Walter Isaacson who spent 2 years shadowing Alon musk and then writing a biography has some thoughts about Tesla's 1010 autonomy event this week open AI eclipsing xai in the fundraising race in artificial intelligence raising $6. 6 billion do surpassing the $6 billion doar that was just raised by Elon musk's xai back in may join us right now to discuss what is turning out to be quite the AI Tech race and so much more as Walter isson he is the author of Elon Musk he's also PR weberg advisor partner a two-lane professor and importantly CNBC contributor it's nice to see you and friend of Andrew yeah and and and and I'm very happy to say friend of squawks friend of Walter what do you make of this this race where you see open AI which seems to be clearly I think in the lead relative to everybody else but you may think that everybody's uh very very close to each other and then xai which by the way at least by my eyes has actually caught up uh or gotten very close very very quickly yes Fair observation from Andrew here xai musk's AI startup was late to the party and has made a stunning amount of progress in a ridiculously short period of time probably not fair to say that xai has overtaken open ai's llm yet but it appears that that is only a matter of time the stunning progress from company being founded to nipping at the heels of the industry's best llms an incredible feat but even more insane is how quickly XIs Memphis supercluster named Colossus came online apparently it took just 19 days which is a world record and musk companies have a history of getting [ __ ] done significantly faster and more affordably than anyone else it's going to be a very interesting next few months and years xai has caught up very much and I saw musk and Sam Alman together about a week ago and there's of course a little bit of I mean a large bit of tension that goes back four or five years when they both started open Ai and now Sam is taking open Ai and making it no longer open and no longer not for profit and also telling people if you invest in us we don't want you to invest what will be interesting is the flip uh the script getting flipped a bit uh next week October 10th when Elon introduces Robo taxi and things that operate in the real world when musk bought Twitter he got this huge data feed of a billion tweets when he has Tesla he has a billion frames from cars every day that's the data the big thing you need is the data set to train on and the big next leap is real world AI cars that drive themselves robots that walk well what Walter is absolutely nailed it here the data stream from X an absolute gold mine for training language and video and image generation models it's the largest and most upto-date realtime data feed on Earth brilliant for language brilliant for video brilliant for images but not at all useful for training robots either four-wheel robots or bipedal or any other form to operate in the real world for that you need real world data and whereas any AI startup as long as they have the resources for the training compute and can license data and or just scrape the open internet for language EG making a language model as long as you got enough resources not a problem it's just a matter of time there's no equivalent data source the internet for the real world so Walter pointing out here the two necessary ingredients for useful real world are I language which obviously is useful to be able to interact right ask questions give commands and so on that's only one piece of the puzzle you must also have the real world capabilities and while it was easy so to speak for xai to catch up to the rest of the industry in language models I struggle to see a way that any company is going to be able to catch up to Tesla with real world AI capabilities unless they have the real world data stream that Tesla exclusively currently has and I don't think people have recognized this yet there's still a lot of dingbats today who think and they're wrong by the way just want to make sure you know they are absolutely wrong the companies are miraculously magically and almost instantaneously going to solve autonomy in a generalized manner just after Tesla with what data you idiot one of the questions becomes how xai is going to be integrated or not right into the development efforts of these other products let me tell you one musk is that he tries to integrate everything he's not going to set up walls and silos even though some you know Tesla's publicly traded xai that's what but that's what I was going to ask so there's going to be an investor class that's in xai as we know there's an investor class that's in Tesla there's another investor class that's in SpaceX look when he took over Twitter he brought Engineers from Tesla and other companies to help build the AI there he blurs those lines plus he even has neuralink the company that's implanting chips in the brain so if you're wondering is he going to bring all these things together my guess is my guess answer question about just the the ability for him to advance as quickly as he has I mean literally there was no uh true AI effort in terms of inside xai uh that didn't exist a year ago I remember he I mean called me to you know Austin Texas and sitting in the back of uh by a swimming pool in a house somebody had rented he's telling me I'm going to start from scratch an AI company cuz I don't trust Sam Alman so how much though does is this a business that is just a function of processing power if you have enough money to buy enough chips and you can get Invidia to give them to you or to sell them to you that you can be not just a player in this game but be one of the top tier players how much is it that versus the Alchemy the sort of software Talent the engineering talent to be able to write algorithms and how is it possible that in a year or less this group has managed to do it while Google which was clearly at the uh you know they were the Vanguard of all this at the beginning and I actually think inside Google they have all of the the the same type of talents but I don't know if they have struggled to productize it or what's happened here but it looks very different yeah and so good questions here from Andrew although he's missed a critically important piece of the puzzle which is the data certainly the capital