Musk tells xAI staff AGI may arrive by 2026
Elon Musk has told xAI employees that the company could achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI) as early as 2026 — effectively another revision of his timeline, just weeks before the end of 2025, the date by which Musk had previously suggested AGI could arrive.
According to Business Insider, at an all-hands meeting last week at xAI’s San Francisco headquarters, Musk said AGI could be reached within “the next few years” and even suggested the milestone could come in 2026. The report describes AGI as AI systems that match or exceed human intelligence.
The role of Grok 5, funding and hardware plans
According to the same report, Musk cited the upcoming Grok 5 model (expected in early 2026) as central to xAI’s AGI ambitions. He also told staff that xAI could access around USD 20–30 billion of funding a year and plans to increase its GPUs from about 200,000 to more than one million to dramatically boost computing capacity.
A pattern of shifting predictions
Musk has changed his AGI timeline several times in recent years. For example, in April 2024 Reuters quoted him as saying that if AGI is defined as “smarter than the smartest human”, it could happen within about one to two years.
Business Insider noted at the end of its report that, in response to its request for comment, xAI sent an automated reply: “Legacy Media Lies.”
