Author: Zheng Songyi

A few hours ago, Elon Musk was interviewed live at the Texas Gigafactory by Jordan Peterson, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto.

During the nearly two-hour interview, the two discussed topics such as the development of AI and human civilization.

At the beginning of the interview, Musk first introduced the recent progress of his own large model Grok (built by xAI).

He said, “The pursuit of a deep understanding of things is the goal of artificial intelligence development, and Grok is also working in this direction.

But to be honest, xAI has only been established for more than a year, and it still needs to do a lot of work to catch up with those companies that have been around for five, ten or even longer.”

Specifically, Musk admitted that the newly released Grok-1.5 model is still far behind GPT and Gemini. He revealed that Grok-2 completed training a month ago, using about 15,000 GPUs (H100), and is currently undergoing fine-tuning and bug fixing, hoping to be released next month with performance close to GPT-4.

In addition, Musk revealed that Grok-3 is currently being trained in the Memphis data center. It will probably complete the training in 3 to 4 months, and then undergo fine-tuning and error correction. It is hoped that it will be released before December. Grok-3 may become the world's most powerful AI model.

It is reported that the Memphis data center has the world's largest supercomputer cluster, with 100,000 liquid-cooled H100s. In terms of computing power, it is about 20 times the 25,000 A100s used by OpenAI to train GPT4.

Many people are worried that as AI technology develops, it will bring unpredictable security risks.

In Musk's view, the ultimate goal of all artificial intelligence companies is to build digital superintelligence, that is, intelligent entities that are much smarter than humans.

"You can think this is a wise choice, or you can say it's dangerous, but whether you agree or not, it's happening," Musk said.

He mentioned, "Faced with the potential risks brought by AI, to use a line from a movie, we can choose to be a participant or a bystander. But the xAI team chose the former in order to have a better chance of guiding AI to develop in a direction that is beneficial to humans."

Musk believes that the emergence of more and more players in the artificial intelligence race is a good thing, which can create a more open AI world.

He pointed out that it would be dangerous to maintain the situation where only Google was in the lead at the beginning, and Larry Page (founder of Google) did not fully realize the safety risks of AI.

"We really need some new AI companies to serve as a counterweight to Google, because at the time Google had strong computing and financial resources. As far as AI is concerned, this is a unipolar world, and if the unipolar world is dominated by Larry Page's personal consciousness, I think it is irresponsible to mankind, which was also the original intention of participating in the creation of OpenAI at the time."

When asked why OpenAI was defined as a non-profit organization, Musk said that companies usually face the risk of being sued if they do not consider the interests of shareholders. Therefore, he does not want OpenAI to be driven by profit, but rather wants it to become a company that truly solves the basic problems of AI.

At the end of the interview, Musk once again emphasized his point of view when talking about the issue of human civilization.

Musk is a proponent of population growth, and he supports continuing to expand the human population because it means the number of human brains on the planet can increase, further expanding the scope of consciousness.

Many people believe that the Earth can no longer bear the weight of human beings, but Musk has a different view. "If we use physics to calculate, the Earth can sustain 10 times the population today."

"We can find better ways to make the resources that support human survival better. 70% of the earth is water, and desalination is now very cheap, so there is no shortage of water. Food is also not lacking if planting technology is improved, and energy problems can also be solved."

In addition, Musk once again emphasized the importance of exploring extraterrestrial planets. He believes that human life should be allowed to naturally extend to multiple planets, further expanding the scope of consciousness and allowing human civilization to last longer.