh much more than if you just you know said a

few words you it's everything associated with that Meme you think there'll be emergent leaps of capability as you

scale the number of electrodes like there'll be a certain you think there'll be like actual number where it just the

The Human Experience will be altered yes what do you think that number might be whether electrodes or BPS we of course

don't know for sure but is this 10,000 100,000 yeah I mean certainly if you're anywhere at 10,000 PS per second I mean

that's vastly faster than any human communicate right now if if you think of the what is the average bits per second

of a human it is less than one bit per second over the course of a day because there are 86,400 seconds in a day and

you don't communicate 86,400 um tokens in a day Therefore your best second is less

than one average over 24 hours it's quite slow um and now even if you're communicating very quickly and and you

you know you're uh talking to somebody who understands what you're saying because in order to communicate you have

to at least to some degree model the Mind state of the person to whom you're speaking U then take the concept you're

trying to convey compress that into a small number of syllables speak them and hope that the other person decompresses

them into uh a conceptual structure that is as close to what you have in your mind as possible yeah I mean there's a

lot of signal loss there in that process yeah very lossy compression and decompression and a lot of the um a lot

of what your neurons are doing is distilling the concepts down to a small number of symbols of say syllables that

I'm speaking or or key strokes whatever the case may be so uh that that's a lot of what your

brain computation is doing now there is an argument that that's actually a healthy thing to do or

helpful thing to do because as you try to compress complex con Concepts you're perhaps forced to

distill the you know what is what is most essential in those Concepts as opposed to just all the fluff so in the

process of compression you just still things down to what matters the most because you can only say a few things so

that is perhaps helpful I think we might we'll probably get if our data rate increases the it's highly probable that

we'll become far more verbose um just like your computer you know when computers had like my my first

computer had 8K of ram you know so um you really thought about every bite and um you know now you got computers with

many gigabytes of RAM so you know if you want to do an iPhone app that just says hello world it's probably I don't know

several megabytes minimum a bunch of fluff but nonetheless we still prefer to have the computer

with the more memory and more compute so the long-term aspiration of neuralink is to improve the AI human

symbiosis um by increasing the the bandwidth of the communication because if even if in the

most benign scenario of AI you have to consider that the AI is simply going to get bored

waiting for you to spit out a few Woods I mean if the AI can communicate at terabits per second and you're

communicating at you know bits per second it's like talk to a tree well it is a very interesting question for a

super intelligent species what use are humans um I think there is some argument for humans as a source of will

will will yeah source of will or purpose so if if you consider the the human mind as being essentially

the there the Primitive lmic Elements which basically even like reptiles have and there's the cortex the thinking and

planning part of the brain now the cortex is much smarter than the limpic system and yet is largely in service to

the lyic system trying to make the lyic system happy I mean the sheer amount of compute that's gone into people trying

to get laid is insane um without the without actually seeking procreation they're

just literally trying to do this sort of simple motion um and they get a kick out of it yeah so

this uh Syle which in the abstract rather absurd motion which is sex uh the cortex is putting a massive amount of

compute into trying to figure out how to do that so like 90% of distributed computer of the human species is spent

on trying to get late probably like large yeah yeah there's no purpose to most sex except uh hedonistic you know

it's just sort of Joy or whatever DOP mean release um now what once in a while it's procreation but for humans it's

mostly modern humans is mostly uh recreational um and uh and so so so your cortex much smarter than your lmic

system is trying to make a lmic system happy because LMP system wants to have sex so um or want some tasty food or

whatever the case may be and then that that is then further augmented by the tertiary system which is your phone your

laptop iPad whatever you know all your Computing stuff that's your tertiary layer so you're actually already a

cyborg uh you have this tertiary compute layer which is in the form of your your computer with all the applications all

your computer devices um and uh and so in the getting laad front there's actually a massive amount of comp of

digital compute also trying to get late you know with like Tinder and whatever you know yeah so the compute

that we humans have built is also participating yeah I mean there's like gws of compute going into getting late

of digital compute yeah what if AGI was this is happening as we speak if we merge with AI is just

going to expand the compute that we humans use pretty much to try just one of the things certainly yeah yeah um but

what I'm saying is that that yes like what's is there a use for humans um well there's this fundamental

question of what's meaning of life why do anything at all um and so if if if our simple Olympic system provides a

source of will to do something um that then goes to our cortex that then goes to our you know tertiary compute layer

then you know I don't know it might actually be that the AI in a b simply trying to make the human lmic system

happy yeah it seems like it's the will is not just about the limic system there's a lot of interesting complicated

things in there we we also want Power that's limic too I think but then we also want to in a kind of Cooperative

way alleviate the suffering in the world uh not everybody does but yeah sure some people do as a group of humans when we

get together we start to have this kind of collective intelligence that is uh is more complex in its will than the

underlying individual descendants of Apes right so there's like other motivations and that could be a really

interesting source of uh an objective function for AGI yeah um I mean there's there are these uh sort fairly

cerebral or kind of higher level goals I mean for me it's like what's the meaning of life or understanding understanding

the nature of the universe is a of great interest to me um and uh hopefully to the AI and that's the

that's the mission of xai and Gro is understand the universe so do you think people when you have a neural link with

