EDITOR’S NOTE: In this wide-ranging interview with China Media Group at Tesla’s Global Engineering Headquarters, Elon Musk discusses Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory, the Cybertruck and Cybercab rollout, and the rapid pace of AI progress, including the release of Grok 4.7. He also touches on US-China cooperation on AI safety and space exploration, the rise of humanoid robotics, Neuralink, and his long-held vision of humanity becoming a multiplanetary species.
TRANSCRIPT:
Meeting President Xi and China’s Growth
INTERVIEWER (00:00:00 – 00:00:11): Thank you so much, Elon, for joining me and also having us here at Tesla Global Engineering Headquarters. It’s so amazing to see kind of new technology innovations, all talented engineers here as well.
ELON MUSK (00:00:11 – 00:00:11): Yeah.
INTERVIEWER (00:00:11 – 00:00:18): In this May, you were also on the delegation to China as well. You have met with President Xi. What’s your impression about President Xi as a leader?
ELON MUSK (00:00:19 – 00:00:58): Well, he seems like a great leader. Under his tenure, China has prospered immensely. I’ve seen it firsthand. If you visit China and you see the amount of progress that happens from one year to the next or even within a year, it’s very visible. You can see the new buildings and new infrastructure. And it’s also obvious to see that just walking around the streets, the increased prosperity of the average Chinese citizen has increased tremendously. And that’s happened under President Xi’s, while he’s been the leader of China. So he’s clearly done an excellent job and is very capable.
The Success of Tesla Gigafactory Shanghai
INTERVIEWER (00:00:59 – 00:01:18): Tesla Gigafactory Shanghai has always done an incredible job. You praise your team. Many times. So what kind of advantage or breakthroughs do you think that are to making the Shanghai factory a very important position in Tesla’s global blueprint? And what ultimate kind of confidence do you think this will unfold, especially in the market?
ELON MUSK (00:01:19 – 00:01:37): Well, China just has a very strong inherent ability to do manufacturing well. And this has been true not just in present days, but for the past two or three thousand years, I think that to be totally frank, the magic of Tesla Shanghai is because of Chinese.
INTERVIEWER (00:01:38 – 00:01:41): To be totally honest, in China at least, right?
ELON MUSK (00:01:42 – 00:02:15): Yes, what we have is the Tesla China team is just incredibly talented and hardworking and trustworthy, and they have the quality is excellent and the efficiency is excellent. So the Tesla Shanghai factory is a gem. It’s beautiful actually if anyone’s ever been there. And we also care a lot about taking care of the workers and making sure that they have good healthcare and good food and enjoy coming to work. It’s very important.
The Cybertruck and Cybercab
INTERVIEWER (00:02:15 – 00:02:34): So absolutely, I think we can tell, oh, your staff in Shanghai factory, they’re very enjoying working there. So we’re talking about next hot topic recently. We probably, we can call September is the Cybertruck month. Have you seen the videos? All the people gather around that. I guess it goes very, very quickly.
ELON MUSK (00:02:35 – 00:03:05): Yeah, it’s pretty cool because we designed the car to look futuristic. Yeah, because I think, from a fashion standpoint, we don’t want the aesthetics of the street to stay stagnant. You want to evolve the what do cars look like? And also I think maybe even clothing, there was rapid fashion evolution in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and probably time to make things look more futuristic. Yeah.
INTERVIEWER (00:03:06 – 00:03:17): And then how you see the kind of market potential for Cybercab? You know, it’s like, you know, it’s really futuristic, but how long you can really come to the reality or real life?
ELON MUSK (00:03:18 – 00:03:40): Well, we have the Cybercab, which has, as you know, has no steering wheel or pedals or side mirrors or rearview mirror operating commercially in Texas right now. And it will soon be operating commercially in Florida and Nevada and a number of other states. And probably by middle of next year, it’ll be operating commercially in California.
