Transcript: Elon Musk on DOGE, Optimus, Starlink Smartphones – on All-In Podcast

So how challenging is this versus cybertruck, Model Y, Model X gigafactory, you know. Yeah, the Faberge egg, known as the Model X. Yeah.

ELON MUSK: Right. Yes. Harder than any of those things.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah. Much harder. Significantly. Yeah.

ELON MUSK: Starship. Yes, well, harder than starship.

INTERVIEWER: No, not harder.

ELON MUSK: Starship’s harder.

INTERVIEWER: So somewhere between a Model X and a starship.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: What’s harder, the hardware or the software?

ELON MUSK: Right now we’re struggling with the final design of the hardware. Like I said, it’s really primarily the hand, not to just dismiss the rest of the robot. The rest is also important. But the hands are — the hands inclusive of the forearm are a majority of the engineering difficulty of the entire robot…

Why the Human Form Factor?

INTERVIEWER: Why the human form factor, Elon? You could make something that’s maybe better than a human or maybe simpler than a human to do specific tasks and maybe better than a human to do more things than a human can do. How did you decide to make it just like a human?

ELON MUSK: Well, if you wanted to do all the things that a human can do, it turns out you need a humanoid robot. So if you wanted to do a subset, that’s much easier. But it turns out humans evolved to the shape and capabilities that we have for good reasons. There is like this value to having four fingers and a thumb and even the pinky actually is quite useful. Toes are much more a question mark, but the fingers.

INTERVIEWER: Well also humans have designed the world as well, so we designed it for us. You can make a humanoid robot. It’ll be immediately backwards compatible with what we’ve built the world for.

ELON MUSK: Precisely.

AI Silicon: 40x Improvement with AI5

INTERVIEWER: There’s another part of the robot. So there’s the LLMs, there’s the actuation, the hands, but also there’s the silicon that runs it. And there was dojo. I think you posted on X, AI5 and AI6 and it just seemed like you were incredibly excited about the direction in which the silicon layer was also going. Can you tell us about that and what that is?

ELON MUSK: Yeah, so at Tesla we basically had two different chip programs, one Dojo and one dojo on the training side. And then what we call, you know, AI4, it’s just our inference chip that the AI4 is currently shipping in all vehicles.

And we’re finalizing the design of AI5 which will be an immense jump from AI4 by some metrics. The improvement in AI5 will be 40 times better than AI4. So 40 times. And this is because we work so closely at a very fine grade level on the AI software and the AI hardware. So we know exactly where the limiting factors are. And so effectively the AI hardware and software teams are co designing the chip.

INTERVIEWER: So a 40x improvement in the silicon, I think then as everybody here in the audience experiences it, is that just an almost like an order of magnitude increase in the quality of FSD and the safety that you experience as a Tesla driver and then the quality of the robot?

ELON MUSK: Yeah, to be precise, the 40x is on. If you said like. Compared to the worst limitation on AI4, which is running the Softmax operation, we currently have to run Softmax in around 40 steps in emulation mode, whereas that’ll just be done in a few steps natively in AI5.

AI5 will also be easily handled mixed precision models. So you don’t have. It’ll dynamically handle mixed precision. There’s a bunch of sort of technical stuff that AI5 will do a lot better in terms of nominal sort of raw compute. It’s 8 times more compute, about 9 times more memory, roughly 5 times more memory bandwidth.

But because we’re addressing some core limitations in AI4, you multiply that by that 8x computer improvement by another 5x improvement because of optimization at a very fine grain silicon level of things that are currently suboptimal in AI4, that’s where you get the 40x improvement.

Tesla Software Version 14: A Major Upgrade

ELON MUSK: Now that said, I am confident that the current chips, AI4 chips that are in the cars will achieve self driving safety that is at least 2 to 3 times that of human and maybe even 10x. And the software that will be released for that is coming out over the next few months.

So version 14 will be the biggest upgrade in Tesla software since version 12. We are increasing the parameter count by an order of magnitude. There’s a lot of reinforcement learning that’s been used. Like you can think of AI sort of as a way of compressing reality. And some of those compression steps, we were too lossy and we addressed the lossiness in the compression steps.

So these are all software updates that’ll go out. So just over the air updates, your car is going to feel like it is sentient by the end of the year.

Starlink Direct-to-Phone Connectivity

INTERVIEWER: It feels that way already, to be honest. I saw in the trades that you spent about $17 billion on some spectrum and that. So some couch change to enable your satellites and the Starlink network to connect directly with phones. What will that look like in a year or two? Are we going to drop our Verizon account and just expand our Starlink account? We’re kind of hoping because Verizon kind of sucks.

