Superhuman artificial intelligence that is smarter than anyone on Earth could exist next year, Elon Musk has said, unless the sector’s power and computing demands become unsustainable before then.
The prediction is a sharp tightening of an earlier claim from the multibillionaire, that superintelligent AI would exist by 2029. Whereas “superhuman” is generally defined as being smarter than any individual human at any specific task, superintelligent is often defined instead as being smarter than every human’s combined ability at any task.
“My guess is that we’ll have AI that is smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year,” Musk said in a livestreamed interview on his social network X. That prediction was made with the caveat that increasing demands for power and shortages of the most powerful AI training chips could limit their capability in the near term.
“Last year it was chip-constrained,” he said. “People could not get enough Nvidia chips. This year it’s transitioning to a voltage transformer supply. In a year or two, it’s just electricity supply.”
In 2023, when he predicted a five- to six-year runway for superintelligence, Musk was vocally concerned about the ramifications.
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 like that is realistic so xAI is essentially going to build an AI. In a good way, sort of hopefully.”
Read more here from the Guardian.
