Elon Musk says AI will master all fields by 2028

Elon Musk says AI could master every field by 2027 or 2028, calling AI researcher François Chollet's prediction conservative. Musk has repeatedly brought forward his timeline for AI surpassing human intelligence.

In Short

• Elon Musk says AI could master all fields by the end of 2027 or 2028
• He called AI researcher François Chollet’s 10–20-year prediction “conservative”
• Musk has repeatedly revised his timeline for AI surpassing human intelligence

Elon Musk says AI will master all fields by the end of next year or 2028 max. Back in 2021, AI researcher Franois Chollet posted a thread on X (then Twitter) predicting how things are going to change within 10 to 20 years. His argument was almost every branch of science – physics, chemistry, biology, even archaeology – would basically become a branch of computer science.

He compared it to something that already happened. In 2000, if you'd said "most companies will be tech companies," people would've laughed. Twenty years later, Walmart and FedEx run on software just as much as they run on trucks and shelves. Nobody argues about that anymore.

Fast forward to almost five years. Chollet reposted the thread now with a simple note: the prediction that got so much pushback in 2021 is "looking obvious by the day now."

That's when Elon Musk jumped into the replies. He called Chollet's timeline “conservative” and said, “AI will beat all fields by the end of next year or maybe 2028, at the latest”.

Now Musk may be calling Chollet’s prediction conservative because he believes AI progress is accelerating far faster than the 10–20 year timeline Chollet outlined. If Chollet's claim just means AI becoming a genuinely essential tool in every scientific discipline, running simulations, crunching data, spotting patterns humans would miss, that's arguably already happening, and maybe even happening ahead of schedule. Discoveries in protein folding, materials science, and climate modelling are already being made through AI.

Is this something new?

Not really, especially at a time when topics like AI safety and its impact have become the hottest topics on the planet. As for Musk, he too has a history of making striking comments on the matter. Back in 2017, responding to a study that predicted AI would beat humans at everything by 2060, Musk said he thought it would happen more like 2030 to 2040. By 2024, he'd sped that up considerably, predicting AI would be smarter than any single human by the end of 2025, and smarter than all of humanity combined within five years. Then in January 2026, at Davos, he pushed the date in again, saying AI could become smarter than any human by the end of that year, or by the end of 2027 at the latest, with humanity's collective intelligence being surpassed within five years after that. Now, again replying to Chollet, he's put the "master every field" version of the claim at 2027 to 2028.

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