Tucker Carlson Tonight — Full Interview April 17, 2023 Elon Musk's full Fox News interview with Tucker Carlson: the dangers of AI and his plans for a 'TruthGPT', plus Twitter, free speech and government influence on social media.
Elon Musk's full Fox News interview with Tucker Carlson: the dangers of AI and his plans for a 'TruthGPT', plus Twitter, free speech and government influence on social media.
Transcript Artificial intelligence is one of those topics that's just spooky and sci fi enough to make for a compelling television segment. They love it on the morning shows. But at the same time, AI is complex enough that it's easy to misrepresent. It sounds like something that could be revolutionary, even dangerous to humanity. But is it? And if it is, what should we do about it? Those questions are significant enough that we wanted to find someone who could provide a definitive answer. Elon Musk seemed like the right person. Musk has been thinking about AI and worrying about it for most of his life. Nearly a decade ago, he helped found a nonprofit research project called Open AI. And the point was in the name. If we're going to have artificial intelligence, and apparently we are, it ought to be open, open to the world. That would help ensure that it's used for good and not evil. That was the idea. But as the years passed and Musk found himself preoccupied building a couple of enormous companies, SpaceX and Tesla, OpenAI got away from him. As of tonight, OpenAI is no longer open. It's not a non profit research project dedicated to using artificial intelligence to serve humanity. It is instead a commercial enterprise backed by Microsoft and controlled to some extent by the Democratic Party. Elon Musk thinks that's a problem. In fact, he believes it's a threat to human civilization, tantamount to maybe even more terrifying than thermonuclear weapons. The conversation you're about to see took place recently in a hotel room in Los Angeles. We think it's important enough that we're going to play the entire thing for you over the course of tonight and tomorrow. Here's how the conversation began. So all of a sudden AI is everywhere. People who weren't quite sure what it was are playing with it on their phones. Is that good or bad?
Yes. So I've been thinking about AI for a long time, since I was in college. Really. It's one of the things that the sort of four or five things I thought would really affect the future dramatically. It is fundamentally profound in that the smartest creatures, as far as you know, on this earth are humans is our defining characteristic. Yes, we obviously are weaker than, say, chimpanzees, less agile, but real smarter. So now what happens when something vastly smarter than the smartest person comes along in silicon form? It's very difficult to predict what will happen in that circumstance. It's called the singularity. It's a singularity like a black hole, because you don't know what happens after that. It's hard to predict. So I think we should be cautious with AI and we should, I think there should be some government oversight because it affects the, it's a danger to the public. And so when you, when you have things that are a danger to the public, you know, like, let's say so food, food and drugs. That's why we have the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Aviation Administration, the fcc, we have, we have these agencies to oversee things that affect the public where there could be public harm. And you don't want companies cutting corners on safety and then having people suffer as a result. So that's why I've actually for a long time been a strong advocate of AI regulation. So that I think regulation is, you know, it's not fun to be regulated. It's, it's sort of somewhat of a, sort of arduous to be regulated. I have a lot of experience with regular regulated industries because obviously automotive is highly regulated. You can fill this room with all the regulations that are required for a production car just in the United States. And then there's a whole different set of, of regulations in Europe and China and the rest of the world. So very familiar with being overseen by a lot of regulators. And the same thing is true with rockets. You can't just willy nilly shoot rockets off, not big ones anyway, because the FAA oversees that. And then even to get a launch license, there are probably half a dozen or more federal agencies that need to approve it, plus state agencies. So it's, I've been through so many regulatory situations, it's insane. And you know, sometimes people think I'm some sort of like regulatory maverick that sort of defies regulators on a regular basis, but this is actually not the case. So in, you know, once in a blue moon, rarely I will disagree with regulators, but the vast majority of the time my companies agree with the regulations and comply anyway. So I think, I think we should take this seriously and we should have a regulatory agency I think needs to start with a group that initially seeks insight into AI, then solicits opinion from industry and then has proposed rulemaking. And then those rules, you know, will probably, hopefully, grudgingly be accepted by the major players in AI. And I think we'll have a better chance of advanced AI being beneficial to humanity in that circumstance.
But all regulations start with a perceived danger. Planes fall to the sky or food causes botulism. I don't think the average person playing with AI on his iPhone perceives any danger. Can you just roughly explain what you think the Dangers might be, yeah.
So the danger really AI is perhaps more dangerous than say mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production in the sense that it is. It has the potential, however small one may regard that probability, but it is non trivial. It has the potential of civilizational destruction. There's movies like Terminator, but it wouldn't quite happen like Terminator because the intelligence would be in the data centers. Right. The robot's just the end effector. But I think perhaps what you may be alluding to here is that regulations are really only put into effect after something terrible has happened.
If that's the case for AI and we only put in regulations after something terrible has happened, it may be too late to actually put the regulations in place. The AI may be in control at that point.
You think that's real? It is. It is conceivable that I could take control and reach a point where you couldn't turn it off and it would be making, making the decisions for people.
