Save All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Elon Musk is back in the news again. (Really, does he ever leave the news?) Last week, Musk announced a new artificial intelligence venture called xAI. The timing of the launch is odd considering Musk still runs Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, Boring Company, and Twitter. Twitter in particular is causing him headaches, with both its sagging business and increased competition from rivals like Meta’s Threads. All of these developments are happening in the shadow of what feels like a lazy subplot on a bad sitcom—a proposed mixed-martial-arts cage match between Musk and his rival, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. This week, we talk with WIRED editor at large Steven Levy about the launch of xAI and its stated goal of “understanding the true nature of the universe.” We also discuss the places generative artificial intelligence has yet to venture, and the ways in which xAI could make an impact in the field of deep learning. And of course, we talk about that cage match. Yech. Show Notes Steven Levy: Yeah, I'm giving away my boomer credentials here. Michael Calore: All right, well on that note, let's take a break and we'll be right back with more. [Break] Michael Calore: Steven, you have the enviable job of keeping up with the goings on of all these billionaires in Silicon Valley. As we mentioned earlier, Elon Musk challenged Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match last month. Lauren Goode: Wait, wait, just take a moment. Michael Calore: Yes. Lauren Goode: We are talking about this transformative technology and then all of a sudden we're like, yeah, these two dudes, these bros, they want to have a fight. Michael Calore: They do. Lauren Goode: It's legitimate enough at this point that we're talking about it on our WIRED podcast. Michael Calore: Yes. We all thought it was a joke was when it was announced. Lauren Goode: Yes. Michael Calore: But now it actually seems to be happening. They're talking to the big production company that does all the mixed martial arts pay-per-view shows. They're talking to venues in Las Vegas about hosting it. Both of the participants appeared willing to want to go forward with it and they're talking about how they're training. Lauren Goode: Yeah. Mark Zuckerberg's been working out. Michael Calore: I mean he's been working out for years. But, it's just strange. Everything about it is strange. Lauren Goode: They saw the headlines about how Taylor Swift was driving local economies with her concerts and they thought, you know what? We want to get in on that too. Michael Calore: I would love to know the motivations. Steven Levy: Hold my energy drink. Michael Calore: Yes. Well, Steven, in your Plaintext newsletter last week you wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg pleading him to not step into the ring with Elon Musk and to not engage with him in hand-to-hand physical combat. Did you ever think that you'd be passing along advice like that in a consumer tech newsletter? Steven Levy: No, I didn't. But this is the world we live in where insane scenarios are actually happening. We've just talked about these chatbots which were really the realm of science fiction where people are very seriously talking now about the kind of companions we saw in the movie Her as a reality, this slam dunk within our grasp right now. Black mirror is the mirror now, is our mirror. So this is just another implausible episode of Black Mirror, which has come to life. In this case, this battle. I mean, I'm not still 100 percent convinced that it's not a goof, but every time you try to poke it to see, OK, the joke, it's not happening. So you'll see the head of the MMA organization, mixed martial arts organization, they're talking about how to sanction the battle. And I wrote to Meta and I said, hey, tell me is this serious? I actually wrote to Mark, I sent a message to Mark saying, hey, tell me if this is really happening. He didn't respond. Sometimes he does. Then I talked to his PR person and said, I'm not going to comment on this. But then you see, because Lauren referred to, they posted this picture of him training with some MMA guys who were apparently famous in this. So they're talking like it really might happen. I'm still a little wary. But I think this is corrosive stuff here. I mean, these people are middle-aged billionaires who like it or not, are leaders in these important technologies. So we're now putting our trust, really, into the technologies that these people are building, and it turns out they're acting like a pair of 9-year-olds out there saying they're going to settle their battles by combat. And then Marc Andreessen, let's bring on this guy- Lauren Goode: OK. I'm so glad you brought this up because I was going to ask you what you made of this essay. I mean, it read like an Onion headline. Like, man, who made billions off people staring at their computer screens all day long and using browsers now tells the kids to go out and fight. Steven Levy: He's saying it's a tough world out there, people that got to learn to fight. I've actually traveled with some billionaires. They travel with big security contingent. No one's going to come up to them and put them in a choke hold. They wouldn't even get within 20 feet of them. These people are saying how great it is that you should train your kids in combat because it's primal. It's part of being like a man, or presumably they don't talk about their daughters, but I guess they want them to be battle fighters too. I don't know. But to me- Lauren Goode: Well, I think he makes the