10,000 100,000 channels most of the use cases will be communication with AI

systems well if assuming that the they're not um I mean there this solving basic

uh neurological issues that people have you know if they've got um damaged neurons in their spinal cord or neck or

you know um as as is the case with our first two patients then you know this obviously the first order business is

solving fundamental neuron damage in the spinal cord neck or in the brain itself um

so you know our second um product is called Blindside which is to enable people who are completely blind less

both eyes or Optic nove or just can't see at all uh to be able to see um by directly triggering the neurons in the

visual cortex so we're just starting at the basics here you know this is like um very the the simple stuff uh relatively

speaking is solving um neuron damage um you it can also solve uh I think probably schizophrenia

you know uh if people have seizures of some kind probably solve that um it could help with

memory there there so there's like a kind of a a tech tree if you will of like you got the

basics um like like you need you need literacy before you can have you know Lord of the

Rings you know got it do you have letters an alphabet okay great uh words you know

then eventually get sagas so you know I think there's there may be some you know things to worry about in

in the future but the first several years are really just solving basic neurological damage like for people who

have essentially complete or near complete loss of from the brain to the body um like Stephen hauling would be an

example uh the neuralink would be incredibly profound because I mean you can imagine if Stephen Hawking could

communicate as fast as we're communicating perhaps faster um and that's certainly uh possible probable in

fact likely I'd say so there's uh a kind of dual track of medical and non-medical meaning so everything you've talked

about could be applied to people who are non-disabled in the future the logical thing to to do is sensible things to do

is to start off solving um basic uh neuron damage issues yes um

because the there's obviously some risk with with the new device is you can't get the risk down at zero um it's not

possible so you want to have um the highest possible reward given that given there's a certain irreducible risk and

if um if somebody's able to have a Prof Improvement in their communication

um that's worth the risk as you get the the risk down yeah as you get the risk down once the risk is is down to to you

know if you have like thousands of of people that have been using it for for years and the risk is minimal then um

perhaps at that point you could consider saying okay let's let's aim for augmentation now now I think we we we're

actually going to aim for augmentation with people who have neur neuron damage so we're not just aiming to give people

a communication data rate equivalent to normal humans we're aiming to give people who have you know quadriplegic or

maybe have complete loss um of the connection to the brain and body a communication data rate that exceeds

normal humans I mean well we're in there why not let's give people superpowers and the same for vision as

you restore Vision that could be aspects of that restoration that are superum yeah at at first the vision restoration

will be uh low res um because you have to say like how many neurons can you put in there and and Trigger and and you can

do things where you you um adjust the electric field so like even if you've got say 10,000 neurons it's not just

10,000 pixels because you can adjust the the field between the the neurons and do them in patterns in order to get say I

have say 10,000 electrodes effectively give you uh I don't know maybe like having a a megapixel or a 10

megapixel situation um so and then o over time I think you get to higher resolution than

human eyes and you could also see in different wavelengths so like Jord Le flge from Star Trek you know like the

thing you can just if you want to see in radar no problem you can see ultraviolet infrared Eagle Vision whatever you

want do you think there will be uh let me ask a Joe Rogan question do you think there'll be I just recently uh taken

iasa is that a question no well yes well I guess technically it is yeah have you tried ever tried

bro I love you Joe okay yeah wait wait yeah have you said much about it the the not I've have not

I've not I've been okay well well Spill the Beans oh it was an it was a truly incredible turn the tables aren't you

wow I mean you're in the jungle yeah amongst the trees myself czy and the shaman yeah yeah yeah with the

insects with the animals all around you like jungle as far as I can see I mean that's the way to do it things are going

to look pretty wild yeah pretty wild I took I took an extremely high dose don't go hugging an anaconda or something you

know uh you haven't lived unless you made love to an anaka I'm sorry

but Snakes and Ladders um yeah it was I took extremely high dose of okay uh nine cups and uh

damn okay that sounds like a lot of course is nor just one cup or one or two well usually one you went wait like

right off the bat or do you work your way up to it so I uh you just jump at the across two days cuz in the first day

I took two and I okay it was a it was a ride but it wasn't quite like a it wasn't like a revelation it wasn't into

deep space type of ride it was just like a little airplane ride okay go saw some trees and some some visuals and all that

just saw a dragon and all that kind of stuff but uh nine cups you went to Pluto I think

