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Podcast

Elon Musk — "In 36 Months, the Cheapest Place to Put AI Will Be Space”

Dwarkesh Podcast

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  • Use Real Robots To Close Sim-To-Real Gap
    • Train robots via large-scale real-world self-play cohorts plus massive simulation to close the sim-to-real gap.
    • Build tens of thousands of robots in an academy to iterate real tasks while running millions in sim for scale. Transcript: Elon Musk Actually, you’re highlighting an important limitation and difference between cars. It’s like we do have, we’ll soon have like 10 million cars on the road. And so it’s hard to duplicate that massive training flywheel. For the robot, what we’re going to need to do is build a lot of robots and put them in kind of like an Optimus Academy so they can do self-play in reality. So we’re actually pulling that out. So we’re going to have at least 10,000 Optimus robots, maybe 20,000 or 30,000 that are doing self-play and testing different tasks. And then Tesla has quite a good reality generator, like a physics-accurate reality generator. We made this for the cars, we’ll do the same thing for the robots. And actually have done that for the robots. So you have a few tens of thousands of humanoid robots doing different tasks. And then you can do millions of simulated robots in the simulated world. (Time 1:23:11)
  • Robots Require New Supply Chains, Then S-Curves
    • Optimus production will follow an S-curve; initial ramp is slow due to custom parts and nonexistent supply chains.
    • Elon expects Optimus Gen3 can reach ~1M units/year once manufacturing scale is achieved. Transcript: Elon Musk I think you’d want to go to Optimus 4 before you went to 10 million units a year. Other Host / Co-interviewer Okay, but you can do a million a year at Optimus 3. Elon Musk Yeah. I mean, it’s very hard to spool at manufacturing. So like manufacturing, like the output per unit time is always follows an S curve. So it starts off agonizingly slow, then it has this sort of exponential increase, then linear, then a logarithmic outcome until you eventually asymptote at some number. But Optimus initial production, it’s going to be a stretched out S-curve because so much of what goes into Optimus is brand new. There’s not an existing supply chain. As I mentioned, the actuators, electronics, everything in the Optimus robot is designed for physics first principles. It’s not taken from a catalog. These are custom designed everything, literally everything. (Time 1:26:20)
  • Fix Permits, Tariffs, And Refining To Secure Supply
    • Remove permitting and tariff bottlenecks that block rapid electricity and solar scaling when national strategic power is needed.
    • Prioritize domestic refining and fabs where foreign concentration threatens supply security. Transcript: Elon Musk Up solar in the US. Well, just electricity output in the US needs to scale up. Right. Other Host / Co-interviewer It can’t without good power sources. You just need to get it somehow. Yeah. Where I was going with this is, if you were in charge, if you were setting all the policies, what else would you change? So you’d change the solar tariffs as well. Yeah. Elon Musk I would say anything that is a limiting factor for electricity needs to be addressed provided it’s not very bad for the environment. Other Host / Co-interviewer So presumably some permitting reforms and stuff as well will be in there. Yeah. Elon Musk There’s a fair bit of permitting reforms that are happening. A lot of permitting is state-based, so but anything better. But this administration is good at removing permitting roadblocks. And I’m not saying all tariffs are bad. I’m just saying- Solar tariffs. (Time 1:30:40)
  • Steel Over Carbon For Fast Iteration
    • Switching Starship from carbon composite to stainless steel reduced cost, improved toughness, and leveraged cryogenic strength gains.
