Jason: Let's get started. We wanted to try something new this week. Every week, I get a little upset. Things perturb me, Sacks, and when it does, I just yell and scream, "Disgraziato." And so, I bought the domain name for no reason other than my own amusement. But, I'm not alone in my absolute disgust at what's going on in the world. So this week we're going to bring out a new feature here on the All-In podcast: Disgraciato Corner.

Chamath: My Disgraciato Corner goes to Jason Calcanis and Pete Buttigieg, where in the first 30 seconds of the interview they compared virtue signaling points about how each one worked at various moments at Amnesty International. Literally affecting zero change, making no progress in the world, but collecting a badge that they used to hold over other people.

Host: But I've noticed if you demonstrate interest in anything on X now, if you click on it, god forbid you like something, man, the algorithm is on it. It will give you more of that. It will give you a lot more.

Elon: Yes. So, we did have an issue. We still have somewhat of an issue where there was an important bug that was figured out and solved over the weekend which caused in-network posts to not be shown. So basically if you followed someone you wouldn't see their posts. It's obviously a big bug, a major bug. Then the algorithm was not probably taking into account if you just dwelt on something. But if you interacted with it, it would go hog wild. So if you, as David said, were to favorite, reply or engage with it in some way, it is going to get you a torrent of that same thing.

Host: Yeah. It just it's like it was giving you if you take a you'd have like it was just going too far. Obviously it was overcorrecting. It had too much gain on it. It just turned up the gain way too high on any interaction, you would then get a torrent of that. It's like, "Oh you had a taste of it. We're going to give you three helpings. We're going to force you with the food funnel."

Host: And and that's all being done I assume it's all being done with Grok now. So it's not like the old hardcoded algorithm or is it using Grok?

Elon: Well, what's happening is that we're gradually deleting the legacy Twitter heuristics. Now, the problem is that as you delete these heuristics, it turns out one heuristic, one bug was covering for the other bug. And so, when you delete one side of the bug, it's like that meme with the internet where there's this very complicated machine and there's a tiny little wooden stick that's keeping it going.

Elon: Now, something we're going to be adding is the ability to have a curated following tab. Because the problem is like if you follow some people and they're maybe a little more prolific than others. That makes the following tab hard to use. So we're going to add an option where you can have the following tab be curated. So Grok will say what are the most interesting things posted by your friends and then we'll show you that in the following tab.

Elon: The really big change is where Grok literally reads everything that's posted to the platform. There's about 100 million posts per day. So it's 100 million pieces of content per day. Grok is going to start off reading what Grok thinks are the top 10 million of the 100 million and will actually read them, understand them, categorize them and match them to users. This is not a job humans could ever do. And then once that is scaling reasonably well, we'll add the entire 100 million a day. So it's literally going to read through a 100 million things and show you the things that it thinks out of 100 million posts per day, what are the most interesting posts to you?

Host: How has it been 3 years in?

Host: Yeah. What's the takeaway? 3 years later, you obviously don't regret buying it. It's saved free speech. That was good. Seemed to have turned that whole thing around and that was I think a big part of your mission. But then you added it to xAI which makes it incredibly valuable as a data source. So when you look back on it, the reason you bought it to stop crazy woke mind virus and make truth exist in the world again. Great. Mission accomplished. And now it has this great future.

Elon: Yeah, we've got community notes. You can also ask Grok about any anything you see on the platform. You just press the Grok icon on any X post and we'll analyze it for you. And and research it as much as you want. So you can basically have just by by tapping the Grok icon you can assess whether that post is the truth the whole truth or nothing but the truth or whether there's something supplemental or you need to be explained. So I think it I think it's actually we made a lot of progress towards freedom of speech and and and people being able to tell whether something is false or not false, you know, propaganda.

Elon: The recent update to Grok is actually I think very good at piercing through propaganda. And then we used that latest version of Grok to create Grokipedia, which I think is much more it's not just I think more neutral and more accurate than Wikipedia but actually has a lot more information than a Wikipedia page.

