Musk says real-world data from X and Tesla will fuel AGI’s efforts

Elon Musk said his AI company xAI has assigned a 10% probability of achieving artificial general intelligence with its upcoming Grok 5 model, arguing that progress toward human-level reasoning would depend on live data rather than the static training sets used by rival labs.

He claimed during a recent interview at the Baron Investment Conference that xAI’s data access from X is its key competitive advantage.

“Grok 5 is the first time I thought, we have a non-zero chance of achieving artificial general intelligence, not that that chance is great,” Musk said.

Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, describes systems that can match or exceed human reasoning on any task, not just the limited tasks that current models like ChatGPT, Claude or Grok can handle.

Musk has previously predicted that AGI could emerge sometime in the late 2020s, saying the technology could “disarm” humanity to achieve world peace.

Musk said Grok 5, expected in the first quarter of 2026, would be a six-trillion-parameter model with text, image, video and audio capabilities, offering “much higher intelligence density per gigabyte” than previous versions.

Success in AI depends on attracting top researchers, bringing new hardware online quickly and securing unique data, the billionaire said. On the data front, he pointed to X, which he bought for $42 billion in 2022, as the key benefit of xAI.

“We have the X System, formerly the Twitter System, which is by far the best source of real-time data in the world,” Musk said.

Under X’s terms of service, the company may share public posts, engagement data, profiles, and other public activities with xAI, and may also use a user’s interactions with Grok on the platform to train and refine xAI’s models.

Musk said Grok also needed strong video understanding to achieve AGI.

“The vision will be extremely good. It will be able to understand real-time video, which I think is fundamental,” he explained. “If you can’t do that, which people obviously can, you really can’t achieve AGI.”

Tesla is moving forward

Speaking to Tesla’s self-driving system, Musk claimed it is four times safer than human drivers.

“The numbers are broadly unequivocal, given that over 10 billion miles have now been driven, it is four times easier to drive completely on your own than not,” he said. He added that Tesla was now demonstrating the system to all customers “for safety reasons.”

Musk also provided an update on Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus, saying production costs could drop to $20,000-$30,000 once the company reaches a stable production rate of 1 million units. He predicted a global future with 30 billion to 40 billion humanoid robots, or multiple robots for every human worker.

He said Tesla’s AI 5 chip program only made progress after consolidating two internal efforts into one team.

“I combined the two programs into just one program to get everyone focused on the AI ​​five-chip, which is essential,” Musk said. He claimed the chip would deliver two to three times the performance per watt of Nvidia hardware, at about a tenth the cost.

When asked about his motivation, Musk said he considered himself “unabashedly pro-human,” adding that he wanted to expand human consciousness and explore whether other civilizations existed in the universe.

Despite this, Musk has previously claimed that advances in AI and robotics will lead to a “crisis of meaning” for humanity.

“I think the real problem, the most likely problem, is how do we find meaning in a world where AI can do everything we can do, but better? That may be the bigger challenge,” Musk said.