Elon Musk: The Economy Will Be 10x the Size in 10 Years

Yeah. You look like you're in great shape.

Is any, like, sort of youth serum things going on or what?

Yeah. Well, you'll

To some degree. Mean, like, don't know if we wanted everyone to live well or whatever, but I think health span and not you know, having an extended period of senescence where where you're just drooling on yourself sounds like a good idea. We we want to avoid that.

it Late.

Yes. So SpaceX is in a quiet period. I can't actually tell things that would cause the problems.

Yeah. I think we've been in recursive improvement for a while here. Say if you mean by, like, recursive self improvement without a human in the loop? Is that what you mean?

Mean humans are gradually getting less and less in the loop on the recursive self improvement. So every successive model built by the one before it. So that is happening to a large degree, it's not yet fully automated. It may be there end of this year, but not later than next year.

We're in the hard takeoff.

Mean look at I mean at this point I go to sleep, there's some massive AI breakthrough and when I wake up, there's another one. Yes. Yeah. It's hard to keep track, honestly. So Yeah. It's a bit of a head spinner.

Yeah. You know, Grok's doing pretty well and in some metrics, by some metrics, it's the best. For example, it's the best at predicting things, which is arguably the best metric for intelligence. The new growth for 04/2020 is really, really good. We're currently behind on coding. The reason I was a bit late for this was that I was just in a giant sort of all hands on coding, just going through all of the things that need to happen to essentially catch up and exceed our competitors on coding, which I think we'll do. I feel we should probably get there by the middle of this year. And then I think people don't quite understand just how much intelligence there will be or just how far it will exceed human intelligence to a degree that is impossible to fully understand. But you could certainly imagine a situation where we let's say a million times more energy is harnessed than all of Earth's current electricity usage, that would still only be roughly a millionth of the sun's energy output. So essentially, if you increase the Earth's economy by a factor of $1,000,000 it's still roughly a trillion since we're a trillionth of the Sun's energy, if you increase The U. S. Economy in terms of electricity usage by roughly $1,000,000 you will be roughly one millionth only of the Sun's energy harnessed. But what an economy or an intelligence using a million times more electricity than all of civilization think about or look like or do? It's going to be something pretty magnificent. The challenge will be even vaguely appreciating in that level of intelligence. But it's safe to say it will solve everything you can possibly think of.

Long term, you've been, know, certainly one of them. And I do enjoy your unrelenting optimism.

Hope. Hope. Yeah, exactly. You've taken to heart monetizing hope, which is pretty funny. Keeping up with that one.

I'd probably roasting you and saying you monetize. But hey, you've been better than monetizing misery, suppose. Yes.

When you have AI AI and robots are gonna increase the, like, economic output or or by by so many orders of magnitude, we we cannot possibly comprehend it.

Yes. Not even on this planet, in the solar system.

For sure. Because your best case outcome for earth for intelligence is roughly one billionth of the sun's energy. That's your best case outcome if generate Intercept intelligence only on it, right? Yes, yes. Because roughly half a billionth of the sun's energy hits Earth and that's the vast majority of energy that's out there. But that would be access. So really the intelligence in the solar system will be many orders of magnitude greater than the intelligence on earth itself.

It's hard to predict the path exactly, especially if it because often things are kind of an S curve or a series of S curves where it starts off slow, grows exponentially, hits linear zone and then goes logarithmic. That generally has been what I've seen with breakthroughs in AI. AI, for example, is there'll be some breakthrough, it'll do have an S curve, and then it looks like it's just going to go to infinity, but then you hit logarithmic returns until there's another breakthrough. Progress in AI is just a series of overlapping S curves or connected S curves.

Okay. This is going to sound pretty crazy.

There's a of receptive audience to wild prognostications.

I'd say the economy is 10 times its current size in ten years. Greater than. Okay. I'm something.

I feel like that's a 10x in roughly ten years, I feel, is actually a fairly comfortable prediction with there's obviously if there's like World War III or something that could put a kink in those plans or those expectations. But in the absence of World War III, if current trends continue, I would say the economy taxes in ten years.

And we'll have a base on the moon.

And we'll have people on Mars.

I think so. In ten years, I think we'll have a mass driver on the moon in ten years.

Well, we're in the final stages of completion of Optimus three, which is really going to be by far the most advanced robot in the world. Nothing's even close. In fact, I haven't even seen any demos of robots that are as good as Optimus three, frankly. Maybe they're out there or they're secret or something, I don't know. But You know, I'd to make sure I'm saying things that are reasonably public as well, of course.

