Artificial intelligence that surpasses any human on Earth could exist as early as next year, according to Elon Musk. However, he warned that the energy and computing power needed to achieve this goal could exceed the current capabilities of the AI industry.
Musk’s latest prediction is a significant acceleration from his previous estimate of achieving superintelligent AI by 2029. “I guess that we’ll have AI that is smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year,” Musk said in an interview broadcast live on his social network, X (formerly Twitter).
Musk did, however, add a caveat: the ever-increasing need for energy and the too-small output of powerful AI chips could limit their capabilities in the short term. “Last year it was a chip constraint,” Elon Musk said. “People couldn’t get enough Nvidia chips. This year, it’s becoming a transformer shortage. In a year or two, it will just be an electricity constraint.”
Challenges to Musk’s Prediction: Energy and Chip Constraints
Musk has expressed concern about the progress of AI in the past year. “If I could have a pause button on AI or very advanced digital AI superintelligence, I would do it… It’s really important to be concerned about a Terminator-type future, to avoid a Terminator-type future,” Musk said, referring to the film in which a self-aware computer system declares war on humanity.
Elon Musk recently claimed that his Grok AI chatbot is now as good as OpenAI’s advanced GPT-4 model. However, GPT-4 has been around for over a year, and competitors may have already surpassed it. Claude 3 Opus from Anthropic is considered the new leader in the AI market.
Musk has made bold predictions in the past, but not all of them have come true. In 2016, Musk made some off-target predictions. He said Tesla cars would be self-driving from New York to LA in just two years (that hasn’t happened). He also predicted a SpaceX Mars mission by 2018 (still waiting on that one). Similarly, his 2017 claim of a Neuralink product within four years hasn’t come to pass. The first time a human received a brain implant from Musk’s company was just this year, seven years later.
