Our Optimus robot is the most sophisticated humanoid robot in the world. We're aiming to have several thousand of those built this year. We'll 10x that output next year, maybe up to 100,000 humanoid robots, and then 10x it again the following year.

The cumulative sum of human knowledge has been exhausted in AI training. That happened basically last year. Pretty much any cognitive task that doesn't involve atoms, AI will be able to do within three or four years. The FBI had this portal into Twitter where they could spy on anything and censor anything and had a two-week auto-delete. So we don't even know what they did.

If I might start off with kind of a big overall question, and I'll do some questions, and then we'll get some questions in from the group. You know, I have to say that I've been actually a Tesla owner for many years. Thank you. You're clearly someone of great taste. Well, I will say that I drove from Miami to Fort Lauderdale to meet my brother for dinner about 40 miles, and I did not touch, well, I touched the wheel. Let me tell you that because...

It's the cadre of itself, and you do not need to intervene. It did not need me for this entire ride. It's pretty magical. When you tell people that they've not experienced it, they don't believe you.

Yes, and I didn't believe me either. Because I've been a skeptic about how far it would go, and your latest releases of software are really incredible. Thank you. As a big question, coming in the next decade, what do you think is going to be the greatest advances in technology that will affect people's lives? What should they be expecting to see here from technology in their lives?

Well, I don't want to blow your minds, but AI is going to be big.

I feel confident in that prediction. The funny thing is, if you go back even five years ago, certainly 10 years ago, even 15 years ago, I was saying AI is going to be this massive thing that has deep superintelligence, smarter than the smartest human. People thought I was kidding. There's no way the computer is going to be smarter than the human and be able to do all these complicated things.

The latest AIs are able to pass complicated tests better than most humans. They can pass the medical tests better than 80% of doctors or something. They can diagnose radiography better than most people who've been doing it their whole life.

So that's just accelerating, obviously. If you haven't seen Jensen's talk, it's excellent. It really shows how much AI is advancing. And it's advancing on the hardware front, on the software front, in terms of data. The new sort of thing is synthetic data, because we've actually run out of all the books. You take the entire internet and all books ever written,

And all interesting videos. And you've now exhausted all of the, basically the cumulative sum of human knowledge has been exhausted in AI training. That happened basically last year. And so the only way to then supplement that is with synthetic data, with AI.

It'll sort of write an essay or come up with a thesis, and then it will grade itself and sort of go through this process of self-learning with synthetic data, which is always challenging because how do you know if it hallucinated the answer or it's a real answer? So it's challenging to find the ground truth. But it is pretty wild that AI at this point has run out of all human knowledge to train on. Yeah.

It's just crazy. I know that you're building for Grok the largest AI center on the planet.

We already have, yeah. It's a number issue. Microsoft is planning $80 billion, where I used to work for a while. That's a lot of money by anyone's standards. I did a poll, and we asked, is AI making a difference in your life today? 13% said yes. And they said in five years from now, will AI make a difference in your life? 87% expect in five years it will make a difference. What is it going to do for people? Is it going to put them at work or to work?

AI will do anything you want and even suggest things you never even thought of. So AI really within the next few years will be able to

Any cognitive task. It obviously begs the question, what are we all going to do? Pretty much any cognitive task that doesn't involve atoms, AI will be able to do within, I'd say, max three or four years, maximum. And then another element of it is the robotics. AI can't just be thinking in a data center. It's got to do things. That's where you need the robots.

And you need self-driving cars, which obviously you've experienced. And that rate of improvement is exponential in how good those self-driving cars are. We feel confident in basically being better than human driving in about three months, basically Q2 of this year. We feel confident of having a probability of accident that is better than the average experienced driver.

And then it'll keep going from there. Ultimately, I think it's going to be 10 times safer than a human driver. And then 100 times safer. Like it's to the point where really it just won't crash. So that's happening this year with Tesla. So Tesla, and this is a software update to a car. As you experienced yourself, it's the same car. It got a software update and suddenly it's way smarter at driving.

