Elon Musk said artificial intelligence could dominate every field by 2028 at the latest, compressing a 2021 forecast from AI researcher François Chollet that science would become increasingly computational over the following 10 to 20 years.
Musk Compresses Chollet’s AI Timeline Dramatically
Chollet resurfaced his May 2021 prediction on Tuesday, saying it had drawn "enormous pushback" but was "looking obvious by the day now." His original post predicted nearly every scientific discipline would effectively become a branch of computer science, driven by simulations, big-data analysis and machine learning.
Musk replied to the X post saying, "Your prediction was conservative. AI will beat all fields by the end of next year or maybe 2028, at the latest." The forecast extends Musk’s recent prediction that AI will become "superhuman" at virtually every digital task by the end of 2027.
Independent Study Shows Progress Still Uneven
A peer-reviewed study published Sept. 3 in npj Digital Medicine evaluated 20 AI models on 1,245 questions from orthopedic and sports-medicine cases, finding a substantial gap between performance on conventional questions and more complex multimodal clinical reasoning tasks.
Leading systems topped 90% accuracy on structured multiple-choice questions, but accuracy on open-ended tasks requiring integrated text-and-image reasoning barely reached 60%. The researchers concluded that current models still face barriers to independent clinical competence.
AI Labs Push Deeper Into Science
AI systems are also moving beyond question answering. Anthropic said last week that Claude optimized more than 30 open-source biomolecular models in under four weeks, speeding them up roughly fourfold. Reuters separately reported last Friday that Anthropic has established a physical biology laboratory as it expands into drug discovery and combines AI with real-world experiments.
Alphabet Inc.’s (NASDAQ:GOOG)(NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google DeepMind’s Co-Scientist system uses multiple AI agents to generate, debate and refine scientific hypotheses, showing how developers are targeting discovery itself.
Musk is betting his own companies can push that progression further. SpaceXAI released Grok 4.7 this week for coding and knowledge work, while Grok 5 is being trained with Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ:SPCX) engineering data. Deepwater Asset Management’s Gene Munster recently predicted the model could become "the most useful engineering tool in history".
Photo courtesy: Frederic Legrand – COMEO on Shutterstock
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