Elon Musk says Tesla will be the first to develop AGI

Elon Musk has claimed that his electric vehicle firm Tesla will be among the first to build artificial general intelligence (AGI), and “probably the first to make it in humanoid / atom-shaping form,” in a new post on X.

Musk deems Tesla’s work on its Optimus humanoid robot and manufacturing systems as a way not just to advanced automation, but to physically embodied AGI that can manipulate the real world with high precision.



AGI refers to AI systems that can perform a wide range of intellectual tasks at or beyond human level, rather than being limited to specific, narrow applications such as chatbots or image generators.

This has become a major battle between big AI labs such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and xAI, who are jostling for supremacy in more general-purpose machine intelligence. Meta is seeking to reach something more personal, which it calls "Super Intelligence", where the technology uniquely knows the user.

Many frontier LLMs and agents today demonstrate impressive performance in different aspects. However, several experts and academic reviews still consider AGI hypothetical or a future possibility as these systems lack robust autonomy, grounded understanding of the physical world, consistent long‑term planning, and reliable self‑improvement without human oversight.

Top industry leaders have offered differing views on when AGI might arrive. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has said he expects AGI to be developed within the current US presidential term. He has also said AGI is “a very sloppy term”, warning that powerful systems need strong governance.

At the India AI Impact Summit in February, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said AGI could be here in five to seven years. He said it could have “ten times the impact of the Industrial Revolution, probably at ten times the speed of anything else”. However, he added, “it’s still to be written how we can make that beneficial for the whole world”.