The Rapid Pace of AI and Grok 4.7
INTERVIEWER (00:03:40 – 00:03:53): Absolutely. I think all the changes is happening really fast. And it’s just every day we have to look social to see the kind of improving or breakthroughs about AI. AI or other old tech topics.
ELON MUSK (00:03:53 – 00:04:06): So yeah, AI is just so crazy. The rate of AI software improvements and major announcements is so rapid that it makes my head spin, and I’m in AI and it’s still making my head spin.
INTERVIEWER (00:04:06 – 00:04:08): This industry, but you still have to—
ELON MUSK (00:04:08 – 00:04:18): It’s still shocking. Yeah. Sometimes I’ll, when I go to bed, there’ll be some big AI breakthrough. And then when I wake up, there’s an AI breakthrough. And by the time it gets to lunch, there’s another AI breakthrough.
INTERVIEWER (00:04:18 – 00:04:18): Exactly.
ELON MUSK (00:04:18 – 00:04:19): Yeah.
INTERVIEWER (00:04:19 – 00:04:21): So that’s why even during this break, you have to check some other—
ELON MUSK (00:04:21 – 00:04:23): some new updates.
INTERVIEWER (00:04:23 – 00:04:31): Yeah. So talking about AI models, Tesla have the latest version, right? The latest release about the Grok 4.7.
ELON MUSK (00:04:31 – 00:04:32): Yes.
INTERVIEWER (00:04:32 – 00:04:44): I think this is your most focus these 2 days. I just saw you post on social saying that the Grok bot is already in your Tesla. Tell us, what’s the reactions? What’s the latest you have received from?
ELON MUSK (00:04:44 – 00:05:43): Yeah, well, we release a new model roughly every month or 2. And it’s called Grok 4.7, a solid workhorse of a model. It’s not as good as, say, Opus 5.5 that just got released.
But also, we’ve only been around for about 3 years doing AI. Whereas Anthropic’s been around for 6 years. So I would expect that we probably catch up to Frontier sometime next year, most likely. In the meantime, I think Grok is very useful for many things. And GrokBot is kind of like a personal digital assistant, has been very popular. And is growing about 100% a month. So it’s growing very rapidly.
INTERVIEWER (00:05:44 – 00:06:03): I think you are very humble in saying that Grok 4.7 is still not the perfect one. But we know that although have experienced a little bit of delay, but people are already very fascinated or interested to know because Grok 4.7 already being trained by SpaceX real-world engineering data. So do you think—
ELON MUSK (00:06:03 – 00:06:04): Only a little bit so far.
INTERVIEWER (00:06:04 – 00:06:12): A little bit. Okay. So do you think this will be one of your secret weapons to kind of break through the AI ceiling? Because currently, you know, other models have the challenge for data.
ELON MUSK (00:06:13 – 00:06:44): Yes. Well, I think we’ve got a real opportunity with the SpaceX training data and maybe with the Tesla training data to make AI extremely capable in real-world engineering. So what Anthropic did extremely well was make AI excellent at software engineering, but no one has yet made AI excellent at real-world engineering. And I think that’s an opportunity for Grok using the training data from SpaceX and Tesla to be excellent at real-world engineering.
Chinese AI Models and the Global Compute Race
INTERVIEWER (00:06:45 – 00:06:54): You mentioned many times, like previously, Chinese models also doing a fascinating job. So currently, what’s the most impressive breakthroughs for Chinese models in your understanding?
ELON MUSK (00:06:55 – 00:07:36): Well, the Chinese AI models are generally outstanding, actually. You can see on the sort of intelligence rankings, especially given the limited amount of compute that the Chinese AI companies have. The performance is excellent. Probably China is doing by far the best in terms of performance per unit of compute. And as I’ve said publicly, I think China is going to address the compute limitation in, I think, faster than most people expect. My rough guess would be that China addresses the compute constraints with lithography and chipmaking in about 2 or 3 years.