Host: How did you guys how did you do this?

Elon: We finished training on a maximally truth seeking version of Grok that is good at cogent analysis. So breaking down any given argument into its axiomatic elements, assessing whether those axioms are likely to be true, they're not contradictory, that the conclusion most likely follows from those axioms. So we just trained Grok on a lot of critical thinking. Then we took that version of Grok and said okay cycle through the million most popular articles in Wikipedia and add, modify, and delete. So that means research the rest of the internet, whatever is publicly available, and correct the Wikipedia articles and fix mistakes, but also add a lot more context.

Elon: Sometimes really the nature of the propaganda is that facts are stated that are technically true but do not properly represent a picture of the individual or event.

Host: This is critical because when you have a bio as we all do on Wikipedia, over time, it's just the people you fired or you beat in business or have an axe to grind. So it just slowly becomes the place where everybody who hates you then puts their information. And I looked at mine. It was so much more representative and it was five times longer, six times longer. And what it gave weight to was much more accurate. Much more accurate.

Elon: Yes, this is version 0.1 as we show at the top. So I do think actually by the time we get to version 1.0 it'll be 10 times better. But even at this early stage, it's not just that it's correcting errors but it is creating a more accurate, realistic and fleshed out description of people and events.

Host: Do you think that you can take this corpus of pages now and get Google to deboost Wikipedia or boost Grokipedia in traditional search? Because a lot of people still find this and they believe that it's authoritative because it comes up number one, right? So how do we do that?

Elon: If people share a lot of Grokipedia links or cite it on their websites or post about it on social media, or when they do a search when Grokipedia shows up they click on it, it will naturally rise in Google's rankings. I did text Sundar because even sort of a day after launch if you typed in Grokipedia Google would just say did you mean Wikipedia?

Elon: Grokipedia will succeed I think very well because it is fundamentally a superior product to Wikipedia. It is a better source of information. And we haven't even added images and video yet. We're going to add a lot of video using Grok Imagine to create videos. So, if you're trying to explain something, Grok Imagine can take the text from Grapedia and then generate an explanatory video.

Host: Can you actually change people's minds by putting the truth in front of them or do people just take, you know, they kind of ignore the truth because they feel like they're in some sort of camp and they're like, I'm on... they want the confirmation bias and they want to stay in a camp and they want to be tribal about everything.

Elon: It is remarkable how much people believe things simply because it is the belief of their in-group, whatever their sort of political or ideological tribe is. Some people would prefer, they will stick to whatever their ideological views are, whatever the sort of political tribal views are, no matter what. The evidence could be staring them in the face and they're just going to be a flat-earther. You know, there is no evidence that you can show to a flat earther to convince them the world's round because everything is just a lie.

Host: I think the ability to hit @Grok in a reply and ask it a question in the thread has really become like a truth seeking missile on the platform. That combined with community notes. Now you've got like two swings at bat. The community's consensus view and then Grok coming in.

Elon: We want X to be the best source of truth on the planet by far. And where you hear any and all points of view. But where those points of view are corrected by human editors with community notes and the essence of community notes is that people who historically disagree agree that this community note was correct.

Sacks: I remember. Yeah. I mean I remember... Elon was staying at my house. We had talked the week before and he told me the deal was going to close. And so, I was like, "Hey, do you need a place to stay?" And he took me up on it. And the day before he went to the Twitter office, there was a request made to my staff. Do you happen to have an extra sink?

Elon: Well, I think the store was confused because my security team was asking for any kind of sink. Like normally people wouldn't ask for any kind of sink because you need a sink that fits in your bathroom or connects to a certain kind of plumbing. So they're like trying to ask these like well what kind of faucets do you want? That's no no I just wanted a sink. The store was confused that we just wanted a sink and didn't care what the sink connected to.