Well, let me try a few timelines then, because I'm not the youngest guy around. I want to be a better person for as much technology. My standards for what is young get older every year as I get older. I used to build computers and kits, right, when you couldn't buy them yet. And I don't have to do that anymore. So self-driving, some timelines, self-driving cars, certified, government-certified self-driving, you think will be within a year?

Well, I mean, there already are autonomous, you know, in some regions, like Waymo has autonomous vehicles with no one in it, but they're limited to like a few cities in the US. The Tesla solution, which is a much more difficult path to go, but ultimately much more powerful, is a general solution to self-driving. So the Tesla software is just purely AI and vision. It doesn't rely on any expensive sensors, no LIDARs, no radars, or it doesn't even require knowing the area beforehand.

Like, you could have a drive someplace that's never been before and no Tesla's ever been before. It could even be an alien planet. I mean, and the cars still work, still drive. That's this year, you know? And when can I get a phone robot? Well, that's the other element, humanoid robots. I think probably most people, if not everyone, would like to have their own Quistel C3PO R2D2. And I actually think humanoid robots will be the biggest product ever in history by far.

Yeah, it's just wild because you can just say, well, every human is going to want one, most likely. And then there'll be all of industry in terms of making and providing products and services. So you have to say, what's the ratio of humanoid robots to humans? My guess is it's at least three to one, four to one, maybe five to one. So we're talking about 20, 30 billion humanoid robots.

It's not even clear what money means at that point or if there's any meaningful cap on the economy. I think at that point, assuming that things haven't gone awry, in the good AI scenario, I think we won't have universal basic income. We'll have universal high income.

So do you think five years for my first robot? Well, for Tesla, Optimus Robot really is, unless somebody's got something secret we don't know about. Our Optimus Robot is the most sophisticated humanoid robot in the world. It's got a hand that has 22 degrees of freedom. It looks and feels like a human hand. And...

We're aiming to have several thousand of those built this year. Initially, we'll test them out at Tesla factories. But then, assuming things go well, we'll 10x that output next year. So we'll aim to do maybe up to 100,000 humanoid robots next year, and then 10x it again the following year. It's like 500,000 robots in three years. That's a lot. Yeah.

Maybe we should think of these in terms of Roman legions. How many legions of robots will we have? A Roman legion is 5,000. When will we have a colony on Mars? Well, I think we'll be able to send the first uncrewed spacecraft to Mars in two years. So Earth and Mars synchronize every two years.

And so we're at a synchronous point right now. So then the next one will be roughly two years from now. And then there'll be two years from then, there'll be another one. So for the first trip, obviously, we want to make sure that we can land Starship without crashing. We need to prove that we can land Starship on Mars without incrementing the crater gout. And if those land safely, then

Maybe on the next trip, we would send people. And then hopefully that would grow exponentially. So eventually, there will be thousands of starships going to Mars. And it might have this really cool visual, like Battlestar Galactica or something, with all these ships departing altogether with these bright points of light in space. I think it would look really cool.

But I think the goal has to be to get to the point where Mars is self-sustaining. The point at which Mars is self-sustaining is really defined as the point at which if the resupply shifts from Earth stop coming for any reason, that Mars doesn't die out, that Mars can continue to grow. So if there's something that happens on Earth, like let's say there's a World War III or some natural disaster or

Forget us why, but for whatever reason, the resupply ships stopped coming. If Mars can still continue to survive, then the probable lifespan of civilization is dramatically greater. So if you sort of stand back and say, how would you evaluate any civilization? You'd say like, well, is that civilization still stuck on its home planet or are they a multi-planet civilization?

And we don't want to be one of those lame one-planet civilizations. We don't have a respectable outcome here. Even if we don't make it beyond our solar system, we're at least going to get to another planet. Yeah. And finally on my list, brain technology communication. Am I going to see that also? Because right now, this is looking pretty good for me. Yeah. So we've got neural link. We've got three humans with neural links implanted and all working well.

And we've upgraded devices that will have more electrodes, basically higher bandwidth, longer battery life, and everything.

