CEOs bet up to $10 million to prove Elon Musk's AI prediction wrong

CEOs are betting against Elon Musk’s prediction that AI will surpass human intelligence by 2026. Kirsty Wigglesworth/Getty

• Bets are coming in against Elon Musk’s predictions about AI.
• Geometric Intelligence CEO Gary Marcus and CEO of ingk.com Damion Hankejh have offered up millions.
• Elon Musk predicts AI will surpass human intelligence by the end of next year.

CEOs are betting against billionaire Elon Musk’s AI predictions.

Musk said during a live interview with Norges Bank CEO Nicolai Tangen on X, formerly Twitter, that AI is the fastest advancing technology he’s ever seen, with barely a week going by without a new announcement.

“My guess is that we’ll have AI that is smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year,” Musk said. “And then AI, the total amount of sort of sentient compute of AI, I think will probably exceed all humans in five years.”

Gary Marcus, the founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning AI startup acquired by Uber in 2016, doesn’t agree with Musk’s AI predictions. And he offered $1 million to prove him wrong.

Moments after the bet was posted, Damion Hankejh, Investor and CEO of ingk.com, offered to up the bet to $10 million.

Hankejh did not respond to a request for comment.

Marcus said Musk hasn’t responded so far, and it’s not the first time he hasn’t heard back from the billionaire about a bet.

Marcus previously bet $100,000 against Musk’s claims that AGI was imminent. The bet grew to $500,000.

For Marcus, it’s not just about winning a bet. He told Business Insider that he would like to have a public discussion with Musk about the real status of AI.

“For years, a lot of the people in the tech industry have been making claims that feel implausible to me from a scientific perspective,” Marcus told BI. “And there have been a lot of broken promises yet hardly any accountability.”

As an example, Marcus cited technology like driverless cars, saying it was easy to put together demos but much harder to actually create a reliable device.

Marcus said he thinks people need to understand what is actually realistic — and large language models are not going to be smarter than humans in the next five years, he said. In fact, Marcus thinks we may be decades away from machines as trustworthy and reliable in their thinking as humans.

Marcus said that while large language models are the best tech in AI right now, they’re not actually good.

Marcus cited hallucinations, security data leaks, and reliability issues as some of these concerns. He also said the technology is being used for misinformation and using copyrighted data to take away from artists.

“We should want the world to find better, more trustworthy ways to build AI,” Marcus said.

Marcus said one of the ways to do so is by employing some kind of licensing authority requiring to show the benefits of AI.

Musk has been vocal about his concerns with the technology. He’s said there’s a 10 to 20% chance AI will destroy humanity.

He also sued OpenAi, alleging it betrayed its mission to benefit humanity. Marcus said he publicly defended him over the lawsuit.

“I was actually quite supportive of Musk,” Marcus said. “I think that drawing attention to those things is a good thing.”

Marcus told BI he believes AI could help humanity, but he’s much less optimistic about AI being trustworthy in the near future.

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