No, it's that. That's definitely where things are headed for. Sure. I mean, things like, like say ChatGPT, which is based on GPT4 from OpenAI, which company that I played a critical role in creating, unfortunately, back when it was a nonprofit. Yes. I mean, the reason Open exists at all is that Larry Page and I used to be close friends and I would stay at his house in Palo Alto and I would talk to him late into the night about AI safety. And at least my perception was that Larry was not taking AI safety seriously enough. And what did he say about it? He really seemed to be sort of digital superintelligence, basically digital God, if you will, as soon as possible.
Yes. He's made many public statements over the years. The whole goal of Google is what's called AGI, Artificial General Intelligence or artificial superintelligence. And I agree with him that there's great potential for good, but there's also potential for bad. And so if, if you've got some radical new technology, you want to try to take set actions that maximize the probability, it will do good and minimize the probability will do bad things.
It can't just be helpful.
Let's just go barreling forward and hope for the best. And then at one point I said, well, what about we're going to make sure humanity's okay here? And. And then he called me a speciast.
Yes. And there were witnesses. I wasn't the only one there when he called me a specist. And so I was like, okay, that's it. Yes, I'm a specist. Okay, you got me. What are you? Yeah, I'm fully a speciesist. Busted. So that was the last draw. At the time, Google had acquired DeepMind. And so Google, DeepMind together had about 3/4 of all the talent in the world. They obviously had a tremendous amount of money and more computers than anyone else. So I'm like, okay, we have a unipolar world here where there's just one, one company that has close to a monopoly on AI talent and computers like scale computing. And person who's in charge doesn't seem to care.
This is not good. So then I thought, what's the furthest thing from Google would be like a nonprofit that is fully open? Because Google is closed for profit. So that's why the open and open air force open source, you know, transparency. So people know what's going on.
And that we don't want to have like a. I mean, while I'm normally in favor of for profit, we don't want this to be sort of a profit maximizing demon from hell that just never stops.
So you want species incentives here, Incentives that.
Yes, I think we want, we want pro human. Yeah, let's make the future good for the humans. Yes, yes. Because we're humans.
So can you just put it. I keep pressing, but just, just for people who haven't thought this through and aren't familiar with it. And the cool parts of, of artificial intelligence are so obvious, you know, write your college paper for you. Write a limerick about yourself. There's a lot there that's fun and useful, but can you be more precise about what's potentially dangerous and scary? Like what could it do? What specifically are you worried about going
with old sayings, the pen is mightier than the sword. So if you have a super intelligent AI that is capable of writing incredibly well and in a way that is very influential, you know, convincing. And then is constantly figuring out what is more convincing to people over time. And then enter social media, for example, Twitter, but also Facebook and others, you know, and potentially manipulates public opinion in a way that is very bad. How would we even know?
How do we even know? So to sum up in the words of Elon Musk, for all human history, human beings have been the smartest beings on the planet. Now human beings have created something that is far smarter than they are, and the consequences of that are impossible to predict. And the people who created it don't care. In fact, as he put it, Google founder Larry Page, a former friend of his, is looking to build a, quote, digital God and believes that anybody who's worried about that is a species, in other words, is looking out for human beings first. Elon Musk responded. As a human being, it's okay to look out for human beings first. And then at the end he said, the real problem with AI is not simply that it will jump the boundaries and become autonomous and you can't turn it off in the short term. The problem with AI is that it might control your brain through words. And this is the application that we need to worry about now, particularly going into the next presidential election. The Democratic Party, as usual, was ahead of the curve on this. They've been thinking about how to harness AI for political power. More on that next. In the long term, I may become autonomous and take over the world, but in the short term, it's being used by politicians to control what you think, to end your independent judgment and erase democracy on the eve of a presidential election. Elon Musk is very worried about that. He told us about his plan to stop it.
What's happening is they're training the AI to lie.
Exactly right. And to withhold information.
To lie and, and, yes, and yeah, exactly. To either comment on some things, not comment on other things, but not to say what the data actually demands that it say exactly
how did it get this way? You funded it at the beginning.
What happened? Yeah, well, that would be ironic. But Faith, the most ironic outcome is most likely, it seems.
That's good. That's actually from a friend of mine, Donna came up with that one. I actually have a slight variant on that. Which is the most entertaining outcome is the most likely. But that's entertaining as viewed from a third party viewer. Like. So if we're like an alien from on high.
Like you could go see a movie about World War I. They're being blown to bits and gas and everything in the trenches. And it's like you're eating popcorn and having a soda, you know, it's fine. Not so great for the people in the movie.
This is Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation is most likely Jonah's variant, which is irony. And then my variant, which is
most entertaining as seen by a third party audience, which seems to be mostly
true, but it seems true in this case. So you gave them, did you give them a lot?