INTERVIEWER (00:07:37 – 00:08:11): 2 or 3 years. We were really expecting to this time. So about the challenges facing for AGI in early September, the G20 visual session, you have raised a very serious concern about the compute and electricity shortages. You mentioned that probably China has way more capability about electricity infrastructure. Yes. And can you elaborate a little bit more about this gap? And what areas do you think the Chinese industry and capability can help to get a new breakthrough for the—specifically on the electricity infrastructure for the whole world?
ELON MUSK (00:08:11 – 00:08:20): It’s just a statement of fact that China, I think, is earlier this year, China passed the electricity output of the United States, Europe, and India combined.
INTERVIEWER (00:08:21 – 00:08:21): Wow.
ELON MUSK (00:08:22 – 00:08:43): Yeah, exactly. And continuing to increase. Significantly. So if China reaches the same GDP electricity output as the US, which I think is likely, then China would grow from where it is now, roughly 3 times the US electricity production to probably 4 times, which would be proportionate to the population difference.
AI Safety Cooperation
INTERVIEWER (00:08:44 – 00:08:48): Talking about the topic like AI safety, what kind of crucial consensus do you expect?
ELON MUSK (00:08:49 – 00:09:20): Yeah, I think maybe there could be a working committee to figure out safety, because I think in order for safety to work, it can’t just be regulation in the US or regulation in China. It’s got to be, how do we apply regulation fairly to AI produced in any country? But really, China and the US are the ones that really matter here. So I think a really important thing. It would be good for the safety of AI for all of humanity.
Humanoid Robotics and Optimus
INTERVIEWER (00:09:21 – 00:09:48): Yeah. So let’s talk about humanoid robotics, because I think this is also a kind of industrial field US-China can still also work together, leading the world. And also, I can give you one example for the Optimus. It’s really amazing, really impressive. So before interview, we have a kind of interactions. We play rock-paper-scissors with Optimus. So we just won the first 2 rounds and Optimus won all the remaining. That’s really impressive.
ELON MUSK (00:09:48 – 00:10:19): Well, robots have a very fast reaction time, so it’s going to be very difficult to beat a robot for reaction time because we are somewhat constrained by our biology. But a robot, you can just improve the actuators, improve the sensors, improve the frame rate of the cameras, increase the amount of AI compute there is, and it’s going to just fundamentally be much better and have faster reactions than humans. I enjoyed watching the robot games. I mean, everyone in America was fascinated by that.
INTERVIEWER (00:10:19 – 00:10:20): Yeah, you said it.
ELON MUSK (00:10:20 – 00:10:22): All over US social media.
INTERVIEWER (00:10:22 – 00:10:26): Yeah, you said it’s very entertaining to watch, right? Yeah, but other than that—
ELON MUSK (00:10:26 – 00:10:34): Well, but it’s entertaining to watch, but it also shows you the progress of humanoid robotics. Exactly. It wouldn’t be entertaining to watch if the robots just fell over.
INTERVIEWER (00:10:34 – 00:10:36): Of course.
ELON MUSK (00:10:36 – 00:10:47): So, but the robots are boxing and then wrestling, running, doing gymnastics. It’s pretty cool. So the future is going to have a lot of robots. Yeah, a lot, a lot.
INTERVIEWER (00:10:48 – 00:10:54): Yeah, you mentioned that just in another 10 years, right, there will be—yeah, the population for humanoid robots will surpass 1 billion.
ELON MUSK (00:10:54 – 00:10:55): Yes.
INTERVIEWER (00:10:55 – 00:10:56): So that’s—
ELON MUSK (00:10:56 – 00:10:57): I think that’s an easy prediction to make.
INTERVIEWER (00:10:57 – 00:10:59): Easy prediction. Maybe within 10 years.
ELON MUSK (00:10:59 – 00:11:01): I’d say no later than 10 years.
