Elon Musk tells xAI staff AGI could arrive by 2026; Says next 2–3 years are critical

Elon Musk recently held a companywide meeting in which he told the xAI staff that the survival over the next two to three years would be critical. Musk believes that if the company is able to endure, then it could emerge as a dominant player in the race to artificial general intelligence (AGI). As reported by Business Insider, Elon Musk made these remarks at xAI’s all-hands meeting. These remarks from the Tesla CEO comes at a time when the AI industry is entering one of its most competitive phase yet. OpenAI recently, entered a “state of emergency” to accelerate the release of its latest model, while Google unveiled its new Gemini system in November. Against these giants, xAI is positioning itself as the insurgent challenger, betting on speed, scale, and Musk’s trademark bravado to carve out market share.

What Elon Musk said on the race to AGI

Elon Musk also told its staff that xAI can achieve AGI as early as 2026, citing rapid progress with its Grok models. Earlier, Musk a 10% chance of reaching AGI with Grok 5, slated for release next year. This is not the first time that Elon Musk has made bold predictions about the AGI timelines. As reported by Gizmodo, in 2024, Musk suggested that the AGI breakthrough could arrive by 2025. The shifting timelines highlight both Musk’s optimism and the uncertainty surrounding the technology’s development.

xAI’s Colossus project

In the all-hands meeting, Musk also talked about xAI’s Colossus project which has already amassed around 200,000 GPUs and it plans to expand to 1 million. This aggressive hardware build-out is designed to match or surpass the compute capacity of established players. Musk argues that proximity to his other companies, including Tesla and SpaceX, provides synergies that competitors cannot replicate.

Beyond terrestrial competition, Musk floated ideas of space-based data centers manned by Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots. While such concepts remain speculative, they underscore Musk’s willingness to push boundaries in ways that differentiate xAI from more cautious rivals.