So we expect to hopefully do, I don't know, 20 or 30 patients this year with the upgraded Neuralink devices. And this, our first product is we're trying to enable people who have lost their brain-body connection. So they're a tetraplegic or paraplegic or basically, like you can imagine, like say Stephen Hawking. If Stephen Hawking could communicate as fast or even faster than a normal human, that would be transformational. Yeah. So that's how our first product is.

Being able to read the motor cortex of the brain and say that if you think about moving your hand, it will move the cursor on the screen. And it enables people to control their computer or their phone just by thinking. And then our next part will be blindsight. So even if somebody has lost both eyes or has lost the optic nerve, or if they've been blind from birth, we can interface directly with the visual cortex in the brain and enable them to see.

And we already have that working in monkeys enabling people to control devices. And ultimately we think if you have a second neural link device that is past the point where the spinal damage occurred, we can actually transmit the signals from the brain past where the wires are broken and enabled someone to walk again. So that would really be profound, obviously. I'm confident that that is physically possible. And then the long-term.

The goal of Neuralink is to be able to improve the bandwidth. So right now when we're speaking, our bandwidth in bits per second is quite low. And the sustained bandwidth of a human is less than one bit per second over a 24-hour period. So there's 86,400 seconds in a day. And the average human outputs much less than 86,400 bits in a day.

If someone's a writer, they might be able to see that, but most people, though, do not output more than the number of seconds in a day. But with Neuralink, you could increase that output capability by a thousand or maybe a million. So it would be a profoundly different experience. Like you'd be superhuman, essentially. Well, put me down for all of this so far. Early adopter. Yeah.

And trust me, you'll really like the chip. I can guarantee it. And let me kind of bring us down to earth for a question on Doge. I worked very closely, actually, with President Clinton in the 90s, where we did have reinventing government. We did balance the budget in two years, actually. That's awesome.

It didn't last very long because it got blown up very quickly. Have you identified some cuts that you're really looking at that you think will be successful? Do you think two trillion is a realistic number now that you're looking more closely at it?

I think we'll try for 2 trillion. I think that's like the best case outcome. But I do think that you kind of have to have some overage. I think if we try for 2 trillion, we've got a good shot at getting one. If we can drop the budget deficit from 2 trillion to 1 trillion and free up the economy to have additional growth such that the output of goods and services keeps pace with the increase in the money supply, then there will be no inflation.

So that I think would be an epic outcome. And in terms of saving money in the government, it's a very target rich environment for saving money. Like if you look at any direction, it's like people's like, where will you find places to save money? It's like being in a room full of targets and you can't miss.

There's just a lot of waste in government, especially the federal government, where the checks never bounce, like they've got the infinite money computer. The people that spend the money are not the people, it's not their money. It's very hard for people to care about spending someone else's money. I certainly know people in the government who do care about spending money effectively, and they try to do so, and they can't. The system prevents them from doing so.

And they even get told to do crazy things, as you guys probably sound familiar, where you get towards the end of the budget cycle, and they're told to spend up to their budget. And even on nonsense stuff, because if they don't spend their budget, their budget gets reduced. So it's actually sort of a perverse incentive to waste money. And then they kind of get punished for not wasting money. So it's totally bananas.

Well, I agree. I did a mathematical analysis in terms of how government used to do things. So if you take the Brooklyn Bridge or the Lincoln Tunnel and you add reflation, the infrastructure bill should actually get you 4,000 adjusted Lincoln Tunnels. Yeah. Of course, it's not because government doesn't use the view. Right.

No, exactly. But essentially, we've had an accumulation of laws and regulations that make basically any large project essentially illegal. Even if you've tried to do it, you've registered way more money on the paperwork than on the thing itself. So.

And then it gets delayed. There's an element of Doge, which is very important, which is looking at regulations and getting rid of ones where the harm is worse than the good. Like you say, any given regulation is like, okay, there's some amount of good, some amount of harm, but what's that ratio? And there's a lot of regulations where, frankly, they're completely nonsensical. And we want to get rid of nonsensical regulations that do not serve the public good.

