From SpaceX to AI: Musk Talks About His Entrepreneurial Journey and Technological Vision

Recently, the renowned startup accelerator Y Combinator held its first AI Startup School in San Francisco, where Tesla CEO Elon Musk was invited to attend and give an interview. Musk shared his journey from internet entrepreneurship to hard-tech companies like SpaceX and Tesla, as well as his views on the development of AI.

Elon Musk stated that his original intention for founding SpaceX was to advance rocket technology and enable humanity to have the capability to travel to Mars. At that time, he estimated the probability of success to be less than 10%, but he believed that there had to be startups to drive this technology forward; otherwise, it would not happen. The first three launches of SpaceX all failed, and it was the success of the fourth launch that allowed the company to survive.

Speaking of AI, Musk predicts that digital superintelligence may emerge within the next year or two, at which point AI will surpass humans in every aspect. He estimates that the number of humanoid robots in the future could be 5 to 10 times that of humans. Musk emphasizes that a strict adherence to the truth is the most important cornerstone to ensure AI safety.

Regarding the future of human civilization, Musk believes that becoming a multi-planetary species can greatly extend the duration of civilization's existence. He hopes to transfer enough resources to Mars within 30 years to make it self-sufficient. In the long run, human civilization will move towards a Type II Kardashev civilization, at which point the scale of the economy could be thousands or even millions of times larger than it is now.

Musk also revealed that the new generation AI model Grok 3.5 is currently being trained, with a focus on reasoning capabilities. He stated that xAI's training center in Memphis already has over 200,000 high-end GPUs and is building a second data center of equal scale.

Regarding entrepreneurship, Musk advises young people to do useful things as much as possible, pursuing "real merit" rather than glory. He calls on entrepreneurs to internalize responsibility, minimize the self, and maintain a close connection with reality. Musk believes that the tools of physics and first-principles thinking are extremely useful in understanding any field and making progress.