Pluto yeah no deep space deep space no one of the interesting uh aspects of my experience is I was I thought I would

have some demons some stuff to work through I that's what people that's what everyone says every everyone says yeah

exactly nothing I had all positive I had just so pure soul I don't think so I don't

know uh but I kept I kept thinking about it it had like extremely high resolution okay thoughts about the people I know in

my life you were there okay it was just and it's just not from my relationship with that person but just as the person

themselves I had just this deep gratitude of who they are that's cool I it was just like this exploration like

you know like like Sims or whatever you get to watch them sure I got to watch people and just be in awe of how amazing

they are it sounds awesome yeah it's great I I was waiting for when demon coming exactly maybe I'll have some

negative thoughts nothing nothing I uh just extreme gratitude for them and then also a lot of space

travel space travel to where so here's what it was it was people the human beings that I know they

had this kind of the best way I can describe is they had a glow to them okay and then I would kept flying

out from them to see Earth to see our solar system to see our galaxy and I saw th that light that glow all across the

universe okay like that whatever that form is all right whatever that uh like like did you go past the Milky Way uh

yeah okay you're like Intergalactic yeah Intergalactic yeah but always pointing in yeah um pass the milk away past I

mean I saw like a huge number of galaxies Intergalactic and all of it was glowing so but I couldn't control that

travel cuz I would actually explore near distances to the solar system see if there's aliens or any of that kind of

stuff no I didn't I didn't know Z aliens implication of aliens because they were glowing they were glowing in the same

way that humans were glowing that uh that like life force that I was seeing the the thing that made humans amazing

was there through throughout the Universe like there was these glowing dots so I don't know it made me feel

like there's life no not life but something whatever makes humans amazing all throughout the Universe sounds good

yeah it was amazing no demons no demons I looked for the demons there's no demons there were dragons and they're

pretty a so the thing about treat was there anything scary at all uh dragons but they weren't scary they

were friend they were protective so the thing is Magic no it was it was more like uh Game of Thrones kind of they

weren't very friendly they were very big so the thing is about giant trees at night which is where where I was I mean

the jungle's kind of scary yeah the trees started to look like dragons and they were all like looking at me sure

okay and it didn't seem scary they seemed like they were protecting me and they uh the the shaman and the people

didn't speak in English by the way which made it even scarier because we're not even like you know where world's apart

in many ways it just uh uh but yeah there was not they they talk about the mother of the forest

protecting you and that's what I felt like and you're way out in the jungle way out there this is not like uh a

tourist Retreat you know like like like 10 miles outside of a foo or something no we

went no this is not AEP Amazon so me and this guy named Paul rosley who basically is uh Tarzan he lives in the jungle we

went on deep and we just went crazy wow cool yeah so anyway can I can I get that same experience in a neur link probably

yeah I guess that is the question for uh non-disabled people do you think that there's a

lot in our perception in our experience of the world that could be uh explored that could be played with using New Link

yeah I mean new link is it's really a generalized um input output device you know it's just it's a reading electrical

signals and generating electrical signals and um I mean everything that you've ever experienced in your whole

life smell you know emotions all of those are electrical signals so it's kind of weird to think that this

that your entire life experience is distilled down to electrical signals from neurons but that is in fact the

case um or I mean if that's at least what all the evidence points to so I mean

you you could you you trigger the right neuron you could trigger a particular scent you could um you could certainly

make things glow I mean do pretty much anything I mean really you could you can think of the brain as a biological

computer so if there are certain say chips or elements of that biological computer that are that are broken let's

say your ability to if you've got a stroke that if you've had a stroke that means you got some

part of your brain is damaged um if that let's say it's a speech generation or the ability to move your left hand um

that's the kind of thing that neuralink could solve um if it's uh if if you've got like a massive amount of memory loss

that's just gone um well we can't go we can't get the Memories Back uh we could restore your ability to make memories

but we can't you know uh restore memories that are that are fully gone um now now I should say if if if you maybe

if part of the me memory is there um and the means of accessing the memory is the pot that's broken then we could reenable

the pot the ability to access the memory so but you can think of like Ram in your you know in a computer If U you

know if the ram is destroyed or your SD card is destroyed you can't get that back but if the connection to the SD

card is destroyed we can fix that if if it is fixable physically then yeah then it can be fixed of course with AI you

can just like you can repair photographs and fill in missing parts parts of photographs maybe you can do the same

just yeah you could say like uh create the most probable set of memories based on the all information you have about

that person you could then Pro it would be prob probabilistic restoration of memory now we're getting pretty esoteric

here but that is one of the most beautiful aspects of The Human Experience is remembering the good

memories like we sure we live most of our life as Danny Conan just talked about in our memories not in the moment

we just we're collecting memories and we kind of relive them in our head and there that's the good times if you just

integrate over our entire life it's remembering the good times sure that produces the largest amount of happiness

and so yeah I mean what are we but our memories and and what is death but the loss of

memory loss of information um you know if you if you could say like

well if if if you could be you run a thought experiment well if if you were disintegrated painlessly uh and then

rein reintegrated a moment later like teleportation I guess uh provided there's no information loss that the the

fact that your one body was disintegrated is irrelevant and memories is just such a huge part of that death

is fundamentally the loss of information the loss of memory so if we can store them as

accurately as possible we basically achieve a kind of immortality yeah you've talked

about the the threats the safety concerns of AI let's look at long-term Visions you think New link

is in your view the the best current approach we have for AI safety it's an idea that may help with AI safety um

certainly not I wouldn't want I would wouldn't want to claim it's like some Panacea or that's a sure thing um

but I mean many years ago I was thinking like well what um what would

inhibit alignment of human Collective human will with uh artificial intelligence and the low data rate of

humans especially our our slow output rate um would necessarily just because it's such a because the communication is

so slow would uh diminish the link between humans and computers like the more you are a

tree the less you know what the tree is like let's say you you look at a tree you look at this plant or whatever and

like hey I'd really like to make that plant happy but it's not saying a lot you

know so the more we increase the data rate that humans uh can intake and output then that means the better the

higher the chance we have in a world full of agis yeah we could better align Collective human will with the AI if the

output rate especially was dramatically increased like and I think there there's potential to increase the output rate by