ELON MUSK: How many of you want a Starlink phone?

INTERVIEWER: Who wants a Starlink phone? Is it technically possible? I know you can’t see it, but it’s everywhere.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. All right, cool. So this is kind of a long term thing it will allow SpaceX to deliver high bandwidth connectivity directly from the satellites to the phones. But there are hardware changes that need to happen in the phones so that since these frequencies are not supported in current phones, the chipset has to be modified to add these frequencies and that probably is a two year time frame.

So the phones that are able to use the spectrum that was acquired probably start shipping in around two years. And then we also need to deploy the satellites that are going to communicate on those frequencies. So in parallel with building the satellites and working with the handset makers to add these frequencies to the phones, and then the satellites and the phones will then handshake very well to achieve high bandwidth connectivity.

But the net effect is that you should be able to watch videos anywhere on your phone.

INTERVIEWER: Wow.

ELON MUSK: And it’s going to be crazy. Do these frequencies, would they work indoors, inside buildings like the phone currently does?

INTERVIEWER: Ok. And so will you be able to have.

Starlink Global Connectivity Vision

ELON MUSK: Basically if you’re in a building with a thick metal roof, then no. But the same types of normal homes, yes.

INTERVIEWER: Elon, is your vision for this, that instead of having an AT&T account and then roaming when you’re in the UK or you’re in India, it’s just we could have one direct deal with Starlink. It works all over the world eventually, not today, but at some point. Is that the end goal, that basically we don’t need a regional carrier, we have a global carrier and that would be you?

ELON MUSK: That would be one of the options. To be clear, we’re not going to put the other carriers out of business. They’re still going to be around because they own a lot of spectrum. But yes, you should be able to have a Starlink like you have an AT&T or T-Mobile, Verizon or whatever. You could have an account with Starlink that works with your Starlink antenna at home, free Wi-Fi as well as on your phone. And yeah, it would be a comprehensive solution for high bandwidth at home and for high bandwidth direct to cell.

INTERVIEWER: Could you buy some carriers to have more spectrum? Maybe you could buy Verizon.

ELON MUSK: Not out of the question. I suppose that may happen.

Starship Development and Commercial Readiness

INTERVIEWER: Let’s talk about Starship. You just had a really, what appeared to be a phenomenal launch. How close is it to being predictable and ready to go in a commercial setting?

ELON MUSK: I think we will recover the ship next year. We’ve got one more launch of the Starlink version 2 stack. There’s only one booster and ship left that’s in the version two design. And then thereafter it’s version three, which is a gigantic upgrade because that’s got Raptor 3. And pretty much everything changes on the rocket with version 3.

So version 3 might have some initial growing pains because it’s such a radical redesign, but it’s capable of over 100 tons to orbit, fully reusable. And I think unless we have some very major setbacks, SpaceX will demonstrate full reusability next year, catching both the booster and the ship and being able to deliver over 100 tons to a useful orbit.

INTERVIEWER: What does the best rocket in the world do now in terms of tonnage to space?

ELON MUSK: Well, in terms of commercial rockets, the Falcon Heavy, which we’ll do with side booster reuse, we’ll do about 40 tons.

INTERVIEWER: This is five times bigger.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, well, two and a half times bigger. But Starship will be full reuse, full reusability.

INTERVIEWER: Got it.

ELON MUSK: Okay, so everything comes back.

Rapid Recovery from Launch Failures

INTERVIEWER: Elon, after the explosion that happened with the failed launch, there was a lot of…

ELON MUSK: Which one?

INTERVIEWER: Sorry?

ELON MUSK: Which failed launch?

INTERVIEWER: Oh, the more recent one. The more recent with the Starship.

ELON MUSK: The big boom here.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, the big boom on the base and there was a lot of proclamations that there’s going to be environmental and FAA and all these other sorts. The recovery back to the launch pad again was incredibly fast. How did you get back so fast? Not just technically and work wise, but just regulatory clearance wise, because they said there were going to be all these questions and reviews and so on. How did you guys manage that?

ELON MUSK: Well, there were a lot of questions and reviews. We got through them all. And credit to the SpaceX team. They worked incredibly hard and they got the next ship and booster tested and on the pad and flown. And huge credit to the SpaceX team. Very proud of them for doing such a job, a great job recovering.