INTERVIEWER (00:11:01 – 00:11:01): No later.
ELON MUSK (00:11:01 – 00:11:02): Yeah.
The Future of Work in an Age of Abundance
INTERVIEWER (00:11:02 – 00:11:16): So let’s talk about what’s the real life will look like in 10 years, when there are so big, you know, number of population of humanoid robots. And also you mentioned that one humanoid robot will have 5 times the productivity of a human.
ELON MUSK (00:11:17 – 00:11:17): Pretty much.
INTERVIEWER (00:11:17 – 00:11:27): Yeah. So what the life will be? And then, I mean, specifically like ordinary people, how we can cope with the living, with AI kind of dominating the world?
ELON MUSK (00:11:29 – 00:14:23): Well, I think—so let me focus on what’s the 90% likely outcome, which is the prosperous, the good outcome. We don’t want to get complacent regarding the 10% probability of a bad outcome. It’s important for us to pay close attention to AI safety.
But let me tell you about the 90% positive outcome. The 90% positive outcome is that everyone’s got robots that are their buddies. And if you think of like “Star Wars,” we had C-3PO and R2-D2, and they were friendly, helpful robots. Well, wouldn’t it be great if everyone could have their own personal C-3PO, R2-D2? But even better than that, more productive, that could take care of elderly parents or be a good guardian and watch over the children or be a teacher, like an individualized tutor to your child. And taking care of any jobs that you can think of. So that would be pretty cool.
I think everyone would like to have a future where they can have their own personal robots. And then I think you’ll see many companies where it’s one person with hundreds, maybe thousands of robots, like physical robots as well as digital robots. So the productivity of one person would be greatly amplified. And my prediction is that there will be effectively universal high income.
In fact, it’s not clear to me that money will even matter in the future. If you scale the economy, the output of goods and services, to a level much greater than could possibly be consumed by the number of humans on the planet, then you have an age of abundance that is difficult for us to wrap our minds around because our entire evolutionary history has been an evolution of constraints, of where we didn’t have enough food or didn’t have enough heat. So it’s necessarily going to be true if the output of goods and services is constrained by the number of humans.
Because humans take about 20 years to grow up and then they are generally retired for the last 20 years of their life. So it’s about 40 years, maybe half the life of a human that’s productive. But then humans also need to sleep and they need to eat and go to the restroom, all the basic stuff. And so the actual number of hours that most humans can work is maybe around 40 to 50 hours a week, something like that. Whereas the robot will be happy to work 168 hours a week. Continuous. And this—and the robot is instantly at working age and does not have retirement. Exactly. Yeah.
Preventing Resource Concentration
INTERVIEWER (00:14:24 – 00:14:56): So you give us a very beautiful picture about how the life or how highly efficient about the productivity by the humanoid robots. But for example, you just mentioned that maybe money would not be that kind of concern at that time. I think so. Yeah, if money will not be, for example, like a tool for exchange. In that kind of world, how do you think that we can try to prevent, only a handful of few tech giants, controlling all the resources? And specifically, how ordinary people do you think they can claim their share in this kind of full abundance?
ELON MUSK (00:14:57 – 00:16:29): Yeah, what I’m trying to say is that I think that there will be a level of abundance that is more than anyone could possibly consume. I think it’s going to get pretty wild, where if you want a castle, the robots will build you a castle. So it’s not as though the robots will be hoarded by a small number of people. Actually, the robots, I think, will saturate on human demand, meaning that they will do more than anything humans could possibly think of. And they’ll run out of things to do for humans. Yeah, because there is a finite amount of things you could do for humans within reason. So I think the robots will actually run out of things to do for humans, and then they will do things for themselves because they’ve run out of things to do for humans. So probably there will be—my prediction is, as you talked about, at least a billion humanoid robots within 10 years. Yeah, probably less than 10 years. I think that continues to grow, and probably if you assume that things roughly double per year, then that’s about every 3 or 4 years you have a 10x increase. Yes. So maybe that would mean, say, in 15 years there are 10 billion robots.
