What Musk, Dimon’s AI predictions mean for the future of humanity
Both joined a chorus of business executives making bold predictions about AI’s potential for dramatic change.
One of the world’s richest people and the head of the nation’s largest bank join a chorus of business executives making bold prognostications about the technology’s potential
Elon Musk and Jamie Dimon say artificial intelligence will be smarter than humans and transform society.
The question now is whether the prognostications of one of the world’s richest people and the head of the nation’s largest bank will come to fruition, or turn out to be overstated.
In remarks this week, both Musk and Dimon joined a chorus of business executives making bold predictions about AI’s potential for dramatic change.
“My guess is that we’ll have AI that is smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year,” Musk said in an interview Monday with Nicolai Tangen , CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management, Norway’s $1.6 trillion sovereign fund and one of the largest investors in Tesla . The interview was broadcast on Musk’s social-media platform X.
Musk, who is chief executive of Tesla and also runs his own AI company , said AI was the fastest-advancing technology he’s ever seen. He predicted it will probably surpass the collective intelligence of humans in five years.
Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase , told investors Monday that AI could be as transformative as some of the major technological inventions over the past several hundred years.
“Think the printing press, the steam engine, electricity, computing and the Internet, among others,” Dimon wrote in his annual letter to shareholders
Monday. Dimon’s letter to shareholders is highly anticipated every year and read widely in the financial-service industry. He has said AI might lead future generations to only work 3 days a week.
In his letter to shareholders, AI was the first issue facing JPMorgan that Dimon highlighted.
A talent war
The AI race to build the next big thing has sparked a talent war in Silicon Valley. Tech companies have poured cash into
AI at a breakneck pace, with investors and analysts increasingly believing the boom is sustainable. And the technology has supercharged the stock performances of many tech and chip companies aiming to cash in on it.
Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai has said AI could be more profound than the invention of fire or electricity . Vinod Khosla , founder of venture-capital firm Khosla Ventures, declared last year that within 10 years, AI will take on “80% of 80% of the jobs that exist today.”
“The need to work in society will disappear within 25 years for those countries that adapt these technologies,” Khosla said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal .
And yet, the technology has also led to stark warnings about the future of humanity . Earlier this week, Japan’s largest telecommunications company and the country’s biggest newspaper cautioned in a manifesto that unless AI is restrained, “in the worst-case scenario, democracy and social order could collapse, resulting in wars.”
They called on Japanese lawmakers to pass legislation to restrain AI, pointing to rising concern about the AI programs U.S.-based companies have been developing.
In the U.S., the Biden administration last year invoked emergency federal powers to compel major AI companies to notify the government when developing systems that pose a serious risk to national security.
Is it all overblown?
Still, some experts say predictions of AI’s transformative powers have been overblown.
Gary Marcus , a cognitive scientist who sold an AI startup to Uber in 2016, said generative AI may one day approach a level where it can transform society. But there has to be vast improvements to approach the level of change produced by the internet or even smartphones, he said.
“It’s possible as we make new discoveries and build better AI, much better than we have right now, that eventually AI could be transformative for the good,” Marcus said in an interview.
Generative AI programs currently make too many mistakes, are unreliable and have a superficial understanding of the world, Marcus said.
In the short term, he said it is implausible that AI will approach human intelligence by the end of next year, like Musk predicted. Surpassing all of human intelligence in the next five years is also far-fetched, he said.
“Therearemanyfoundationalproblemsinunderstandingthephysicaland psychologicalworldthatthesemachines have not yet solved,” Marcus said.
Marcus offered to wager $1 million with Musk that his prediction of AI becoming smarter than a human by next year turns out to be wrong. A representative for Musk didn’t respond to a request for a comment about the wager.
Damion Hankejh, chief executive of Ingk, a startup semiconductor company, also has doubts about Musk’s prediction. He has offered to put up an additional $9 million as part of Marcus’s wager.
Hankejh says he is bullish on the future of AI, saying it will be the next tech renaissance. But he doesn’t think current AI systems will advance enough to surpass human intelligence.
“It’s never going to happen,” Hankejh said. “Digital math machines aren’t brains.”
‘A lot of hype’
“There’s a lot of hype in AI right now,” says Angel Vossough , the co-founder and chief executive of BetterAI, which is working on an AI winerecommendation tool.
She says AI systems are good at analyzing large data sets, and can make predictions or speed up productivity. But they are nowhere near being as intelligent as humans, she said, as a big part of human intelligence is emotional intelligence.
“It needs to connect, understand and respond to human emotions in a way that actually feels authentic and meaningful,” she said. “I don’t think we’re anywhere close.”
Another issue with the AI boom: It is straining resources like electricity . Chip-design company Arm is funding efforts studying how to make AI applications more energy efficient.
Rene Haas , chief executive of Arm, said Tuesday that AI data centers could consume as much as 20% to 25% of U.S. power requirements by the end of the decade, up from about 4% or less today.
Dimon said JPMorgan now employs more than 2,000 AI and machine-learning experts after first experimenting with the technology more than a decade ago.
He said he envisions AI will help reimagine business workflows throughout the bank.
“While we do not know the full effect or the precise rate at which AI will change our business—or how it will affect society at large—we are completely convinced the consequences will be extraordinary,” Dimon said in his letter to shareholders.