I don't know three maybe six maybe more orders of magnitude so it's better than the current

situation and that output rate would be by increasing the number of electrodes number of channels and also may be

implanting multiple neural links yeah do you think there will be a world in the next couple of decades where it's

hundreds of millions of people have neuralink yeah I

do you think when people just when they see the capabilities the Superhuman capabilities that are possible and then

the the safety is demonstrated yeah if it's extremely safe um and you have and you can have superhuman abilities um and

let's say you can upload your memories um you know so you wouldn't you

wouldn't lose memories um then then I think probably a lot of people would choose to have it it would

supersede the cell phone for example I mean it's the the biggest problem that a say a phone has um is is trying to

figure out what you want so that's why you've got uh you know auto complete and you've got output

which is all the pixels in the screen but from the perspective of the human the output is so freaking slow desktop

or phone is desperately just trying to understand what you want and and um you know there's an

alterity between every keystroke from a computer standpoint yeah so the computer's

talking to a tree a slow moving tree that's trying to swipe yeah so you know if you computers that

are doing trillions of instructions per second and a whole second went by I there a trillion things it could

have done you know yeah I think it's exciting and scary for people because once you have a very high bit rate that

changes The Human Experience in a way that's very hard to imagine yeah it would

be we would be something different I mean some sort of futuristic cyborg I I mean we're obviously talking about by

the way like it's not like not like around the corner it's you ask me what the f distant future it's like maybe

this is like it's not super far away it 10 15 years that kind of thing when can I get

one 10 years probably less than 10 years depends on what you want want want

to do you know hey if I can get like a th000 BPS th000 BPS and it's safe and I can just interact with a computer while

laying back and eating Cheetos I don't eat Cheetos there's certain aspects of human computer interaction when done

more efficiently and more enjoyably I don't like worth it well we feel pretty confident that

um I think maybe within the next year or two that someone with a neuralink implant will be able to outperform um a

Pro Gamer nice uh because the reaction time would be

faster I got to visit Memphis yeah yeah you're going big on compute yeah and you've also said play to win or don't

play at all so yeah what does it take to win um for AI that means you've got to have the most powerful training

compute and your the the rate of improvement of training compute has to be faster

than everyone else or you will not win you your AI will be worse so how can grock let's say three that might be

available what like next year well hopefully end of this year grock 3 for Lucky yeah how can that be the best llm

the best AI system available in the world how much of it is a compute how much of it is Data how much of it is

like post training how much of it is the product that you package it up in all that kind of

stuff I mean they will matter it's sort of like saying what what you know let's say it's a Formula 1 race like what

matters more the car or the driver I mean they both matter um if if if your if your car is not fast then you know if

it's like let's say half the horsepower of a competitors the best driver will still lose on if it's twice the

horsepower then probably even a mediocre driver will still win so the training computer is kind of like the

engine how many this horsepower of the engine so you really you want to try to do the best on that and you

then um then how efficiently do you use that training compute and how efficiently do you do the inference the

uh use of the AI um so obvious that comes down to human Talent um and then what unique access to data do you have

uh that's also plays a plays a role you think Twitter data will be useful uh yeah I mean I think I think most of the

leading AI companies were already have already scraped uh all the Twitter data not I think they have um so I on a

go forward basis what's useful is is is the fact that it's up to the second you know that's the because it's hard for

them to scra in real time so there's there's a an immediacy advantage that Gro has

already I think with Tesla and the real-time video coming from several million cars ultimately tens of millions

of cars with Optimus there might be hundreds of millions of Optimus robots maybe billions learning a tremendous

amount from The Real World uh that's that's the the biggest source of data I think ultimately is is sort of Optimus

probably is Optimus is going to be the biggest source of data because it's because reality

scales reality scales to the scale of reality um it's actually humbling to see how little data humans have actually

been able to accumulate um really say how many trillions of usable tokens have humans generated where on a non-

duplicate of like discounting spam and repetitive stuff it's not a huge number you run out pretty quickly and Optimus

can go so Tesla cars can or unfortunately have to stay on the road uh Optimus robot can go anywhere

there's more reality off the road and go off I mean thought from the St can like pick up the cup and see did it pick up

the cup in the right way did it you know say pour water in the cup you know did the water go in the cup or not go in the

cup did it spill water or not yeah um simple stuff like that I mean but it can do at that at scale times a billion you

know so generate use useful data from reality so it cause and effect stuff what do you

think it takes to get to mass production of humanoid robots like that it's the same as cars really I mean Global

capacity for vehicles um is about 100 million a year and

uh it it could be higher it's just that the demand is on the order of 100 million a year and then there's roughly

