Elon Musk issues frightening warning about superhuman artificial intelligence: one year left

Elon Musk predicts that next year superhuman artificial intelligence will be smarter than humans. The billionaire inventor cautioned that a shortage of learning chips and rising demand for electricity could limit plans in the near term.

Billionaire Elon Musk has said that superhuman artificial intelligence that is smarter than anyone on Earth could emerge next year, unless the industry’s power and computing demands become unsustainable before then.

As The Guardian notes, this prediction is a sharp rebuttal to the multi-billionaire’s earlier claim that superintelligent artificial intelligence will be created by 2029. While a “superhuman” is usually defined as a person who is smarter than any single person at performing any particular task, superintelligent is often defined as a person who is smarter than all humans combined at performing any task.

“I predict that we will have artificial intelligence that is smarter than any human, probably around the end of next year,” Musk said live on his social media platform X. That prediction came with the caveat that rising energy demands and a shortage of the most powerful AI training chips could limit their capabilities in the near term.

“Last year there were problems with chips,” Musk said. – People couldn’t get enough Nvidia chips. This year we are switching to power from a voltage transformer. In a year or two it will just be electricity.”

In 2023, when Elon Musk predicted that the development of superintelligence would last five to six years, he openly expressed concern about the consequences, The Guardian recalls. Speaking at the launch of his artificial intelligence startup xAI that same year, he said: “If I could press pause on building artificial intelligence or truly advanced digital superintelligence, I would. This doesn’t seem realistic, so xAI is essentially going to create artificial intelligence. In a good way, one hopes.

“It’s actually important for us to worry about the future of the Terminator so we can avoid it,” Musk added, referring to the cult film in which a self-aware computer system wages war on humanity.

A year on, xAI is firmly trying to lead the development of superintelligence, notes The Guardian. In a recent interview, Musk said the latest version of his Grok AI chatbot complies with GPT-4, OpenAI’s leading model. GPT-4 has been around for over a year and competitors have already matched or surpassed its capabilities, with Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus generally considered the new market leader.

The entrepreneur’s forecasts are notorious for their straightforwardness, states The Guardian. In 2016, Elon Musk incorrectly predicted that Tesla would be able to drive itself from New York to Los Angeles within two years. That same year, Musk said his rocket company SpaceX would fly to Mars in 2018, but that still hasn’t happened. And in 2017, Musk suggested that his startup’s first product, the brain chip Neuralink, would hit the market “in about four years.” The first person received an implant from the company seven years later.

Musk has his hands full, notes The Guardian. Over the weekend, he declared war on a Brazilian Supreme Court judge, calling for him to resign or be impeached over court orders against X that demand the accounts of some Brazilian users be blocked. On Monday, it emerged that he had given court testimony about his posts on the site, in which he admitted that he “may have done more to financially harm the company than to help it.”

He added: “I am guided in my publications not by what is financially profitable, but by what I think is interesting or important or entertaining to the public.”