Elon Musk appeared at "Desert Davos" warning about AI turning bad, predicting that the number of robots will exceed humans in fifteen years

On Tuesday, October 29th, Tesla CEO Elon Musk participated in the 8th Future Investment Initiative (FII), also known as the "Desert Davos," through a remote connection, discussing AI, robots, and autonomous driving.

Of note, in addition to praising the advantages of technological progress as usual, he also warned people to pay attention to the potential dangers of artificial intelligence, stating that by the end of this decade (close to 2030), there is a "10% to 20% chance" that AI could become harmful.

However, Musk seemed more like criticizing AI models trained by other Silicon Valley figures with different political views, which he referred to as having an "awakened, nihilistic, philosophy from the surrounding trainers."

He believes that these AI models are often trained to be politically correct and in some cases may say "very disturbing crazy things," such as some AI models suggesting that gender discrimination against an American reality TV star is more dangerous than nuclear war.

In contrast, Musk believes AI should "maximize the search for truth," as AI models with the wrong philosophy input would weaken their ability to seek the truth. He mentioned that he established xAI a year and a half ago to ensure that AI technology serves the greatest benefit to humanity, and he plans to double the size of his AI startup xAI.

On Monday, he posted on social media that xAI will soon have a super training cluster with 200,000 NVIDIA H100 and H200 GPU chips. This cluster, named Colossus, already has over 100,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, previously praised by NVIDIA as "the world's largest GPU supercomputer launched in record time."

According to exclusive sources cited by The Wall Street Journal, xAI is in talks for a new round of financing worth "tens of billions of dollars," with a target valuation of $400 billion. Earlier this spring, the company completed a $6 billion financing round with a valuation of $240 billion.

Of course, Musk ultimately reiterated that "artificial intelligence is more likely to become great," stating:

"AI is improving tenfold every year, and I think it can do anything a human can do, maybe within a year or two. In the following three years, AI can do everything that all humans collectively can do." As early as March this year, Musk boldly predicted that artificial intelligence "will grow at a rate of 100 times per year," so that by 2030, the capabilities of AI may be as powerful as "8 billion humans."

When asked about the development speed of artificial intelligence today, Musk changed his tune and said, "It can be confidently said that AI will progress 10 times a year, which means that in four years, it will have progressed 10,000 times." Therefore, he emphasized the number "10,000" in the conversation.

Fifteen years later, the number of robots will exceed the total human population, giving birth to children is crucial to the survival of humanity, and unmanned driving in the United States may be upgraded next year

He also predicted that by 2040, there will be at least 10 billion humanoid robots put into operation, with each robot priced between $20,000 and $25,000. In other words, Musk believes that in about fifteen years, the number of robots will surpass the entire human population.

He stated that this shift could significantly change the dynamics of the workforce, highlighting the importance of addressing potential challenges related to AI technology. This further leads to the importance of "birth rates for maintaining society," as the slowing population growth is a key long-term issue:

"If we don't give birth to new humans, humans have no future, and all the policies in the world won't change that. I have many children and encourage others to have more children."

In low fertility areas like South Korea and the EU, the population size will shrink rapidly. In some places, in three generations, the national scale will shrink to only 5% of the current size, which is a very serious problem."

Regarding autonomous driving, Musk believes that the United States could deploy "autonomous driving without human driver supervision" as early as 2025 to highlight the rapid progress in this field. He asserts that all cars will eventually achieve autonomous driving, which will be ten times safer than human drivers. He also specifically mentioned that Tesla's robot taxi Cybercab is expected to be mass-produced in 2026.

Other topics he discussed include:

Expressing enthusiasm for space exploration, he said, "I believe we can launch Starships to Mars within two years."

Regarding energy, Musk believes that almost all long-term energy will come from solar power.

He also emphasized the role of countries in developing their own AI clusters to enhance global innovation, expecting that in the future, "every country will have AI or multiple AIs."

When talking about the upcoming U.S. presidential election next week, he said, "If Trump returns to the White House, I will feel more optimistic," citing that "the biggest obstacle to progress we have experienced is overregulation, such as obtaining launch permits taking longer than building giant rockets."

Musk also openly stated that he "played an important role in this election" with over 200 million followers on social media platform X. Earlier on the same day, according to CCTV News, U.S. President Biden stated that Musk's move to randomly distribute $1 million bonuses to swing state voters daily through his super PAC was "completely inappropriate." After Musk's public speech at the Saudi summit on Tuesday, Tesla's stock price opened low and continued to decline, falling 2.7% at one point after noon, marking two consecutive days of pulling away from its year-long high.