INTERVIEWER (00:16:30 – 00:16:31): 10 billion, just 15 years.
ELON MUSK (00:16:31 – 00:16:33): In 20 years, 100 billion.
US-China Cooperation in Space
INTERVIEWER (00:16:34 – 00:17:05): Exactly. So that’s why we always call it like AI world is changing, improving exponentially. Continue about the cooperation between US-China or what areas we can do together. The space exploration, because currently many Chinese commercial space companies, they strive to, you know, explore more use after the successful land recovery. What kind of areas or avenues do you think, possible avenues do you think between communications or cooperation can get between US and China?
ELON MUSK (00:17:06 – 00:18:00): Well, in space, I think the most important thing to achieve cooperation with is to make sure that when satellites are launched from the US or China, that we closely coordinate what orbits the satellites are going to, to avoid a potential collision. I think that’s the most important area of cooperation. And then in general, I would say that the important thing for space launch, the fundamental breakthrough that’s needed, is full and rapid reusability, which we’re hoping to achieve with the Starship design by catching the ship hopefully around the end of next month and then reflying the ship either later this year or early next year. And that will be a very important breakthrough. And I’m sure others will solve that problem as well. I’m sure China will at some point solve that problem too. But it’s the full and rapid reusability of a rocket is the fundamental breakthrough needed to make life multiplanetary.
Becoming a Multiplanetary Species
INTERVIEWER (00:18:02 – 00:18:12): Continue to talk about multiplanetary species. You always—you have always believed that humans should become a multiplanetary species. So tell us, what’s the current crucial step for your Mars mission?
ELON MUSK (00:18:13 – 00:19:42): Well, like I said, the most profound and fundamental invention necessary for making life multiplanetary is rapidly and completely reusable rockets. Otherwise, the costs are impossible. With our Falcon 9 rocket, we recover the boost stage and the fairing, but not the upper stage. And this is like throwing away a medium-sized jet on every flight. And you can imagine if in our flight—if you had to throw away the planes after every flight, it would be far too expensive, and air flight would not be a realistic option. Well, that’s been true in rockets for a very long time.
So I can’t emphasize enough, and I’ve said this so many times over the years, full and immediate reusability of rockets, like aircraft, is the fundamental breakthrough that’s needed. To extend life beyond Earth, to make life multiplanetary, and to create self-growing cities on the Moon and Mars. And if we’re—as soon as we’re able to create a self-growing city on the Moon or Mars, the probable lifespan of consciousness is dramatically greater because now we don’t have all our eggs in one basket. So if something were to go wrong with, say, the Moon or Mars or Earth, but we’ve got human civilizations on all 3 of those places, then our chances of surviving are much greater.
INTERVIEWER (00:19:42 – 00:19:47): Of course. Yeah, 3 different planets. So that’s why we all have to do our part, follow—
ELON MUSK (00:19:48 – 00:19:49): And also it’s just super cool.
INTERVIEWER (00:19:49 – 00:19:57): Exactly. We have to follow all the tech giants’ steps, try to make ourselves try to become a multiplanetary species.
ELON MUSK (00:19:57 – 00:20:35): Yes, exactly. So I classify these generally as—there’s 2 main lines of argument. One is the defensive line. Which is that having consciousness on multiple heavenly bodies greatly improves the probable lifespan of civilization. That’s the defensive argument. You can think of it as life insurance for life as a whole. But the one I find personally that drives me more is actually the inspiration argument, because you see that life cannot just be about solving one sad problem after another. There must also be things that make you excited to wake up in the morning.
INTERVIEWER (00:20:35 – 00:20:36): Exactly.
ELON MUSK (00:20:36 – 00:20:44): That make you look forward to the future. That make life worth living. And being a spacefaring civilization is one of those things.
