Elon Musk Predicts AGI by 2026 (He Predicted AGI by 2025 Last Year)

Elon Musk expects his company xAI to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI) within the next two years, possibly by 2026, according to a new report from Business Insider. If you feel like you’ve heard this before, you probably have.

Musk predicted the same in 2024, claiming that AGI will be achieved by 2025. Take a look at any calendar, and you’ll see that we’re only a few weeks away from the end of 2025.

“How long until AGI?” asked Logan Kilpatrick, head of product at Google AI Studio, in May 2024.

“Next year,” Musk replied, to which Kepatrick replied, “Great if that’s true.”

That wasn’t true, of course. But musk has a long history, so to speak, Upbeat Predictions about his company’s future achievements. His predictions often have ulterior motives.

Remember when Musk was making a lot of noise about the dangers of AI and fearing it might destroy the world? The billionaire signed a letter in March 2023 calling for a six-month pause in all AI development. It was revealed less than a month later that Musk was secretly building his own AI project at Twitter. By July 2023, Musk officially announced the creation of xAI, the company that makes his Grok AI chatbot.

The CEO wasn’t seriously concerned about the risks posed by AI. He was frustrated because OpenAI was so advanced at the time.

Musk’s take on artificial general intelligence, or any new technology, depends largely on how he promotes his companies at any given time. The ever-present possibility of achieving AGI, whether you think it will be good or bad for the world, helps drive investment in AI technology, something that appears to be propping up the entire US economy at the moment.

The new report from Business Insider also says that Musk told xAI employees that investment in the private company is going well, with funding ranging from $20 billion to $30 billion annually. An email to xAI with questions about the report was met with an automated response that simply said “Legacy Media Lies.” Musk has great disdain for the news media, and once had a Twitter answering machine that sent a poop emoji.

Part of the problem with discussing artificial general intelligence is that there is no single agreed-upon definition. As IBM describes it, we will have achieved artificial general intelligence when AI can “match or exceed the cognitive abilities of humans at any task.” But clearly defining terms like “cognitive abilities” and “any task” is very complex.

Other people like to define AGI as a type of self-awareness that would make AI more human-like. Instead of simply repeating words from its training data, the AI ​​will understand itself as a kind of consciousness. People in this camp are excited and/or worried about this theoretical turning point because they assume it will be the beginning of the robotics revolution and artificial intelligence’s attempt to destroy humanity. Musk has raised these concerns significantly, though he has recently backed away from them.

In the absence of large robot armies, achieving present-day artificial general intelligence through a system that hates humanity might seem like something out of a 1970 science fiction movie. Giant: Project Forbinwhere non-human systems clash with nuclear weapons systems to threaten the world. We don’t really have advanced humanoid robots for Terminator 2 situation so far.

But Musk is working on that too. Tesla is expected to produce one million humanoid Optimus robots annually over the next five years, and they will also babysit your children. He just needs to figure out how to make Optimus work without remote operation before all of that happens.

Who knows? Artificial general intelligence could magically be achieved in the next few weeks, and perhaps Musk’s old predictions will come true. But the billionaire also has another prediction deadline on the horizon. Last October, Musk told Joe Rogan that he would demonstrate a flying car by the end of this year.