argument that it's good for self-defense. Steven Levy: Well, when you get into a ring with someone, you're really talking about a very avoidable situation that you don't have to go into to defend yourself. I don't have to worry about defending myself against a mixed martial arts fighter in a ring because I'm not going to go in a ring. They'd have no love loss for each other and they don't respect each other. And Elon Musk even did a tweet suggesting they pull out a ruler and compare each other's you know know whats. That's not the kind of behavior that I believe we want our thought leaders to emulate. And it's particularly nasty because bringing it back to AI, both Zuckerberg and Musk are people who are building these large language models, they're trained with assumptions. So just think about it, the people who are programming these models, training these models, both believe that it's like a reasonable and desirable thing to do to settle your disputes with fighting. And maybe that stuff is going to bleed into the answers that their large language models give. Those are their assumptions on the way the world is, and as we've learned assumptions that people have bleed in to the training sets and the results you get from the queries you give to large language models. So I think actually there's subtle problem with this that goes beyond the idea that it's something out of Idiocracy. Lauren Goode: Let's assume for a second that we're not all being trolled- Steven Levy: A real possibility. Lauren Goode: It's a real possibility. How is this fight between Elon and Mark's symbolic of the battle they're waging over their platforms right now? Steven Levy: Well, because it's very tough business competition, and that's our system. And you could say the system is great because they talk all the time about how competition leads them to build better products, but it also leads people, as we've seen in this very example, to sometimes release products before they're fully baked. So Microsoft released its search engine powered by large language model before it was ready to go out into the world without trying to steal journalists actually from out under their wives. I'm referring to this conversation that Sydney, the Microsoft Bing chatbot had with the journalist Kevin Roose, which exposed a pretty big flaw in the iteration that they shipped with their large language model. Michael Calore: So Musk and Zuckerberg have said that they would donate the pay-per-view revenue to charity. Does that make it any easier for you to swallow if they actually go through this? Steven Levy: No, that's like pennies compared to what they could give to charity. These people worth each over $100 billion Musk is worth over $200 billion. They could just flip $5 billion to some charity and they'd never miss it, ever. So what are they going to give a few million, 10 million to charity and that's going to excuse behavior, which is going to stand for a symbol of our corrosive times for all eternity? I don't think so. Michael Calore: It is all very grim. Lauren Goode: How much of this is a distraction from the threat of regulation? Steven Levy: Well, I don't know. I mean, I think that it's not going to stop that. It'll draw attention, but people haven't stopped writing about regulation and Lina Khan still managed to come out with some sort of criticisms of what's going on in the AI space. She wasn't distracted by it, and she's not going to get in the ring with them. Lauren Goode: Right. But I mean, these guys are professional attention merchants. To steal a phrase from Tim Wu, right? This is what they do. They know how to traffic and attention. They know how to get people's attention. And this is, it's a head fake in a way. Michael Calore: That's a good fighting term, head fake. Lauren Goode: Yeah, there really is. It's also a good basketball term. But I suppose that's a pump fake. But yeah, attention is a limited resource of ours. We do have a limited amount of it, and there is lot— Steven Levy: Wait, Lauren, are you an MMA fan? Lauren Goode: I'm not actually. I don't think I've ever watched a single match. Although a friend of mine did say the other evening over dinner that if this cage match came to be that she would get it on pay-per-view, and I said yes, and I'd be there, I'd come over and I would absolutely watch it. Michael Calore: We would all watch it. Lauren Goode: Actually, in an ideal world, Steven, you and I would go cover it in person. Steven Levy: Right. I hope I can expense it. Lauren Goode: Yeah. Because I just want to be there to soak in the absurdity and to feel the vibes and to write about it for WIRED, I think there would be nothing better. But it does feel that that's what it is, it is a peak level of absurdity. And we are talking about it right now, we're devoting attention to it right now while there's this flurry of activity in Washington, we have Senator Schumer calling for a series of AI talks and panels so that our legislators can get up to speed on how this technology works. And we are at this pivotal moment where we need to start seriously thinking about how this is going to affect our humanity more than it has already. And here we are we're talking about a Vegas cage match between these two bros. By the way, my money's on Zuck. But, yes. Steven Levy: Just imagine if you were someone who's working in AI in China and you're watching this happen, you're thinking, these are the people that I'm competing against? Michael Calore: Yes, it is all very absurd. Lauren Goode: Yes, indeed. Yep. Michael Calore: Well, I don't want to think about this anymore, so let's take a break and we'll