Elon Musk believes AI will surpass human-level intelligence by the end of 2025, with the total “sentient compute” exceeding all humans within 5 years (by 2026).
His previous predictions have moved up the timeline, from 2029 to 2030, and now to 2026, as AI development has accelerated.
He cites the influx of top talent like physicists moving into AI as a driver of this rapid progress.
He acknowledges hardware constraints like GPU availability and electricity supply as potential bottlenecks in the near-term (1-3 years).
Data scarcity is also a challenge, with companies looking to alternatives like YouTube transcripts and Reddit posts to train their models.
Musk is confident in rapid AI progress, some experts like Daphne Koller are more skeptical that human-level AI will be achieved anytime soon, as there is still much to learn.
Musk’s startup xAI is working on an AI chatbot called Grok which he claims is better than ChatGPT, but still constrained by compute power needs.
Musk’s own AI company, xAI, is trying to obtain 20,000 GPUs by May to train its Grok chatbot, and would need 100,000 GPUs for an even more advanced model.