Topline
SpaceX chief Elon Musk said Thursday his firm may soon match and eventually exceed the frontier AI models developed by competitors OpenAI and Anthropic, making the prediction ahead of high-stakes AI talks he is expected to attend in Washington, D.C., alongside other wealthy tech moguls.
SpaceX, Twitter and electric car maker Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends an event during the Vivatech technology startups and innovation fair at the Porte de Versailles exhibition centre in Paris, on June 16, 2023.
Photo by JOEL SAGET/AFP via Getty Images
Key Facts
Musk said in a post he was “cautiously optimistic” SpaceX will have a Fable or GPT-6 level AI model in two to three months, referring to advanced frontier AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
The SpaceX chief made another prediction, adding, “If our second derivative remains strong, SpaceX will reach pole position in about 6 months.”
“We will keep accelerating,” Musk said, noting SpaceX’s “AI efforts are only 3 years old, vs 6 and 10 years old for Anthropic and OpenAI.”
Musk’s comments come ahead of his expected appearance at a White House state dinner with President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Who Else Will Be At Thursday’s White House Dinner?
In addition to Musk, tech moguls expected to or confirmed to attend the state dinner include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Apple executive chairman and ex-CEO Tim Cook, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, OpenAI president Greg Brockman and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. The cumulative net worth of the tech leaders is over $2.2 trillion.
Forbes Valuation
We estimate Musk’s net worth at $929.1 billion, making him the wealthiest person in the world.
Contra
Musk has a history of making industry predictions that have not panned out. The Tesla chief repeatedly predicted fully autonomous, driverless Teslas in the 2010s, though there are still no fully autonomous Teslas available for large-scale public use. He also predicted in 2011 that humans could put a person on Mars within a decade. NASA now predicts the benchmark will be reached in the 2030s.
Key Background
Musk and Altman supported Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s warning to slow down AI development this month, with Amodei noting risks to infrastructure and the possibility of cyberattacks, bioterrorism and economic disruption. The AI leaders chimed in on the risk of their own products after a senior researcher at Anthropic and former Anthropic and OpenAI employee warned AI could result in human extinction within the next decade. Some lawmakers and tech leaders have called for AI regulation, though the U.S. still lacks comprehensive federal guardrails for AI development and use. Trump has called for acceleration of AI development despite the warnings, framing it as a race with China. The president has also encouraged data center construction throughout the U.S., suggesting communities opposing data centers want to be “backwards and poor.”
Further Reading
Trump Says Communities Will Be ‘Backwards And Poor’ If They Oppose Data Centers (Forbes)
Tech Moguls Worth Combined $2.2 Trillion Attending Trump-Xi Dinner: See Who’s Going (Forbes)
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