I mean, creating a fully reusable orbital rocket is one of the hardest engineering problems ever. Certainly a candidate for most difficult engineering project ever. It’s on the podium at least. So that’s been the goal of SpaceX from the beginning, from 2002. And here we are 23 years later. So it’s a long journey and with a super talented team – by far, I think the most talented group of rocket engineers that has ever been assembled. And finally next year I think we’ll be able to achieve full reusability.

Technical Challenges for Full Reusability

INTERVIEWER: Elon, what are the big technical blockers that you’re focused on there between now and that full reusability? Are there some showstoppers where you’re just literally obsessing over trying to figure out still, or is it more about getting through a laundry list of your learnings and just integrating it into the next launch?

ELON MUSK: Well, for full reusability of the ship, there’s still a lot of work that remains on the heat shield. So no one’s ever made a fully reusable orbital heat shield – the shuttle heat shield had to go through nine months of repair after every flight. Right. So no one has ever made a fully reusable orbital heat shield.

INTERVIEWER: And is that a material science problem or is that an engineering problem or both?

ELON MUSK: Yeah, I mean, it’s a material science engineering problem. So it’s… But we really are looking at the fundamental physics here again, physics first principles and trying to figure out how do we make something that is, you know, it can withstand the heat, is very light, doesn’t transmit the heat to the primary structure and all tiles stay on, they don’t crack.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

ELON MUSK: And then as you ascend, if you hit some rain, the tiles don’t dissolve in rain. There’s a lot of different issues and they really need to know that these tiles are working. You can’t go through this laborious inspection. So it really needs to be these tens of thousands of tiles all work and don’t need to be refurbished or checked one by one. That was the case with the shuttle.

Grok and xAI Development

INTERVIEWER: Can we maybe switch now? I mean, you talked about Tesla. Then you go to SpaceX. Now I’d like to ask you some questions about Grok and xAI. You want to just give us an update? I think you talked about where the next gen model is and you said something incredible. I still don’t think people really understand it, which is, you know, there’s going to be a next training run where you expect, you know, not to start from the common web and common crawl where you expected an enormous amount of synthetic data. Just tell us about how the evolution of Grok is going and this innovation and why it’s so important.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, so we’re running a lot of, using a lot of inference compute and reasoning to look at all of the source data, which is really the corpus of human knowledge, and then thinking about each piece of information and then adding what’s missing and correcting mistakes and removing falsehoods from the training data.

So it’s like if you take the Wikipedia as an example, but this really applies to books, PDFs, websites, every form of information. Grok is using heavy amounts of inference compute to look at, as an example a Wikipedia page and say what is true, partially true or false or missing in this page. Now rewrite the page to correct the… Remove the falsehoods, correct the half truths and add the missing context.

INTERVIEWER: Elon, by the way, could you just publish that? Could we create like a Grokipedia? I mean that would be great.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, especially for our bio pages, which are a disaster.

ELON MUSK: Wikipedia is so biased and it’s a constant war. You know, if something gets corrected five minutes later, there’ll be an army of people trying to… I mean it’s become hyper partisan and there’s political activists all over it. So if you do fix, for example, Wikipedia as a source of truth, it’d be great to publish that just so the world has it.

INTERVIEWER: All right, I’ll talk about that. Talk to the team about that. Grokpedia or whatever. Here’s the Grokpedia version. Be interesting and then just have it out there for… In terms of training Grok 5, you’re scaling up your supercluster in Colossus in Memphis. Could you give us an update on that? And then also as part of that, where are we in the scaling laws?

AI Scaling Laws and Future Intelligence

INTERVIEWER: If you scale a bigger cluster, do you get a more powerful AI model? Is there a point of diminishing returns or how much more compute? If you throw twice as much compute at it, do you get a 10% better model? Do you get 100% better model? Is it log linear? How much more juice is there left in scaling hardware, do you think?

ELON MUSK: I think there’s a natural logarithmic function associated with the amount of compute. So then for argument’s sake, 10x more compute will double the intelligence. Maybe that’s… That might be a rough rule of thumb, but you know, that still means that, you know, you go from 100 IQ to 200 IQ still pretty big deal.

And I think we’ll see intelligence continue to scale all the way up to where most of the power of the sun is harnessed for compute and then ultimately most of the power of the galaxy, sort of Kardashev 2 to Kardashev 3 scale compute.

So I guess once you think about artificial intelligence not as sort of this destination that you reach, but really as part of the overall escalation of intelligence that we are aware of, you know, human intelligence has also scaled as you have… As the population has increased and we’ve been able to store more and more information. Human intelligence has scaled.

