ELON Musk has shared some predictions for the capabilities of artificial intelligence.
The billionaire CEO behind Tesla and SpaceX has a history of making bold pronouncements.
And this week, he reiterated his prediction that Artificial General Intelligence would soon be as smart as or smarter than a human.
While most AI excels at specific tasks, AGI attempts to tackle challenges like humans, with reasoning and cognition.
Progress in AI has been impressive, but AGI is a level of artificial intelligence we haven't reached yet.
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Musk, who has long been vocal about AI, said this would be achieved within the next two years.
"If you define AGI as smarter than the smartest human, I think it's probably next year, within two years," he told Norway wealth fund CEO Nicolai Tangen during an interview this week.
Musk also told Tangen that the next version of Grok, the AI chatbot from his xAI startup, was to be trained by May.
Musk founded xAI last year as a rival to OpenAI, the company behind the popular ChatGPT for which Musk served as an initial member on its board of directors.
EXPERTS REACT
Musk's prediction is not new – and unsurprisingly has been met with mixed reactions from experts in the field of AI.
Christian Rebernik, founder and Co-CEO at Tomorrow University of Applied Sciences said, “Musk’s prediction that AI will surpass human intelligence rings true, particularly in the light of the recent passing of the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act, confirming AI’s permanence.
"It’s crucial government bodies and businesses are mindful about its adoption, and ways of working alongside it."
Meanwhile, researchers from McKinsey noted in a blog post, "We’re still far from reaching a point where AI tools can understand, communicate, and act with the same nuance and sensitivity of a human—and, critically, understand the meaning behind it."
They added that most researchers and academics believe we are decades away from realizing AGI.
And some predict that AGI won't even be realized this century (or ever).
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Rodney Brooks, a roboticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-founder of iRobot, believes AGI won’t arrive until 2300, McKinsey reported.
SOCIAL MEDIA REACTS
Experts in the field of AI weren't the only ones with opinions on Musk's recent quotes.
Social media platforms like X, formerly Twitter, quickly flooded with commentary.
"Elon Musk is an optimist. Good approach. I would take the same approach. It gets things done," one person wrote on X.
"But even if AGI would come tomorrow, I would still give it a decade to have a meaningful impact on a common person's life. All technologies take time to affect the common person," they added.
"AGI will be achieved internally first by several companies and nations, and kept from public eyes for years," another speculated.
"It all depends on your definition of AGI. If you told me 10 years ago we would be able to ask something called 'ChatGPT' anything in the world and it could answer in seconds, I would think that's a pretty intelligent system," another commented.