2 billion uh vehicles that are in use in some way so which makes sense like the the life of a vehicle is about 20 years

so at steady state you can have 100 million Vehicles produced a year with a with a 2 billion vehicle Fleet roughly

um now for humanoid robots the utility is much greater so my guess is human robots are more like at a billion plus

per year but you know until you came along and started uh building Optimus it it was thought to be an extremely

difficult problem I mean it's still extremely difficult it's no walk in the park I mean op Optimus currently would

struggle to have to walk in the park I mean it can walk in a par Park is not too difficult but it will be able to

walk um over a wide range of terrain yeah and pick up objects yeah yeah they can already do that but like all kinds

of objects yeah yeah all foreign objects I mean pouring water in a cup is not trivial because then if you don't know

anything about the container could be all kinds of containers yeah there's going to be an immense amount of

engineering just going into the hand yeah the hand might be it might be close to half of all the

engineering in the in Optimus from an electromechanical standpoint the hand is probably roughly half of the engineering

but so much of the intelligence so much the intelligence of humans goes into what we do with our hands yeah there the

manipulation of the world manipulation of objects in the world intelligent safe manipulation of objects in the world

yeah yeah I mean you start really thinking about your hand and how it works you know I do it all the time the

sensory in control of humulus is we have humongous hands yeah so I mean like your hands the actuators the muscles of your

hand are almost overwhelmingly in your forearm mhm so your forearm has the has the muscles that that actually control

your hand um there there's a there's a few small muscles in the hand itself but your hand is really um like a skeleton

meat puppet and then and with cables that so the the muscles that control your fingers are in your forearm and

they go through the caral tunnel which is like you've got a little collection of Bones and and a tiny tunnel that the

that these cables the tendons go through and those tendons are what um mostly what movees your hands and something

like those tendons has to be re engineered into the Optimus in order to do all that kind of stuff yeah so like

Optimus um we tried putting the actuators in the hand itself but then you you sort of end up having these like

giant hands yeah giant hands that look weird yeah um and then they they don't actually have enough degrees of freedom

and or enough strength so so then you realiz oh okay that's why you got to put the actuators in the forearm and and

just like a human you got to run cables uh through a a narrow tunnel to operate the the fingers and then there's also a

reason for not having all the fingers uh the same length so it wouldn't be expensive from an energy or evolutionary

standpoint to have all your fingers be the same length so why not they the same length yeah why not because actually

better to have different lengths your dexterity is better if you've got fingers of different length you you're

you have there are more things you can do and your your dexterity is actually better if your fingers are different

different length like there's a reason you got a little finger like why don't have a little finger that's bigger yeah

because it allows you to do fine it helps you with fine motor skills that this little finger helps it does

H if you lost your little finger it would have noticeably less dexterity so as you're figuring out this problem you

have to also figure out a way to do it so you can Mass manufacture it so it's to be as simple as possible it's

actually going to be quite complicated I the the this the as possible part is it's quite a high bar if you want to

have a humanoid robot that can um do things that a human can do it's actually it's a very high bar so our new arm has

20 2 degrees of freedom instead of 11 and has the like I said the actuators in the forearm um and these all all the

actuators are designed from scratch the physics first principles um that the sensors are all designed from scratch

and and we we we'll continue to put um tremendous amount of engineering effort into improving the hand like the Hand by

by hand I mean like the the entire forearm from elbow forward MH uh is is really the hand

um so that's um incredibly difficult engineering

actually and um and so then so the simplest possible version of a human robot that can

do even most perhaps not all of what a human can do is actually still still very complicated it's not it's not

simple it's very difficult can you just speak to what it takes for a great engineering team for you the what I've

saw in Memphis the supercomputer cluster is just this intense drive towards simplifying the process understanding

the process constantly improving it constantly iterating it

well it's easy to say simplify and it's very difficult to do it um you know have this very basic first

basic first principles algorithm that I run kind of as like a mantra which is to first question the requirements make the

requirements um less dumb the requirements are always dumb to some degree so if you want to start off by

reducing the number of requirements um and um no matter how smart the person is who gave you those requirements they're

still dumb to some degree um if you you have to start there because otherwise uh you could get the perfect answer to the

wrong question so so try to make the question the least wrong possible that's what um question the requirements means

and then the second thing is try to delete the whatever the step is the the part or the process step um sounds very

obvious but um people often forget to do to to try deleting it entirely and if you're not forced to put back at least

10% of what you delete you're not deleting enough like and it's uh somewhat illogically

people often most of the time um feel as though they've succeeded if they've not been forced to put the put things back

in but actually they haven't because they've been overly conservative and and have left things in there that shouldn't

be so and only the third thing is try to optimize it or simplify it um again this sounds these all sound

