SpaceX, founder of XAI, and Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia.
Please, please have a seat. Now, I'm sure we can do a bigger round of applause for one of the greatest two leaders of our history. Let's go ahead. So we're talking about I lost count, you know, 7 to 8 trillion dollars worth of market cap comp. I lost count. But right now, we're here to celebrate a historic moment. A moment that yesterday during the dinner, and thank you for joining us under the patronage of the honorable president and his royal highness the crown prince Musedi, where we had the pleasure to hear it firsthand. This is the greatest alliance between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United States, where we have joined hands and you have helped us build our energy-based economy, fueling and energizing the industrial age. And now fast forward going to the intelligence age, where we can fuel AI factories, robotics, EVs, and all of the rest. Speaking of that, let's start with you, Elon, if you don't mind, Jensen. And feel free to chime in. You have a big fascination of something all of us have admired: first order thinking, which Jensen sometimes calls first order scaling, which is an opportunity for how you have dropped the cost of batteries from a thousand for kilowatt hour to sub hundred bucks. And right now you're doing the same thing with robotics for actuators with servo rotors and motors. So I want to hear from you. How do you manage to always disrupt every single industry with that thinking?
Well, it's mostly not disruption, it's creation. So with, say, SpaceX with reusable rockets, there really weren't any reusable rockets. But the essence of revolutionizing space travel is reusability. If you throw the rocket away every time, the cost of access to space is extremely high. With respect to electric cars, there weren't any electric cars when we started making them really. You couldn't buy any to the best of my knowledge. So with Tesla, we wanted to make electric cars compelling and affordable. That was the goal. With respect to humanoid robotics, there are no useful humanoid robots at this point. There are sort of gimmicks, but there are no actually useful humanoid robots. I think Tesla's going to make the first actually useful humanoid robots, and this will be quite a revolution and something that everyone will want. Because I always think of who wouldn't want their own personal C3PO R2-D2? Of course everyone would want one, right? And then there would be many in industry providing products and services. This is why I say that humanoid robots will be the biggest industry or the biggest product ever, bigger than cell phones or anything else, because everyone's going to want one, or maybe more than one, and there will be many in industry.
I just want R2-D2 in C3PO's body.
Yeah, there you go. Well, I mean, a humanoid robot would be better than R2-D2 and C3PO combined.
Yeah. So, and you know, people often talk about eliminating poverty and that kind of thing, but really, how long have they been talking about that? There's lots of talk, lots of NGOs sort of trying to do these things, but really not succeeding. The evidence speaks for itself. But AI and humanoid robots will actually eliminate poverty. Tesla won't be the only one that makes them. I think Tesla will pioneer this, but there will be many other companies that make humanoid robots. There is only basically one way to make everyone wealthy, and that is AI and robotics.
And we can't talk about robotics without AI factories. Yesterday was such a historic day for the two nations but also for all of us where we celebrate the AI strategic partnership with the US, signed witnessed by the honorable president and his royal highness, about how we are committing our capital, energy, land to energize the AI US ecosystem, to be able to build inference nodes, training nodes, and to be the most AI-enabled nation with that announcement. Tell me what's next in AI factories, Jensen.
There's a beautiful story about how Saudi Arabia's building AI refineries now, building AI factories instead of oil refineries. I love that. I've said that AI is an infrastructure. The reason for that, of course, we understand AI from the perspective of the technology and how it's revolutionizing every industry. Digital intelligence of course has applications into every field, and so it's going to be used by every company, every industry, every country. In that way, it's foundational and therefore it's part of infrastructure. What is new about AI from a computer science perspective is that the way computing was done in the past was largely retrieval-based computing. Somebody typed in a story or created a piece of art or came up with four versions of a digital ad — it's all pre-built by somebody, which is then using a system to retrieve the appropriate version for you. It's a retrieval-based computing model. Hadoop and many of the frameworks and operating systems of the past were all designed to retrieve the appropriate information for you. But today, software is going to be generated in real time. It's generative based on context, based on circumstance, based on who you are, based on the problem you ask, based on your prompt. It will generate unique content for you every single time, for everybody. It's unique. When you use Grok, every time you use it is different just based on the prompt you give it and the circumstance. So therefore, it used to be retrieval-based. Today, it's generative. And if it's generative and every time is different, then you need AI factories all over the world to generate the content in real time, which is the reason why you need AI factories. This is a unique way of doing computation, but the benefit of course is that everything isn't preconceived and pre-documented, and it's contextually sensible and therefore intelligent.
So AI factories and robotics. We heard it yesterday from his royal highness, his vision to augment our workforce with roughly tens of millions of robotics to be able to infuse the next wave of productivity and progress. But this scares a lot of folks here when it comes to the future of jobs. So let's hear your thoughts, Elon and Jensen, on that.
Well, you say in the long term, where will things end up? Long term, I don't know what long term is. Maybe it's 10, 20 years, something like that. For me, that's long term. My prediction is that work will be optional.
Yes. It'll be like playing sports or a video game or something like that. If you want to work, in the same way you can go to the store and just buy some vegetables, or you could grow vegetables in your backyard. It's much harder to grow vegetables in your backyard, but some people still do it because they like growing vegetables. That will be what work is like: optional. Now, between now and then, there's actually a lot of work to get to that point. I always recommend people read Ian Banks' Culture books to get a sense for what a probable positive AI future is like. And interestingly, in those books, money no longer exists. It's kind of interesting. My guess is that if you go out long enough, assuming there's a continued improvement in AI and robotics, which seems likely, money will stop being relevant at some point in the future. Now, there will still be constraints on power, like electricity, and mass — the fundamental physics elements will still be constraints. But I think at some point, currency becomes irrelevant.
By the way, the Nvidia earnings call is later today. And by the way, since currency is still relevant...
Elon just wants to share some breaking news.
The two of us like to share some breaking news. I would say there are different horizons you could look at. Everybody's jobs will be different. That, I think, is for sure. How the students learn will be different. How people do their work will be different, obviously, because a lot of the things we do mundanely, arduously, or very difficultly are going to be done very simply. So we're going to be more productive from that sense. One of the things I will say is that for most people or a company, if your life becomes more productive and the things you're doing with great difficulty become simpler, it is very likely because you have so many ideas you'll have more time to go pursue things. It is my guess that Elon will be busier as a result of AI. I'm going to be busier as a result of AI. The reason for that is because we have so many ideas we want to pursue, so many things that we still have in our backlog inside our company that we can go pursue. If we were more productive, we can get to those things faster. So in the near term, I would say that there is every evidence that we will be more productive and yet still be busier because we have so many ideas. One thing I will give you as evidence — I was just telling Elon about this earlier — radiology, for example, has largely been converted to AI-driven radiology, and there are some really great companies doing that. The surprising thing is that the prediction that all radiologists would be the first jobs to go was exactly the opposite. The trend shows that there are more radiologists being hired now as a result of AI. The reason for that, if you take a step back, is that the goal of a radiologist is not to study the images. The goal of a radiologist is to diagnose a disease. Now, the studying of the images became so productive that they could study more images, study more modalities, spend more time with the patients. And as a result, they were actually accepting more patients. We're doing more radiology all around the world, doing a better job with diagnosing disease. So that's kind of the near-term outcome of AI and productivity. We'll see what happens long term. When currency doesn't matter anymore, just let me know right before.