I came up with the name and the concept and pushed, had a number of dinners around the Bay Area with, you know, with some of the people, the leading figures in AI. And I helped recruit the initial team. In fact, the Ilya Suskay who was really quite fundamental to the success of OpenAI. I put a tremendous amount of effort into recruiting Ilya and he changed his mind a few times and ultimately decided to go with OpenAI. But if he had not gone with OpenAI, OpenAI would not have succeeded. I really put a lot of effort into creating this organization to serve as a counterweight to Google and then I kind of took my off the ball, I guess. And they are now closed source and they are obviously for profit and they're closely allied with Microsoft. In effect, Microsoft has a very strong say, if not directly controls OpenAI at this point. So you really have an OpenAI Microsoft situation and then Google, DeepMind are the two sort of heavyweights in this arena.
So it seems like the world needs a third option.
Yes. So I think I will create a third option, although starting very late in the game, of course.
I don't know. I think we'll see. It's definitely starting late, but I will, I will, I will try to create a third option. And that third option hopefully does more good than harm. Like the intention with opening, I was obviously doing good, but it's not clear whether it's actually doing good or whether it's. I can't tell at this point except that I'm worried about the fact that it's being, it's being trained to be politically correct, which is simply another way of being untruthful. Saying untruthful things.
So that's, that's a bad sign. There's certainly a path to AI dystopia is to train AI to be deceptive. So yeah, I'm going to start something which you call truth GBT or a maximum truth seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe. And I think this, this might be the best path to safety in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe. Hopefully they would think that, I think, because, yeah, like humanity could decide to hunt down all the chimpanzees and kill them, but we don't because we're actually glad that they exist.
And, and we aspire to protect their
habitats, but we feel that way because we have souls and that makes us sentimental and reflective. It gives us a moral Sense longings? Can a machine ever have those things? Can a machine be sentimental, can appreciate beauty?
Well, I mean, we're getting into some, you know, philosophical areas that are hard to resolve. You know, I take somewhat of a scientific view of things, which is that we might have a soul or we might not have a soul. I don't know. It feels like we have. I feel like I've got some sort of consciousness that exists on a plane that is not the one we observe. Yes, that is certainly how I feel. But it could be an illusion. I don't know. But for, for AI in terms of, of, of understanding beauty, is there some sort of appreciating beauty and being able to create incredibly beautiful art?
Will I be able to create incredibly beautiful art? It already does.
Have you seen some of the mid Journey? I have this stuff. It's incredible. It is so, no, no question that it can create art that we, that we perceive as stunning, really. And it's doing so still images now, but it won't be long before it's doing movies and shorts and, you know, like movies, just a series of frames
with audio, but at that point, because it can mimic people and voices, any image, it can mimic reality itself. So effectively.
I mean, how could you have a criminal trial? I mean, how could you ever believe that evidence was authentic, for example? And I don't mean like in 30 years, I mean like next year. I mean, that seems totally disruptive to the way to all of our institutions.
But I'm also, I think it's more like our, you know, will humanity control its destiny or not? Will we have a future that is better than the past or not?
Will humanity control its future or not? And in the meantime, how will this be used to control us? If you've played around with the latest versions of AI you will learn it prefers to end the world with nuclear Armageddon before you use naughty words. So those are its priorities. Elon Musk is a strong believer in free speech. So strong that he purchased Twitter, a company he didn't need and hasn't profited from, as a way to restore free speech to the Internet, to bring us back, say, six years, to the free country he lived in then. And once he bought Twitter, he discovered it wasn't really a social media application. It was really a tool for global intelligence agencies. He's got detail on that after the break. Elon Musk bought Twitter because he used Twitter. It's as simple as that. And he was infuriated by Twitter's effort to Silence people on the Internet. That's how strongly he believed in free speech. He paid $44 billion and lost tens of billions of dollars doing it. And when he took over and looked behind the curtain, he discovered Twitter was really a tool of the global intel agencies to spy on people and emit propaganda. Here it is. You bought Twitter, famously. You've got a lot of other businesses and a lot going on.
You said you bought it because you believe in speech, free speech. You've had a lot of hassle since you bought it. In retrospect, was it worth buying it?
I mean, it raised to be seen as to whether this was financially smart. Currently it is. It is not. You know, we just revalued the company at less than half of the acquisition price. Did you realize? Yes. My timing was terrible for when the offer was made because it was right before advertising plummeted.
You caught the high water mark, I noticed.
Yeah. Yeah. So I must be a real genius here. My timing is amazing since I bought it for at least twice as much as it should have been bought for. But some things are priceless. And so whether I lose money or not, that is a secondary issue compared to ensuring the strength of democracy. And free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy.
And the speech needs to be as transparent and truthful as possible. So we've got a huge push on Twitter to be as truthful as possible. We've got this Community Notes feature which is great.
It is awesome. And it's like, I saw it this
morning, it was far more honest than
Ad Announcer
the New York Times.