Now human… Because of population declines and low growth rate, human intelligence is somewhat plateauing and will actually decline. And my guess is that I think that we might have AI smarter than any single human at anything as soon as next year. And then probably within 5… say 20, 30, probably AI is smarter than the sum of all humans.

The Decline of Human Intelligence and Birth Rates

INTERVIEWER: Do you think humans are on the decline because the AI is evolving? Do you think there’s this evolution of the ecosystem on Earth that’s underway that we don’t really understand the structure of what’s going on?

ELON MUSK: Yeah, maybe we implicitly know that it’s coming. I mean, I hope the birth rates turn around. I’m a big proponent of increased birth rate, obviously.

INTERVIEWER: Well, you’re doing anything about it or no?

ELON MUSK: Yeah, I’m trying to set a good example.

INTERVIEWER: You know, we had a big conversation at this conference we didn’t expect. Which is suicidal empathy. The west, this declining birth rate. I noticed you’ve been pretty active about it. And open borders. And open borders, like “let the invaders in.” Could all three of those be the same thing?

The West’s Suicidal Tendencies

ELON MUSK: It seems like there’s a number of symptoms of the west being suicidal. The most obvious one being the birth rate is not at replacement level. So obviously, if that continues indefinitely, then the west will literally not reproduce enough to replace itself.

But there’s other things, too. There’s the fact that the borders were totally opened to the point where Western culture, the social fabrics, started to come apart. And you see this especially in Europe, where the indigenous cultures of the UK or France or Germany are starting to potentially be taken over by cultures of people who are brought in and aren’t assimilating.

You have crime where we have this case on social media right now, this young woman, Irina, who’s just killed in a senseless way on a subway, which is horrific enough in and of itself. But then in addition to that, the elite media just, for whatever reason, just refused to cover it, like it didn’t exist. So you have this issue of crime that’s not being addressed or even acknowledged.

INTERVIEWER: And no acknowledgement of this. It’s almost like we’re trying to deny the reality of the spiral.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, so you have all these data points that seem to suggest that the west is suicidal or doesn’t seem to want to defend itself or propagate itself. Look, I think everyone in this room thinks that life is awesome, right?

INTERVIEWER: Pretty great. It’s worth living.

ELON MUSK: Yeah. And when Alex Karp was here earlier today, defending the west, that got some of the loudest applause at the conference.

INTERVIEWER: So I guess we probably don’t really understand what’s going on. What’s your take, Elon? Because you know, what’s your take on the suicide of the West?

ELON MUSK: Yeah, I’m very worried about it. You know, I think there’s… She said that the actions of the west are indistinguishable from suicide. But it’s… Look, at least in America there’s generally a sense of optimism. But when’s the last time you talked to someone from Europe who lives in Europe who’s optimistic?

INTERVIEWER: Not for a while. Decades.

The Philosophy of Curiosity and Human Expansion

ELON MUSK: It’s rare. So I think unless people have a sense of optimism and purpose about the future, suicide might be just what happens. Having a child is an act of optimism about the future. So if you’re not optimistic, I think we need to maybe give people a sense of optimism and excitement about the future and a belief that the future will be better than the past and they’ll be more interested in having kids.

INTERVIEWER: Did religion play a role in the past, Elon, to kind of placate and make folks feel that way when they want?

ELON MUSK: Yeah, I think so. Nature abhors vacuum. And if you take away religion, then I think you actually get something in its place which is actually worse than what was there before. I mean it’s destructive. Basically, you get the woke mind virus filling the hole that religion used to have, taking the place of religion. You get these dystopian de facto religions that are very self destructive.

So I think perhaps some sort of revival of religion or at least what we need is some coherent philosophy that people can get excited about. I mean, for me it’s a philosophy of curiosity. I’m curious about the nature of the universe and I want to go out there and I want humanity to be out there exploring the stars, maybe meeting alien civilizations. Maybe in some cases we see the ruins of a long dead alien civilization, but they were never very strong for 10 million years.

The kind of stuff that you see in Star Trek in a non dystopian sci fi book or movie or show. And so I have a philosophy of curiosity. I just want to know what’s going on. And in order to know what’s going on, we must have and increase in the scope and scale of consciousness, we must expand as consciousness. We must grow humanity and we must extend humanity in order to comprehend, to understand the universe or even what questions we should ask about the answer that is the universe.

Douglas Adams book “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” is actually a deep book on philosophy disguised as humor. And the point he was trying to make in that book was that the questions are really the hard part. The answer is universe. The answer is everything you see around you. But what are the questions that we don’t know to ask.

