Elon Musk talks up AI safety while fighting regulation in wild week of strange alliances

SpaceX founder Elon Musk addresses members of the media during a press conference announcing new developments of the Crew Dragon reusable spacecraft, at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, Oct. 10, 2019.

Philip Pacheco | Afp | Getty Images

Elon Musk had a head-spinning week in AI.

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 actually 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. He urged companies to test each other's new models to identify and fix safety issues before they get released, an option he sees as preferable to the government taking a heavy-handed regulatory position in AI.

"You can always escalate the amount of regulatory oversight, but it is very difficult to reduce it," Musk said in a virtual appearance at the event. "It does tend to be very much a one-way ratchet."

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.

Musk didn't immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.

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The back and forth in just the past week is a microcosm of Musk's history in artificial intelligence, dating back to an early check he wrote to fund DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014. The year after that deal, Musk co-founded OpenAI with Altman and others as a nonprofit research lab.

Meanwhile, Musk's other public company, Tesla, continues work on so-called physical AI, including driverless cars and humanoid robots.