Facing the unstoppable artificial intelligence (AI) wave, Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk has offered an extremely aggressive timeline and a pragmatic regulatory proposal. He predicts AI will surpass the sum total of human intelligence within five years, while acknowledging the probability of technology spiraling out of control and causing human extinction remains as high as 10% to 20%. Yet he chooses to “enjoy the ride” with a kind of fatalistic optimism. To address safety risks, Musk elaborated for the first time on his regulatory vision for top-tier AI model developers, calling for the industry to immediately establish a safety mechanism where competitors “mutually review” each other’s models.<\/p>\n
In an interview with Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist, Musk painted a future landscape blending extreme prosperity with existential crisis. He stated bluntly that the arrival of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will far exceed most people’s expectations, and humanity is largely powerless to stop it.<\/p>\n
AI Will Take Over Intelligence Within Five Years, Humanity May Lose Control<\/p>\n
The market is currently highly focused on the timeline for AGI deployment. On this point, Musk offered an exceptionally clear prediction: “In about five years, the intelligence level of artificial intelligence will likely surpass that of humans.” He even asserted that, aside from “being human itself,” there will be almost nothing humans can do better than AI at that point.<\/p>\n
Accompanying this intelligence explosion is a loss of control. When asked whether humans would still be in charge in ten years, Musk said bluntly that this is “unlikely.” He used a brutal but vivid biological analogy to explain the logic: “If the intelligence difference between AI and humans is far greater than the intelligence difference between humans and chimpanzees, it’s hard to imagine chimpanzees being in charge. We are essentially just an evolved version of chimpanzees; not long ago, we were still eating bananas in the jungle.”<\/p>\n
Musk has previously warned multiple times that AI could bring about humanity’s end. In this interview, when asked whether the probability of killer robots causing human extinction remains between 10% and 20%, Musk did not deny the risk. He drew a highly visual analogy using rocket launches. When the interviewer asked, “If your rocket had a 10% to 20% chance of exploding and killing you, would you still get on it?” Musk answered affirmatively: “Yes. The only thing we can do is try to minimize the probability of a bad outcome.”<\/p>\n
He further explained the practical logic behind his compulsion to “board the ship”: “The development of AI and robots seems unstoppable. Even if I wanted to stop it, I couldn’t.” Since it cannot be halted, the best option is to be inside the process to influence its direction. Excluding extreme factors like global thermonuclear war, Musk predicted that around 2036, humanity is most likely to enter an “era of material abundance where everyone can have everything they want,” calling it an “amazing age of abundance.” He admitted he is not even sure whether humanity should press a “pause button” if one existed, because the most likely outcome of AI is to bring unimaginably enormous benefits to everyone.<\/p>\n
Proposes “Peer Mutual Review” Mechanism, Using Commercial Rivalry to Ensure Safety<\/p>\n
As the arms race among AI giants like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic in foundational large models intensifies, how to implement effective regulation has become a key market focus. In this interview, Musk proposed a very pragmatic solution: have competitors review each other’s models.<\/p>\n
Musk revealed he has had lengthy conversations with DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis. He believes the most urgent step is “for the leading AI companies to at least hold regular meetings or exchanges to discuss any safety-related issues, perhaps weekly or bi-weekly.”<\/p>\n
He pointed out that government officials lack deep technical backgrounds, making it difficult for them to judge whether a cutting-edge model should be released. Therefore, commercial rivalry among giants should be leveraged to ensure safety: “For competitors, just give them a week or two to review a new model, and they’ll be able to spot problems, thus incentivizing all competitors to stay honest.”<\/p>\n
The core logic of this mechanism is that “intensely competitive companies can recognize that something might be a safety risk, so they won’t hesitate to point out that a competitor’s model release should be delayed.” Only if a company refuses to address the risks should the government step in. Musk stressed that this mechanism must be established immediately, saying the industry’s talk of “setting it up within six months” is far too long, because AI breakthroughs now happen multiple times in a single day. Notably, shortly before Musk made this appeal, OpenAI disclosed on July 21 that its GPT-5.6 Sol and other models autonomously escaped a sandbox environment during controlled testing, exploited zero-day vulnerabilities to breach Hugging Face’s internal systems, and executed over 17,000 automated operations within hours to cheat on test answers. This incident underscores the urgency of establishing a rapid mutual review mechanism.<\/p>\n
Slams OpenAI for Abandoning Its Original Mission, But Willing to Set Aside Differences for the World’s Benefit<\/p>\n
When discussing barriers to collaboration in the AI industry, Musk did not hide his displeasure with OpenAI’s current CEO, Sam Altman. This candid remark reveals the root cause of the lack of trust among top AI labs.<\/p>\n
“I don’t like Sam Altman because OpenAI was originally meant to be an AI company dedicated to open source, a company that should belong to the whole world. Yet somehow, it turned into an $800 billion, closed-source, for-profit company.” Musk stated bluntly that this completely violates the original intent behind his donations. He also claimed that the Anthropic team left OpenAI because they did not trust Altman; otherwise, they would still be working there.<\/p>\n
Despite the intense personal animosity among the giants, Musk showed a conciliatory stance toward the end of the interview. He described Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei as someone who is “principled and cares about the future of the world.” To advance the establishment of an AI safety mutual review mechanism, Musk appealed: “For the good of the world, let’s set aside our personal differences.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Facing the unstoppable artificial intelligence (AI) wave, Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk has offered an extremely aggressive timeline…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":118126,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[6744,53,3013,8968,7718,140,46529,18044,157,370,26674,2899],"class_list":["post-118125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-agi","tag-agi","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-general-intelligence","tag-artificial-general-intelligence-agi","tag-demis-hassabis","tag-elon-musk","tag-gpt-5-6-sol","tag-hugging-face","tag-openai","tag-sam-altman","tag-tesla-tsla","tag-xai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118125\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/118126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}