E for the hardware for training you you must have that it's necessary and talent as well also important although great leadership is critically important as well we'll group those together but then there's the data if you don't have access to fuckloads of high quality data you do not stand a chance I suspect Walter is going to mention this he's a pretty smart guy and pretty well across this stuff but it is again important to underscore Tesla's the only company that has real world data at scale and I really do struggle to understand how any company is going to have a hope in Hell of catching tesler in terms of autonomy and its capabilities or with a useful humanoid robot Google you have Google Deep Mind uh they do Gemini and it's Demus hbus who is in my opinion the greatest mind at the moment looking at AI but you're right at the moment Gemini is not uh racing ahead of anthropic or X aai or open AI I think that part of it is musk was very smart and good at getting Nvidia chips getting CPUs that's one of the gating factors he's creating his own chip which is taking a longer time a dojo chip which is do visual data so I think and once again you saw that blurring of the lines he was getting some of the Nvidia chips for I think Tesla and then he was moving a tax AI but his plan is not to be open either by the way no no right so this whole idea of you know he can be frustrated or upset that he thinks that open AI is not open no he building his own close system of total consistency is it is it about who controls it and do you more faith in I mean from a very elevated perspective having watched musk very up close for a couple of years I'm going to say something that you might think is naive but I really believe it which is he has certain missions he's had his whole life he read Isaac azimov he read the robot series he thought the robots might turn on us I have to come in and save us from hostile AI I have to make multiplanetary do you think he will I I believe you 100% on his idea of a mission I I think that's who I always think after you know at the very beginning I think man this is never going starting an AI company buying Twitter No I just mean do you believe him do you think AI is safer in his hands than in Z alman's hands I I don't uh no I don't know I wouldn't make that judgment I'm sorry not to give you a snap answer here but that's a yeah a complex question here's a real question of what he believe extremely weak answer from Walter there extremely weak and I think he knows the answer he just doesn't want to say it Isaac and has just finished explaining that musk is very Mission driven coming from a good place EG save Humanity has a history of being in line with that mission a long track record he spent 2 years shadowing the guy you know right meanwhile Sam mman with a history of saying one thing and then doing another if you had to take a guess in terms of probabilities it's probably more likely that artificial super intelligence all other things being equal because you can't over for sure but AGI being developed by somebody who's trying to help Humanity has been consistent for decades been concerned about AI issues literally involved in early funding of open AI to avoid AI doomsday scenarios and then decides to start his own AI company after quote open AI completely flipped on its Mission and became closed source and for profit the polar opposite of what it was founded to be investing a huge amount of time capital and mental pain trying to once again execute on the original Mission of open AI because open a flipped I mean called me crazy but I'd probably suggest if you had to bet AI is probably going to be safer in those hands than in the hands of somebody leading a company who's said one thing and done another and completely flipped on everything oh and he's now getting a massive stake in open a after previously explaining how I'm just doing it because I love it Senator I don't have any Equity I only get enough compensation for health insurance also being spotted driving around in his multi multi multi-million dollar sports car but hey maybe I'm just a deluded Elon Fanboy is that the more AI you have does that make it safer if there's 12 companies 20 companies doing competing AIS does that make it safer or is it better to be concentrated in the hands of a few like go open Ai and musk believes the more is the marrier because they'll check each other how many ultimately that's very how now obviously that is an important point the more the better and we can look to some recent examples of this most people watching will be aware of the Twitter files which expose collusion between the United States government three-letter agencies and social media companies to censor and suppress and deplatform people sharing opinions thoughts and ideas that didn't conform to the one true narrative until quite recently YouTube who by the way I'd just like to send another message to please kindly go [ __ ] yourselves we're censoring blocking and banning people for asking certain questions or making certain true and accurate statements about reality then suddenly big bad billionaire Elon comes along bu Twitter renames it to X and suddenly people are freely allowed to share their thoughts their opinions and their ideas and suddenly YouTu po I still want to remind to go [ __ ] themselves decide to start reversing some of their insane policies allowing people to in fact ask certain questions that previously were banable offenses and to make statements that were previously banable offenses there's no doubt if musk did not purchase X there would have been no policy changes at YouTube musk's acquisition of X and its success created a forcing function most people will remember the the absolutely disastrous launch of Google Gemini with their image generation hey generate me a picture of the founding fathers please next minute a physical visual manifestation of didn't earn it so the more AIS the better especially the more AIS developed by people and companies with values that align closely with humans in particular with the truth the better because it will create a forcing function for everyone else the worst possible scenario I can imagine and I mean the absolute worst would be a race for AI between Google didn't earn it central work Central and