Elon Musk is once again betting that artificial intelligence will outsmart us all — and he expects that to occur sooner than he initially thought.
"My guess is we'll have AI that is smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year," Musk said during a live interview with Norges Bank CEO Nicolai Tangen on X, formerly Twitter, earlier this week that's now an episode of his podcast "In Good Company."
The Tesla CEO added that the "total amount of sentient compute" — a concept that may refer to AI thinking and acting independently — will exceed all humans in five years.
The tech billionaire's timeline for AI exceeding human brainpower appears to have shortened as companies like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft race to build the best rival products. In March, Musk wrote on X that AI will be smarter than "all humans combined" by 2029. That same month, he shared another prediction on when machines will outpace human brainpower, pushing the year to 2030.
Now, the business mogul suggests that AI could surpass human intellect by 2026 partly because of the sheer number of talent in the sector.
He says that the "world's smartest people" such as physicists, have moved into AI because of how quickly the industry advances, which could speed up development. (Coincidentally, Musk says OpenAI has poached some of Tesla's AI engineers.)
"We're seeing a lot of the best talents going into AI," Musk says in the interview.
But the tech CEO says hardware constraints may get in the way of rapid advancement. Last year's constraint, Musk says, was the dwindling supply of chips needed to power AI training efforts. This year's challenge, he says, will be transitioning to a "voltage transformer supply" or getting the total amount of electricity needed to power AI systems which he implies may be less widely available in the next one to three years. And on top of that, companies are running out of quality data to train their models.
Musk expects to encounter these challenges in making Grok, an AI chatbot backed by his startup xAI, smarter than its rivals. While the tech leader claims Grok is better than OpenAI's ChatGPT, he says the current "limiting factor" to making his model even more powerful is the massive amounts of computing needed to train it.
He says he's trying to get his hands on roughly 20,000 GPUs, Nvidia's highly coveted AI chips, by May, which he claims is doable. But for Grok 3, which would be xAI's most advanced model, Musk says that 100,000 GPUs are required for additional training. That could be a major roadblock that data scarcity would amplify.
Musk pointed to synthetic and real-world video data as a potential alternative training source. But it's not just his company working to bypass data walls. OpenAI, a firm that the business leader helped start, is discussing feeding its upcoming model GPT-5 on YouTube video transcripts to prepare for a potential information shortage, sources told The Wall Street Journal. Google, too, appears to be hitting a wall. In February, the search giant struck a $60 million dollar-a-year deal with Reddit, a public forum, to train its AI models on user posts which critics say could lead to troubling outputs.
But despite the training obstacles, Musk seems convinced that AI is advancing at a fast enough rate to reach artificial general intelligence in the next few years, though some experts don't think that will happen anytime soon.
Daphne Koller, a former computer science professor at Stanford and MacArthur "genius," said on a January panel that machines won't be as smart as humans for a long time, as they still have a lot to learn.
"We're only starting to scratch the surface of the data that are available," Koller said.
Musk didn't immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment before publication.
FAQs
Elon Musk is getting even more bullish on artificial intelligence. The Tesla CEO, in an interview on Twitter/X, has accelerated his forecast for the capabilities of AI, saying he expects large language models will surpass human intelligence by the end of 2025.
Did Musk predict AI will overtake human intelligence? ›
Elon Musk predicts AI will overtake humans to the point that 'biological intelligence will be 1%' Elon Musk gave his thoughts on AI's impact, space exploration, and Starlink during the 27th annual Global Conference organised by the Milken Insitute.
How long until AI is smarter than humans? ›
In 1993, Vinge predicted greater-than-human intelligence between 2005 and 2030. In 1996, Yudkowsky predicted a singularity in 2021. In 2005, Kurzweil predicted human-level AI around 2029, and the singularity in 2045. In a 2017 interview, Kurzweil reaffirmed his estimates.
What year will AI surpass human intelligence? ›
Elon Musk Predicts AI Will Surpass Human Intelligence by 2026, Sparking Debate.
How much faster can AI think than humans? ›
Computers have the ability to process far more information at a higher pace than individuals do. In the instance that the human mind can answer a mathematical problem in five minutes, artificial intelligence is capable of solving ten problems in one minute.
Will AI take over the world by 2030? ›
By 2030, experts predict AI could automate jobs, erode privacy, transform industries, and disrupt society in many other intricate ways. This article dives deep into the monumental impacts AI may have on humanity's future.
Will AI really replace humans? ›
Will AI replace humans? No, AI will not replace human intelligence, as it is humans who are developing AI applications through programming and algorithms. Automation makes it easier to replace manual labour, and today, in every sector, these AI technologies are making it easier to complete complex tasks.
Is AI a threat to humanity? ›
The report, released this week by Gladstone AI, flatly states that the most advanced AI systems could, in a worst case, “pose an extinction-level threat to the human species.”
Will AI become self-aware? ›
We don't know whether AI could have conscious experiences and, unless we crack the problem of consciousness, we never will. But here's the tricky part: when we start to consider the ethical ramifications of artificial consciousness, agnosticism no longer seems like a viable option.
Can AI take over the world? ›
If you believe science fiction, then you don't understand the meaning of the word fiction. The short answer to this fear is: No, AI will not take over the world, at least not as it is depicted in the movies.
AI could replace as many as 85 million jobs worldwide by 2025, according to a 2020 World Economic Forum report.
What comes after AI? ›
Artificial intelligence commands the attention of corporate giants and political leaders but a global race is underway to develop what some experts consider the next transformative technology: quantum computing.
Who created AI? ›
Alan Turing published his work “Computer Machinery and Intelligence” which eventually became The Turing Test, which experts used to measure computer intelligence. The term “artificial intelligence” was coined and came into popular use.
What can AI beat humans at? ›
Shall we play a game? A single artificial intelligence can beat human players in chess, Go, poker and other games that require a variety of strategies to win.
Can AI defeat human intelligence? ›
The pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or what's often referred to as "superhuman" AI as of now, is a myth. A system that can understand, learn, and apply knowledge across a broad spectrum of tasks at a level surpassing human capabilities remains a lofty goal.
What will happen when an AI surpasses human intelligence? ›
The concept of singularity, often referred to as the technological singularity, describes a theoretical point in the future when artificial intelligence (AI) surpasses human intelligence, resulting in an era of rapid technological advancements that defy our current understanding and ability to predict.
Do you think AI will overtake humans? ›
In a paper published last year, titled, “When Will AI Exceed Human Performance? Evidence from AI Experts,” elite researchers in artificial intelligence predicted that “human level machine intelligence,” or HLMI, has a 50 percent chance of occurring within 45 years and a 10 percent chance of occurring within 9 years.
Will AI surpass human brain? ›
The AIs we create may never have consciousness, but they are increasingly able to do intelligent things. In some cases, they already do them at a level beyond us, which is a trend that will likely continue. AI will achieve human-level intelligence, but perhaps not anytime soon.
Has AI reached human intelligence? ›
Transhumanism, the researchers and thinkers who follow this school of thought are convinced that we are approaching the technological singularity, which will be achieved in the year 2050. Currently, artificial intelligence has far exceeded the level of human intelligence.
