The Blacklynx Brief - Vol.6 - The Elon Musk Edition

Author

Jan Verhulst
September 15, 2023

Good morning all,

This week we’re throwing our regular format out the window and are dedicating this edition to someone who influences both fields we are highlighting on a weekly basis. And that person is of course Elon Musk.

This week Walter Isaacson’s biography on Musk is released and that is an excellent reason to highlight Mr. Musk this week.

If you plan on picking up a copy later, peace be with you. But if a 688-page read about a mercurial entrepreneur isn’t your preferred way to spend $35, here’s a taste of what Walter Isaacson talks about in Elon Musk

Musk’s childhood and personal life: Isaacson writes that Musk’s dad, described as emotionally and physically abusive, is the No. 1 demon in his mind—and that demon, in part, motivates Musk. He also revealed that Musk has three children with Grimes, bringing the total number of children he is known to have fathered to 11. The pair had kept their third child, a boy named Techno Mechanicus, a secret.

His relationship with another tech titan: A portion of the biography focuses on Musk’s relationship with Bill Gates, including their meeting at a Tesla factory. The tour turned sour when Musk told the Microsoft co-founder, a notable philanthropist, that most philanthropy is “bullshit” and grilled him on why he had shorted Tesla stock. Grimes’s take on their dynamic was, “I imagine it’s a little bit of a dick-measuring contest.”

The extent of Musk’s influence and power via Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, and X: It’s not a surprise that Musk’s world-changing companies occupy significant space in his biography, but what may be news to non-Musk scholars is what Musk genuinely believes about them.

Musk called Tesla “the company doing the most to solve climate change,” when Gates told him batteries would never power large semitrucks.

He built SpaceX with the explicit goal of turning humanity into a multiplanetary species, even hosting meetings about future governance…on Mars.

Musk created Starlink, which made headlines last week for the book’s revelations about its role in Ukraine’s fight against Russia, to generate profit while he worked on the whole interplanetary thing.

He was so committed to his “hardcore” takeover of Twitter (now X) that he hired moving vans to transfer the company’s servers from one data center to another on Christmas Eve.

Elon Musk is a complex figure in the world of artificial intelligence. He is notoriously one of the main proponents of slowing down development of artificial intelligence before the advent of AGI or Artificial General Intelligence. Also refered to as “the singularity”.

Musk is convinced that without boundaries in place that a new race of machines could emerge that will remove humanity from this earth.

In March Musk co-signed a letter urging to halt development of these platforms at least 6 months.

His critics were doubtful of the authenticity of this request as Elon and his companies were clearly lagging behind and he was accused of hypocrisy. Because he’s - in the background - one of the biggest builders of AI systems.

His mission is to build artificial intelligence as an extension of the human will. He wants to use artificial intelligence to augment our brain (Neuralink) , prevent all car accidents (Tesla) , aid us in difficult physical tasks (Optimus Robot) and help make humanity an interplanetary species by getting us to Mars (SpaceX).

And then there’s Starlink (giving everyone on the planet access to the internet) or Hyperloop (solve all traffic congestion).

And then there are even some quirky side projects like his (not a ) flamethrower.

And yet - many people have a visceral dislike of him.

His sometimes erratic seeming behavior is often misunderstood. If you’ve ever listened to an interview with Musk you cannot help but admire the way his brain works. As a youth, he was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome so it’s no surprise that his social skills are somewhat lacking.

By the way for some excellent interviews with Musk go here:

Both are multiple hours long and allow you - dear reader - to form an opinion yourself if Musk is indeed good or evil.

In March 2023 Musk founded xAI - a new venture focused solely on Artificial Intelligence development. The mission of this new company is (and this is no joke) : “To understand the true nature of the universe”.

At the same time as he was calling for the halting of AI development, Musk was buying GPU’s (graphics cards) by the millions. Difficult to fathom how his brain works- he might be accelerating development to be the one that is able to set the safeguards on AI in place. Or he might be a hypocrite in it for the money.

Hopefully Walter Isaacsson’s biography is going to perhaps going to give us some insight in the man himself.

To not completely stray from the format we have some Elon Musk-themed news for you ! That can go off our checklist.

(Elon Musk) Cybersecurity News

X/Twitter has updated its Terms of Service to use your posts for AI Training

When Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, it came as a bit of surprise. What would he possible want with it ? Slowly but surely it’s becoming quite clear what he want to do. He has spent the last few months locking down the platform from a security perspective , mainly to prevent API’s and scrapers to interact with it. This week the terms of service changed to make it possible to train AI with the posts on the platform:

The verbage is misleading : ‘improving’ and ‘personalizing’ sounds so much better than “personal targeting”. He notoriously threatened to sue Microsoft (and OpenAi) because he discovered massive data scraping from Twitter.

Elon Musk Destroys His Phone Once Every Year

According to Cybersecurity Insiders , Musk destroys his phone once every year. In fear that someone might get hold of that device and use data from the device against him.

He’s not alone - it’s a trend that we see emerging with extremely rich and influential people. It’s almost like the more public you are with your data - sharing your life , your children etc. the lower you are on the social ladder.

The highest trees catch the most wind. Suppose that tomorrow you win the lottery and receive an ungodly amount - let’s say 250 million euros.

Well - I hate to break it to you but safety and privacy must be one of your foremost concerns. There’s a lot of “bad hombres” out there who would come swarming to your house to hold you at gunpoint.

Can’t imagine what that must be like for someone like Musk.

If you’re interested in hearing more on how to lock down your phone, we might do a series in the future.

(Elon Musk) AI News

Tesla's Stock Soars 10% On Dojo Announcement

Last week we mentioned a Twitter(x) live broadcast in which Elon Musk demonstrated Tesla's fully self-driving V12 beta software.

These capabilities are made possible by “Dojo”: a $300 million supercomputer . Dojo contains about 10.000 Nvidia H100 GPU’s. It’s being described as “one of the most powerful machines in the world”. This is the computer for which Musk was buying all these GPU’s (as mentioned above).

Morgan Stanley published a report on this supercomputer and stated that Tesla could add 500 BILLION dollar to its marketcap due to what will become possible.

Where’s Apple ?

When combing through AI news we get a lot of updates on ChatGPT and their creators OpenAI (owned by Microsoft). There’s a lot of talk about Google’s AI systems (Bard and xxx) and of course Meta is joining the race. Then you have Musk’s new initiative xAI. And that ‘s just in the US. Many nations are working on their own large language models and other AI systems.

But where’s Apple? They seem to be forgotten in the conversation.

Well, apparently they’re spending millions of dollars per day training Ajax (not the football team) but its most advanced language model.

We’re going to leave you with an excerpt from an interview Tucker Carlson (then still at Fox News) had with Musk in April

Sweet dreams !

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