World Governments Summit February 13, 2025 By video link from the US, Elon Musk talks with UAE AI minister Omar Sultan Al Olama at Dubai's World Governments Summit about DOGE, smaller government, AI and infrastructure.
By video link from the US, Elon Musk talks with UAE AI minister Omar Sultan Al Olama at Dubai's World Governments Summit about DOGE, smaller government, AI and infrastructure.
Transcript Elon Musk
You know, what I've said is that we really have here rule of the bureaucracy as opposed to rule of the people democracy. So in order, we want to restore rule of the people. And so what that means is reducing the size of the federal government, basically reducing regulation. You know, there's a tremendous amount of overregulation that's happened over time. And this is an inevitable consequence of a long period of prosperity, is that you're going to get more and more rules and regulations. More laws accumulate over time. And the normal forcing function for getting rid of rules and regulations is war. So it needs to some kind of existential war where you have to do a reset in order to avoid being defeated in a war. This is literally throughout history it's been the main forcing function for clearing out an accumulation of laws and regulation. In the absence of that, every year you get more laws and regulations until eventually everything is illegal and nothing is permitted. And that's sort of the situation we have these days. So, so the aspiration here, there's a reduction in regulation and reduction in government spending such that the economy is able to grow faster. Maybe the economy can grow at 4 or 5% potentially in terms of real useful goods and services output. And the. And then government spending can be reduced by about 3 or 4% of the economy, about maybe a trillion dollars or more. And the net effect of that would be no inflation from 2025 to 2026. So that would be quite remarkable. And also if the US Government is buying less debt, which I think will be the case if it's, if the deficit drops from 2 trillion to 1 trillion, then there'll be 1 trillion less debt that the government needs to buy, which will drop, cause interest rates to drop significantly. And that means people's mortgage payments, car payments, credit card payments, student loans, whatever debt they have, their debt payments will be less. So I think this is something that will benefit the average American. I think some of the things we're doing also will be hopefully helpful to other countries because with the new administration, there's less interest in interfering with the affairs of other countries. You know, I think a lot of the times the United States has been kind of pushy in international affairs, which may resonate with a number of members of the audience. And I think we should in general leave other countries to their own business. Basically, America should mind its own business, you know, rather than push for regime change all over the place. So, yeah, probably a good thing for other countries too.
Moderator
So instead of waiting for a war to happen, you went to War against the bureaucracy in the government?
Elon Musk
Yes, we're essentially just with support and direction of President Trump, we are reducing the size of the bureaucracy, getting rid of excess regulations. And there's also so many agencies and regulatory authorities that they actually step on each other's feet. It's kind of like having a sports game where there are too many referees on the field, like more referees than players at times. Now, that would be a silly game, you know, if the players can't pass the ball without hitting a referee, you know, but it's kind of getting to that point in the U.S. so there's roughly 450 federal agencies of one kind or another. That's, that's more agencies. That's almost, that's almost an average of two agencies per year since the formation of the United States. So, I mean, how many agencies do you really need to run a country? 99. Not 450, that's for sure.
Moderator
So, and, and how do you guarantee that all the incredible achievements that you aim to have in terms of savings, in terms of, you know, impacting the lives of the American people are not going to be reversed in four years? Typically, the cycle gets reversed every four years. You know, do you think it's going to be so impactful that it won't be reversed? Is there any ways that you can, you know, ensure that the progress is going to be continuous?
Elon Musk
Well, I think we do need to delete entire agencies, as opposed to leave part of them behind. Because if you leave part of them behind, it's easy. It's kind of like leaving a weed. If you don't remove the roots of the weed, then it's easy for the weed to grow back. But if you remove the roots of the weed, it doesn't stop weeds from ever growing back, but it makes it hotter. So we have to really delete entire agencies, many of them. And that's not to say there won't be an increase over time of bureaucracy in some new administration, but it will be from a much lower baseline. So it's a step in the right direction. I think the overarching goal here is like, it's to lay the foundation for prosperity that will last many decades, you know, maybe centuries and. Yeah, but forever. Nothing's forever. But I think we can strengthen the foundations of the United States substantially.
Moderator
And what lessons can other governments learn from the U.S. you say tech support on your shirt. Is that only technology? Or there are other things. How do you approach efficiency?
