The SpaceX founder has previously raised alarm over the risks of AI on the human race. He made the warning in a new interview with the New York Times. Mr Musk also spoke about his relationship with musician Grimes and his new son X Æ A-Xii, in the interview.
Mr Musk’s latest warning on AI held that people are underestimating the rapid development of machine learning due to technological advances.
He said: “My assessment about why AI is overlooked by very smart people is that very smart people do not think a computer can ever be as smart as they are. And this is hubris and obviously false.
“We’re headed toward a situation where AI is vastly smarter than humans and I think that time frame is less than five years from now.”
But while Mr Musk raised alarm about the speed of machines learning, he stressed that AI being smarter than humans would not be the end of the world.
He added: “It just means that things get unstable or weird.”
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Mr Musk also said that people who don’t believe the risks around AI becoming smarter than humans are “way dumber than they think they are”
He added: “I’ve been banging this AI drum for a decade.
“We should be concerned about where AI is going.
“The people I see being the most wrong about AI are the ones who are very smart, because they can’t imagine that a computer could be way smarter than them.
“That’s the flaw in their logic. They’re just way dumber than they think they are.”
In 2015, Mr Musk helped launched an artificial intelligence non-profit called OpenAI, which aims to help AI develop by open sourcing information.
He resigned from the company’s board of directors in 2018 to avoid a conflict of interest with his other venture Tesla, who are focused on using AI to help their cars develop self-driving abilities.
This year, the company released a piece of software called GPT-3, which is capable of generating texts similar to those written by humans.
Previous versions of GPT were considered “too dangerous” for wide release.
OpenAI believed that it would be used maliciously, including people using the software to generate fake news and spam messages.
The warning is a shocking downgrade from previous estimates for when machine intelligence surpasses humans.
Ray Kurzweil, a noted futurist, previously pinpointed 2045 as the tipping point for AI.
But in an interview with author Martin Ford, Mr Kurzweil warned that current tech like Google Search and Talk to Books are already “at least a billion times faster than humans”.
He added: “It’s not at human levels of intelligence yet, but once we get to that point, AI will take advantage of the enormous speed advantage which already exists and an ongoing exponential increase in capacity and capability.
“So that’s the meaning of the singularity, it’s a soft take off but exponentials nonetheless become quite daunting. If you double something 30 times, you’re multiplying by a billion.”