Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Monday predicted the development of artificial intelligence that was smarter than the smartest human probably by next year, or by 2026.
In a wide-ranging interview on X spaces that suffered multiple technology glitches, Musk also told Norway wealth fund CEO Nicolai Tangen that AI was constrained by the availability of electricity and that the next version of Grok, the AI chatbot from his xAI startup, was expected to be trained by May.
"If you define AGI (artificial general intelligence) as smarter than the smartest human, I think it's probably next year, within two years," Musk said when asked about the timeline for development of AGI.
"AI is the fastest advancing technology I've seen of any kind, and I've seen a lot of technology,” he went on.
“AI hardware and computers that are coming online dedicated to AI are increasing by a factor of 10 every year, if not every 6-9 months. Many, many software breakthroughs are demonstrated on the curve,” Musk said.
“My guess is we'll have AI smarter than any one human around the end of next year," he reiterated.
“The AI compute growth chart says it all,” Musk responded to a graph, posted by X host hart Mario Nawfal, depicting the growth rate of the computational capacity year over year since 1998.
Last year, at Britain's AI Safety Summit Musk had advocated for the establishment of a neutral oversight body to monitor AI development and raise red flags if necessary.
Chips and Grok
The billionaire, who also co-founded OpenAI, said a lack of advanced chips was hampering the training of Grok's version 2 model.
Musk founded xAI last year as a challenger to OpenAI, which he has sued for abandoning its original mission to develop AI for the benefit of humanity and not for profit. OpenAI denies the allegations.
Musk said training the Grok 2 model took about 20,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, adding that the Grok 3 model and beyond will require 100,000 Nvidia H100 chips.
But he added that while a shortage of chips were a big constraint for the development of AI so far, electricity supply will be crucial in the next year or two.
Tesla vs China
Speaking about electric-vehicles, Musk reiterated Chinese carmakers are "the most competitive in the world" and pose "the most toughest competitive challenges" to Tesla.
He has previously warned that Chinese rivals will demolish global rivals without trade barriers.
Musk also addressed a union strike in Sweden against Tesla, saying "I think the storm has passed on that front."
Tangen said Norway's $1.5 trillion sovereign wealth fund, one of Tesla's largest shareholders, had met with the EV company's chair last month and received an update on the situation.
You can listen to the entire interview here.
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