    • The material choice traded idealized mass savings for manufacturability and faster iteration. Transcript: Elon Musk Originally, yeah, we were going to make Starship out of carbon fiber. And carbon fiber is pretty expensive. You can generally, when you do volume production, you can get any given thing to start to approach its material cost. The problem with carbon fibers is that material cost is still very high. So it’s about 50 times, particularly if you go for a high-strength specialized carbon fiber that can handle cryogenic oxygen, it’s like roughly 50 times the cost of steel. And at least in theory it would be lighter. People generally think of steel as being heavy and carbon fiber as being light. And for room temperature applications, you know, like say, more or less room temperature applications like a Formula One car, static aerostructure or any kind of aerostructure really, You’re going to probably be better off with carbon fiber. Now, the problem is that we were trying to make this enormous rocket out of carbon fiber, and our progress was extremely slow. Other Host / Co-interviewer And it had been picked in the first place just because it’s light? Elon Musk Yes. At first glance, most people would think that the choice for making something light would be carbon fiber. Now the thing is that when you make something very enormous out of carbon fiber and then you try to have the carbon fiber be efficiently cured, meaning not room temperature cured, because Sometimes you’ve got like 50 plies of carbon fiber. And carbon fiber is really carbon string and glue. And in order to have high strength, you need an autoclave, so something that’s essentially a high-pressure oven. And if you have something that’s a gigantic, the oven’s got to be bigger than the rock one. So we’re trying to make an autoclave that’s bigger than any autoclave that’s ever existed, or do room temperature cure, which takes a long time and has issues. But the final issue is that we’re just making very slow progress with carbon fiber. Dwarkesh Patel I think the meta question is why it had to be you who made that decision. There’s many engineers on your team. Yeah, how did the team not arrive at steel? Elon Musk Yeah, exactly. Dwarkesh Patel This is part of a broader question of understanding your comparative advantage at your companies. Elon Musk Because we were making very slow progress with carbon fiber, I was like, okay, we’ve got to try something else. Now for the Falcon 9, the primary airframe is made of aluminum lithium, which is a very, very good strength weight. Actually, it has about the same, maybe better strength weight for its application than carbon fiber. But aluminum and lithium is very difficult to work with. In order to weld it, you have to do something called friction-stir welding, where you join the metal without it entering the liquid base. So it’s kind of wild that you could do that. But with this particular type of welding, you can do that. But it’s very difficult to like say, let’s say you want to make a modification or attach something to aluminum lithium. You now have to use mechanical attachment with seals. You can’t weld it on. And so I wanted to avoid using aluminum lithium for the primary structure for Starship. And there was this very special grade of carbon fiber that had very good mass properties. So with rockets, you’re really trying to maximize the percentage of the rocket that is propellant, minimize the mass, obviously. But like I said, we’re making very slow progress. And I said, at this rate, we’re never going to get it to Mars. So we’re going to have to think of something else. I didn’t want to use aluminum lithium because of the difficulty of friction still welding, especially that at scale was hard enough at 3.6 meters in diameter, let alone at 9 meters or Above. Then I said, well, what about steel? And so now I had a clue here because some of the early US rockets had used very thin steel. The Atlas rockets had used a steel balloon tank. So it’s not like steel had never been used before. It actually had been used. And when you look at the material properties of stainless steel, especially if it’s been like full-hard, if it’s brain-hardened stainless steel at cryogenic temperature, the strength Weight is actually similar to carbon fiber. So if you look at material properties at room temperature, it looks like the steel is going to be twice as heavy. But if you look at the material properties at cryogenic temperature of full hot steel stainless of particular grades, then you actually get to a similar strength weight as carbon fiber. And in the case of Starship, both the fuel and the oxidizer are cryogenic. So for Falcon 9, the fuel is rocket propellant grade kerosene, basically like a very pure form of jet fuel. But that is roughly room temperature, although we do actually chill it slightly below. We chill it like a beer. Delicious. We do chill it, but it’s not cryogenic. In fact, if we made it cryogenic, it would just turn to wax. But for Starship, it’s liquid methane and liquid oxygen. They are liquid at similar temperatures. So basically, almost the entire primary structure is a cryogenic temperature. So then you’ve got a 300 series stainless that’s strain hardened. Because it’s at almost all things at cryogenic temperature, actually has a similar strength of weight as carbon fiber. It costs 50 times less than raw material and is very easy to work with. You can weld stainless steel outdoors. You could smoke a cigar while welding stainless steel. It’s very resilient. You can modify (Time 1:55:37)
  • Relentlessly Attack The Limiting Factor
    • Drive urgency by repeatedly identifying and removing the current limiting factor until progress accelerates.