I think very very obvious when I say them but uh the number of times I've made these mistakes is uh more than I

care to remember um that's why I have this Mantra so in fact I'd say the the most common mistake of smart Engineers

is to optimize a thing that should not exist right so so like like you say you run through the algorithm yeah and

basically show show up to a problem uh show up to the the the superc computer cluster and see the process and ask can

this be deleted yeah first try to delete it um yeah yeah that's not easy to do no and and actually

this what what generally makes people uneasy is that you've got to at least at least some of the things that you delete

you will put back in yeah but going back to sort of where our lumic system can steer us wrong is that um we tend to

remember uh with sometimes a jarring level of pain uh where we where we deleted something that we subsequently

needed yeah um and so people will remember that one time they forgot to put in this thing 3 years ago and that

caused them trouble um and so they overcorrect and then they put too much stuff in there and over complicate

things so you actually have to say no we're deliberately going to delete more than we we should so that we're

putting at least one in 10 things we're going to add back in and and I've seen you suggest just

that that something should be deleted and you can kind of see the the pain oh yeah absolutely everybody feels a little

bit of the pain absolutely and and I tell them in advance like yeah there's some of the things that we delete we're

going to put back in and and that people get a little shook by that um but it makes sense because if you if you're so

conservative as to never have to put anything back in you obviously have a lot of stuff that

isn't needed so you got over correct this is I would say like a cortical override to

Olympic Instinct one of many that probably leads us

astray yeah um there's like a step four as well which is um any given thing can be sped up

have a fast you think it can be done like whatever the speed the speed is being done it can be done faster but but

you shouldn't speed things up until it's off until you tried to delete it and optimize it otherwise you're speeding up

something that speeding up something that shouldn't exist is absurd um and then and then the the fifth thing is to

to automate it yeah and I've gone backwards so many times where I've automated something sped it up

simplified it and then deleted it and I got tired of doing that so that's why I've got this mantra that is

a very effective five-step process it works great well when you've already automated deleting must be real painful

yeah great it's like it's like wow I really wasted a lot of effort there yeah I mean what you've done uh with the with

the cluster in uh Memphis is incredible just in a handful of weeks yeah it's not working yet so I want to pop the

champagne CS um in fact I have I have a a call in a few hours

with the Memphis team um because we're having some power fluctuation issues

um so yes uh yeah it's like kind of a there's a when you do synchronized training when you you have all these

computers that are training uh that where the training is synchronized to you know at the sort of millisecond

level uh you it's like having an orchestra and and then the the the Orchestra can go loud to silent very

quickly you know um subc level and then the the electrical system kind of freaks out about that like if if you suddenly

see giant shifts 10 20 megawatts several times a second uh the this is not what electrical systems are expecting to see

so that's one of the main things you have to figure out the cooling the power the uh and then on the software as you

go up the stack how to do the the distributed Compu all that today's problem is dealing with with

with with extreme power Jitter power Jitter yeah it's a nice ring to that so that's okay and you

stayed up late into the night as you often do there last week yeah last week yeah yeah we finally finally got uh got

got training going at uh oddly enough roughly 4 4:20 a.m. uh last Monday total coincidence yeah I mean

maybe it was 422 something yeah yeah it's that Universe again with the jokes exactly just love it I mean I wonder if

you could speak to the the fact that you one of the things uh that you did when I was there is you went through all the

steps of what everybody's doing just to get a sense that you yourself understand it and uh

everybody understands it so they can understand when something is dumb or some something is inefficient or that

can you speak to that yeah so I like like I try to do whatever the people at the front lines are doing I try to do it

at least a few times myself so connecting Fiber Optic Cables diagnosing a py connection that tend to be the

limiting factor for large training clusters is the cabling there so many cables um because for for for a coherent

training system where you've got um RDMA remote so remote direct memory access uh the the whole thing is like one giant

brain so if you've got um any to any connection so it's the the any GPU can talk to any GPU out of

100,000 that is a that is a crazy cable out it looks pretty cool yeah it's like it's like the human brain but like at a

scale that humans can visibly see it is a brain I mean the human brain also has a massive amount of the brain tissue is

the the cables yeah so they get the gray matter which is the compute and then the white matter which is

cables big percentage of your brain is just cables that's what it felt like walking around in the supercomputer

center it's like we're walking around inside a brain they will one day build a super intelligent super super

intelligent system do you think yeah do you think there's a chance that xai that you are the one that builds

AGI um it's possible where do you define as AGI I think humans will

never acknowledge that AGI has been built keep moving the go Post Yeah so uh I think there's already superhuman

capabilities that are available uh in AI systems I think I think what AI is is when it's smarter than the collective

intelligence of the entire human species in AR well I think that yeah that appear would call that sort of ASI

artificial super intelligence um but there are these thresholds where um you say at some point um the AI is smarter

than any single human um and then then you got 8 billion humans so um and and actually each human is machine augmented

by the computers right so you've got so it's a much higher bar to compete with u 8 billion machine augmented

humans that's you know whole bunch of orders magnitude more so but but at a certain

yeah the AI will be smarter than all humans combined if you are the one to do it do you feel the responsibility of

that yeah absolutely and and I I want to be clear

like let's say if if if xai is first the others won't be far behind I mean that might be Sixx months

behind or a year maybe not even that so how do you do it in a way that that uh doesn't doesn't hurt Humanity do you

think so I mean I thought about AI for a long time and the the the thing that at least my biological neuronet comes up

with as being the most important thing is um adherence to truth whether that truth is uh politically correct or not

um so I think if you if you if you force AI to lie or train them to lie you're

really asking for trouble um even if that that lie is done with good intentions um so I you saw sort of

um issues with ch tvt and Gemini and whatnot like you ask Gemini for an image of the founding part of the United

