‘Tesla AI Is Actually Very Advanced:’ Elon Musk on AI, China, Twitter and More | WSJ

slightly different from extraterrestrial, but do you think you'll live to see Mars? I hope I like seeing the first humans on Mars, but I think. It will take me some

more

time to get it self-sufficient, so it will be at least 20 years from the first visit before I can sustain myself. By my guess, it may be 40 or 50. And that's assuming you

actually

do it right, so it's tough , but I think it's important to improve the survivability of civilization and who's going to pay for that, I mean, it's your investors. You're going to put up the money to do that, are you going to expect the government to fund that?

Where does that money come from? Because, as you say, you can make a profit with Starlink, you can make a profit with launching satellites for other people and space tourism, but I mean it's a harder return, isn't it? Yes, I think I think in the long term the value will be incredibly high. It would simply be beyond the planning horizon of most people or most investors. So, I mean, obviously, yeah, yeah. There's a thriving city on Mars and there's a lot of interplanetary commerce and SpaceX is the main provider of that, it would be immensely valuable, so, but you know, the only thing is that being this self-sufficient, you know, Colony. and um, I think we, I think we generally operate on too much of an assumption that civilization is solid and nothing could really bring it down, a sentiment that has been common throughout history among empires shortly before they called it that and that's it.

You know. I have to say you know there's a bit of late Empire Vibes going on right now um uh yeah you sure are um yeah um uh it's AI something that in your opinion either accelerates the risk of that or increases the risk of that. that. with that result, I think so, I mean, we could definitely make a city on Mars self-sufficient without AI or without some kind of AGI, which is usually artificial general intelligence or super intelligence that I have, so I think that's not the case. . necessary for anything we are doing, but it is happening and happening

very

quickly, so there is a risk that

advanced

AI will eliminate or limit the growth of the humanities.

I was thinking rather the opposite: it increases the chances of the planet plant being self-introduced. implodes and those things become reality, I mean, how worried are you about these developments right now that accelerate your bad scenario here? Well, I mean the development of a kind of artificial digital superintelligence, uh, it's

very

much a double-edged sword, so it's if you have a genie that can grant you anything, it can also do anything, that necessarily presents a danger. and I hope that the first uses of AI will be, or certainly the first government uses of AI, will be weapons technology, so just having

more

advanced

weapons in battle if you come back that can react faster than any human, that's really what AI will be capable of.

I mean future wars between advanced countries or at least countries that have significant drone capability will be much more. Drone Wars, so I want to go back to AI because this is a big thing and I would like to talk about it in more detail, but I want to go back to the present from a long way in the future. you just hired a new CEO, uh, Linda Yacarino, an advertising veteran, um, on Twitter, you normally focus on hiring engineers, you know, Linda is a very different person, can you quickly tell us about your courtship, how you feel Was it?

Well, um, we had conversations. For several months, just in relation to advertising, and then Linda felt that it would be very useful for advertisers to see me in person, so she invited me to a conference in Miami, which was very useful and she met with several. from advertisers personally to assure their acquaintances that Twitter is a good place to advertise and, in general, that hate speech is

actually

rejected and that the quality of the system, especially with respect to scams and spam, is dramatically better than it used to be um we've gotten rid at this point of over 90 percent of the scams and scams the scams and spam on Twitter should be pretty rare at this point in the UCS camp um so we've also launched um, sort of, just to be clear when you say you've gotten rid of 90 of the scams, is that the same as Bots or are they scams in general and Bots are a different animal here they were?

It normally uses Bots for scanning, but it hasn't eliminated Bots by 90 percent. No, I think so, I actually think it's okay, yeah, yeah, I think we have yeah, maybe over 19. Now she's said that at least um it's now. It is much more difficult to operate a platform on Twitter and make it produce any advantage. Such a dramatic improvement on Bots. A dramatic improvement and the ability to detect sort of test armies, which is a little bit different. That's where you have to say, "Oh, you." I know, a hundred people in a warehouse in a low-wage country, each of whom is sitting at a desk with 100 phones, so you have 10,000 real people and then they will act together to address a particular issue or make something happen.