Sacks: One of my favorite memories was we get in there and the place is empty. The Twitter headquarters was two buildings. One of the buildings was completely and utterly empty. And the other building had like 5% occupancy. We all go get something to eat and we realize there's more people working in the cafeteria than at Twitter. There were more people making the food than eating the food.

Elon: This is where we discovered that the actual price of the lunch was $400. The original price was $20, but it was at 5% occupancy. So it was 20 times higher and they still kept making the same amount pretty much. So, effectively lunch was $400.

Elon: I remember going into the men's bathroom and there's a table with menstrual hygiene products. Refreshed every week. Tampons like a fresh box of tampons. And we're like but there's literally no one in this building. But no, they hadn't turned off the "send fresh tampons to the man's bathroom in the empty building" had not been turned off. So, every week they would put a fresh box of tampons in an empty building for years. This happened for years.

Sacks: I remember it was shortly after that you discovered an entire room at the office that was filled with #Staywoke t-shirts.

Host: Just to be serious about it for a second, the amount of waste that we saw there during those first 30 days, this was a publicly traded company. So if you think about the financial duty of those individuals, there was a list of SAS software we went through and none of it was being used. Some of it had never been installed and they had been paying for it for 2 years.

Elon: There was millions of dollars being paid for analysis of pedestrian like software that use cameras to analyze the pedestrian traffic to figure out where you can alleviate pedestrian traffic jams in an empty building.

Sacks: Let's talk about the free speech aspect for a second because I think that is the most important legacy of the Twitter acquisition and I think people have short memories and they forget how bad things were three years ago. First of all, you had figures as diverse as President Trump, Jordan Peterson, Jay Bhattacharya, Andrew Tate. They were all banned from Twitter.

Sacks: Second, beyond just the bannings, there was the shadow bannings. And Twitter had claimed for years that they were not shadowbanning. This was a paranoid conservative conspiracy theorist.

Elon: There was a very aggressive shadow banning by what was called the trust and safety group which of course naturally would be the one that is doing the nefarious shadow banning. I just think we shouldn't have a group called trust and safety. I mean this is an Orwellian name if there ever was one.

Sacks: I think third to me was government collusion, government interference. So you released the Twitter files. Nothing like that ever been done before where you just you actually let investigative reporters go through Twitter's emails. And they found that there was extensive collusion between the FBI and the Twitter trust and safety group where it turns out the FBI had 80 agents submitting takedown requests and they were very involved in the banning, the shadow banning, the censorship.

Sacks: I think people forget that the censorship wasn't just about COVID. There was a growing number of categories of thought and opinion that were being outlawed. The quote content moderation which is another Orwellian euphemism for censorship was being applied to categories like gender and even climate change. The definition of hate speech was constantly growing. This trend of censorship was growing. It was galloping and it would have continued if it wasn't, I think, for the fact that you decided to buy Twitter and opened it up.

Elon: I do think we've got a fundamental issue with corporate governance in publicly traded companies where you've got about half of the stock market is controlled by passive index funds and most of them outsource their decision to advisory firms and particularly Glass Lewis and ISS. I call them corporate ISIS. You know, so all they do is basically just they're just terrorists. They own no stock in any of these companies.

Elon: My concern for the future, because this Tesla thing is called sort of compensation, but really it's not about compensation. It's just that I in order if I'm going to build up Optimus and have all these robots out there, I need to make sure we do not have a Terminator scenario and that I can maximize the safety of the robots. But I feel like I need to have something like a 25% vote. Which is enough of a vote to have a strong influence but not so much of a vote that I can't be fired if I go insane. My concern would be, you know, creating this army of robots and then being fired for political reasons because of ISS and Glass Lewis. And then I cannot ensure the safety of the robots.

Elon: Yes. I believe that will go to a jury trial in February or March. And then we'll see what the results are there. But there's a mountain of evidence that shows that OpenAI was created as an open source nonprofit. It's literally the exact description in the incorporation documents. In fact the incorporation documents explicitly say that no officer or founding member will benefit financially from OpenAI. And they've completely violated that. And you can just use the wayback machine and look at the website of OpenAI again open source nonprofit, open source nonprofit the whole way until it looked like wow there's a lot of money to be gained here and then suddenly it starts changing.