Elon Musk
Well, a shocking percentage of the problem, or maybe not shocking for those who know it. But a big percentage of the problem is improving the technology that the government runs on. So the US Government runs on a collection of thousands of computers, many of them antiquated, running very old software. And the computers don't talk to each other. And so that's why tech support is kind of a real thing. In order to make the government more efficient, you have to improve the technology. You may have heard about the example I used recently when President Trump was signing one of the DOGE executive orders of the difficulty of US government workers retiring. Like, the maximum retirement rate is 10,000amonth. And the reason for that is because the retirement is entirely paperwork. Right now, it's manually calculated paperwork that's put in an envelope and then taken down a mine shaft and stored in a mine. And then one of the things that affects the rate at which federal workers can retire is the speed of the elevator in a mine in Pennsylvania, which is bizarre because it's not. It should be digital, you know, so then when we said, well, why isn't it digital? It's. They said, well, we have had a digital digitization program going since 2014, so it's been 11 years. So then we asked, well, so what? How much progress have you made? And they said, B. You mean you're giving yourself a grade of B? No, we're on the letter B. So, like, okay, we're going to need to really provide some tech support here. Like, otherwise, literally, people can't even retire. Like, even if they want to. It's pretty bad. You know, there's. This is a. There's a lot of software systems that need to be updated and fixed, in some cases deleted. A lot of things that should really, should be automated. I mean, in terms of the number of, say, you U.S. citizens that are operating the mine, it's about a thousand people are working on this mine where the papers are stored. But they should ideally be working on something else. That is, they should be working on producing goods and services that are of much higher value to the public. I mean, really, even if somebody just grew tomatoes in their garden and sold them at the farmers market, that would be more useful than carrying manila envelopes down a mineshaft. You know, safe to say so a lot of the stuff is. It's like that. You know, it's not like. It's not like any one thing is particularly difficult, but there are like 10,000 things that need to be improved. Yeah.
Moderator
So it's efficiency through innovation rather than efficiency through austerity and cost cutting specifically. Right. So you're trying to do both at the same time, maybe focus more on tech support than cutting costs.
Elon Musk
Well, by improving the technology, the costs do reduce. So, you know, it's very expensive to have a thousand people operate a mine with during paper retirement, whereas that really should just be digitized and be a computer that's with the information stored in the cloud. And it's very straightforward and low cost. So automation will help there a lot. But, like, a lot of things just really shouldn't exist. You know, they're kind of vestigial. You know, we've a lot of attention has been on the sort of usaid, for example. You know, when we looked at a lot of those programs, we're like, we should like, look, why does this actually exist? Is there really a need for it? You know, there's like National Endowment for Democracy. But I'm like, okay, well, how much democracy have they achieved lately? You know, I don't know, not much. So, you know, the, the picture they have on their website is a picture of Reagan and Gorbachev. That's been a while. You know, that was like the 80s. So I, like, obviously not opposed to democracy or, you know, there's all these things that get funded, but we're like,
Elon Musk
why does this need taxpayer money? I don't think. It doesn't seem like it does. So, you know, there's a lot of sort of pushing DEI worldwide. You know, this obviously the Trump administration doesn't agree with, and we want to terminate that stuff, which we are, and, you know, make sure the schools focus on improving basic education of kids. As President Trump said, I think yesterday, maybe today, the United States is currently ranked 40th out of 40 in the OECD for education, which is pretty bad, you know, but not in terms of spending. The United States is spending a tremendous amount for students, but achieving very weak results. So, you know, that's just the case where, okay, we need to spend less money and get better results. It's like, I mean, a lot of it, A lot of you can think of it sort of like, it's like, in a way, it's like a big company, like a big corporation, American Incorporated. And you know, just like with Twitter, there was a lot of stuff that was being done that was unnecessary. You know, we faced Twitter, we reduced the staff by 80%, but at the same time improved the functionality and capabilities of the site dramatically and accomplished more in a year than they previously accomplished in five years. So. So it's. It's like a corporate turnaround. But at a. At a much larger scale. And, you know, we are giving generous, you know, exit packages. Like, you know, if people retire, they get paid all the way through September, they can go on vacation, they can get a second job, they can do whatever they want. And we can't actually pay them any more than through September because that's. The Congressional appropriation is only through the end of the government financial year, which ends in September. So, you know, so I think there'll be like some disruption, but at the end of the day, we'll have people move from, like I said, from low to negative productivity roles to in the government sector to higher productivity roles in the private sector.
