Elon Musk has once again raised the bar of expectations and, as usual, did so without half-measures. According to Business Insider, at a recent all-hands meeting at xAI headquarters in San Francisco, Musk stated that his company is capable of creating artificial superintelligence within the next few years, and under favorable conditions—even as early as 2026.
We are talking about AGI—artificial general intelligence—which is capable not just of performing individual tasks, but of thinking, learning, adapting to new conditions, and in many ways surpassing human intelligence. Essentially, this is the moment when the phrase “smarter than humans” stops being a metaphor.
According to Musk, if xAI survives the next two to three years of intense competition, the company could overtake all competitors and become the most powerful player in the AI market. The key factor, he says, is xAI’s ability to rapidly scale computing power and data volumes. In simple terms, whoever has more hardware and energy is smarter. In this logic, Musk feels confident.
As recently as November, Musk estimated the probability of achieving AGI with the Grok 5 model at roughly 10%. The Grok 5 release is scheduled for early next year. For a person accustomed to thinking in terms of Mars colonization, 10% sounds more like “entirely plausible.”
One of xAI’s main advantages, according to Musk, is financial resources. The company can expect funding of $20–30 billion per year, plus synergy with his other ventures—Tesla, SpaceX, and the entire Musk ecosystem. For example, Grok is already integrated into Tesla vehicles, giving direct access to millions of users and real-time data streams.
Employees present at the meeting noted that Musk appeared pleased with the company’s progress. One insider described the atmosphere as “buoyant.” Nevertheless, his signature futuristic ideas were not absent. Musk spoke about building data centers in space and reminded attendees of his plans to colonize Mars. Moreover, he suggested that Tesla Optimus humanoid robots could eventually service such extraterrestrial data centers.
Optimus, Musk said, could start assisting SpaceX missions as early as next year. The idea of space-based data centers is not unique; both Sundar Pichai of Google and Sam Altman of OpenAI have publicly discussed such possibilities, although Pichai candidly called it a “moonshot.” In response to Business Insider’s inquiry, xAI simply replied with the automated message: “Legacy Media Lies.” As usual, traditional media misunderstood something again.
Over the past year, xAI has rapidly expanded its data center infrastructure under the Colossus project. Previously, the company reported having around 200,000 GPUs, and Musk announced plans to scale up to 1 million GPUs. This is no longer a garage startup, but a full-fledged industrial machine consuming electricity and data at industrial scale.
At the same time, xAI remains a relatively new player in a field dominated by giants like OpenAI and Google. However, the race for AGI is clearly accelerating. Recent reports indicated that OpenAI has been operating in “emergency mode,” rushing to release a new model. In November, Google unveiled the latest version of Gemini, while xAI regularly rolls out Grok updates.
At the same meeting, xAI employees showcased updates to existing products. These included improvements to Grok Voice for Tesla owners, enhanced agent functionality, more accurate outcome predictions, improved speech recognition, and even video editing tools. All of this appears to be an effort not just to catch up with the market, but to demonstrate that xAI can move faster and broader.
Setting aside the futurism and cosmic romanticism, the picture is simple and rather stark. xAI has money, hardware, data, and a person who genuinely believes the future should be built with Mars in mind. Whether superintelligence will emerge by 2026 remains an open question. But there is no doubt that the race for AGI has entered a phase of maximum acceleration.
All that remains is to observe—and to be polite to chatbots, just in case. You never know what might happen.
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