It seems very popular when it is not and we have been able to defeat almost all of them, we believe that very few of them are still capable of operating, so the quality of the system has improved a lot, okay? So if you said that to Linda you're still going to say what you think whatever the commercial impact of that is and she's accepted that, is she happy that you've fallen in line? uh yeah, she's fine, and as her CEO, do you have any say in moderation or is she your responsibility? Do you do that well together?

The general principle is that we were here close to the law, so for any given country we will try to adhere as low as possible. Our law is very between countries and we can't just. fight the law in another country because they will just isolate us, so the general principle is to do everything possible to allow free and open communications between people, as long as they are not like I said, breaking, she is aligned on that. that plan, yeah, that approach, um, yeah, there's something important that's like that and that obviously doesn't mean that advertisers should be forced to appear next to any content, so we've also developed adjacency controls that ensure that, if what you're advertising is like Disney Disney, for example, is a big advertiser, it doesn't use advertising for a children's movie, you know, it won't want the close content to be family-friendly, that's totally understandable, so, then, it's not So. advertisers have to appear next to content they don't agree with and can some people say they can't be a little erratic with their tweets or at least tweet a wide range of content?

Does anyone say I don't want to be next to Elon Musk? It's something that happened on the platform. I've never heard that yet, um, but uh, um, and did Linda come up with that? What did you tweet and was that something that could affect advertisers? Did she ask you about that? In fact, she did it at the conference we did in Miami, so our speech is Paramount. Well, I wanted to ask you a little bit. On your view of Twitter as a community and as a conversation, you've talked about your desire to maximize unregretted time, could you explain what that means and how that's measured?

Yeah, previously Twitter was mostly uh focused on this number called uh they called mdow monetizable daily active users um, but the problem is when you look closely, a bunch of those users didn't even go to Twitter, they went to um uh , they would see a notification on their phone about a tweet, but they wouldn't actually click on the site, so what really matters is the seconds of screen time of the actual user, um, so that's the figure we track in this moment and is based on the screen time you reported to us. uh uh iOS Android and the browser, so it would have to be the time the app is in the foreground, it's the most rigorous way to evaluate this, so when you say no regrets, sorry, continue exactly. so in terms of subgrade, it's a little bit harder to measure, but we can certainly gather it anecdotally, i.e. if you spent half an hour on Twitter yesterday, what percentage of the percentage of that time do you regret journaling? the feedback button has been very positive, uh, they find the information useful, entertaining, fun, um, so it seems like we're headed in the right direction, as far as I can tell.

I'm certainly open to any criticism of the room, well, let me. let me ask you a question about that, which is, you know, you recently tweeted about George Soros, you said, um, let me go back, well, let me get the words straight because I'm kind of interested in what you think about this, he wants to erode the same fabric. of civilization Soros hates humanity, which obviously generated a lot of responses on Twitter from both sides, a lot of different points of view, is that irreparable moment, irreparable moment when that debate that you created fits into that category, does it?

Do you think it's okay? I mean, I said. like the source reminds me of Magneto, you know, well, you know you went a little further, but again, without getting into Soros' tweet, you know you're obviously a big figure on Twitter and you're setting a tone and a name. I'm just curious to know if that kind of debate that's going on fits the definition that you're trying to create in that New Town Square. Well, I think the important thing is that look what I say it's not uh is what I would say um you know it's kind of like a city square.

I am not going to mitigate what I say because that would be inhibiting your freedom of expression, that does not mean that you have to agree with what I say to imply that if someone says the opposite, that is, they will not receive support in Twitter, is that the point is to have a set of deviant points of view and freedom of expression is only relevant if it is a speech from a speech by someone you don't like and who says something you don't like is allowed, if so you have freedom of speech, otherwise you don't, and for those who would advocate for censorship, I would say it is if you are successful at it.

