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If you were already pretty terrified about artificial intelligence (AI), this probably won't help quell any fears.
A recent episode of Joe Rogan's rambling and often controversial podcast featured a futurist called Ray Kurzweil, who made a stab at the question of when AI will overtake human intelligence. Kurzweil has a history of making predictions about our future, and he didn't hold back.
He said: "We're not quite there, but we will be there, and by 2029 it will match any person. People think that will happen next year or the year after."
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And it's true that AI has seen a recent explosion. OpenAI has gone from being a little start-up no one had heard of to a company worth billions, with ChatGPT powering that ascent, and it feels like every tech company on the planet is trying to show how it's using AI tools.
And it turns out one of the people who suspects AI is getting smarter at an even quicker pace is Elon Musk himself, who has appeared on Rogan's podcast multiple times (including a famous episode where he smoked marijuana with the host, much to the dismay of his shareholders).
Musk responded to a clip of Kurzweil's prediction on X, the social media platform he bought and renamed from its old moniker of Twitter.
He confidently asserted: "AI will probably be smarter than any single human next year. By 2029, AI is probably smarter than all humans combined."
AI will probably be smarter than any single human next year. By 2029, AI is probably smarter than all humans combined. https://t.co/RO3g2OCk9x
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 13, 2024
That means he thinks things will progress a lot more quickly than Kurzweil does, and given that he has an AI startup of his own, he might have some private evidence to back that up.
X has its own AI chatbot, too, called Grok and designed to try to be funnier than most of the competition, so Musk is clearly personally invested in the whole scene.
With the amount of development going on in AI circles, then, all we can really do is sit back and wait to see what does indeed happen in the next year - and whether an AI smarter than a human does indeed appear.
From there is the prospect of the scarier-sounding eventuality, where a single AI entity is smarter than all of humanity - something that sounds straight out of the latest Mission Impossible movie, but without Tom Cruise running in to save us all.
