Elon Musk is on a prediction rampage, and most of the media can’t seem to figure out what to do about it.
Brace yourself for Elon’s bold new prediction:
“AI is the fastest advancing technology that I’ve ever seen of any kind, and I’ve seen a lot of technology. You know barely a week goes by without some new announcement, and if you look at the amount of AI hardware, the computers coming online that are dedicated to AI, that is increasing what looks like at least by a factor of 10 every year, if not every 6 to nine months. So when you combine the hardware coming online really an order of magnitude increase every you know—call it at least every nine months—and many, many software breakthroughs, if you look at that curve it looks insane. My guess is that we’ll have AI that is smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year, and then AI, the total amount of sort of sentient compute of AI, I think will probably exceed all humans in 5 years.”
Sorry, my bad. That’s one fromApril 2024. (Didn’t come true1) His new new prediction, is this:
@rauchgAI will be able to do anything digital (that doesn’t require shaping atoms) at a superhuman level by the end of next year“,“username”:“elonmusk”,“name”:“Elon Musk”,“profile_image_url”:“https://pbs.substack.com/profile_images/2053244804520427520/m8mdWZCG_normal.jpg”,“date”:“2026-08-31T01:54:09.000Z”,“photos”:\[\],“quoted_tweet”:{},“reply_count”:553,“retweet_count”:901,“like_count”:9118,“impression_count”:1544320,“expanded_url”:null,“video_url”:null,“video_preview_media_key”:null,“belowTheFold”:false}“ data-component-name=“Twitter2ToDOM”>
Sound familiar? Essentially, all he did was quietly push back the date, from 2025 to 2027.
I serously doubt this prediction too. (Both times I offered to bet him a million dollars; neither time did he respond.) Here in 2026, as opposed to scifi dreamland. there are still a zillion things smart people can (usually) do that machines still struggle with.
Like not make stuff up. (Unless they choose to, or on drugs or have brain damage, etc.).
And the smartest people can do stuff like write Pulitzer Prize-worthy novels and articles and so on. Of the10 sample challenges I raised with Miles Brundage at the end of 2024, some within reach of ordinary humans, some within the reach only of exceptional humans, the number AI has solved still looks to be approximately zero.
Of course making a new prediction that the same as the old prediction, just with the dates quietly moved back is Elon’s MO.
Note the absolute confidence and sincerity, with phrases like “for sure”, “I am extremely confident”, “it’s looking quite likely”, etc.
A lot of individuals have noticed this pattern by now, but the media very rarely calls him on it.
Instead, usually they just report his predictions, in perfectCEO said a thingstyle, without really questioning them, just like they platformed all his ridiculously overoptimistic driverless car predictions for the last decade.
A perfect case in point arrived in my inbox this morning, from_The Information_:
The predictions here are outlandish. So far, the global economy has scarcely budged from the contributions of AI:
and nobody has articulated a serious theory about what those billion humanoid robots might be doing. Unless we are counting “serve as remote control children’s toys”, the chance is approximately zero.
The “five times more productive” thing comes, presumably, from thin air. Will they be able to fix plumbing leaks five times faster than human plumbers? Be five times more productive at taking care of elderly patients? When I asked Rodney Brooks about the humanoid robot part, he called it a “hallucination”, noting that “there are no deployed humanoid robots that are even on the same continent as 1% as productive as a human, and the derivative is not even 0.1 per year“.
Alas,_The Information_didn’t even_try_to evaluate any of Musk’s predictions.
On the plus side,_The Information_gave Musk’s motivate for wanting to_build_the robots. But what they should have don't is to examine his track record on timeline predictions—hint, it is poor—and they should questioned his motive for making projections that so frequently are off the mark, invariablhy in the same self-serving drive-up-his-stock direction.
Political reporters do this kind of questioning all the time; mainstream tech reporters, not so much.
And no doubt you can come back in two years (or two weeks) for more nearly identical predictions from Musk, with more dates silently shifted back. As long as it drives up his stock prices and the media doesn’t call him out, why should he stop?
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Of course it’s not just Elon. Altman gets the same treatment, like in the softball interview TIME just ran with Altman, where Altman got say whoppers like this, happily retweeted by the interviewer, Alex Heath.
In reality, literally thirteen months ago Altman was saying that GPT-5 could do anything a PhD could. The journalist couldn’t be bothered to look. People like Dario Amodei and Demis Hassabis[often get a free ride in the mainstream media](https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/no-dario-amodei-we-will-not-be-curing?r=8tdk6&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web), too.
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A few mainstream journalists do stand out. Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor of_The Economist_challenged Musk in a recent interview; Ronan Farrow, writing for_The New Yorker_, challenged Altman earlier this year. But examples like those remain all too rare.
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PS. Bonus from that same softball TIME interview:
For more detailed context, here Altman’s fuller, utterly risible comment:
s_!rrgC!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb06894c6-74f2-429a-bfc5-9d9c44661e67_1408x1760.jpeg)
Technically Musk’s 2024 prediction is worded ambiguously, “_My guess is that we’ll have AI that is smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year,”_could mean (merely that) we will have AI that is smarter than the perpetually drunk guy at the bar across street. But I don’t think that’s what Musk meant. From the context I think that he meant AI would be smarter than even the smartest individual human being by the end of 2025, overtaking collections of humans a bit later.
https://bender.layer3.press/articles/9e402b86-dd1f-499a-8366-1768e67ed52c
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