Musk had predicted the same thing in 2024 and claimed that AGI would be achieved by 2025. Look at any calendar, and you’ll see that we’re just a few weeks away from the end of 2025.
“How long until AGI?” asked Logan Kilpatrick, product lead at Google AI Studio, in May 2024.
“Next year,” Musk replied, to which Kipatrick responded, “Much bigger if true.”
Of course, this was not true. But Musk has a long history of, shall we say, optimistic Predictions about the future achievements of their own company. And his prophecies often have ulterior motives.
Remember when Musk was making the most noise about the dangers of AI and worried that it could destroy the world? The billionaire signed a letter in March 2023 calling for a halt to all AI development for six months. Less than a month later it was revealed that Musk was secretly building his own AI project on Twitter. By July 2023, Musk had officially announced the creation of xAI, the company that makes his Grok AI chatbot.
The CEO was not at all concerned about the risks posed by AI. He was simply disappointed that OpenAI was so far ahead at the time.
Musk’s treatment of AGI, or any new technology, depends largely on how well he can promote his companies at any given time. And the continued possibility of achieving AGI, whether you think it will be good or bad for the world, helps fuel investment in AI technology, which is currently driving the entire US economy.
The new report from Business Insider also says Musk told XAI staff that investment in the private company is going well, with “about $20 billion to $30 billion in funding per year.” An email sent to XAI with questions about the report received an auto-response that simply said, “Legacy media lies.” Musk has a strong hatred of the news media and previously had an auto-responder on Twitter that sent a poop emoji.
Part of the problem with discussing AGI is that no one agrees on a definition of it. As IBM describes it, we will have achieved AGI when artificial intelligence can “match or exceed the cognitive abilities of humans in any task.” But clearly defining terms like “cognitive abilities” and “any function” is extremely complex.
Others prefer to define AGI as a type of self-awareness that would make artificial intelligence more like humans. Instead of simply reproducing words from its training data, AI will understand itself as a type of consciousness. People in that camp are excited and/or worried about that theoretical tipping point because they believe it will be the beginning of a robot revolution and AI’s attempt to destroy humanity. Musk has heavily publicized those fears, although he has recently backed off.
Absent large robotic armies, achieving AGI in the present day with systems that hate humanity would likely look like a 1970s sci-fi movie. Colossus: The Forbin ProjectWhere non-humanoid systems use nuclear weapons systems to threaten the world. We don’t actually have advanced humanoid robots. terminator 2 Situation now.
But Musk is working on that too. They estimate that Tesla will produce 1 million humanoid Optimus robots per year within the next five years, and they’ll even take care of your kids. He just needs to figure out how to get Optimus to work without teleoperation before all this happens.
Who knows? AGI could magically be achieved in the next few weeks, and perhaps Musk’s old prediction will come true. But the billionaire also has another predicted deadline on the horizon. In October, Musk told Joe Rogan that he would demonstrate a flying car by the end of the year.
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