SpaceX's Ambitious $26.5 Trillion AI Projection

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
On the podcast today, OpenAI is hiring a Clinton crisis veteran to rebuild AI's public image. We wanna talk about what that means, why I think we have this bad public image, and what we can do about it, what the truth to it is, and what some of the overblown areas of it are. Trump is also canceling the AI testing executive order. A bunch of CEOs declined to come to an Oval Office event. There's a bunch of drama there, but this is something we were reporting on that he delayed it. Now, it feels like it's actually canceled. SpaceX is saying that there is a $26.5 trillion AI market, and this is all happening as Grok is falling behind OpenAI and Anthropic in usage. Google is now shifting their AI science strategy, moving it more towards agentic research systems. We'll talk about what that means for science. And the literary world has been pretty much unprepared for AI-generated fiction. There was a huge prize scandal, and it exposed a bunch of the kind of AI-generated detection gaps. I actually have probably a contrarian take on all of that, but let's get into the podcast today. The first thing I want to cover is the OpenAI kind of AI crisis public image scandal thing that's going on right now, where essentially they've hired Chris Lane, who is a Clinton-era, he's called the crisis fixer. But basically what he does is he leads their global affairs and their communications. Right now, the company is fighting with a whole bunch of different organizations, and there's lawsuits, there's a lot going on, especially in the fact that they're kind of fighting with this negative public sentiment towards AI. I think it's something like 60% or 70% of people have a negative view of AI when they pull the general public. So Lee Han, his goal right now is to basically rebuild trust. He also has to lobby the states to pass AI laws that aren't going to constrain OpenAI's growth. And this is a balancing act that is pretty complicated for OpenAI, but honestly, for anyone. And he has a lot of work on messaging, and he's got to talk about job loss and AI safety. There's a lot going on there. So the thing that I do think is really important is that he actually helped launch Leading the Future SuperPAC last summer. That secured over $100 million in funding commitments from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and a bunch of other tech figures. OpenAI also recently backed an Illinois Liability Shield Bill for AI labs, causing catastrophic harm. They then kind of distanced themselves after there was a lot of criticism from that, but that was what they recently were lobbying for. So that's another crisis that he's going to have to try and talk to. And also another crisis he's going to be dealing with is that a bunch of former members of OpenAI's Economic Research Unit, they quit, and they all said that they were quitting because that particular team became an advocacy arm, and they were saying that it was basically downplaying a lot of OpenAI's negative economic impacts.
And if it was kind of inconvenient to the leadership, then they would just say, like, look, everything about AI is good. Trump is officially canceling the AI testing executive order. A whole bunch of CEOs declined to come to an Oval Office event.
This is getting scrapped before it was going to be, you know, AI models had up to 90 days that they had to give their model to the government to go test, make sure it was safe before public release. A lot of the top labs, AI CEOs declined this kind of last minute Oval Office event about this. And the order, essentially, they were saying was going to slow down AI launches in the US. China obviously has accelerated in its own AI governance framework. And a lot of people were saying, look, China might be 30 to 60 days behind us with a lot of their models if we're going to have to, you know, delay all of our model releases by 90 days for the government to do a review, which honestly probably isn't going to come up with a verdict that's any different than the red teaming offices at all the AI labs. I mean, I think we saw Anthropic pretty responsibly say, look, our Mithos model has a lot of issues. They gave it to a lot of big organizations to go fix bugs. They gave it to the government to fix code vulnerabilities and other things. And so it feels like these, you know, the top labs are doing a good job of trying to get all of the testing down, all the safety stuff done. And so added another 90 days on top of that felt like it might basically push us so China could perhaps accelerate and have their models be better than us. That was kind of the reason for why a lot of this was canceled. OpenAI supported this particular order that Trump was working on. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, both were telling Trump to cancel it. Something that's interesting is there was this whole event where all of these CEOs were supposed to talk about it. A bunch of them weren't gonna be able to make it. And ultimately Trump decided to cancel it and just say, look, I'm canceling this whole executive order. But apparently there's a bunch of executives who were in the air flying to the White House when the event got canceled to turn around. So a bunch of the AI labs were trying to say, hey, look, give us a 14-day testing window instead of the original proposed 90-day testing window.