Musk: Next year artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence

(Patria) - Artificial intelligence smarter than anyone on Earth could exist next year, unless the sector's power and computing requirements become unsustainable before then, said Elon Musk.

The prediction marks a sharp tightening of Musk's previous claim that superintelligent artificial intelligence would exist by 2029.

"I suspect that probably by the end of next year, we will have AI that is smarter than any human," Musk said in an interview broadcast live on his social network X.

This prediction comes with the caveat that the increasing power demands and shortage of the most powerful AI training chips could limit artificial intelligence capabilities in the near future, The Guardian reports.

"Last year there were chip constraints. People couldn't get enough Nvidia chips. This year it's moving to transformer power. In a year or two, it's just power supply left," Musk said.

In 2023, when he predicted five to six years until the advent of superintelligent AI, Musk was loudly concerned about the consequences.

Speaking alongside the launch of his AI startup xAI that year, he said: "If I could press pause on AI or really advanced AI digital superintelligence, I would. It doesn't seem realistic, so xAI will basically build AI. For good, I hope".

"It's actually important for us to worry about the future of Terminator in order to avoid the future of Terminator," Musk added, referring to a film in which a self-aware computer system wages war against humanity.

A year later, xAI is firmly trying to lead the development of superintelligence. In a recent interview, Musk said that the latest version of his chatbot Grok AI is on par with GPT-4, OpenAI's leading model.

GPT-4 is over a year old, and competitors have already met or exceeded its capabilities, with Anthropic's Claude 3 Opus generally considered the new market leader.

The entrepreneur's predictions have not always proven to be accurate. In 2016, he incorrectly predicted that Tesla would be able to drive autonomously from New York to Los Angeles within two years, and in the same year, he said his rocket company SpaceX would fly to Mars in 2018, which has still not happened.

The following year, Musk suggested that his first product, the Neuralink brain chip implant, would be on the market "in about four years." The first human received an implant from the company seven years later.