It's great. We put a lot of effort to ensuring that Community Notes does not get gamed or have biases. It simply cares about what is the most accurate thing. And, you know, sometimes truth can be a little bit elusive, but you can still aspire to get closer to it.
You know, and so, and I think the effect of Community Notes is more powerful than people may realize, because once people know that they could get noted, you know, Community noted on Twitter, then they'll think more carefully about what they say. Likely. Basically, it's an encouragement to be more truthful and less deceptive.
When you jumped into this, though, when you bought it, did you understand clearly you understood its importance? You wouldn't bought it Twitter.
Right. But it's not the biggest, but it's the most important of the social media companies. But did you understand the kind of ferocity you'd be facing, the attacks you'd be facing from power centers in the country.
I thought there'd probably be some negative reactions. So I'm sure everyone would not be pleased with the, with, with it. But at the end of the day, you know, if the public is happy with it, that's what matters. And the public will speak with their actions. I mean, if they find truth Twitter to be useful, they will use it more. And if they find it to be not useful, they will use it less. They find it to be the best source of truth, I think they will use it more. Now there's obviously a lot of organizations that are used to having sort of unfettered influence on Twitter that no longer have that.
We used the New York Times of their, of their badge this morning. And then you called them diarrhea. You did, you did. I'm just, I'm just quoting you. You described their Twitter feed as diarrhea.
I said it was the Twitter equivalent of diarrhea.
Okay, it's not literally diarrhea, but no,
it's, you know, it's a metaphor, but an accurate one. So I mean, if you look at NY Times Twitter feed, it's unreadable. It's like because what they do is they tweet every single article, even the ones that are boring, even ones that don't make it into the paper. So it's just non stop zillion tweets a day with no, you know, they really should just be saying like what are the top tweets? What are the big stories of the day? I don't know, put out like 10 or something. You know, some number that's manageable as opposed to right now. If you were to follow NYTimes on Twitter, you're going to get barraged with like hundreds of tweets a day and your whole feed will be filled with NY Times. So this is something I would recommend actually for all publications, which is for your primary feed only. Put out your best stuff. I think I know a thing or two about how to use Twitter because, you know, it was the most interacted with account on the whole system before the acquisition. Before the acquisition closed, I didn't have the most number of followers, but I had the most number of interactions. And so I clearly know something about how to use Twitter. You know, people's attention is limited, so just make sure you put the stuff that's most important there.
So because you know, you and people like you do interact on Twitter, it's obviously enormously powerful in shaping public opinion. It's where a lot of ideas and trends are incubated. Yeah, you Know, that's why it's also a magnet for intel agencies from around the world. And one of the things we learned after you started opening the books is that they were exerting influence from within Twitter.
Did you know that going in?
No. Since I've been a heavy Twitter user since 2009, my. It's sort of like I'm in the matrix. I mean, I can see, like, things. Do things feel right? Do they not feel right? What tweets am I being shown as recommended? I get a feel like, what accounts are making comments, where are the comments? Eerily similar. And then you look at the account and it's just obviously a fake photo, and it's just obviously a bot cluster over and over again. So I started to get just more and more uneasy about the Twitter situation. I sort of starting to feel like something's wrong in the state of Denmark here. Something feels wrong about the platform. It seemed to be just drifting in a. I couldn't place it exactly just ahead of it felt like it was drifting in a bad direction. So then I was like. And my conversations with the board and management seem to confirm my intuition about that. But basically I was convinced these guys do not care about fixing Twitter. And I had a bad feeling about where it was headed based on the conversations I had with them. So then I was like, you know what? I'll try acquiring it and see if acquiring it is possible. Now, I didn't have enough cash to acquire it, so I would need support from others, from some of the existing investors. I would also need, like, a lot of debt. And so it wasn't clear to me whether an acquisition would succeed, but I thought I would try. And ultimately it did succeed. Anyway, here we are.
But when you got there and all of a sudden you own it and all the data on the service belongs to you.
Well, it belongs to the people, in my view, but. Yes, but.
But you can see what it is, and you can see what they've been doing, and you can see who's been working there. You were shocked to find out that various intel agencies were affecting its operations.
The degree to which various government agencies had effectively had full access to everything that was going on on Twitter blew my mind. I was not aware of that.
Would that include people's DMs?
Yes. Yes, because the DMs are not encrypted. So one of the first. You know, one of the things that we're about to release is the bloody encryption.
That's pretty heavy duty, though, because a Lot of well known people, reporters talking to their sources, government officials, the rich people in the world, they're DMing each other. And the assumption obviously was incorrect, but was that. That's private. But that was being read by various governments.
Yeah, that seems to be. Yes.
Yes, it is. So like I said, we're moving to have the DMS be optionally encrypted. I mean, you know, there's like a lot of DM conversations which are, you know, just chatting with friends, not, not important. That's hopefully coming out later this month, but no later than next month is the ability to toggle encryption on or off. So if you, if you are in a conversation you think is sensitive, you can just toggle encryption on and then no one at Twitter can see what you're talking about. I could put a gun to my head and I couldn't, I couldn't tell. I can. That's sort of the gun to the head test. If someone puts a gun to my head and can I still not see your DMs? That should be. That's the acid test.
