Elon Musk called AI “more dangerous than nuclear bombs” while speaking with columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times DealBook Summit Wednesday night. He also spoke about how very soon AI would be people’s “digital god,” and that the “genie” is already “popping its head out” of the bottle, calling the technology a “double-edged sword” of “good and bad.”Musk addressed the “troubling arc” of open AI and said there needs to be some rules around the software. He pointed out there are regulations around anything that poses a danger to the public — since AI is one of them, it too should require regulation. “In my view AI is more dangerous than nuclear bombs,” Musk said. “You cannot just go make a nuclear bomb in your backyard.” Musk said there was a time in his life he “couldn’t get to sleep at night” because he was “worried about the danger of AI.” “I’ve thought AI could be something that would change the world in a significant way since I was in college 30 years ago,” he said. “But the reason I didn’t go full AI right from the get-go was because I was uncertain about which edge of the double-edged sword would be sharper: the good edge or the bad edge.”“So I held off on doing anything because I was uncertain if you just make this magic genie what would happen,” Musk continued. “You may think you want a magic genie, but once that genie’s out of the bottle, it's hard to say what happens.”“And the genie’s certainly popping its head out.”Musk was asked about the AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and “how hard it is to train, to create the inferences, to create the weights” of the AI software. “All these weights, they’re basically just numbers in the Comma-Separated Value file. And that’s our digital god,” Musk said. “The SCV file. I find that funny.”“But that’s kind of literally what it is. I think it’s coming pretty fast,” he said, adding “within three years” the software will be able to “write a novel as good as JK Rawling or discover new physics or invent new technology.”Musk also commented on the significance of data, which is collected en masse on Twitter ("X") and the fact the claim Open AI is not being trained on uncopyrighted data “is a lie.”“Data is very important. You can say that data is more valuable than gold,” Musk said. “X may be the best social data. There are more links to X than anything. So it is where you would find what is going on on earth at any given time. Google has mass amounts of data, so does Microsoft. But X is one of the best sources of data.”“Obviously Open AI systems train on copyrighted data,” he said. Sorkin commented that anything can be put on Twitter ("X"), even a 1,000-word article and that would be “considered fair use.”“By the time these issues are decided, we will have a digital god,” Musk responded. Sorkin also pressed him on the need for regulations, claiming Musk is someone who has pushed against them in the past. Musk said actually in the last decades there have been a "hundred thousand" regulations his companies have complied with, such as to get his Tesla cars on the road and maybe only five they have disagreed with.“Tesla cars could not go on the road without regulation,” he said. “In fact, I am incredibly compliant with regulations” except in the rare case the regulation “does not serve the public good."
