AI systems are improving at breakneck pace, and someone’s who’s at the forefront of driving this progress has come up with an interesting set of predictions on how they see AI’s development panning out.
Elon Musk has said that he expects that AI will exceed the collective intelligence of all humans by 2030. This would mean that at that point, AI systems will be smarter than all human beings on earth put together. Musk said that the probability of this happening was “~100%”, which meant that he was nearly certain it would happen.
“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. Probability that AI exceeds the intelligence of all humans combined by 2030 is ~100%,” he posted on X.
In addition, Musk made two other predictions. By the end of 2025, he believes that an AI system will be smarter than any single human. This could mean that AI systems could outscore humans in IQ tests and all coding competitions. Musk also believes that by 2027 or 2028, AI will be more intelligent than all humans. By 2030, AI will be smarter than all humans combined — if all humans were to collectively pool together their smarts, they’d still fall short of this artificial intellingence.
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.
Musk isn’t the only person in the AI space who believes AI systems are set to become incredibly smart. Meta’s Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun has said that AGI is possible in 5-10 years, while Anthropic’s Dario Amodei has said that AGI will be achieved in 2026-2027. OpenAI’s Sam Altman, on the other hand, says his company knows what it has to do to create AGI, but it might be hard for humanity to tell when it’s been achieved. And with Elon Musk saying that AI systems will be smarter than all humans combined by 2030, the world might be set to change in ways that are more dramatic than what most people currently expect.