And that's how it should be. If you want your.
Have you had complaints from various governments about doing this?
I haven't had direct complaints. To me, I've had sort of like some indirect complaints. I think people are a little concerned about complaining to me directly in case I tweet about it. You know, they're like, oh, so they sort of try to be more roundabout than that. You know, I mean, if I got something that was unconstitutional from the US Government, I would say my reply would be to send them a copy of the, you know, First Amendment and just say like, what part of this are we getting wrong?
You have a lot of government. You have a lot of government.
What part of this are we getting wrong? Please tell me.
I mean, it's a pretty. No, I'm just saying. But you're kind of exposed in your other businesses. So this is just in case our viewers aren't following this. This is not. You're not just like a journalist taking a stand on behalf of the First Amendment. You're a guy with big government contracts giving the finger to the government. Do you think Twitter will be as central to this presidential campaign as it was in the last several.
I think it will play a significant role in elections, not just domestically, but internationally. The goal of new Twitter is to be as fair and even handed as possible. So not favoring any political ideology, but just being. Being, being fair at all.
Why doesn't Facebook do this? I know that Zuckerberg has said, and I take him at face value that he. Well, I do actually in this way that he is a kind of old fashioned liberal who doesn't like to censor. He has, but he, you know, like, why wouldn't a company like that take the stand that you have taken, which pretty rooted in American traditional political custom, you know, for free speech.
My understanding is that Zuckerberg spent $400 million in the last election, normally in a get out the boat campaign, but really fundamentally in support of Democrats. Is that accurate or not accurate? That is accurate, yes. Does that sound unbiased to you?
So you don't see hope that Facebook will approach this as a non aligned arbiter? You've allowed Donald Trump back on Twitter. He hasn't taken you up on your offer because he's got his own thing.
Do you think he will go back on Twitter?
Well, that's, that's obviously up to him. You know, my job is to, as you know, I take the freedom of speech very seriously. So it's, you know, I didn't, I didn't vote for Donald Trump. I actually voted for Biden. Not saying I'm a huge fan of Biden because I would think that would probably be inaccurate. But you know, we have difficult choices to make in these presidential elections. It's not. I would prefer frankly that we put someone, just a normal person as president, A normal person with common sense and whose values are smack in the middle of the country. You know, just, you know, set out the normal distribution and I think they would be great. Yeah, I think we have made maybe being president not that much fun. You know, to be totally frank,
public doesn't trust big news organizations anymore because they're so obviously filthy and dishonest. They don't trust social media companies because as you just heard, Facebook is working for the Democratic Party. We asked Elon Trust and how he's going to do that after firing 80% of his staff. That's nice. So the headline here so far is that before Elon Musk bought it, Twitter wasn't so much a social media site as a honey trap operated by global intelligence agencies, including our own. One of the very first things Elon Musk did was fire all the spies who worked at Twitter. Then he fired a lot of other people too, including the entire PR department, the HR department, and a lot of other useless baggage that weren't helping the company do anything worth doing. And what happened next, we asked him,
meant a shrinking Pie, obviously, for most of the traditional media companies, and made them more desperate to get clicks, to get, you know, get attention. And it's made them. When, you know, when they're. When they're in sort of a desperate state, they will then tend to really push headlines that get the most clicks, whether those headlines are accurate or not. So it's resulted, in my view, I think. I think most people would agree, a lesson, truthful, less accurate news. So. Because they just got to get a rise out of people. And I think it's also increased the negativity of the news because I think we humans instinctually respond more to negative. I think we have an instinctual negative bias, which kind of makes sense in that if, like, let's say, like, it's more important to remember where. Where was the lion or where was the tribe that wants to kill my tribe, then where is the bush with berries?
Like, one's like a permanent negative outcome, and the other is like, well, I might go hungry. So. Meaning there's an asymmetry in. Sort of involved asymmetry in negative versus positive stuff. And also, historically, the negative stuff would have been quite proximate. Like, it would have been near. Represented a real danger to you as a person if you heard negative news. Because historically, you know, like a few hundred years ago, we're not hearing about what negative things are happening on the other side of the world or on the other side of the country. We're only. We're hearing about negative things in our village, things that could actually have a bad effect on you. Whereas now we're hearing about. I mean, the news very often seems to attempt to answer the question, what is the worst thing that happened on earth today? Wonder why are you sad after reading that?
You know, do you read any legacy media outlets?
I mean, I really get most of my news from Twitter at this point. It is the number one news source, I think, in the world at this point.
What percentage of your staff did you fire at Twitter? One of the great business stories of the year.
I think we're about 20% of the original size.
Yes. So a lot of people voluntarily.
Sure, sure. But. But it's. 80% are gone from the data.
