Elon Musk was interviewed by Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM) CEO Nicolai Tangen and said he expects we’ll have an AI smarter than humans by the end of next year.
NBIM manages the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, which is the world’s largest publicly held financial fund. As investment money continues to flow into AI, Tangen says the NBIM believes AI “has the potential to affect the financial return on our investments over time.”
Tangen interviewed Elon Musk on X Spaces to get his view of where AI is headed. Musk said that AI is the fastest-advancing technology that he’s ever seen.
Musk noted that a big driver of this rapid growth is the fact that “the computers dedicated to AI are increasing…at least by a factor of 10 every year if not every 6 to 9 months.”
Musk predicts that with AI computing increasing by an order of magnitude every 9 months coupled with almost daily software breakthroughs we will “have AI that is smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year.”
Projecting beyond that, Musk said, “The total amount of sentient compute will probably exceed all humans in five years.”
AI obstacles
Musk said that last year the main constraint of AI development was the limited AI chips supply. While that hasn’t been resolved, he says that another big factor hampering development is the limited energy supply due to a lack of voltage transformers.
Musk said that electricity availability is likely to be the biggest hurdle AI companies will have to deal with over the next 3 years.
He’s confident that these constraints will be overcome. Because the field of AI is moving so fast, Musk says that the smartest people in the world are shifting focus from fields like physics to work on exciting developments in AI.
xAI and Grok 2
When asked about xAI, Musk said that the biggest challenge is limited GPU availability to train Grok 2.
He expects the 20,000 NVIDIA H100s they are using will enable them to complete Grok 2’s training in May. xAI anticipates Grok 2’s performance to surpass GPT-4.
Looking a little further ahead, Musk said, “The next step will be for Grok 3 which will be, I guess, GPT-5 or beyond…requires 100,000 NVIDIA H100s for training coherently.”
Besides chip availability, training data is quickly being consumed and Musk says this is something that will need to be dealt with too.
Synthetic data and real-world video are the likely sources to fill the data gap. Tesla probably has the largest real-world video collection from its autonomous vehicle program.
While Musk expects AGI, defined as an AI smarter than a single person, in the next two years he says we’re about 5 years out from AI besting machine-augmented human collective thinking.
Musk is well-placed to make these kinds of predictions. In a year or two we’ll know if he was overly optimistic, or perhaps even underestimated what AI will soon look like.
You can listen to the interview below.
— Nicolai Tangen (@NicolaiTang1) April 8, 2024
— Nicolai Tangen (@NicolaiTang1) April 8, 2024
