The Technological Singularity Has Already Begun: Musk’s Vision of a Future with Near-Zero Cost Labor

In a recent interview with Peter Diamandis, Elon Musk, the founder of xAI, declared that the technological singularity is already underway. According to his forecast, a fully capable Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — capable of solving any intellectual task on par with humans — will emerge this year. By 2030, the combined computational power of AI is projected to surpass the total biological intelligence of all humanity.

What does this mean in practical terms? Musk believes physical labor will become a resource with an almost negligible cost — limited only by the price of raw materials and electricity. He predicts that in just three years, humanoid robots like Optimus will be able to perform surgical operations better than humans by learning from the experience of millions of procedures. In such a world, the concept of Universal Basic Income becomes obsolete, giving way to “Universal High Income,” where the cost of most goods and services approaches zero.

Musk identifies the key driver of this growth not as model architecture, but as a radical increase in “intelligence density per watt” of energy. Energy itself, rather than a shortage of chips, is becoming the primary constraint: the industry has hit a wall due to a lack of “transformers for Transformers” — electrical substations to power computing clusters. In response, xAI is preparing to launch its “Cortex” supercomputer with a capacity of 0.5 GW, which will be fully operational by mid-year.

Architectural changes are also on the horizon. While current models are trained in 16-bit format and quantized to 4 bits for inference, xAI plans to transition to native 4-bit training, which promises a manifold increase in performance. The new model, Grok 5, is expected in the first quarter. Musk also notes that traditional benchmarks are becoming obsolete: AI is starting to formulate questions that humans cannot even comprehend, let alone verify the answers.

In the long term, a solution to the energy problem could be orbital data centers. Once Starship reduces the cost of launching cargo to below $100 per kilogram, placing computational power in space will become economically viable — there, gigawatt-scale solar energy is available without atmospheric losses or the constraints of terrestrial power grids.

Musk warns that the world is entering a phase of “supersonic tsunami” of change, where regulators physically cannot keep pace with technology. He asserts that the only safe way to navigate the singularity is to create AI oriented toward “maximum truth-seeking.”