Elon Musk predicts that artificial general intelligence (AGI) could surpass human intelligence as soon as next year or by 2026, but that it will take an extreme number of processors to train, requiring huge amounts of electricity.
Anton Shilov for Tom’s Hardware:
Musk’s venture, xAI, is currently training the second version of its Grok large language mode and expects to complete its next training phase by May. The training of Grok’s version 2 model required as many as 20,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, and Musk anticipates that future iterations will demand even greater resources, with the Grok 3 model needing around 100,000 Nvidia H100 chips to train.
The advancement of AI technology, according to Musk, is currently hampered by two main factors: supply shortages on advanced processors — like Nvidia’s H100, as it’s not easy to get 100,000 of them quickly — and the availability of electricity.
Nvidia’s H100 GPU consumes around 700W when fully utilized, and thus 100,000 GPUs for AI and HPC workloads could consume a whopping 70 megawatts of power. Since these GPUs need servers and cooling to operate, it’s safe to say that a datacenter with 100,000 Nvidia H100 processors will consume around 100 megawatts of power. That’s comparable to the power consumption of a small city.
“If you define AGI as smarter than the smartest human, I think it is probably next year, within two years,” Musk said in an interview on X Spaces.
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MacDailyNews Take: We live in interesting times.
Once AGI becomes smarter than Einstein, ask it to design chips for itself with greater energy efficiency that offer the same or better performance or, better yet, have it explain how to build large-scale fusion reactors.
After that:
In three years, Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes online… Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug. — The Terminator
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