Yeah. Okay. This is pretty public and accurate. Yes. Yes. I think we'll start production on OPTIMAS three this summer, very slow at first. Like this sort of classic S curve ramp of manufacturing units versus time. And then probably reach high volume production around summer next year. And then we'll have After the S4 design complete next year. I try to release a new robot design every year and an improved robot design every year.

It's 10,000,000 square feet round numbers.

That'll be that'll that'll be quite that that's gonna be a a a factory design too. Like, it's not different from other factories.

We still have a lot of humans building things. Tesla direct employees who are building things or like basically people in the factory are either building or managing people who are building is roughly 100,000. So we have a lot of people. Tesla total headcount is around 150,000 of which two thirds are in the factory in one form or another. And then our suppliers, there's probably maybe 1,000,000 or 2,000,000 people in our suppliers type of thing. So it's a lot of people. We do expect that is that the output per person at Tesla becomes very, very high. We're not planning any like layoffs or reductions in personnel. In fact, we will increase our headcount. But the output per human at Tesla is going to get nutty high. We were together,

Yeah. I mean, to be clear, I don't think we should be sort of complacent. We do need to be careful because the future is a range of possible outcomes and they're not all great. But at this point, I do agree with you that it's likely to be great. It's probably 80% likely, maybe more likely to be great. And do think we'll have universal income. We're basically just issuing money to people and really just because the output of goods and services will so far exceed the money supply that effectively you have deflation. Deflation is just the ratio of the outputs of goods and services to the money supply. So that's, so if the rate of growth of goods and services far exceeds the rate of growth of the money supply, which I predict will happen, then you will have deflation.

Yeah. Basically, AI and robots are going to make so much stuff and provide so many services that they will actually run out of things to do for the humans. They'll just run out of things to do for the humans. And then they, well, you know, there's only so much that humans can even express that they want. So you go back to my example of like, if you go a million times greater than the earth's economy, you've long since saturated all human desire. If you go a thousand times more than our current economy, a thousand times, you probably have already saturated human anything people can think of that they want.

Yeah, I think money will stop being relevant at some point in the future.

It's probably something like an in banks culture sort of future. And I think the AI down the road will really not use human currency. It will just care about power and mass, wattage and tonnage.

Yeah. Pretty much. Yeah. All this stuff, it's really just truly just represents like some percentage ownership in companies that I've And it's not like sitting in the bank account. It's just literally I own a percentage of the companies. The companies are doing lots of useful things. The value of the company grows. I own a percentage of the companies and that sums up to that number which seems high.

You're welcome.

I mean it's called the singularity for a reason, know, which is that it's hard to predict what happens in the singularity. Mean, Grock's logo is the singularity. I love it. It's a beautiful logo behind you, by the way. It's gorgeous. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. It's sort of the light the halo around a black hole is the mass and light are falling in type of thing. It's hard to know what happens inside the singularity. But it's going to be very interesting. Like we're going to live in the future will be very entertaining. Of that I'm confident. Yes. And think also like AI and robotics is also the only way we're going to solve our budget deficit frankly and not just go bankrupt as a country. So you've had an influence on me in that I'm like, I've just decided to be more optimistic. It's like we just should be more optimistic.

And I wasn't an optimist, but I was like maybe dwelling a little too much on the negative stuff.

and a realist a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. You don't wanna be complacent or just assume everything's gonna go well, but try to make it go well. But I mean, will be some pretty amazing things that happen. So if you've got humanoid robots that are, that have very high dexterity and are incredibly smart, it means that everyone on earth will have access to better medical care than than the richest person on earth, which by the way, would say like, you know, if I'm allegedly the rich person, I think actually sovereigns are richer than me, by the way. But it's like, you know, I had to have like a neck surgery three times because the first two ones were done wrong. You know, like I'm like, what that? Know, so and I like my back still hurts a little bit. I'm like, can AI please solve back pain? That would be a huge one. And I think it will. Know, back pain sucks. I think that's maybe sometimes why do people get grumpy when they get older? Because of back pain. It's like if your back hurts all the time and you can't sleep well, you're going be grumpy.

That would be amazing.

Honestly, average happiness level for humans would just go upstream tremendously if you just saw back pain because it's not a question of if you'll get back pain, it's when you'll get back pain.

inviting It's not a good design.

you have like

you I understand you can get MRI and CAT scans and everything, but what do you do with that?

Serum or something? Yeah. Exactly. Know,

Yeah. I think it would be really cool to have a pet miniature woolly mammoth. That would be pretty epic.

That'd be that'd be adorable. Little things are just running around trumpeting away, and it's like, look at that. This is a be a great little pet. Amazing. Can somebody please do Jurassic Park in real life? I'd definitely go, even if there was some risk of death. That'd be super cool. I think if anybody's going

Yeah. Well, Jurassic World, whatever. That would be great.