Two CEOs willing to bet millions of dollars to prove Elon Musk’s AI prediction wrong

He does have a penchant for making bold claims and sometimes he is right whereas on other occasions way off the mark. We are talking about Elon Musk and his ‘predictions’. Recently Musk appeared in an interview and said that AI will become smarter than humans very soon. In an interview with Norges Bank CEO Nicolai Tangen on X, Musk said, “My guess is that we'll have AI that is smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year. And then AI, the total amount of sort of sentient compute of AI, I think will probably exceed all humans in five years.”

Musk’s bold claims were countered by not one but two CEOs who were willing to counter Musk’s claims and ready to bet millions of dollars, according to a report by Business Insider. Gary Marcus, founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning AI startup, wasn’t buying Musk’s claims. In a post on X, he baited Musk with a million-dollar bet. “Dear @elonmusk, $1 million says your latest prediction – that AI will be smarter than any individual human by the end of 2025 – is wrong,” Marcus said in a post on X.

He further said, “Game? I can suggest some rules for your approval.” Marcus, on his part, made it clear that he believed computers are already smarter than humans in many ways. “Note that in some respects (but not all)  computers have been smarter than the smartest human beings for decades. No human can translate between as many languages as Google Translate, no human can beat machines in chess, etc,” he said in his post. He disputed the precision on AI doing things better than humans. “I assume you mean more this, that whatever smart intellectual labour any human working on their own, even the best human in a given domain, can do will be beaten by AI by end of 2025. That is what I am challenging,” he said.

Soon after Marcus made the bet, another CEO offered to up the stakes. Damion Hankejh, CEO, ingk.com, made the offer to raise the bet up to $10 million.