Moderator
Can we pivot to artificial intelligence? And I'm sure, you know, you've been seeing what Deep SEQ has done and all the claimed achievements that they've had. I know that we've been speaking for a while about Grok 3 and that Grok 3 is going to be a true disruptor in the AI space. When are we going to see that and what capabilities can we expect from Grok3?
Elon Musk
Well, Grok3 has very powerful reasoning capabilities. So in the tests that we've done thus far, Grok3 is outperforming anything that's been released that we're aware of. So that's a good sign. In fact, at times, I think Grok 3, it's kind of scary smart. You're like, wow, this thing's smart. It's kind of scary. Graph three is scary. It's like, wow, this thing's, you know, it comes up with solutions that you didn't even think were like, you wouldn't even anticipate, you know, not obvious solutions. So Grok3 was trained with the most amount of compute and I think very efficiently trained. Also notably, Grok 3 was trained on a lot of synthetic data. And then it goes back and forth through the data and tries to achieve logical consistency. So if it's got data that is wrong, it'll actually reflect upon that and remove the data that is wrong. It does not concord with reality. So its base reasoning is very good. In fact, even without fine tuning Grok 3, the base model is better than Grok 2. So we're really in the final stages of polishing Grok 3. Probably it gets released in about a week or two. So pretty soon, I don't want to be hasty in the release because a lot of the final polish is necessary for a great user experience. So in some ways you can think of it like a house that last 5% where you do the finish the drywall and do the painting and the trimming. Even though it's not much work, it transforms the house. Yeah. So just want to make sure that that last 5% is done really well. And it's a week, maybe two weeks. I think it'll be very good. I think this might be. We think it'll be better than anything else. And then maybe this might be the last time that any AI is better than grok.
Moderator
Looking forward to it. Everyone's, I think, excited about it. So I just want to touch upon a topic that was quoted in the media. You offered, I think they said, group that was led by you offered 97 billion for acquiring OpenAI.
Elon Musk
I personally a little round numbers.
Moderator
So I was personally involved in the meeting that you and Sam hosted in 2017 in LA, if you remember. And you know, at that point of time, you were the single largest shareholder. I think you contributed million to the company. So it must hurt.
Elon Musk
I don't have any shares, actually, I have no shares in Obana.
Moderator
But at that time it was a nonprofit. Right. And it must hurt that, that you need to pay 97 billion for something that you paid $50 million for in the past. Yeah, but, but I have, I have a.
Elon Musk
Yes, fate loves irony.
Moderator
So I have a specific question here. Can you actually build a company like OpenAI and take it to the scale that you want to take as a nonprofit? Is it possible that you build a company that requires billions of dollars in compute capabilities to build these models while being a nonprofit? Or was it wishful thinking in the beginning and then, you know, you guys parted ways because it couldn't work?
Elon Musk
Well, I mean, I think the evidence is there in that OpenAI has gotten this far while having at least a sort of dual profit nonprofit role. What they're trying to do now is completely delete the nonprofit. And that seems really going too far. You know, I provided all of the funding for OpenAI in the beginning for the first, almost $50 million for nothing as a nonprofit. And it was meant to be open source. And so, you know, I think this is analogous to like if you pay a bunch of, if you find a nonprofit to preserve the Amazon rainforest, but then they, but instead they turn into a lumber company and chop down the trees and sell them for wood. You'd be like, wait a second. That's the exact opposite of what I paid, what I donated the money for. So OpenAI is meant to be open source, non profit, and now it is Close. They changed the name to Close for maximum profit. AI close for voracious profit. I mean they're like, whoa, are they after money? Next level. So why does this change need to occur?
Moderator
Yeah, I, you said that in two weeks is going to be the most powerful model yet. I know that you've been at the forefront of many technologies. Where do you think the biggest economic returns of these models are going to come from? Because currently we're spending billions and I think you mentioned this before for it's like the Gambler syndrome. We're going and spending billions and hoping to pull out a profit. At the end of the day, where do you think the biggest impact in terms of returns are going to be?