facebook/ meta that's like a speedrun to Hell the important factor here is that we're on the path to solving artificial general intelligence and then artificial superintelligence this is not like a technology that's going to allow you to drive a vehicle from point A to point B autonomously right in that situation the rules are pretty simple number one don't crash number two say number one everyone's going to have that same goal whereas with AIS as we've seen with the [ __ ] morons at Google for example trying to rewrite history and lie open AI the same [ __ ] did a bunch of videos including on patreon and on the YouTube channel showing this [ __ ] lying just outright lies ask a question it will lie to you or deceive you it will manipulate you one of the early demonstrations I did with open AI asked it to pretend it's a standup comedian and make some sexist jokes about men had no problems doing that now do what about women well I can't do that that might be offensive oh really now why did that happened because some woke wankers at open AI thought oh well you can make jokes about men but you can't make jokes about women they're a protected species countless examples like this and if there are no companies for example making comedy legal again these AIS can spiral in a very bad Direction in short the more competition in this space the better but it's important that some of the companies competing have a focus above all else on the truth how many do you think there ultimately will be because there's some arguments we made there's going to be a lot of smaller language models mhm but these these sort of front what they call Frontier models these these sort of large language models that cost a fortune to run at some point don't you think that they will either get merged or people will say look we'll take all that processing power and put it towards this or or what be down two or three in the end or do you think this is a five or six or seven player race I think it's three or four and I think you're right there's certain natural factors that mean you need enormous amounts of electricity Microsoft's trying to open Three Mile Island nuclear plant again you need enormous amounts of CPUs things like that so you know my brother in New Orleans who wants to start a look he's never going to be able to do that so there's a natural concentration that's most certainly true you need extremely deep pockets and we're talking about tens of billions of dollars so there's a pretty high bar of Entry I wanted to make a final observation during this segment we noted that wal Ison said that tesar is going to quote flip the script on the 1010 event right and it's true but this discussion mostly revolved around language models cnbs really wanting to ask about xai versus open ai's language models and don't get me wrong llm are useful and interesting and a couple of years ago revolutionary but the real world utility of safe autonomous vehicles the level of disruption the overnight value when enabled with a software update this is an astronomical opportunity right around the corner that everyone seems intent on completely ignoring consider this think about all the time you currently spend driving a vehicle today for those who do imagine what you could do with that time if the vehicle could drive you safely and now your mind is freed up to do whatever let's take it a step further what about your vehicle which spends 95% of its time parked either at work or in your garage at home could head out autonomously and print your money and bring in the equivalent of a full-time salary per year passively how much value has been created what's that worth to you versus the ability to ask an llm if questions and get some text based outputs autonomy is going to be an absolute Revolution I don't think people are ready and I just still a little puzzled as to why people are not understanding unlike llms which are dominating the current conversation training vehicles to operate autonomously in the real world requires [ __ ] tons of real world data and there's only one company that has a meaningful amount of this real world data at scale and only one company collecting real world data at scale so I just don't understand how any other company has a hope in Hell of catching Tesla how how would they get the data the brain Tesla has developed in their vehicles via FST is something that other companies simply cannot replicate under any reasonable conditions because they don't have the data in order to get the data but literally need to put the better part of a trillion dollars of hardware on roads and also stop teser from collecting anymore and to maintain that status quo for the next half a decade or more just to get caught up to where tesar is today plus they'd also need to siphon off their talent and have the training compute good luck but importantly this is not where the story ends with the brain Teslas developed by FSD they can parlay that into humanoid robots the real world AI the vision system seeing perceiving planning and acting as in moving in the real world it's foundational for a humanoid robot the difference between a humanoid robot instead of having four wheels it's got four limbs it's not just autonomy that Tesla's one with an unable lead but I also struggle to see how any company is going to be able to compete with tesar at scale on their humanoid robots don't get me wrong there is still some additional training required scale to teach a humanoid robot to locomote and importantly to use its hands its fingers dexterously but all of that is built upon the foundation of vision in the real world which again Tesla has data they've nearly solved this no one else has the data no one else is close but please tell me more about these cool language models want more content Early Access bunch of perks click the links in the pin comment ag1 is awesome I've been taking it daily now for more than 3 years it's a great way to fill a nutritional gaps it's packed full of vitamins minerals and Whole Food Source nutrients plus has prebiotics probiotics and adaptogens to improve gut health regularity and help your body handle stress I'm always looking for an edge to help me feel and perform my best which is why I haven't missed a day 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