Tesla CEO and owner of social media platform X, Elon Musk, issued a rather terrifying prediction earlier this week when he stated that he believes the development of artificial intelligence that will bypass the smartest human on earth could potentially happen by next or 2026. This is why we shouldn’t be trying to play God. For decade upon decade, going all the way back to Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” stories on stage, screen, and written in prose have warned us about the dangers of attempting to supplant the Creator and make life, not in terms of procreation, but literally creating beings the way God did, and it seems we haven’t listened at all.
I mean, hello? Haven’t any of the people developing AI watched the Terminator movies? You know, Skynet, T-800s, “I’ll be back?” None of this ringing a bell? How about “The Matrix?” No? Artificial intelligence is bad, mmmkay?
Rather than taking the warnings these stories offered us about AI, people are using them as playbooks on how to create that which brings about our doom. It’s like Ray in “Ghostbusters” when the marshmallow man just “pops in there” — his mind — and becomes the form for the destroyer of earth.
It’s just like Ian Malcolm said in “Jurassic Park.” These scientists and tech gurus were so preoccupied with whether or not they “could” create artificial intelligence, they didn’t stop to think about whether or not they “should” create it.
According to the NY Post:
In a wide-ranging interview on X spaces that suffered multiple technology glitches, Musk also told Norway wealth fund CEO Nicolai Tangen that AI was constrained by the availability of electricity and that the next version of Grok, the AI chatbot from his xAI startup, was expected to be trained by May.
“If you define AGI (artificial general intelligence) as smarter than the smartest human, I think it’s probably next year, within two years,” Musk went on to say after being asked about the timeline for the development of AGI.
The billionaire, who also co-founded OpenAI, said a lack of advanced chips was hampering the training of Grok’s version 2 model. Musk founded xAI last year as a challenger to OpenAI, which he has sued for abandoning its original mission to develop AI for the benefit of humanity and not for profit. OpenAI denies the allegations.
Musk said training the Grok 2 model took about 20,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, adding that the Grok 3 model and beyond will require 100,000 Nvidia H100 chips. But he added that while a shortage of chips were a big constraint for the development of AI so far, electricity supply will be crucial in the next year or two.
Speaking about electric-vehicles, Musk reiterated Chinese carmakers are “the most competitive in the world” and pose “the most toughest competitive challenges” to Tesla.
Musk also previously issued a warning about our rivals in China, stating they will obliterate global rivals if there are no trade barriers. During the interview Musk also spoke out about a union strike taking place in Sweden against his company, Tesla, stating, “I think the storm has passed on that front.”
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