Musk says AI will beat all fields by 2028 at the latest, answering Chollet's 10-to-20-year forecast
Chollet's 2021 forecast gave science 10 to 20 years to become computational, but Musk says AI beats every field within two.
Elon Musk has put a date on it. On September 22, 2026, at 1:36 pm Eastern, he told François Chollet on X that AI will beat all fields by the end of next year, or 2028 at the latest.
He was answering Chollet, who'd reposted a forecast of his own from May 2021 about half an hour earlier (1:05 pm, by X's timestamp) and said it was looking obvious. Musk called it conservative.
- Musk
- Beat all fields by the end of next year or maybe 2028, at the latest
- Chollet's forecast
- Within 10-20 years, nearly every branch of science will be a branch of computer science
- Chollet now
- This prediction is looking obvious by the day
What Chollet predicted
Chollet's 2021 post gave science 10 to 20 years. By then, he wrote, physics, chemistry, biology and medicine would each be a branch of computer science (he threw in archeology too), run on simulations and machine learning.
Within 10-20 years, nearly every branch of science will be, for all intents and purposes, a branch of computer science. Computational physics, comp chemistry, comp biology, comp medicine... Even comp archeology. Realistic simulations, big data analysis, and ML everywhere
He says it got a lot of pushback when it went up. Five years later he reposted it, and that repost is what Musk replied to.
The tweet below got enormous pushback at the time I posted it, more than 5 years ago. But this prediction is looking obvious by the day now.
What Musk said back
I was surprised by how far apart the two claims are. Chollet was describing scientists doing their work on computers. Musk's word is beat. His claim is about AI doing better than the people in those fields, and he gives it a year or two.
Your prediction was conservative. AI will beat all fields by the end of next year or maybe 2028, at the latest.
He doesn't say what beating a field would look like. So 2028 is hard to check. It's also his second forecast in a week. On September 18 he guessed that AI roughly doubles US growth next year, which we set against the Fed's own projection.
My guess is that AI roughly doubles US GDP growth next year from ~2% to ~4%. Maybe even more.
Ten days after pacing
On September 12, Musk was quick to back Dario Amodei's essay asking the labs to pace the frontier. His reply was three words long.
Dario is right
Neither of his posts this week says whether a 2028 deadline changes what his own company builds.
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