In a recent interview with Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk predicted that human-level artificial intelligence (AI) could be realised by the end of next year. NBIM is the manager of the world’s largest publicly held financial fund, the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, which is increasingly investing in AI due to its potential to impact financial returns.
During their conversation on X Spaces, Musk conveyed his observations that AI is the most rapidly advancing technology he has witnessed so far. He attributed this swift development to the fact that computers dedicated to AI are growing exponentially, increasing by at least tenfold annually, if not every six to nine months. With a combination of this rate of AI computing growth and recurrent advancements in software, Musk believes an AI “smarter than any one human” could be realised by the end of next year.
Looking ahead, Musk projects that within five years, “the total amount of sentient compute will probably exceed all humans”. However, limitations exist that could potentially hinder AI’s growth. One of the main barriers to AI development last year was a restricted supply of AI chips. According to Musk, AI developers are also dealing with an insufficient energy supply resulting from a scarcity of voltage transformers, making electricity availability a likely significant hurdle to overcome in the next three years.
Regarding xAI and one of its models, Grok 2, Musk said that the scarcity of GPUs for training is a major challenge. With the assistance of 20,000 NVIDIA H100s, he expects Grok 2’s training to be completed in May, with its performance anticipated to exceed GPT-4. By utilizing synthetic data and real-world video, Musk believes these resources can alleviate the issue of rapidly consumed training data.
Musk is bullish that the existing constraints to AI advancement can be overcame as top minds are moving from other disciplines such as physics to work on AI advancements. Looking ahead, he estimates that five years from now, AI will surpass even machine-augmented human collective thinking.
These types of prognostications are bold, and while Musk is well-positioned within the industry to make them, only time will validate the accuracy of his predictions.
