Elon Musk predicts AI will surpass human intelligence in the next year

Elon Musk says that that by the end of next year, new models of artificial intelligence will be smarter than humans, as long as there is enough electricity and hardware to power the technology that is getting stronger.

“My guess is that we’ll have AI that is smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year,”said the d CEO of Tesla, X, and SpaceX. According to Musk, AI will likely be smarter than all humans within five years. He said this in an interview on X with Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management, on Monday.

Musk has always been optimistic about the progress being made in what is called “artificial general intelligence.” These are AI tools that are so smart they can beat the smartest people in any field. But Monday’s prediction is earlier than what he and others had thought would happen. He said last year that “full” AGI would be reached by 2029. Musk has said some very big things that haven’t happened yet, like that Teslas will be able to drive themselves and that a rocket will land on Mars.

Over the past 18 months, a lot of big steps forward in AI have been made, such as the release of tools for making videos and smarter chatbots. These developments have moved the field forward faster than anyone thought possible. Demis Hassabis, one of the founders of Google’s DeepMind, said earlier this year that AGI might be possible by 2030.

Microchips, especially those made by Nvidia, are needed to train and run AI models, but there aren’t enough of them to continue development at the same speed. Musk said that these restrictions were getting less strict, but new models are now testing other data centre equipment and the power grid.

“People couldn’t get enough Nvidia chips last year, so prices went up. This year, the power supply is switching to a voltage transformer. “In a year or two, the only thing that will stop them is the lack of electricity,” he said.

It’s interesting that Musk wants to get into the AI race right after taking a public stand last year calling for a break in the development of advanced AI. “Profound risks to society and humanity” are posed by super-powerful AI tools, he said. He also said that training any system more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4, which is the market leader, should stop right away.

Musk said on Monday that his AI startup, xAI, was training a second version of Grok “which we think should be better than GPT-4.” He also said that a new model that is orders of magnitude more powerful would come after that, which should be done by May.In the past year, Musk has spent more time and money on xAI. People who know about the process say that he is trying to get billions of dollars from investors in the US, the Middle East, and Hong Kong so that he can compete with OpenAI. If he succeeds, the funding round would value the company at $18bn. Musk has been very important, and sometimes controversial, in the last ten years in making new AI tools.

He helped to start OpenAI in 2015, but he left the company in 2018 because he didn’t agree with CEO and co-founder Sam Altman about where research should go.

Musk sued OpenAI and Altman in March for breach of contract, saying they broke the start-up’s stated goal of making AI that helps people. OpenAI strongly denies this claim.