So how do you run the company with only 20% of the staff?
It turns out you don't need all that many people to run Twitter, but
Yes. I mean, if you're not trying to run some sort of glorified activist organization and you don't care that much about censorship, then you can really let go of a lot of people. Turns out,
How many others, without naming names, but how many? I had dinner with somebody who runs a big company recently said, I'm really inspired by Elon. And I said, the free speech stuff. He goes, no, the firing, the staff stuff. How many other CEOs have come to you to talk about this?
I spend a lot of time at work, so it's not like I'm meeting with lots of people. They see what. But I think we just had a situation at Twitter where it was absurdly overstaffed. You know, so it wasn't like. You look and say, like, what does it really take to operate Twitter? You know, most of what we're talking about here is a group text service at scale. Like, how many people are really needed for that? You know? And if you look at the. You say, like, what has been the product development over time with Twitter? And you're like, so, like, you know, years versus product improvements. And it's like a pretty flat line. So what are they doing? It took a year to add an edit button. That doesn't work most of the time. I mean, this is. I feel like there's a comedy situation here. You're not making cars. That's very difficult to make cars or get rockets to orbit. So the real question is, how did it get so absurdly overstaffed? This is insane. So anyway, and it's clearly working. In fact, I think it's working better than ever. We've increased the responsiveness of the system by, in some cases, over 80%. We're trying to make Twitter the most trusted place on the Internet, the least untrustworthy place on the Internet. I don't think anyone should trust the Internet, but maybe we can make Twitter the least untrustworthy. Like I said, try to get the truth to the people as best we can.
When Elon Musk took over Twitter, the company had something called a human rights team. There was no measurable increase in human rights around the world. In fact, Twitter was doing its best to crush human rights. The only advantage human beings have or have ever had is they're the smartest beings on the planet. But soon that will not be true. In fact, like, next week. So when I become stronger than we are, what do you do exactly? And what does it mean for democracy? We asked Elon Musk about contingency plans for dealing with advanced general intelligence. Here's part of that conversation. You've heard people say we should just blow up the Server farms, because there's no way that once this gets rolling, there's no way to slow it down. What do you think of that?
Well, the, the really heavy duty intelligence is not going to be distributed all over the place. It'll be in a limited number of service centers. If you say like very, like very sort of deep AI, heavy duty AI, it's not, it's not going to be in your laptop or your phone. It's, it's going to be in, you know, situation where there's like 100,000 really powerful computers working together in a service center. So it's not, it's not like subtle and there are limited number of places where that can happen. In fact, you could, if you could just, you can just look at the heat signature from space and it'll be very obvious. I'm not suggesting we could look to service centers right now, but there may be some, it may be wise to have some sort of contingency plan where the government's got an ability to shut down, shut down power to these server centers. Like you don't have to blow it up, you can just cut the power. And what would trip or cut connectivity as well? That's another way.
Right, but what would trip that switch, do you think, in your mind, what would be the threshold that you'd have to pass to warrant the government cutting off your power or cutting off your signal?
Well, I mean, I guess if we lost control of some super AI, like for some reason, like the things that would normally work to do a passive shutdown, like the administrator passwords, if they somehow stop working where we can't slow down or, you know, I don't have a precise answer, but if there's something that we're concerned about and are unable to stop it with software commands, then we probably want to have some kind of hardware off switch.
Yes, I think, you know, can't hurt. Have you talked to, since, you know, Larry Page and you obviously, you know, the OpenAI guys, because you started with
Have you talked to the people who run these two, the biggest AI companies about this recently?
I haven't talked to Larry Page in a few years because he got very upset with me about OpenAI. So when OpenAI was created, it did, it did shift things into it from unipolar world where Google DeepMind controlled, like I said, 3/4 of all AI talent to where there's now sort of Bipolar World or OpenAI and Google DeepMind. And they're. And now weirdly it seems OpenAI is maybe ahead. So I have had conversations with
OpenAI team, Sam Altman. I haven't talked to Larry Page because he doesn't want to talk to me anymore for a few years.
Can I ask you just about since you've been around a lot of this, the thinking. So why would anyone not be a specist, be human centered in his thinking about technology? What's the thinking there?
I think what he's trying to say is that if I were to guess that he. That all consciousness should be treated equally and whether that is digital or biological.
I disagree, yeah. Especially if the digital consciousness, or whatever you want to call it, digital intelligence, decides to curtail the biological intelligence.
Right. So you're just building your own slave master. And why would you do that?
Doesn't sound great. Yeah, I mean, we shouldn't. We should at least. No need to rush, you know, what's the hurry? Where's the fire?
Well, what. I mean, tell us about the hurry. So this for. I know you've been talking about this for years and on the sort of the periphery of our attention, we've heard Elon Musk talking about AI, but for most people it's been like three months since they've had any interaction with this at all. So what's the timeline here? At what point does it start to really change our society, do you think?