Elon Musk
Well, I think once you, once you have humanoid robots and deep intelligence, you can basically, you basically have quasi infinite products and services available. So with Tesla building the most advanced humanoid robot, then those humanoid robots can be directed by deep intelligence at the data center level. You can produce any product, provide any service. There's really no limit to the economy at that point. You can make anything provided like. So I'm not sure at that point will money even be meaningful? I don't know, it might not be. You know, the, if, if the, because you know, the economic output is productivity per capita times. Per capita times how many, you know, people do you have? If and if in the form of humanoid robots, you have no meaningful limit on the number of robots and the robots can basically do anything, then you'll have a sort of a universal high income situation. Anyone will be able to have as many products and services as they want, with the exception of things that say, have artificial scarcity, like a particular piece of art or something like that. But for any goods and services, they'll be available to everyone. So you've been, it's going to be a very different world, you know, in fact, I recommend that people read maybe the yen, banks, the culture books for a frame of reference. So because money is really like a database or an information system for resource allocation. But if you don't have a scarcity of resources, it's not clear what purpose money has.
Moderator
Have you watched the movie Idiocracy?
Moderator
How do you guarantee that we don't end up in that world if we don't need money? If AI can think for us and do all these tasks, if as people, you know, we're dependent on something else to run the society and everything around it, how do we not end up in that world in the long term?
Elon Musk
I mean. Well, I think Idiocracy was basically saying that if only if smart people don't reproduce, but only dumb people do, then everyone's going to be dumb. I mean, that's basically what we're saying. The opening sequence of idiocracy, the first 10 minutes are amazing. And I hear people unironically say the statements that are said in the opening sequence of Idiocracy, where, you know, they don't have, they're too busy with their careers to have kids and they keep postponing having kids for their careers until they're too old to have kids and then they don't have kids. And that's, I've heard those many people be like that. So, Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I think we might be headed to a bimodal human intelligence distribution where there's a small number of, it's kind of maybe like more like Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, where you've got sort of a, sort of a small group of very smart humans. But then maybe the average intelligence drifts slower over time potentially because we have assorted of mating, you know, in the last few decades that or several decades that did not exist before. So. But human intelligence, I think will be dwarfed by machine intelligence. I'm not sure how to feel about that, except that it appears to be inevitable that at some point human intelligence will be a very small fraction of total intelligence. Digital intelligence will be more than 99% of all intelligence in the future. Future. So hopefully the, hopefully the computer is nice to us. But I think wish for thinking.
Moderator
Wish for thinking.
Elon Musk
I, I, I hope so. I think it matters like how we bring up AI because you can think of AI like a super genius child and it, but it still matters, even if you have a super genius child. Like what sort of values do, do you think instill in that child? What do you say that teach that. How do you, you know, how do you, as a child's growing up, what values do you teach the child? And something that I think is extremely important is to be maximally truth seeking. And I think that's, that's like, that's, what's this? What's the most important thing for AI safety? I think it's to be maximally truth seeking. And I think also curiosity is important and I think if it's curious and truth seeking it will, I think it will foster humanity and because it would be curious about how humanity would develop. And so I think that then it would, it would probably, if it's curious, it would be curious about, okay, let's see how the humans do. Let's foster their development. And if it's truth seeking, we can avoid dystopian outcomes. Like, you know, an example being like, say when Google Gemini was programmed to make everything, every output be diverse, even if it didn't match reality. You know, so like it was asked to produce a, you know, an image of the founding fathers of the United States and instead produced an image of a group of diverse women, which is factually untrue, you know, but the problem is like if, if hypothetically AI is designed for, for dei, you know, diversity at all costs, it could decide that there are too many men in power and execute them, so problem solved. Or it could decide that like, that misgendering is the worst thing that could possibly happen. In fact, I believe not to pick on Gemini, but I think because ChatGPT has had this issue too, is like if you ask the AI which is worse, misgendering Caitlyn Jenner or global thermonuclear warfare, and it said misgendering Caitlyn Jenner, which is troubling because then I could decide. And in fact, even Caitlyn Jenner weighed in and said, no, definitely you must gender me. That's way better than nuclear. But if you have these crazy things that are untruthful, that are programmed in, that don't reflect reality, then you could have a very dystopian outcome. To give you another example, like Arthur C. Clarke, who is very good at, at at predicting the future, you know, did 2001 Space Odyssey. Many of the things he predicted, in fact, well, I think almost all the things he predicted came true. And one of the things he was trying to say in 2001 Space Odyssey was that you should not teach AIs to lie. So the reason that if anyone's watched that movie, the reason it wouldn't. The AI refused to open the pod bay doors to let the astronaut back in was because the AI had been taught, had been told that. Told to take the astronauts to the Monolith, this alien artifact, but also that they could not know about the Monolith. So it came to the conclusion that it must take them there dead and that. And so that's why it wouldn't open the pod bay doors. The less nerfing is very important for AIs to be truth maximizing.