Well, Linda Iaccarino in her keynote here mentioned the Doge thing, and she got enormous applause. So I think the country is really waiting to see this effort. They're behind it. They're optimistic. Let me try to get in one more topic here before I get one or two other questions out there, which is, obviously, Mark Zuckerberg made an amazing 180-degree turn. That's cool.

What's your reaction to what he did and his acknowledgement, frankly, that the government was, in fact, censoring things, or he was censoring things, or the government, or some combination thereof? Yeah, I mean, there's no question. I mean, 1,000% of the government was censoring things. We know that for a fact from the Twitter files. Some of the stuff was pretty illegal, frankly. The FBI had this portal into Twitter where they could spy on anything and censor anything and had a two-week auto-delete. So we don't even know what they did.

Except that they had immense power to do whatever they wanted, which doesn't sound legal. That sounds pretty crazy. There was also a lot of self-censoring. There was just a lot of censoring going on. I feel very strongly that you have to have freedom of speech to have a functioning democracy. If you don't have

If freedom of speech, freedom of expression, then how do you know what's really going on? And if you can't make an informed vote, then you don't have a real democracy. That's incredibly important to listen to the wisdom of the founders of the country and say, why did they make that the First Amendment? They did it for reasons because they came from places where there was massive censorship and the penalties for speaking your mind would be fines, imprisonment, or death.

And they're like, we really don't like that. That should not be the case in America. So then they, you know, freedom of speech. So, yeah. You just posted, you are the media. Citizen journalism, I mean, really becoming more and more important in the safety of media. And you see it with the wildfires here. Yeah, exactly. It really takes the citizens to report and help people. Yes.

Yeah. Actually, before the internet, you had to have what I call legacy media. You had to have some aggregation points where you'd have reporters go and find things out, then they would go to their office, they would write up articles, they would then print those articles on paper, that paper would then be distributed. And it was the only way to know what was going on. But it was very slow, especially in the old days. I think when

Like when Lincoln was assassinated, I think it took like three weeks for the Vietnamese to reach Asia or something like that. And in fact, in the old days, like you wouldn't even know that your country had gone to war.

Because it would take like a month for the fact, hey, we're at war, to reach your village. We learned about Feral Harbor because we decoded the Japanese. I didn't know that we decoded their cyber system. I mean, that's how we actually learned about it.

Okay, thank you. I got three questions in from the audience that Dan Gardner and Toby Daniels of OnDiscourse had. Want to know, do you think the internet sucks? And what do you think we need to do to fix that? You mean the content on the internet or your internet connection? Because Starlink can help you on the internet connection.

Starlink is great for internet connectivity, especially for faces that have bad connectivity. In fact, I think Starlink is really having a significant effect in terms of lifting people out of poverty in many parts of the world where people have a product that they want to sell, but if they don't have an internet connection, they can't do it.

Or if they want to learn things. Basically, you can learn anything on the internet for free. MIT has all its lectures that are available free on the internet. But you need an internet connection. So once you have an internet connection, you've got access to education. You've got access to a global market. So I think it's very significant how connectivity makes a difference in people's lives.

But no, with respect to maybe the question was geared at like, is there too much negativity on the internet? I think at times there is too much negativity. You know, actually on the X platform, I proposed like, well, we were going to tweak the algorithm to be a bit more positive. And then people got upset about me for that. I'm like, okay, like, what do you guys want? You know?

Well, actually, the second question from Zach Moffat's year of party victory was, how do you make pessimism uncool again? So I think it's exactly what you're saying, which is that, you know, it's become people are afraid. You know, this used to be a can-do nation, always very positive. And now the country, when I ask if we're on the right track or the wrong track, they never say that we're on the right track anymore.

Hopefully with this, you know, I'm actually pretty optimistic about next four or five years. I think we're actually gonna, I think we have the potential for a golden age.

