TECH TRENDS | Musk, Zuckerberg, and Hassabis Address G20 Ministers in North Carolina

The G20 Innovation Ministers' Meeting was held on September 1-2 at the Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and was co-chaired by White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Kratsios and Commerce Secretary Lutnick. According to Sina Finance, it was one of a series of preparatory meetings during the United States' G20 presidency and will lead to the leaders' summit in Miami on December 14-15. On September 1, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google DeepMind Chairman Demis Hassabis, and former White House AI adviser Sacks spoke by video link. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang are scheduled to join Lutnick for a fireside chat on September 2, but no verifiable full transcript was available at the time of writing. The U.S. side unveiled a policy proposal called the Carolina Principles on the first day of the meeting. It calls for no new artificial intelligence regulator, new rules only in “novel situations,” and joint technical testing with the private sector. Kratsios told ministers that policymakers do not need to treat every innovation as an unprecedented policy challenge, and said scientific discovery was an underappreciated topic, with AI applications in materials, chemistry, mathematics, and physics expected to produce the biggest breakthroughs over the next five to ten years. Musk said AI could expand global economic output by 20% to 30%, or about $20 trillion to $30 trillion a year. He said that by the end of next year, all digital work that does not require “messing with atoms” could be done by AI, and predicted that at least 1 billion humanoid robots would be operating within 10 years. He described power supply as the immediate core crisis, saying chip capacity is expanding faster than electricity construction and that the industry consensus is that a significant power shortage will emerge next year. Musk said his company is building its own power generation facilities for data centers, and argued that innovation should proceed in a relatively unregulated environment, with new things presumed legal rather than illegal. Zuckerberg said data center construction will create demand for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of skilled trades jobs, and that Meta cannot find enough workers for its planned data centers. He said more carpenters and electricians are needed, and urged countries not to restrict open-source weight models. Hassabis called for safety testing mechanisms for AI systems and compared the impact of artificial general intelligence to 10 times the Industrial Revolution. Sacks said the current stage is a new industrial revolution and an opportunity to upgrade the power grid and bring some advanced manufacturing back to the United States. He also said electricity prices could fall if AI companies build their own power supplies for data centers, while sharing the grid with residents would push prices higher.