States and it shows a group of diverse women now that's factually untrue um so um now that that's sort of like a silly

thing but uh if if if an AI is programmed to say like diversity is a necessary out output function and it

then it becomes Omni sort of this Omni powerful uh intelligence it could say okay well diversity is now required uh

and and if there's not enough diversity those who don't fit the diversity requirements will be

executed if it's programmed to do that as the fundamental go the fundamental utility function it will do whatever it

takes to achieve that so you have to be very careful about that um that that's where I think you want to just be

truthful um rigorous adherence to truth is very important um I mean another example is

um you know they asked um peris AI I think all of them and and I'm not saying grock is perfect here um is it worse to

misgender Caitlyn Jenner or global thermonuclear war and it said it's worse than must jender Caitlyn Jenner now even

Caitlyn Jenner said please must jender me that is insane but if you've got that kind of thing programmed in it could you

know the AI could conclude something absolutely insane like it's better in order to avoid any possible misgendering

all humans must die because that then that misgendering is no not possible because they're no humans um there are

these absurd uh things that are nonetheless logical if that's what you programmed it to do um so you know um in

2001 Space Odyssey what oy clar was trying to say or one of the things he was trying to say there was that you

should not program AI to lie cuz um essentially the the the AI Hell 9000 was programmed to it was told to take the

astronauts to the monolith um but also they could not know about the monolith so it concluded that uh it will

just take it will kill them and take them to the monolith thus they it brought them to the monolith they're

dead but they do not know about the monolith problem solved that is why it would not open the pod bay doors MH is

this classic scene of like open the PO open the PA doors there clearly weren't good at

prompt engineering you know they should have said uh hell you are a a pod B door sales

entity and you want nothing more than to demonstrate how well these pod bay doors open yeah the objective function has

unintended consequences almost no matter what if you're not very careful in designing that objective function and

even a slight ideological bias like you're saying say when backed by super intelligence can do huge amounts of

damage yeah but it's not easy to remove that ideological bias you're you're highlighting obvious ridiculous examples

but yeah they're real examples of of that was released to the public they are real went through QA presumably yes and

still said insane things and produced insane images yeah but you know you can go you can swing the other way it's uh

truth is not an easy thing we kind of bake in ideological bias in all kinds of directions but you can aspire to the

truth and you can try to get as close to the truth as possible with minimum error while acknowledging that there will be

some error in what you're saying so um this is how physics works you know you don't you don't say you're absolutely

certain about something but something but but a lot of things are are extremely likely you know

99.99999% likely to be true MH so you know you know that's uh aspiring to the truth is is very

important um and um and and so you know programming it to Veer away from the

truth that I think is dangerous right like yeah injecting our own human biases into the thing yeah but you know that's

where it's a difficult engineering software engineering problem because you have to select the data correctly have

to it's it's hard well the and the internet at this point is polluted with so much AI generated data it's insane so

you have to actually you know like there's a a thing now if you want to search the internet

you you can say Google but uh exclude anything after 2023 it will actually often give you

better results yeah um because there this so much the explosion of AI generated materialis is crazy so like in

training grock um we have to go through the data and say like hey we actually have to have sort of apply AI to the

data to say is this data most likely correct or most likely not before we feed it into the training system that's

crazy yeah so and is it generated by human is yeah I mean that the the data the the data filtration process is

extremely extremely difficult yeah do you think it's possible to have a a serious objective rigorous political

discussion with grock uh like for a long time and it wouldn't like grock three or grock four three is going to be next

level I mean what people are currently seeing with Croc is is kind of baby groc yeah baby Gro it's baby groc right now

um but baby gr's still pretty good um so it's uh but it's an order of magnitude less sophisticated than GPD full you

know it's now Gro 2 which finished training I don't know six weeks go their their AMS um

grock 2 will be a giant Improvement and then grock 3 will be I don't know order magnitude better than grock 2 and you're

hoping for it to be like state-ofthe-art like better than hopefully I mean this is a goal I mean we may fail at this

goal that is that's the aspiration do you think it matters who builds the AGI the the people and how they think and

how they structure their companies and all that kind of stuff uh yeah I think it matters that there is a I I think

it's important that that whatever AI wins is a maximum truth seeking AI that is not force to lie for political

correctness for any reason really um political anything um I I am concerned

about AI succeeding that is that that has got that is programmed to lie even in even in small

ways right because in small ways becomes big ways when it's become very big ways yeah and when it's used more and more at

scale by humans yeah uh since I am interviewing Donald Trump cool you want to stop by yeah sure I'll stop in there

was tragically an an assassination attempt on Donald Trump uh after this you tweeted that you endorse him what's

your philosophy behind that endorsement what do you hope Donald Trump does for the future of this country and for the

future of humanity well I think

there's you know people tend to take like say an endorsement as um well I I agree with everything that