I think it starts to have probably an impact this year. GPT4Now. It's like writing poetry. And pretty decent poetry, actually. Pretty decent skill at rhyming is incredible.
Yes, it is. You've got a narrative.
Yeah. So you could say that's hard to do. Like most humans can't do that.
So it's already past the point of what most humans can do. Most humans cannot write as well as ChatGPT, and no human can write that well that fast as the best of my knowledge. So maybe Shakespeare.
How can you have a democracy with technology like that? If democracy is government by the people, each person's vote is equal to every other person's vote. I mean, people are choosing their votes freely. Can you have a democracy with this?
Well, that's why I raised the concern of AI being a significant influence in elections. And even if you say that AI doesn't have agency, well, it's very likely that people will use the AI as a tool in elections. And then if the AI is smart enough, are they using the tool or is the tool using them? So I think things are Getting weird. And they're getting weird fast.
Things are getting weird and they're getting weird fast. And not just in technology, but in banking. As someone who runs three of the world's most successful companies, Elon Musk knows a lot about banks. We couldn't resist asking him about what seems like a global banking crisis. His answers are next. In addition to having a lot of wise and prescient thoughts about artificial intelligence, Elon Musk is also one of the world's most successful businessmen. He runs Tesla and Space X and now Twitter. And we thought, wait a second, there seems to be an international banking crisis underway and a lot of inflation. Let's ask Elon Musk what he thinks of that. So we did, and here's what he said. So you've seen a couple regional bank collapses.
And we've been told that's not a big deal, that these are isolated and each one collapse for unique reasons. They're not, it's not systemic in any sense. What's your sense, your sense of the stability of the American banking system?
Well, it's actually at this point a global banking system process. So the, you know, we have a situation here where it's not merely, it's not that the, the canary in the coal mine has died, but the miners are starting to die too. So, you know, Silicon Valley bank collapsing overnight is one hell of a big canary. It's more like a turkey. I mean, it's not just, it's not like some small fry thing. I think that there is a serious danger with the global banking system. There's, there's a strong argument that the, if you were to actually mark to market the portfolios of the banks, the loans and whatnot, that the entire banking industry would have negative equity. It feels that way, yes. So if you look at say, commercial real estate, like offices and whatnot, the whole work from home thing has substantially reduced office usage in cities around the world. And you know, I think, I think San Francisco is a 40% off. San Francisco is like an extreme example, but I think it's on 40% vacancy. Even new York has, I think almost all cities at this point have record vacancies of commercial real estate. So now commercial real estate used to be something that was a grade A asset, that if a bank had commercial real estate holdings, those would be considered the highest security, some of the safest assets you could have. Now that is not the case anymore. One company after another is canceling their leases or not renewing their leases or if they go bankrupt, there's nothing for the bank who owns that real estate to go after because they're previously strong company now dead. What do you go after at that point? So we really haven't seen the commercial real estate shoe drop. That's more like an anvil, not a shoe. So the stuff we've seen thus far actually hasn't even. It's only slightly real estate portfolio degradation. But that will become a very serious thing later this year in my, in my view. I think if we see which are likely to see a drop in house prices because the interest rates are too high and for most people when buying a house, they look at the monthly payment. If you're a 3030 mortgage, the vast majority of is interest. So if the Fed rate is high, you have a high base interest rate. Effectively the price you can pay for the house drops because you now have to pay more interest. Which means that if you've got a fixed monthly payment, you can now afford to buy a house for less. Less money effectively drops the, the prices of houses. Yes, this is the kind of thing that tends to accelerate. So then you can get negative equity in the home market as well. And so if banks end up having loan losses in both their commercial and they're definitely going to have loan losses in their commercial portfolio, but also in their mortgage portfolio. This is a dire situation. The, there is, there is a solution to mitigate the magnitude of the damage here, which is for the Fed to lower the rate. But they raised the rate again. Now, if I recall correctly, which I, you know, important caveat, I think the last time the Fed raised rates going into a recession was 1929.
Yeah, the Great Depression.
The concern, I'm going to tell you, nothing you don't know, but the concern is if the Fed drops rates again, then inflation will accelerate and you can't do that in an election year.
So inflation is going to happen no matter what. If you increase the money supply, you get inflation, right. So there's not some magical cure for getting rid of inflation except to increase the productivity, the output of goods and services. So say like what is money? You've got these sort of, it's basically numbers in a database that sum up to some total. Then you've got the output of goods and services of the economy. And the, as long as the ratio of money to ratio of goods and services stays, if that, if that stays constant, you have no, no inflation. If, if you add more money, if you add money to the system faster than you increase goods and services, then you have inflation so all of these Covid sort of stimulus bills were not paid for. They were just generated more currency, more, you know, more money. Was, was, was created because the federal government, the checks never. The checks always pass. You know, unless you had a debt limit, which there's probably going to be some debt limit crisis later this year. But provided you haven't hit the debt limit, the, the federal government, unlike state governments or city governments or individuals, can simply issue more money. And that's what they did. I mean, as the old saying goes, there's no free lunch. So if you could just issue massive amounts of money without negative consequences. Why don't we just take that to the limit, make everyone a trillionaire. Well, I mean, they tried that in Venezuela. How'd that work out?