INTERVIEWER: Now?

ELON MUSK: Some of the questions I guess I do know, I’d like to know, is the standard model of physics correct about the origins of the universe? Are we actually 13.8 billion years old? How does the universe end? Does it end in a heat death or in some other way? We’re in a black hole. We might be.

INTERVIEWER: Elon, can you talk about the whole…

ELON MUSK: Sort of simulation question? Are we a simulation? Maybe.

INTERVIEWER: Where do you think we find the answer first? In AI or in the stars? Because you’re pursuing both, obviously.

The Wonder of Discovery

ELON MUSK: Yeah. I don’t know if I hope more people can get behind a philosophy of curiosity, because I think it’s very exciting and inherently optimistic because there’s this amazing sense of wonder about the nature of the universe. And when you uncover some secrets to the universe, that’s amazing. And you’re a whole world of understanding has opened up.

I mean, we used to not even know where all the continents were. It used to be the map would be, there’d be dragons. What we know is that when they sailed in that direction, they didn’t come back. I mean, the moon base, that’s all they knew.

INTERVIEWER: I kind of feel the moon base or just going to the moon for real this time would be a big step in the right direction. You still have the moon planned? What’s the status of that? Is that still on the agenda?

ELON MUSK: I think we want to try to reach new heights as a civilization.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

ELON MUSK: So I think it’s fine to go to the moon, but we should go to the moon in order to establish a lunar base. A lunar research base.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

Mars: The Key to Human Survival

ELON MUSK: I mean, there are parts of the moon that are perhaps older than parts of Earth. And we might understand more about the nature of the universe. If we had a science space on the moon, that would be very cool. And then we also want to go beyond the moon to Mars and build a self sustaining city on Mars.

I do think that there is a fork in the road of Human destiny where if we can establish a self sustaining city on Mars. With the key test being if the resupply shifts from Earth stop coming for any reason, does Mars continue to prosper? Or does it die out at the point at which Mars is able to prosper and grow on its own?

The probable lifespan of consciousness is dramatically greater because we are no longer dependent on everything going right on Earth. There’s always some possibility of self annihilation on Earth with World War three or super virus or a meteor that destroyed the dinosaurs. We know from the fossil record that there have been many mass extinction events.

So the question that I’m always wondering about is will the civilizational arc continue to ascend such that we can make Mars self sustaining before the civilizational arc descends? Because the window of opportunity to make life multi planetary exists now for the first time in the four and a half billion year history of Earth.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, Elon, let’s assume that we get there and you’re there. You know, you’d be the elder statesman, you’d have the moral authority of Mars. How do you run Mars?

The Timeline for Mars Self-Sufficiency

ELON MUSK: But this point that I think I want to just emphasize again that it’s more important than the form of governance on Mars or who’s there. In the early days what really matters is that Mars is self sustaining. That we are truly a multi planet species and such that we’ve achieved planetary redundancy.

So that if something, and obviously we should do everything possible to make sure life on Earth is great. But there’s always some risk of an annihilation event on Earth. Self annihilation or some natural disaster. And so the probable lifespan of consciousness increases dramatically as soon as we are multi planet species. With the key test being can Mars survive if the resupply ships stop coming.

So getting the first missions to Mars are not that important. What matters is can you get sufficient tonnage to Mars such that Mars can prosper on its own. And that means it has to have all of the ingredients of civilization. It’s not just that you need to build for example a chip factory on Mars or ship fab on Mars. But you need the ability.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have a sense of the time scale? Let’s assume starship is at a state starting in 2026 and there’s going to be a bunch of testing. Obviously there’s going to be a bunch of early testing. We only have certain launch windows. So there’s a bunch of time constraints. Is this a 50 year thing in your mind? Is it 150 year thing? Is it something that is for our generation or is it our children’s generation? Where do you see that point? If it’s optimally possible, things go and break our way.

ELON MUSK: I think it can be done in 30 years, provided there’s an exponential increase in the tonnage to Mars with each successive Mars transfer windows, which is every two years. So every two years the planets align and you can transfer to Mars.

So I think in roughly 15, but maybe as few as 10. But 10 to 15 Mars transfer windows. If you’re seeing exponential increases in the tonnage to Mars with each Mars transfer window, then it should be possible to make Mars self sustaining in about, roughly 25 years. Amazing. That’s incredible.

INTERVIEWER: All right, ladies and gentlemen, Elon Musk. We’ll see you when we’re back in town. We miss you. See you in person next time. Thank you, brother.

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