March 3, 2025 – In a recent episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, once again shared his views on the development of artificial intelligence (AI). While he has consistently expressed concerns about the potential risks of AI, this time, he seemed to hold a relatively optimistic attitude towards the future of humanity.
Musk stated that he believes the probability of AI leading to the destruction of humans is only 20%, while the chance of a positive outcome is as high as 80%. This is not the first time he has mentioned this probability; he had previously predicted that the likelihood of AI causing human extinction was between 10% and 20%.
During the interview, Musk also predicted that AI would surpass human intelligence within the next one to two years and reach a level of being “smarter than all humans combined” by 2029 or 2030. It’s worth noting that this aligns with his previous forecasts, although he had mentioned last year that AI could potentially exceed human intelligence by the end of 2025.
Musk’s fundamental perspective on AI remains unchanged. He has always maintained that AI will vastly surpass human intelligence and pose an “existential risk,” and the current situation seems to be validating his viewpoint. Other experts in the field of artificial intelligence have also expressed concerns about the possibility of AI leading to human extinction. Geoffrey Hinton, a deep learning expert, believes that there is a 10% chance of AI causing human extinction within the next 30 years, while Roman Yampolskiy, an AI safety researcher and cybersecurity director, has stated that the probability of humans facing “destruction” is as high as 99.999999%.
Despite his concerns about the potential for AI to destroy humanity, Musk revealed in the interview that his initial involvement in AI was to create a “non-profit open-source AI” as a counterweight to Google. He was one of the 11 co-founders of OpenAI but later left the organization. Last year, Musk filed two lawsuits against OpenAI, with the first one being withdrawn. In the second lawsuit, Musk’s lawyers accused OpenAI of straying from its mission, shifting to a profit-making model, and forming a partnership with Microsoft.
Expressing his dissatisfaction with the current state of OpenAI, Musk announced during the interview that this had motivated him to found xAI and introduce the Grok chatbot. Grok is designed as an “AI that pursues the ultimate truth,” even if such truth might be “politically incorrect.” Musk emphasized that he believes the most likely outcome of AI progress is “awesome,” suggesting that the future of AI will be either “super great” or “super terrible,” rather than somewhere in the middle.
