AI is sending Elon Musk into a tizzy.
The Tesla CEO spoke about the wonders of AI during an interview at the X Takeover event on Saturday. Then, he struck an unusually reflective tone.
“I’ve got a little bit of cyber psychosis,” Musk said. “Maybe a lot actually.”
Throughout the past year, Musk said that he’s had “AI or SI psychosis” — referring to President Donald Trump’s renaming of artificial intelligence to super intelligence — “probably half a dozen times.”
AI psychosis, which is not a clinical term, doesn’t have a set definition, but it’s often referred to as when repeated AI use deepens a user’s delusions. It’s also been used an insult hoisted on techies who had drunk the Kool-Aid and used AI to an extreme degree. Some psychiatrists also consider it a mental health condition when AI negatively impacts pre-existing vulnerabilities.
Since then, some techies have rebranded AI psychosis as a badge of honor of sorts. At a May party, attendees chanted: “One, two, three — AI PSYCHOSIS!”
The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen championed AIPAAS — “AI Psychosis As A Service” — and called the psychosis’ opposite “AI cope.”
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan joked in March: “I have cyber psychosis, but I think a third of the CEOs that I know have it as well.”
More recently, Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar referenced AI researchers who had taken up smoking because they expect AI to cure cancer. It was an example of what he called Silicon Valley’s “mass psychosis.”
Musk’s own AI “psychosis” was in reference to his belief that AI could understand beauty. “You’re like, ‘Wow, AI can do good taste? That’s wild,'” he said at the Saturday event.
Prior to the Saturday interview, Musk hadn’t spoken much about AI psychosis. He’d certainly seen the term, though.
In April, Musk responded to Andreessen’s X post where he wrote that there were three states of being: “AI Euphoria, AI Psychosis, and AI Psychosis Psychosis.”
“Yeah,” Musk replied.
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