    • Set aggressive but achievable deadlines at roughly a 50% success probability to force focus. Transcript: Elon Musk Urgency is going to come from where I was leading the company. So my sense of urgency, I have a maniacal sense of urgency. So that maniacal sense of urgency projects through the rest of the company. Dwarkesh Patel Is it because of consequences? They’re like, Elon said a crazy deadline, but if I don’t get it, I know what happens to me. Is it just you’re able to identify bottlenecks and get rid of them so people can move fast? How do you think about why your companies are able to move fast? Elon Musk Yeah, I’m constantly addressing the limiting factor. So… I mean, on the deadlines front, I mean, I generally actually try to aim for a deadline that I at least think is at the 50th percentile. So it’s not like an impossible deadline, but it’s the most aggressive deadline I can think of that could be achieved with 50% probability, which means that it will be late half the time. There is like a law of geassi’s expansion that applies to schedules. Whatever schedule you have, like if you said we’re going to do this something in like five years, which to me is like infinity time, it will expand to fully available schedule and it will Take five years. There’s a physical limit. Physics will limit how fast you can do certain things. Scaling up manufacturing, there’s a rate at which you can move the atoms and scale manufacturing. That’s why you can’t instantly make a million or something, a million years a year or something. You’ve got to design the manufacturing line. You could bring it up. You could ride the S-curve of production. So, yeah, I guess, what can I say that’s actually helpful to people? I think generally, a maniacal sense of urgency is a very big deal. And you want to have an aggressive schedule, and you want to figure out what the limiting factor is at any point in time and help the team address that limiting factor. (Time 2:11:40)
  • Attempts To Reduce Federal Fraud
    • Elon recounts trying to cut government fraud and encountering political resistance, sympathetic narratives, and entrenched systems.
    • He describes simple fixes like mandatory appropriation codes that could save tens to hundreds of billions annually. Transcript: Elon Musk Well, I think like waste and food are not good things to have, you know. I was actually pretty worried about, I guess, I mean, I think in the absence of AI and robotics, we’re actually totally screwed because the national debt is piling up like crazy. Now, our interest payments, the interest payments to national debt exceed the military budget, which is a trillion dollars. So, over a trillion dollars just in interest payments. You know, that was like, I was like, okay, pretty concerned about that. Maybe if I spend some time, we can slow down the bankruptcy of the United States and give us enough time for the AI and robots to help solve the national debt. It’s the only thing that could solve the national debt. We are 1,000% to go bankrupt as a country and fail as a country without AI and robots. Nothing else will solve the national debt. And so we’d like to, well, we just need, we need enough time to get, build the AI and robots to, and not go bankrupt before then. (Time 2:20:28)
  • Government Use Is The Greatest AI Risk
    • Elon warns the biggest danger from AI/robotics misuse is government deployment to suppress populations.
    • He argues limited government and constitutional checks are the best guardrails against authoritarian misuse. Transcript: Elon Musk I think probably the biggest danger of AI, or maybe the biggest danger of AI and robotics going wrong is government. Interesting. You know, the way to think, like people who are opposed to corporations or worried about corporations should really worry about the most about government because government is just A corporation in the limit. It’s a government. It is. Government is just the biggest corporation with a monopoly on violence. So I always find it like a strange dichotomy where people would think corporations are bad, but the government is good when the government is simply the biggest and worst corporation. But people have that dichotomy. They somehow think at the same time that government can be good, but corporations bad. And this is not true. Corporations have better morality than the government. So I actually think that is the thing to be worried about. It’s like if the government could potentially use AI and robotics to suppress the population. (Time 2:34:01)