Host: We've had a big debate about jobs here. Obviously, there's going to be job displacement. You and I have talked about it for decades. What's your take on the pace of it?

Elon: Well, I call AI the supersonic tsunami. So, not the most comforting description in the world. There was a tsunami, a giant wall of water moving faster than the speed of sound. That's AI.

Elon: The reason I wanted to create OpenAI was to serve as a counterweight to Google because at the time Google was sort of essentially had unilateral power in AI. And Larry Page was not taking safety seriously. He called me a "speciest." You were more concerned about the human race than you were about the machines. I was like, Larry, we need to make sure that the AI doesn't destroy all the humans. And then he called me a specist. I'm like, well, Larry, what side are you on?

Elon: So OpenAI was created essentially as the opposite, which is an open source nonprofit, the opposite of Google. Now unfortunately it needs to change its name to Closed for Maximum Profit AI. Fate is an irony maximizer. You have to say what is the most ironic outcome for a company that was created for to do open source nonprofit AI is it's super closed source. It's tighter than Fort Knox. And they are going for maximum profit.

Host: Did you saw the Bill Gates memo that he put out? A lot of people are talking about this memo. Did climate change become woke? Did it become like woke? And is it over being woke? Like what happened and what happened with Billy G?

Elon: The reality of the whole climate change thing is that you've just had sort of people who say it doesn't exist at all and then people who are super alarmist and saying, you know, Florida is going to be underwater in 5 years. And now obviously neither of those two positions are true. The reality is you can measure the carbon concentration in the atmosphere. The parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere has been increasing steadily at 2 to 3 percent per year. At some point if you continue to take billions eventually trillions of tons of carbon from deep underground and transfer to the atmosphere and oceans, you will change the chemical constituency of the atmosphere and oceans.

Elon: The reality is that in my opinion is that we've got at least 50 years before it's a serious issue. I don't think we've got 500 years. But we've probably got, you know, 50. It's not 5 years. So really the right course of action is actually just the reasonable course of action which is to lean in the direction of sustainable energy.

Elon: It is important to appreciate just the sheer magnitude of the power of the sun. So this is here are some just important basic facts. The sun is about 99.8% of the mass of the solar system. Then Jupiter is about 0.1%. And then everything else is in the remaining 0.1%. So, basically no matter what you do, total energy produced in our solar system rounds up to 100% from the sun. Maybe that gives some perspective of why solar is really the thing that matters.

Host: What about creating a fusion reactor on earth?

Elon: My opinion on creating a fusion reactor on earth is I think this is actually not a hard problem. If you just scale up a Tokamak, the bigger you make it the easier the problem gets. You can absolutely in my opinion make a reactor that generates more energy than it consumes. But why would we bother doing that on making a little itty bitty sun that's so microscopic you'd barely notice on Earth when we've got the giant free one in the sky.

Host: But we only get a fraction of 1% of that energy on the planet Earth.

Elon: If people want to have fun with reactors, that's fine. Have fun with reactors. But it's not a serious endeavor compared to the sun. It's sort of a fun science project to make a thermonuclear reactor, but it's not it's just peanuts compared to the sun.

Host: But then doesn't your technical challenge become the scalability of manufacturing of those systems? So, accessing the raw materials and getting them out of the ground of planet Earth to make them. Do we have an ability to do that with what we have today?

Elon: Yes. Solar panels are made of silicon, which is sand essentially. On the battery side, like iron phosphate lithium-ion battery cells, iron is the biggest element on earth as measured by mass. Phosphorus is also very common. And the anode is carbon, also very common. And then lithium is also very common. So there's actually you can do the math. In fact, we did the math and published it, that shows that you can completely power Earth with solar panels and batteries. And there's no shortage of anything.