AI is getting better and better at knowledge work, and it might not be long before there isn’t much left to be better at.
Elon Musk says that AI will be able to do any cognitive tax within the next 3 to 4 years at the most. “(AI) will do anything you want and even suggest things you never even thought of,” he said at CES 2025. “So really, within the next few years, AI will be able to do any cognitive task,” he added.
“It obviously begs the question — what are we all going to do? But pretty much any cognitive task that doesn’t involve atoms, AI will be able to do within, I’d say max three or four years, maximum,” he added.
Musk seemed to be saying that AI was progressing at such a rapid pace that there will be no mental task that it wouldn’t be able to do in the next 3-4 years. AI might still struggle for a while in the physical world — involving “atoms”, as he put it — but anything that a human brain can do, it would likely be able to do better in the next 3-4 years.
This isn’t the first time that Musk has come up with this timeline. Just last month, he’d said that by the end of 2025, he believed that an AI system will be smarter than any single human. This could manifest in AI systems outscoring humans in IQ tests and coding competitions. Musk also said that by 2027 or 2028, AI would be more intelligent than all humans. And he said that by 2030, AI will be smarter than all humans combined.
These are pretty aggressive timelines, but Elon Musk is someone who should know what he’s talking about. Musk had co-founded OpenAI in 2015, which went on to release ChatGPT, and is one of the leading players in the AI race. Musk had dissociated himself from OpenAI around 2018, but has now started a new AI company named xAI, which has released a very capable Grok AI model of its own. Musk doesn’t only have a ring-side seat to the action, but is involved in it himself, so he’s someone who would have a solid idea of how AI is progressing behind the scenes.
And having AI be able do all cognitive tasks could upturn the world as we know it. The current world is built in a way that values knowledge work over all others — scientists, doctors, engineers and lawyers make the most money, and are at the top of the social pyramids. If AI can do their jobs better than they can, it might end up reorganizing human society in ways that could be hard to conceive of at this point.