After a decade of conflict in the AI ​​field, Elon Musk forges a strange alliance

Elon Musk has had a head-spinning week on AI.

Musk faced opposition from President Donald Trump after he agreed to a request by rivals Dario Amodei and Sam Altman to establish a basic model laboratory to slow the pace of development. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said AI companies actually need to get faster.

Mr. Trump’s stock portfolio includes Nvidia and SpaceX stocks, according to his latest disclosure, and he said concerns about AI going wild are a “hoax.”

Musk took a more centrist approach during Tuesday’s All In Summit panel discussion, which also included his longtime friend and former White House AI czar David Sachs. He urges companies to test new models against each other to identify and fix safety issues before launching them, an option he believes is preferable to governments taking a heavy-handed regulatory stance on AI.

“You can always increase the amount of regulatory oversight, but it’s very difficult to decrease it,” Musk said in a virtual appearance at the event. “It tends to be a very one-way ratchet.”

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Musk spoke with Huang backstage. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg advised President Trump against industry-funded regulators.

Musk did not respond to requests for comment on this matter.

The exchange just last week is a microcosm of Musk’s history in artificial intelligence, dating back to the early checks he wrote to fund DeepMind. google The year after that deal, Musk co-founded OpenAI with Altman and others as a nonprofit research organization.

Musk has long expressed controversial and often conflicting views on AI, and along the way he has sparked friendships with: google For co-founders Larry Page and Altman, the stakes are higher now than ever. While model developers are deploying the technology and industry players are sounding the alarm about AI’s potential existential threat, internet giants are spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on infrastructure to power AI.

Musk’s space x We are investing heavily in technology growth. The company merged with Musk’s AI startup xAI in February and completed its $60 billion acquisition of AI coding tools provider Cursor in August. Between these two events, SpaceX had the largest IPO in history, briefly making Musk a trillionaire.

Meanwhile, Mr. Musk’s other listed company is teslacontinues to research so-called physical AI, such as unmanned cars and humanoid robots.

“Tesla is probably the largest robotics company in the world,” Musk said at Tesla’s 2021 AI Day, “because our cars are semi-sentient robots on wheels.”

Since his early days in the AI ​​field, Musk has been building his own AI business and fighting regulation, while stoking public fears about the world-destroying threat of AI “superintelligence.” “I just want to focus on what’s going on with artificial intelligence,” he said on CNBC’s “Closing Bell” in 2014, adding that “movies like ‘The Terminator’ have been made about this.” There are some dire consequences. ”

His campaign of fear and optimism is part of a strategy documented in a March 2024 paper by AI ethics and computer science researchers Timnit Gebru and Emil Torres.

The paper mentions Musk more than 30 times and concludes that it argues that he and a small group of AI leaders are “protecting humanity’s future while creating unsafe products, concentrating power, and avoiding responsibility” and disproportionately harming marginalized groups.

In late 2014, Musk told students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that developing AI was “like summoning the devil.” Around that time, he donated $10 million through his foundation to founding the Future of Life Institute (FLI), a nonprofit led by MIT researcher Max Tegmark. The group aimed to raise awareness of the terrifying potential of AI and guide the technology in a way that does not drive humanity to extinction.

In his keynote address at the 2015 Effective Altruism conference, Musk said the threat of advances in AI outpacing human control is the biggest existential risk he can imagine. He immediately signed an open letter from FLI calling for a “pause on AI.”

That same year, Musk co-founded OpenAI with the mission to “advance digital intelligence in ways that are most likely to benefit all of humanity, unconstrained by the need to generate financial profit.”

The rift with Altman began in 2018. Musk privately pressured OpenAI’s co-founders to give him control of the lab and make OpenAI a commercial subsidiary of Tesla. Musk poached key talent from OpenAI for Tesla and resigned from the organization’s board in the same year.

It took another four years before the magnitude of that split began to become apparent. In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, sparking a generative AI boom with Musk largely sitting on the sidelines.

A few months later, in March 2023, Musk signed another “AI suspension letter” from FLI.

“AI systems with intelligence that competes with humans can pose serious risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research and acknowledged by top AI institutes,” the letter begins.

Around the same time, Musk was founding a new AI venture in Nevada called xAI, but he remained silent from Tesla investors and the public until July.

Then a legal battle with Altman began.

In August 2024, Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its co-founders for violating their promise to keep the institute nonprofit. Musk lost a high-profile California trial in May when a jury and a federal judge ruled that his claims had been filed outside the statute of limitations. Musk said he would appeal, but has not yet done so.

Communications uncovered in the lawsuit showed that Musk’s obsession with developing OpenAI was based on fears that Google would control the technology after acquiring DeepMind, although in public he and Altman touted the more altruistic aspects of their mission.

Now, Musk is back to safety-seeking activities. “Dalio is right,” Musk wrote on X, following a weekend essay in which Amodei implored the industry to “pace the frontier.”

This is in stark contrast to February, when Musk called humanity “misanthropic and evil” and said he “hates Western civilization.” Things changed dramatically in May, when Anthropic agreed to pay SpaceX up to $1.25 billion a month to rent computing infrastructure in Memphis, giving Musk’s company a chunk of much-needed AI revenue ahead of SpaceX’s IPO.

“I was clearly wrong about anthropology,” Musk wrote to X in July. “They are clearly the leaders in AI right now.”

Musk’s recent track record on AI safety has been checkered.

He has built data centers in and around Memphis, Tennessee, and has fought lawsuits from nearby residents who suffer from air and noise pollution caused by the operations.

At SpaceX, Musk sold a version of xAI’s Grok model to the U.S. military, which “enabled the U.S. military to deploy more than 2,000 rounds of ammunition to 2,000 different targets within 96 hours,” according to a Justice Department legal filing.

And at xAI (now known as SpaceXAI), Musk has filed suit in Minnesota to ban Grok’s “undressing” feature and in California to halt state regulations that require companies to be transparent about the data used to train their models.

As Musk and his colleagues and rivals debate the right approach to AI safety and whether the government should play a big role or no role at all, lawmakers and independent researchers are increasingly skeptical about the industry’s ability to police itself.

Tyler Whitmer, CEO of the nonprofit Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology (LASST), told CNBC that self-regulation alone is not enough to protect the public from existing and future harms enabled by AI systems.

“We need real regulation that not only creates a level playing field for businesses but also protects the public, and businesses can’t do it alone,” Whitmer said. “The involvement of third-party evaluators, not just the companies themselves, needs to be a mandatory requirement for governments.”

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