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“Does this timeframe seem like something that I would find remotely acceptable?” Musk asked. “Obviously not. If a timeline is long, it’s wrong.”
He stopped at the Apple Store in Union Square and spent $2,000 to buy out the entire stock of AirTags so the servers could be tracked on their journey, and
Elon recommended that they lock the trucks and track them. So James sent someone to Home Depot to buy big padlocks, and they sent the combination codes on a spreadsheet to Portland so the trucks could be opened there.
All very exciting and inspiring, right? An example of Musk’s bold and scrappy approach! But as with all things Musk, it was, alas, not that simple. It was also an example of his recklessness, his impatience with pushback, and the way he intimidated people.
His most valuable lieutenants at Tesla and SpaceX had learned ways to deflect his bad ideas and drip-feed him unwelcome information,
Musk, who liked to manage by decreeing what metrics should be paramount,
the number of miles that cars with Tesla Full Self-Driving were able to travel without a human intervening. “I want the latest data on miles per intervention to be the starting slide at each of our meetings,” he decreed. “If we’re training AI, what do we optimize? The answer is higher miles between interventions.” He told them to make it like a video game where they could see their score every day. “Video games without a score are boring, so it will be motivating to watch each day as the miles per intervention increases.”
Whenever they would see a type of intervention recurring—such as drivers grabbing the wheel during a lane change or a merge or a turn into a complex intersection—they would work with both the rules and the neural network planner to make a fix.
how the FSD software they were using had been trained on millions of video clips collected from the cameras on customers’ cars.
the neural network did not work well until it had been trained on at least a million video clips, and it started getting really good after one-and-a-half million clips.
Within a few weeks in the spring of 2023, millions of tech-aware and then ordinary folks noticed that a transformation was happening with head-snapping speed that would change the nature of work, learning, creativity, and the tasks of daily life.
When Google cofounder Larry Page dismissed his concerns, calling him a “specist” for favoring the human species over other forms of intelligence, it destroyed their friendship. Musk tried to prevent Page and Google from purchasing DeepMind, the company formed by AI pioneer Demis Hassabis. When that failed, he formed a competing lab, a nonprofit called OpenAI, with Sam Altman in 2015.
Musk worried that these chatbots and AI systems, especially in the hands of Microsoft and Google, could become politically indoctrinated,
he worried that chatbots could be trained to flood Twitter with disinformation, biased reporting, and financial scams.
He called AI “the most powerful tool that mankind has ever created,” and then lamented that it was “now in the hands of a ruthless corporate monopoly.”
“He’s a jerk,” Altman told Kara Swisher. “He has a style that is not a style that I’d want to have for myself. But I think he does really care, and he is feeling very stressed about what the future’s going to look like for humanity.”
160 billion frames per day of video that Tesla received and processed from the cameras on its cars. This data was different from the text-based documents that informed chatbots. It was video data of humans navigating in real-world situations. It could help create AI for physical robots, not just text-generating chatbots.
The holy grail of artificial general intelligence was building machines that could operate like humans in physical spaces,
Tesla and Twitter together could provide the data sets and the processing capability for both approaches: teaching machines to navigate in physical space and to answer questions in natural language.
The amount of human intelligence, he noted, was leveling off, because people were not having enough children. Meanwhile, the amount of computer intelligence was going up exponentially, like Moore’s Law on steroids. At some point, biological brainpower would be dwarfed by digital brainpower.
The term “singularity” was used by the mathematician John von Neumann and the sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge to describe the moment when artificial intelligence could forge ahead on its own at an uncontrollable pace and leave
“With AI coming, I’m sort of wondering whether it’s worth spending that much time thinking about Twitter. Sure, I could probably make it the biggest financial institution in the world. But I have only so many brain cycles and hours in the day. I mean, it’s not like I need to be richer or something.”
Getting to Mars is now far more pressing.” He paused again, then added, “Also, I need to focus on making AI safe. That’s why I’m starting an AI company.”
chatbot competitor to OpenAI’s GPT series, one that used algorithms and trained on data sets that would assure its political neutrality.
It would care about understanding the universe, and that would probably lead it to want to preserve humanity, because we are an interesting part of the universe.”
“Answer to The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.”
The engineers briefed him on all the safety reviews and requirements they had endured. “Getting the license was existentially soul-sucking,” Juncosa said. Shana Diez and Jake McKenzie provided details. “My fucking brain is hurting,” Musk said, holding his head. “I’m trying to figure out how we get humanity to Mars with all this bullshit.”
“This is how civilizations decline. They quit taking risks. And when they quit taking risks, their arteries harden. Every year there are more referees and fewer doers.” That’s why America could no longer build things like high-speed rail or rockets that go to the moon. “When you’ve had success for too long, you lose the desire to take risks.”
Driven since childhood by demons and heroic compulsions, he stoked the controversies by making inflammatory political pronouncements and picking unnecessary fights. Completely possessed at times, he regularly propelled himself to the Kármán line of craziness, the blurry border that separates vision from hallucination. His life had too few flame diverters.
One can admire a person’s good traits and decry the bad ones. But it’s also important to understand how the strands are woven together, sometimes tightly.
Even the best people, he wrote, are “molded out of faults.”
would a restrained Musk accomplish as much as a Musk unbound? Is being unfiltered and untethered integral to who he
