— Tsarathustra (@tsarnick) October 13, 2024 So, if his team has the right approach, Musk has put himself in an excellent position to elevate X's Grok AI language model past OpenAI's GPT models, to potentially become the global leader in AI technology over the next year or two. Not that you'd notice, because over the last few weeks he's seemed much more interested in politics than anything else, literally jumping up and down as Donald Trump's #1 supporter as the US presidential election bears down on the world. Indeed, he sees Trump as an opportunity to get his hands on the levers of government, and is now promising to head up a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that would slash at least US$2 trillion, or nearly a third, of the US federal budget should Trump return as president. Yesterday's discussion between Elon Musk and Peter Diamandis Musk certainly enjoys keeping busy, but took time to join Peter Diamandis via video link for a chat about the future of AI as part of a Future Investment Initiative Institute event at the King Abdulaziz International Conference Center in Riyadh yesterday. Enjoy the full 22-minute video here, or we've pulled out some key quotes below with timestamped links. Elon Musk and Dr. Peter Diamandis #FII8 Conversation on the Future of #AI On the pace of AI improvement (1:38) "It's a difficult thing to quantify exactly, but I certainly feel comfortable saying that it's getting 10 times better per year ... So four years from now, that would mean 10,000 times better. Maybe 100,000 times." On when AI will overtake the output of humanity (2:07) "I think it'll be able to do anything that any human can do, possibly within the next year or two. How much longer than that does it take to be able to do what all humans can do combined? I think not long. Probably only, I don't know, three years from that point. So like 2029, 28, something like that." On AI as an existential threat to humanity (3:05) "It's most likely to be great. There's some chance, which could be 10 to 20%, that it goes bad. The chance is not zero that it goes bad, but overall one could say the cup is 80% full, maybe 90% ... I think AI is a significant existential threat, and something we should be paying close attention to. It's probably the most significant near-term threat." On global population collapse (4:08) "The longer term threat is global population collapse. Birth rates have been collapsing pretty much worldwide, and we're headed for a situation where, for example, based on current birth rates, South Korea would have about a third of its current population, Europe would have about half its current population – much less. "And I should say, those numbers are if the birth rate were suddenly to return to 2.1 per woman, which is the stability point. If this effect continues, you would see really many countries become 5% of their current size or less within three generations." Population collapse is potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilizationhttps://t.co/VVN8kElTlS