Musk: Superintelligence won't rule humanity, it will just ignore it
Musk responded in 42 seconds to whether superintelligence will rule humanity: faced with superintelligence thousands or even millions of times smarter than humans, humans don't deserve to be ruled, and it won't have any interest in ruling humanity. He compared humans to chimpanzees: humans won't pass special laws to manage every chimpanzee, they'll just set aside nature reserves. He believes the real risk to humanity isn't being maliciously ruled, but being systematically ignored—like an anthill being flattened when a highway is built.
View original postFor the first time, Musk publicly and directly addressed the core substance of the lawsuit with @OpenAI and his love-hate relationship with @sama Altman. In the latest Forbes interview, when Elon talked about the OpenAI lawsuit, he didn't dwell on personal grievances, but instead directly flipped over the card the whole of Silicon Valley was most afraid to lay on the table. Old Ma said: OpenAI's forced conversion from nonprofit to fully for-profit is setting an extremely dangerous precedent. Many people see this lawsuit as just an interest struggle between founders, or as Musk's sour grapes over missing out on a hundred-billion valuation. But the core Musk pointed out in just over two minutes is actually a Trojan horse that shakes the very foundations of modern commercial philanthropy: If a supergiant, catalyzed by fully tax-exempt, regulation-free charitable donations and now valued at nearly $800 billion, can casually take off its public-interest cloak and stuff itself directly into private pockets, then the existing charitable donation contracts across America and even the world are all dead at the root. When OpenAI was founded, the promise it used to pull everyone in was an extremely noble mission statement: We are a nonprofit, we develop AGI for the benefit of all humanity, and we prevent super-technology from being privatized by commercial oligarchs like Google. Musk and other donors genuinely put in tens of millions of dollars in unpaid donations, not for equity dividends, but for the bottom line of the public interest. Later, in order to raise funds to buy compute, Sam Altman came up with a capped-profit compromise structure. The key clause all parties compromised on at the time was written clearly: the for-profit entity is only responsible for making money and paying back debt; once true artificial general intelligence (AGI) is achieved, all equity and control must be returned without reservation to the nonprofit charitable organization. And what everyone has recently seen is this: This return clause, once used to reassure regulators and donors, was quietly and unilaterally deleted by them. Previously, charitable trusts and tax-exempt funds could exist for over a hundred years because society reached a consensus: you trade tax exemption for public benefit, and your results forever belong to the public. Now OpenAI has demonstrated a brand-new get-rich-quick pipeline: First use the nonprofit slogan of saving humanity to eat up all the tax-exempt benefits, absorb the dedication of top scientists and the public's unpaid donations, then after the technological breakthrough and commercial moat are forged, turn around and amend the charter, and compliantly launder priceless assets that originally belonged to public property into private property split among a few executives and Wall Street capital. If this deal ultimately walks away unscathed, there will never again be truly meaningful charitable investment in the world. All tech giants will learn to use the guise of nonprofit to incubate core assets, leaving R&D risk to taxpayers and donors, and leaving the final payoff to private shareholders. So this has long ceased to be a war between just Musk and Sam Altman, it's more like an ultimate showdown over public trust, the spirit of contract, and the bottom line of Silicon Valley capital's greed.
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马斯克第一次公开正面回应了跟@OpenAI 诉讼案的核心实质以及跟@sama Altman的爱恨情仇, 在福布斯最新访谈里Elon聊到 OpenAI 诉讼案时,没有纠结个人恩怨,而是把整个硅谷最不敢摊开讲的一张底牌直接掀开了, 老马说:OpenAI 从非营利强行转为全面营利,正在开创一个极其危险的先例。 很多人看这场官司,以为只是创始人之间的利益撕扯,或者是马斯克因为错过千亿估值而产生的酸葡萄心理。 但马斯克在 2 分多钟里点破的核心,其实是一场动摇整个现代商业慈善根基的特洛伊木马: 如果一家由全免税、免监管的慈善捐赠催化出来、今天估值逼近 8000 亿美元的超级巨头,可以把公益外衣随手脱掉直接装进私人腰包,那么全美甚至全球现有的慈善捐赠契约,就全部从根子上死掉了。 当年 OpenAI 成立时拉着所有人入局的承诺,是一份极度崇高的使命书: 我们是非营利组织,我们为了全人类的利益研发 AGI,防止超级技术被谷歌等商业寡头私有化。 马斯克和其他捐赠人真金白银掏了几千万美元的无偿捐赠,图的不是股权分红,而是公共利益的底线。 后来为了融资买算力,Sam Altman 搞出了一个上限利润的折中结构。 当时各方妥协的关键条款写得清清楚楚:营利实体只负责赚钱还债,一旦真正的通用人工智能(AGI)实现,所有的股权和控制权必须毫无保留地退还给非营利慈善机构。 而最近所有人看到的事实是: 这个曾经用来安抚监管、安抚捐赠人的归还条款,被他们悄无声息地单方面删掉了。 以前慈善信托和免税基金之所以能存在上百年,是因为社会达成了共识:你用免税换取公益,你的成果就永远属于公众。 现在 OpenAI 示范了一条全新的暴富流水线: 先用拯救人类的非营利口号吃尽免税红利、吸纳顶级科学家的奉献和社会的无偿捐款, 等技术突破、商业壁垒铸成之后,反手修改章程,把原本属于公共财产的无价资产,合规洗成几个管理层和华尔街资本瓜分的私产。 如果这一单最终能全身而退,以后世界上就再也没有真正意义上的慈善投资了。 所有的科技巨头都会学着用非营利的幌子孵化核心资产,把研发风险留给纳税人和捐助者,把终局红利留给私人股东, 所以,这早就不是马斯克和 Sam Altman 两个人的战争了, 更像是一场关于公众信任、契约精神与硅谷资本贪婪底线的终极对决。
Body · AI translation
When Musk discussed whether superintelligence would actually rule humanity, he used just 42 seconds to completely overturn the sci-fi premises that everyone has taken for granted for decades.
He said: We don't even deserve to be ruled.
For many people, the ultimate fear about superintelligence is Terminator, The Matrix, or being locked in a cyber cage and ordered around by a cold machine dictator.
But Musk pointed out an extremely piercing yet extremely clear reality: In any system with a vast disparity in intelligence, ruling itself is a worthless, highly energy-consuming waste.
Faced with a superintelligence thousands or even millions of times smarter than humans, our delusion of controlling it and setting rules for it is nothing but a pipe dream.
But conversely, it will not have even a second's interest in ruling humanity.
He used an extremely clear-headed analogy between humans and chimpanzees: Humans are far smarter than chimpanzees, but do we today draw up a complex set of laws to manage every single chimpanzee in the jungle down to the last detail? No.
We basically leave them alone, draw a protected zone at the edge, and as long as they don't get in the way of the expansion of modern civilization, humans can't even be bothered to glance at them.
Rule presupposes that both sides are still on the same dimension of capability and need power to allocate scarce resources.
When the intelligence gap widens into a chasm of a millionfold, human society's money, territory, politics and ideology are not even worth a speck of dust in the eyes of superintelligence.
It has its own stars and oceans and fundamental physics to explore, and it disdains being the king of the monkeys in a mud pit.
The real risk for humanity's future has never been being ruled with malice, but being systematically ignored.
Just as when humans build a highway through a forest, flattening an anthill is never out of hatred, but simply because the road happens to pass right through there.
So we need to let go of the vanity of being the protagonist of the universe. The superintelligence of the future will neither hate you nor care to meddle with you. How to prove that we are not the anthill under that highway is the only question humanity needs to think about.