In brief
- Musk said xAI gave Grok 5 a 10% chance of reaching AGI and argued its access to real-time data from X was the firm’s main advantage.
- He said Grok 5 would launch in early 2026 with six trillion parameters and strong video-understanding capabilities needed for AGI.
- Musk also updated Tesla projects, claiming its self-driving system was four times safer than humans and projecting large-scale production of Optimus robots.
Elon Musk said his AI company xAI assigned a 10% probability to achieving artificial general intelligence with its upcoming Grok 5 model, arguing that progress toward human-level reasoning would depend on live data rather than the static training sets used by rival labs.
He claimed during a recent interview at the Baron Investment Conference that xAI’s data access from X is its primary competitive edge.
“Grok 5 is the first time where I thought, well, we have a non-zero chance of achieving artificial general intelligence, not that it’s a high chance,” Musk said.
Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, describes systems that can match or exceed human reasoning across any task, not just the narrow jobs current models like ChatGPT, Claude, or Grok can handle.
Musk has previously predicted AGI could emerge sometime in the late 2020s and said the technology could “disarm humanity” to achieve world peace.
Musk said Grok 5, expected in the first quarter of 2026, would be a six-trillion-parameter model with text, image, video, and audio capabilities, and would offer “much higher intelligence density per gigabyte” than earlier versions.
Success in AI depends on attracting top researchers, bringing new hardware online quickly, and securing unique data, the billionaire said. On data, he pointed to X, which he bought for $42 billion in 2022, as xAI’s core advantage.
“We’ve got the X system, formerly the Twitter system, which is the, by far, the best source of real-time data in the world,” Musk said.
Under X’s terms of service, the company may share public posts, engagement data, profiles, and other public activity with xAI, and it can also use a user’s interactions with Grok on the platform to train and refine xAI’s models.
Musk said Grok also needed strong video comprehension to reach AGI.
“Its vision will be extremely good. It’ll be able to understand real-time video, which is, I think, a really fundamentally important thing,” he explained. “If you can’t do that, which is something humans can obviously do, you really can’t achieve AGI anyway.”
Tesla advances
Speaking to Tesla’s self-driving system, Musk claimed it was four times safer than human drivers.
“The numbers are unequivocal at scale, with now over 10 billion miles driven, that it’s four times easier on full self-driving than not,” he said. He added that Tesla now demonstrated the system to all customers “for safety reasons.”
Musk also gave an update on Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot, saying production costs could fall to $20,000-$30,000 once the company reaches a steady-state run rate of 1 million units. He predicted a global future with 30 billion to 40 billion humanoid robots, or several robots for every human worker.
He said Tesla’s AI 5 chip program advanced only after he consolidated two internal efforts into a single team.
“I collapsed the two programs into just one program to get everyone focused on AI five chip, which is essential,” Musk said. He claimed the chip would deliver two to three times the performance per watt of Nvidia hardware at roughly one-tenth of the cost.
When asked about his motivation, Musk said he viewed himself as “unabashedly pro-human,” adding that he wanted to extend human consciousness and explore whether other civilizations existed in the universe.
Despite this, Musk has previously claimed that advances in AI and robotics will lead to a “crisis of meaning” for humanity.
“I think the actual issue, the most likely issue, is how do we find meaning in a world where AI can do everything we can do, but better? That is perhaps the bigger challenge,” Musk said.
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