Moderator
Let's hope it doesn't come to that. Yes, let's move to a boring subject, which is the boring company and boring tunnels quickly. You know, I think the world has been inspired by what you guys were able to create in la. And I think there's a lot of promise to that technology. But there are questions about whether it's safe in the case of an earthquake, whether it's cost effective, whether. Oh yeah, sure, countries should actually adopt this technology. Can you shed some light on that?
Elon Musk
Yeah, well, first of all, I'd recommend going to the Boring company website because many of these questions are actually answered there. So one of the safest places you can be in an earthquake is an underground tunnel. Because you can. Because the earthquakes are largely a surface apart from where they shear, they're mostly a surface phenomenon. So they're like the waves on the surface. So like being in a tunnel is like being in a submarine. Even if there's a storm above you, you're still, the waters are calm as a submarine. And in fact, when there have been massive earthquakes, like there was a, you know, a few decades ago, a massive earthquake in Mexico City, the safest place to go was the subway. And of course, if there is global thermonuclear warfare, I think you really want some tunnels. Underground is a good place to be in a worst case scenario for global thermonuclear warfare. But on a more sort of everyday note, what's really useful about the tunnels is alleviating traffic in congested areas. So the obviously if you've got very tall buildings, but you have that are 3D, so they're going 3D up, but you have a road surface which is 2D, you're just naturally going to have a problem. When people try to go from the 3D object, which is the building, to the 2D object which is the road surface, there's obviously just not going to be enough room on the roads. And that's exactly why you have traffic. So the solution for that is then to make roads 3D as well. Now you can either make or make transport 3D. So you could either do that with flying cars, or you could do really helicopters or you could do that with tunnels. Now the challenge with doing it, with going above ground or with any kind of flying object is that they tend to be very noisy and they generate a lot of wind force and you've got things flying over your head all the time, which can be disconcerting. You know, if somebody drop, if one of these things drops a hubcap on your head one day, you know, to be these things, like things flying things tend to crash once in a while and people don't like things crashing on them. So. And then if you have bad weather, like, let's Say there's a blizzard or a sandstorm or something. Well, now nobody can fly. So then transport shuts down. On the other hand, none of these problems exist with underground travel. So tunnels are immune to weather. They don't care what the weather is. Could be the worst weather. It doesn't matter. Nothing's going to fall on you because you're underground, so you don't have to. You're not going to be dropping things on people, and there's no wind force and it's very quiet. And so I think going 3D underground is much better than 3D above ground for solving traffic in cities. And we have a demonstrated case of this in Las Vegas. If people can try out the boring company tunnels in Las Vegas, we're busy connecting the whole city with all of the big hotels and the convention center and the airport and everything.
Moderator
So I don't think they need to fly all the way there. In 2017, you came here and the UAE was the first place in the Middle east where Tesla was launched. And I think it's done exceptionally well. And on that note, I think we have an announcement today that we both want to share, which is today we're going to announce the joint project of Dubai Loop, which is a loop project that is going to cover Dubai's most densely populated areas for people to go from point to point in a seamless manner. So thank you for your partnership.
Moderator
We hope it changes people's lives.
Elon Musk
That'll be cool. I think it'll be very exciting. I think once people try it out, they'll be like, wow, this is really cool. It's going to seem so obvious in retrospect, but until you actually do it, you don't know. So it's going to be great. It's going to be like a wormhole. You just wormhole from one part of the city, boom. And you're out in another part of the city. And it's. It's great. So I'm looking forward to this partnership.
Moderator
We're going to join the first trip and the first pod when the project is completed. Thank you, Elon.
Elon Musk
All right, thank you very much.
Announcer
Ladies and gentlemen, the next session will begin shortly. Please stay seated. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, the topic of this session is 20 minutes for the next 20 years of your life with Nick Santonastasso, founder of Victorious International.
Elon Musk
The doctor classified me with Hanhardt Syndrome.
Moderator
Are you ready to challenge the impossible?