Elon Musk says there's still a decent chance AI could go bad

Elon Musk at a town hall-style meeting to promote early and absentee voting on October 17, 2024 in Folsom, Pennsylvania. - Photo: Anna Moneymaker (Getty Images)
Elon Musk at a town hall-style meeting to promote early and absentee voting on October 17, 2024 in Folsom, Pennsylvania. - Photo: Anna Moneymaker (Getty Images)

As he anticipates the growth of his supercomputer, Elon Musk said there’s a chance artificial intelligence could go bad by the end of the decade.

While AI is “most likely going to be great,” Musk said “there’s some chance, which could be, 10 to 20%, that it goes bad,” during an interview with Peter Diamandis at the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on Tuesday.

Diamandis asked Musk about predictions the billionaire made at the Abundance Summit in March that AI is growing “as fast as 100 times per year,” and that by the end of the decade, AI could become “as capable as 8 billion humans.”

“I certainly feel comfortable saying that it’s getting 10 times better per year, which is, four years from now that would mean 10,000 times better, so maybe 100,000,” Musk said about the pace of AI. “I think it will be able to do anything that any human can do — possibly within the next year or two.”

Three years after that, Musk said, AI could get to the point of doing “what all humans can do, combined.”

Meanwhile, Musk said that his AI startup, xAI, would “soon” have a training cluster with 200,000 of Nvidia’s H100 and H200 chips, in a post on his social media platform, X. xAI’s supercluster, called Colossus, already has over 100,000 of Nvidia’s (NVDA) H100 GPUs, or graphics processing units. While AI rivals including OpenAI and Meta (META) also have hundreds of thousands of Nvidia’s chips, Colossus, which was brought online in about four months, has the most processors of an individual AI computing cluster in the world.

During his interview at the FII, Musk also said he expects that, in the future, “every country will have AIs, or multiple AIs,” and that “there will be a lot of robots — more robots than people.”

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