AI will be smarter than humans within 5 years: Musk

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has claimed that Artificial Intelligence will be ‘vastly smarter’ than any human and would overtake us by 2025. “We are headed toward a situation where AI is vastly smarter than humans. I think that time frame is less than five years from now. But that doesn’t mean that everything goes to hell in five years. It just means that things get unstable or weird,” Musk said in an interview with New York Times over the weekend.

This is not the first time that Musk has shown concern related to AI.

Back in 2016, Musk said that humans risk being treated like house pets by AI unless technology is developed that can connect brains to computers. He even described AI as an ‘existential threat’ to humanity.

“I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that,” he said. However, Musk helped found the artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI in 2015 with the goal of developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) that can learn and master several disciplines.

Recently, OpenAI released its first commercial product, a programme to make use of a text-generation tool that it once called too dangerous. It has the potential to spare people from writing long texts. Once an application is developed on the basis of the programme, all they need to give is a prompt. OpenAI earlier desisted from revealing more about the software fearing bad actors might misuse it for producing misleading articles, impersonate others or even automate phishing content.