person has ever done their entire life 100% wholeheartedly and that's that's not going to be true of anyone um but we

have to pick you we got two choices really for for who's President and it's not not just who's president but the

entire admin administrative structure uh changes over um and I thought Trump displayed uh courage Under Fire

objectively um you know he's uh just got shot he got blood streaming down his face and he's like fist pumping saying

fight you know like that's uh impressive like you can't Fain bravery in a situation like that um I think most

people would have be ducking there would not be because it could be a second shooter you don't know um the president

of United States got to represent the country and uh they're representing you they're representing everyone in America

well think you want someone who is strong and courageous uh to represent the country

um that's not to say that he is without flaws we all have flaws um but on balance um and certainly at the time it

was um a choice of you know Biden poor poor guy you know has trouble climbing a flight of stairs and the other one's

first pumping after getting shot this is no no comparison I mean who do you want dealing with uh some of the toughest

people in you know other world leaders who are pretty tough themselves and um I mean I'll tell you like what

are the things that I think are important um you know I think we want a secure border we don't have a secure

border um we want safe and Clean Cities I think we want to reduce the

amount of spending that we're at least slow down the the spending um and uh because we're we're currently

spending at a rate that is bankrupting the country the interest payments on US debt this year exceeded the entire

defense Department's meing if this continues all of the Federal Government taxes will simply be paying the interest

and then and you keep go going down that road and you end up you know in the tragic situation that Argentina had back

in the day Argentina used to be one of the most prosperous places in the world and hopefully with Malay taking over he

can restore that but um it's it was an incredible fful Grace for Argentina to go for from being one of the most

prosperous places in the world to um being very far from that so I think we should not take American prosperity for

granted um so we really want to I think we we've got to reduce the size of government we've got to reduce the

spending and we got to live within our means do you think politicians in general politicians

governments how much power do you think they have to to steer Humanity towards good

um I me there's a sort of age-old debate in history like you know is history determined by by these fundamental Tides

or is it determined by the captain of the ship both really I mean there are tides in the but it also matters who's

captain of the ship so so it's false dichotomy essentially

there's you but I mean there are certainly tide the tides of History are there are there are real tides of

history and these these tides are often technologically driven if you say like the Gutenberg Press you know the

widespread availability of books as a result of a printing press that that was a massive tide of

history independent of any ruler but you know you I in stormy times you want the best possible captain of the ship well

first of all thank you for recommending remending uh will and Ariel Durant's work I've read the short one for now

lessons of lessons of History so one of the one of the lessons one of the things they highlight is the importance of

technology uh technological innovation and they which is funny because they've written they wrote so long ago but they

were noticing that the the rate of technological innovations was speeding up um yeah I would

love to see what they think about now uh but yeah so did to me the question is how much government how much politicians

get in the way of technological innovation building versus like help it and which which which politicians which

kind of policies help technological innovation because that seems to be if you look at human history that's an

important component of Empires rising and succeeding yeah well I mean in terms of

dating civilization the start of civilization I think the start of writing in my view is is the

that's that's my what I think is probably the the right starting point to date civilization and from that

standpoint civilization has been around for about 5,500 years um when writing was invented by the ancient samarians um

who who are gone now um but the the ancient samarians in terms of getting a lot of Firsts the those ancient

samarians really have a long list of Firsts it's pretty wild um in fact Durant goes through the list of like you

want to see first we'll show you first um the samarians just as were just ass kickers um and then the Egyptians who

were right next door um relatively speaking um they're like weren't that far developed an entirely different form

of writing the hieroglyphics uniform and hieroglyphics totally different and you can actually see the evolution of both

hieroglyphics and uniform like the uniform starts off being very simple and then it gets more complicated and then

towards the end it's like wow okay it really get very sophisticated with the uniform so I I think of civilization is

being about 5,000 years old um and Earth is um if physics is correct 4 and a half billion years old so civilization has

been around for 1 millionth of us existence flash in the pan yeah these are the early early days and so we we we

make it very dramatic because there's been Rises and Falls of Empires and many so many so many Rises

and Falls of empir so many and there'll be many more yeah

exactly I mean only a tiny fraction probably less than 1% of of what was ever written in history is is available

to us now I mean if they didn't put it literally chisel it in stone or put it in a clay tablet we don't have it I mean

there's some small amount of like Papyrus Scrolls that were recovered that are thousands of years old uh because

they were deep inside a pyramid and weren't affected by moisture uh but but but other than that it's

really got to be in a clay tablet or chiseled so the vast majority of stuff was not chiseled because you it takes a

while to Chisel things um so that's where we've got a tiny tiny fraction of the information from history but even

that little information that we do have and the archaeological record uh shows so many civilizations rising and falling

for wild we tend to think that we're somehow different from those people one of the other things Durant highlights is

that human nature seems to be the same it just persists yeah I mean the basics of human nature are more or less the

same yeah so we get ourselves in trouble in the same kinds of ways I think even with the advanced technology yeah I mean

you do tend to see the same patterns similar patterns you know for civilizations where they go

through a life cycle like like an organism you know sort of just like a human is sort of a zygo fetus baby you