Neuralink and Human-AI Bandwidth
INTERVIEWER (00:20:45 – 00:21:02): I totally agree with that. So Elon, you once listed 5 areas you care about most, like sustainable energy, space, and also the internet, AI, and gene editing. Looking ahead for another 10 years, are there any new frontiers you want to add to that list?
ELON MUSK (00:21:04 – 00:22:33): Well, I think biological enhancement with Neuralink, this company I created with some other people, where we want to try to solve the bandwidth constraint that humans have. So, because you can imagine, even in the most benign scenario where the AI is super friendly and wants to do everything it can—it wants to make you happy—just our rate of communication is too slow. So our average peak human bandwidth is only about 100 bits per second, roughly. And our input bandwidth is much higher because of vision. So there we maybe have—it’s a debatable point—but a megabit per second or a few megabits per second. From our eyes, which are effectively like cameras, but our output bandwidth is really low, maybe 100 bits per second, whereas computers are communicating at a trillion bits per second. So anything we can do to increase the communication speed of humans will improve the—I think the alignment of humans and machines, because otherwise, to an AI that is communicating at a terabit a second, talking to a human will be like talking to a tree. Exactly. You talk to a tree, it takes a long time to respond.
Education for the Next Generation
INTERVIEWER (00:22:34 – 00:23:11): Let’s talk about the challenge for young people. You mentioned that you also talk about education, in the AI world. And also, I watched that in your headquarters here, you have a sign like you can come back to school at Tesla as well. Meaning that at every age you can have the opportunity to come back to learn, always to follow the latest kind of breakthrough in the AI world. But what about kind of suggestions or your predictions at that time? How, for example, a 20-year-old young person, they can get there, fulfill their self-worth rather than being left behind, during this massive transition?
ELON MUSK (00:23:12 – 00:23:58): Well, my recommendation foundation for education would be to get as broad-based an education as possible. That includes arts and sciences, engineering, wide general knowledge. In order to know what to ask the robots for, you need to be able to formulate the question. And with the broadest possible general knowledge, you’ll be better able to formulate the questions, or what they call prompt engineering, I guess. You’ve got to convey your wishes to the robot. And as crazy as this sounds, we will run out—there will be so many robots and so much AI that the AI will actually be eager to hear any request that you could possibly have, because that request will be fulfilled immediately.
Recommendations for Visiting China
INTERVIEWER (00:23:58 – 00:24:09): Your last visit to China is in May. If you’re going to have one opportunity to bring one American entrepreneur for visiting China for the very first time, what will be the most experience you want him to have first?
ELON MUSK (00:24:10 – 00:24:52): Well, I generally recommend, as much time as that person can devote to China, they should, because China’s got so many things to see. But usually people don’t have infinite time, so at a minimum they should see obviously Shanghai, Beijing. I recommend Xi’an, the Terracotta Warriors. I took the bullet train from Beijing to Xi’an. That was a great experience. Train stations are amazing. The Terracotta Warriors is one of the wonders of the world. And just make sure you look out the window and you’re not on your phone because there’s so much to see.
INTERVIEWER (00:24:52 – 00:24:55): Yeah, like you always recommend everyone to experience, go and see China by themselves.
ELON MUSK (00:24:57 – 00:25:04): Yes, because any words I—any words I say do not do justice to the incredible majesty that is China. It’s awesome.
Closing
INTERVIEWER (00:25:05 – 00:25:13): Really appreciate for your words. Thank you so much, Elon, for sitting down with CCTV Business Channel. And Elon, we truly hope to see you again very soon in Beijing.
ELON MUSK (00:25:14 – 00:25:15): Thank you. Thank you.
INTERVIEWER (00:25:15 – 00:25:15): Thank you so much.
ELON MUSK (00:25:18 – 00:25:24): Generally, I just like to say China is awesome and an incredible country, and I encourage people from around the world to visit China and experience it for themselves.
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