Elon Musk is the tech tyrant behind SpaceX, Tesla, Nuueralink, The Boring Company and OpenAI. Earlier this week, the 48-year-old unveiled the shiny new rocket, the Starship MK1, intended to help fulfil Musk’s goal of a permanent settlement on Mars. Tim Dodd, presenter of YouTube channel Everyday Astronaut had the chance to pick the brain of the billionaire after he gave a presentation on the new rocket.
Musk spilled the beans on how his company is able to move forward at such a fast pace, trumping the likes of NASA and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.
He said: “I think I’ve learned a lot of lessons about how to make things go fast.
“And then I’ve propagated those lessons to the SpaceX team and there’s just like an incredibly talented hard working team at SpaceX.
“In fact, at times, I think maybe there are too many talented people at SpaceX, we have too many talented people, we’re cornering the market.
The design must be modified to accelerate progress
Elon Musk
“But there’s this very talented group that works super hard and they have to take the general approach of, if something is taking too long, the design is wrong.
“Therefore, the design must be modified to accelerate progress.”
Musk, who was born and raised in Pretoria, South Africa, before moving to Canada at 17, went on to give an example of this theory in motion.
He added: “One of the most fundamental errors made in advanced developments is to stick with a design even when it is very complicated and to not strive to delete parts and processes.
“It is incredibly important, so this is why the switch to steel was made, because the advanced carbon fibre was taking too long.
“| cancelled the carbon fibre design in October last year, I’m the chief engineer, people don’t realise that.
“But that said, what I used to tell the team is ‘everyone is a chief engineer’ this is extremely important.
“Everyone must understand, broadly speaking, all the systems in the vehicles work.”
Musk finalised by rounding his point up, reiterating that engineers should not spend too much time trying to make the problem work.
He concluded: “So that you don’t have self-system optimisation, because this is naturally what happens, you can see the organisational errors.”
“Instead of getting rid of something, or questioning its constraints, the one department will design to the constraints that the other department has given them without calling into question those constraints.
“You should actually take the constraints that you are given are guaranteed to some degree to be wrong, because the counterpoint would be that they are perfect.
“So question your constraints, it does not matter if the person handing you them won a Nobel Prize, even they are wrong sometimes.
“One of the biggest traps for smart engineers is optimising something that shouldn’t exist.
“The first thing you should say is ‘this is wrong’”.
In July this year, Microsoft invested $1billion (£823,825,000) into Musk’s AI venture that plans to mimic the human brain using computers.
OpenAI said the investment would go towards its efforts of building artificial general intelligence (AGI) that can rival and surpass the cognitive capabilities of humans.
CEO Sam Altman said: “The creation of AGI will be the most important technological development in human history, with the potential to shape the trajectory of humanity.
“Our mission is to ensure that AGI technology benefits all of humanity, and we’re working with Microsoft to build the supercomputing foundation on which we’ll build AGI.”
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