It's only a matter of time before the censorship turns against you. I agree, I mean you can, that's your definition of free speech that you said, but I'm curious to know, on the unrejectable part, what, what, what kind of conversation are you attempting? achieve and if that's something that's acceptable, but maybe not where you want the broader conversation to go well. I mean, I made it clear that you know some of my concerns about Taurus are that he has funded a lot of small but influential races. the country especially with the district attorneys um and we find that, for example, the alien uh and the San Francisco district attorney competes uh uh with the chess board and um the guy I always, I always want to call him Gaston from Beauty and the Beast driving um and and Basically, it's him, of course, a large number of elected ASP members who are very tolerant of crime and often refuse to prosecute, so you were basically trying to make a deeper point with that short yeah , can I move on? quickly to um because I don't want to go too far down that rabbit hole because that debate has developed a little bit on Twitter is um, you know, you're back close to profitability now Twitter's not quite there, but we, we, we .

It's not like you know when I first found it closed. I'd say it's analogous to being teleported onto a plane that's sinking into the ground with its engines on fire. The controls don't work. So it's comforting, to say the least. Now we have to do. a pretty tough bus cutting company uh healthy but we are at this point we are training for if we are lucky we could be casually positive next month but it remains to be seen and staffing is the level we now you want. or are you going to start picking it up again from this, it's gone from I think 8,000 to about 1,500 or something, that's very correct, yeah, I think there is, you know, there is, definitely, we're going to start adding people to the company. um and we've started adding a number of people to the company um and um, but there's still a lot of changes to be made so I think 1500 is probably a reasonable number and this shows what you can do um in a big tech company in In terms of cost reduction, I mean, when you look at other big technology companies in Silicon Valley, would you say, based on your experience, that there is room for much more significant changes in them as well?

Yeah, I think Twitter is maybe kind of an outlier is that there were a lot of people doing things that didn't seem to have much value, and I think that's true, probably in most Silicon Valley companies, maybe not in to the extent that it was a Twitter, but it's still like that, there is a potential for significant cuts, I think that outside of companies without affecting their productivity, in fact, increasing their productivity, so you know, in any company there are people who help to move things forward and people that Like I tried to slam on the brakes and Twitter was in a situation where you had a meeting of 10 people you know and one person with an accelerator and nine nine with a set of brakes, so no.children, it is very important to have children. to continue civilization um and I think sometimes it's seen as, you know, children are seen as an imposition on the world.

I don't think that's the case at all or that people sometimes think there are too many people in the world. That is certainly not the case. You can fit all the humans on Earth in one apartment in New York City. You know it would be uncomfortable, but just to give you an idea of ​​the cross-sectional area of ​​the Earth that is human. It's very small, it just seems big if you're in a big city, but for the vast majority of the earth, if you're given the task from the frontal plane to drop a bowling ball and you have to hit someone who if you would have missed , I almost never hit anyone, so what is it that you rarely walk over a person?

On a plane, you fly from Los Angeles to New York, the vast areas of land with no one, so anyway I think In general, we want it to be socially encouraged to have children. I think companies should certainly support employees who have children. I think in terms of government incentives, there should be some tax breaks for having children that you know or have. It's just not a financial burden to have children and it's always worth keeping in mind, autonomy aside, if someone doesn't have children, what you're really asking is for someone else's children to take care of you when you're old and whatnot.

That doesn't seem quite right, you know, because that's the world before they're forced to eliminate automation, is that someone else, the kids are going to have to take care of you when you're old and, you know. so I think we have to solve this birth rate problem one way or another anyway or civilization will shrink a bit to nothing. Isn't it that when AI comes in it will do all the work for us so that we can handle a potentially lower population or what you're talking about, I think there will be robot nannies that will be very confident, so that will help