So we need to, it's very important to get rid of the mountain of regulations that are holding things back. And I don't mean, there's some good regulations, but there's just so much that we just can't get anything done. I mean, you take sort of the California wildfires, for example, we really need to have fire breaks and we need to clear the brush back away from houses. And we need to make sure the reservoirs are full. These are all kind of obvious things, but due to a bunch of environmental rulings, you can't actually do that in California.

So they're not allowed to do the five rakes and they're not allowed to push the brush back away from houses because it might hurt some red-legged frog or something like that. It's like some sort of creature, usually a creature you've never heard of, that is preventing this from occurring.

You know, there's like this fish called the smelt, for example. And so we have far more freshwater runoff into the ocean than we should really. On the theory that it helps this one little fish that likes a slightly briny freshwater saltwater mix. And if we keep more freshwater, then the smelt fish will not be happy. But there's no actual evidence that the smelt fish is happy.

It's going to be unhappy if we keep a bit more fresh water, in fact. So we should keep more fresh water, keep the reservoirs full, and just have some sensible fire breaks, and move the brushware from houses. That's just an example of where we've saved a lot of trouble, a lot of tragedy in LA. I think AI and robotics is going to lead to a higher standard of living for people beyond what they can imagine. I think we're going to have AI doctors in medicine that are pretty incredible.

That's the final question she says from Catherine Heritage. If all the robots and everything frees up time for humans, what is it they will do with that time? Or what can we ask them to do with that time? I think that's her question that rounds out the circle of technology.

Yeah, I guess it would be a bit like being retired. I mean, this will take a few years, but at some point as AI and robotics get better, eventually AI will be able to do everything that humans can do. So any tasks you do will be optional. Like it'll be like a hobby or, you know, so now it is a big question. We're like, well, this will, our lives have meaning if, if the computers and the robots can do everything better than we can. And

That is a real question. I do wonder about that myself. And maybe that's why we need the neural link, so we can enhance human capabilities so we can ship up with the machine. Yeah. Well, I just want to thank you for the obviously incredibly optimistic view of our technology and where it's going. I feel reassured that

The kind of leaps that are about to be made, particularly to working on our artistic credible in the next few years, not decades away, but really talked in terms of years. I'm very thankful for that. And I think that that's absolutely tremendous message here at the, you know, where we are in Las Vegas kind of study where technology is going to be available to people.

And really, again, thank you for the tremendous role in opening up free speech, role that X and Linda is playing in terms of that. I know that we're working to get full recognition by everyone, whatever the platform as it should be, because free speech is, I think, the proper way to go. Yeah.

I think, on balance, it's good. And one of the things I try to create conceptually with the X platform is it's like a global consciousness. It's like collective consciousness of humanity. Now, if you have a collective consciousness of humanity, well, you're going to get every aspect of humanity, good and bad. That's just naturally what happens. But I do want it to be a good and productive thing. The aspiration is to maximize unregretted user minutes. So you spend time on the platform.

It's like, well, did you regret it or not regret it? And we want to maximize unregretted user time. I always say that everything in technology was either in the Jetsons, Star Trek, or more like that, right? But the one thing that was never predicted in any book that I could find is social media.

So it's the one thing that they have released. No book built around how social media would develop, how it would really impact society, how it would move politically. And it's interesting that everybody missed that in their projections. And so I guess the last, closest question maybe is, what do you want X to be? And where is that backslide going to go? And I think that's a great question. Well, I mean, I do want X to be a force for good.

So I do want to be a force for good, and I do view it as sort of like the group mind of humanity. And you want to have a sort of a healthy, happy, and sane group mind versus the opposite. And I want it to be just like the best source of truth. Like if you're trying to understand what's going on in the world,

That it has the most accurate, the most up-to-date information about anything large or small. So it gives you the best understanding of what's going on in the world, anywhere, anytime. Thank you. Any closing thought you want to leave us with? Otherwise, I'd rather thank you for being so generous with your time. You're welcome. I think I would encourage people to be optimistic about the future. I think it is much more likely to be good than bad. So that's my prediction.

All right, thanks, guys.