Well, they had to eat zoo animals, right?
It's not good. You know, there's no free lunch. There's not some ability to issue money and not have inflation. Many of those candidates
now you can see what they vilify them. It'll be nice to have leaders have that.
Elon Musk has spent a lot of his life staring off into space. Now he's got the world's biggest rocket companies. He seen anything out there? We asked him.
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Buckle up because it is Joe Biden's favorite day of the year, Tax day. We're going to tell you how he marked a special occasion tonight right here.
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Highly recommend that you go directly to aroma360.com to get yours today. So Elon Musk has spent a lot of his life thinking about space. And he's got the world's biggest rocket company. So we asked him, have you ever seen anything out there that suggests alien life? And by the way, how do you think life on this planet is going? Elon Musk is put on the rare voices to raise the alarm about lower birth rates. He's doing something about it personally. He thinks the rest of us should too. Here's this part of the conversation.
People sometimes take the fact that like, we're here on earth for granted, you know, and that there's consciousness is just a normal thing that happens. But to the best of our knowledge, we see no evidence of conscious life anywhere, anywhere in the universe. So it might be there. Yeah, in physics, of course, sort of the Fermi paradox, When Enrico Fermi is amazing physicist, asks the fundamental question, where are the aliens? Yeah, a lot of people ask me, you know, where are the aliens? And I think if anyone would know about aliens on Earth, it would probably be me.
Yeah, I'm, you know, very familiar with space stuff. And I've seen no evidence of aliens. So I would immediately tweet it out. That says split second. That would be like all time, probably tough tweet of all time. Found one, guys. It's a jackpot. Eight billion likes. Next level jackpot. If you find aliens, I don't think they're keeping us under. And it was like some general, I think in the 60s where they said, like, show us the aliens. Like Area 51, et cetera. And he said, like, listen, we are constantly trying to get the defense budget to expand. And you know what we really get? No arguments for anyone. If we pulled out an alien and said, we need money to protect ourselves from these guys. How much money do you want? You got it. They look dangerous. So the fastest way to get a defense budget increase Would we pull out an alien? You know, we're like, yeah, I mean, that could be. The invasion could be arriving any minute, who knows? So I digress.
But, but you were saying that our consciousness makes us unique in the universe as far as we know and that we can.
Yes, I'm not saying that we are unique. I'm simply stating to the best of my knowledge that there is no evidence for other conscious life. I hope there is and I hope they're peaceful, obviously two important characteristics. But we're just saying we haven't seen anything yet.
But you think that we take our existence here for granted? Yeah, I think there are threats to it.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So. I just think we should not assume that civilization is robust. And if you look at the history of civilizations, the rise and fall of the ancient Egyptians, the ancient Sumerians, Rome, you know, there's. Throughout the world there have been rise and fall of many civilizations. So there's an arc, there's sort of a life, sort of a, a life cycle arc to civilizations just as there is to individual humans.
And I think we just want to make sure that we have civilization go onward and upward. And that's, for example, why I'm concerned about decreasing birth rates and the fact that, for example, Japan had twice as many deaths last year as births. So the, that's. And they're, they're a leading indicator.
It's, this is, can I say, and you've, you've written and talked a lot about this, but can I ask you to pause just for a parenthetical note? Why is that? I mean, the urge to have sex and to procreate is, after breathing and eating, the most basic urge. How has it been subverted?
Well, it's just the, in the past we could rely upon, you know, simple limbic system rewards in order to procreate. But once you have birth control and, you know, abortions and whatnot, now you, now you can still satisfy the limbic instinct, but not procreate. So we don't, we haven't yet evolved to deal with that because this is all fairly recent, you know, last 50 years or so for the birth control. I'm sort of worried that, hey, civilization, if we don't make enough people to at least sustain our numbers, perhaps increase a little bit, then civilization's going to crumble. The old question of like, will civilization end with a bang or a whimper? Well, it's currently trying to end with a whimper in adult diapers.
Which is depressing as hell. The most depressing I mean, seriously. Yeah.
War is less depressing. Yeah.
It really got with a bang.
Yeah. With your shoes on. Not with your dad.
Yeah. Whatever you think of Elon Musk, he's one of the rare figures in this country, maybe around the world, who sticks to the fundamentals. How do we keep the human race going? What's good for humanity and what's bad? Those are the questions our leaders should be discussing. Instead, they're lecturing us about trans rights and systemic racism. So it's refreshing to hear it. If you'd like to hear the entire thing.
The full, uninterrupted interview. Every minute our cameras were on with Elon Musk. That's coming soon. It's going up on Fox Nation tomorrow morning.