California · Anthropic · OpenAI · Nvidia · Google · Sam Altman · CNBC Technology
Elon Musk talks up AI safety while fighting regulation in wild week of strange alliances
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Elon Musk had a head-spinning week in AI.
Key facts
- At SpaceX, Musk sold a version of xAI's Grok models to the U.S. military which "enabled U.S. forces to deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours," according to DOJ legal
- The company merged with xAI, Musk's AI startup, in February, and completed a $60 billion acquisition of AI coding tools provider Cursor in August
- Tyler Whitmer, CEO of the nonprofit Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology (LASST), told CNBC that self-regulation won't be enough to protect the public from existing and future harms
- 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 hefty dose of sorely needed
Summary
After agreeing with bitter rivals Dario Amodei and Sam Altman in their call for foundation model labs to slow the pace of development, Musk was contradicted by President Donald Trump and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who said AI companies need to go faster. Trump, whose stock portfolio includes shares of Nvidia and SpaceX according to his most recent disclosure, called fears of runaway AI a "hoax. Speaking on a panel at the All-In Summit on Tuesday that included longtime friend and former White House AI czar David Sacks, Musk took a more middle-of-the-road approach. "You can always escalate the amount of regulatory oversight, but it is difficult to reduce it," Musk said in a virtual appearance at the event. Behind the scenes, the Wall Street Journal reported this week that Musk had joined Huang and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in advising President Trump to oppose an industry-funded regulator.