Musk makes startline AI prediction

Artificial intelligence could become smarter than any single human by the end of next year, according to tech billionaire Elon Musk. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO made the prediction shortly after his AI company, xAI, officially launched its first image generation model, Aurora, earlier this month.

Aurora, an updated version of the first image generation model that xAI introduced in October, allows users to create photorealistic visuals.

Compared to other AI models, Aurora has fewer restrictions and can accurately generate images at almost any prompt, including depictions of famous personalities and copyrighted characters. 

‘It is increasingly likely that AI will superset the intelligence of any single human by the end of 2025 and maybe all humans by 2027/2028,” Musk wrote on Monday, in a post on his social media platform X.

According to him, the probability that AI will exceed the intelligence of all humans combined by 2030 “is ~100%.”

Earlier this year, Musk’s xAI launched Colossus, described as the world’s most powerful AI training system, setting a new benchmark in the rapidly advancing field of AI. Colossus boasts 100,000 liquid-cooled H100 graphics processing units (GPUs), the chips provided by Nvidia, which places xAI well ahead of its competitors, including those from OpenAI.

Meanwhile, high-profile figures and scientists have been raising concerns in recent years, over the potential dangers posed by the unregulated adoption of AI technology.

Last month, renowned computer scientist and professor at the University of Montreal Yoshua Bengio warned that machines could soon have most of the cognitive abilities of humans and thus pose grave risks to humanity as it becomes harder to control AI.

The computer scientist cited a common fear that the AI machines currently being trained “would lead to systems that turn against humans.”

Bengio also highlighted potential risks of social and political disparity stemming from AI, pointing out that a limited number of organizations and governments could afford to build powerful and costly AI machines. This would lead to a concentration of economic, political and military power, eventually threatening geopolitical stability worldwide, the scientist warned.

In June, addressing the G7 summit in Italy, Pope Francis warned humanity against depending on choices made by machines.

The Pontiff stressed that the algorithms “can only examine realities formalized in numerical terms,” while humans who have wisdom and can listen to Sacred Scripture “not only choose, but in their hearts are capable of deciding.”