come back and do our recommendations. [Break] Michael Calore: OK. We desperately need to switch gears now. So let's do our recommendations. Steven, as our guest. You get to go first, what is the thing that you want to recommend to our listeners? Steven Levy: Well, I just saw the movie Oppenheimer, which in WIRED we had a big interview with Chris Nolan, the director, and it's fantastic. It's really one of the best movies I've seen in years. It's a complicated movie. It's Christopher Nolan, of course. And he jumps around time and space, not in a science fiction way but in a narrative sense. But you never lose the thread. And it's an important story about the guy who developed the atom bomb for the US and then how to defend himself in the red scare later on. And it turned out to be a very nuanced prosecution against him. But it had a lot of issues that relate to AI. Do you go along with the technology that has any chance at all, a non-zero chance let's say, of wiping out humanity? So it has resonance there and great acting performances. I highly recommend it. Michael Calore: Did you see it in IMAX? Steven Levy: No, I didn't because there were two screening theaters and they split us up and I got the non-IMAX one. This is not a complaint that I'm going to make. I've had worse things in my life than not making it into the IMAX theater. Michael Calore: Sure. We both saw it last night. Lauren and I did both see it last night also. Lauren Goode: We did. Yeah. We saw it here in San Francisco at the AMC Metreon 16, which I later found out is apparently Christopher Nolan's favorite IMAX screen. Michael Calore: Among his favorites. Lauren Goode: Among his favorites, yes. And we did see it on IMAX. And yeah, all those actors have lovely pores. I want to know who their facialists are. Michael Calore: Did you like the movie, Lauren? Lauren Goode: So that is my recommendation this week as well. I'm just hopping aboard the Steven Levy train here. Steven, if you get invited to Vegas, I'd like to tag along. Also, your recommendation is Oppenheimer and so is mine. I felt intrigued by the movie. I felt rattled by it. I want to see it again. I want to see it again with captioning on, because I watch a lot of things using captions now when I'm watching stuff at home, and it really helps me process dialog in a different way. The movie was incredibly fast moving and there was a lot of dialog, this really heightened dramatic dialog packed into plot driving scenes. And so I was like, I would like to see this … Yeah, just want to see it again and experience it again. I thought the acting was terrific. I thought the special effects were incredible. Yeah, you have to like Christopher Nolan movies, I think. And so there were elements of it I did not love. Probably won't go into my favorite movies of all time Apple Notes list. But it was very good. It was very, very good. Really moving. Steven Levy: Lauren, there was a story recently that talked about how people watching the video with captions is now a thing. Do you think they we're all going to be wearing the AR glasses we have that will have captions on everything that we hear what people say? Lauren Goode: I could see that being useful in a movie like setting where you go to a theater and you don't have the option. And it's certainly great for accessibility reasons. But no, I think most of us are just going to continue to experience captions on our personal devices, on our phones and our TV screens at home because we can just put them on really easily. I think that'll be the most prominent way that we use it. And I think it has to do with, it's a combination of factors. It depends on how a work is mixed, certainly how the audio is mixed and if you can actually hear those channels amongst all the big bombs and explosions and the car crashes and everything else, and dramatic music and the violins. But I think we're probably all destroying our hearing, but frankly, with earbuds in our ears too. Our generation is getting older. Yeah, I don't know. Michael Calore: Every generation is getting older all the time. Lauren Goode: Turns out we just get older. Revelation here. Do you watch with captions, Steven? Steven Levy: I generally will, yeah, actually do that. My hearing hasn't recovered from a 1969 Who concert in the Electric Factory. Lauren Goode: I have to say, back to Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy was incredible. Michael Calore: He was very good. Lauren Goode: Yeah, I would not be surprised if he gets an Oscar. Steven Levy: Mr. Oscar is knocking on Robert Downey Jr.’s door. Lauren Goode: Oh yeah. Robert Downey Jr. was great too. His character was incredibly nuanced. Michael Calore: I think they'll both get nominated. I should mention the film does not pass the Bechdel test. Lauren Goode: Mm, yeah. Yes. Michael Calore: There are few women of depth in the movie. Lauren Goode: Not a lot of emotional depth, especially Jean. She just really got left in the dust there, treated as a mistress character when she was actually in real life, a much bigger role. Michael Calore: Yes. I felt the movie was claustrophobic. I felt like everything was packed in a little bit too tight. You got bombarded a lot over three hours with a very fast moving scenes, a lot of fast moving camera stuff, very loud noises, a loud score, and a lot of visual jump cuts. So there was not a whole lot of breathing room. I have been comparing it to spending three hours in a dryer because you just kind of get tossed around and you don't really know which way is up a lot of times and it's very loud— Steven Levy: That something you— Michael Calore: I'm sorry?