Artificial intelligence will be smarter than the cleverest human within two years, Elon Musk has predicted.

Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, said the milestone could be reached as long as the supply of electricity and advanced chips could meet the demands for training the technology.

“My guess is that we’ll have AI that is smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year,” Musk said during a discussion on Twitter/X, his social media platform. The billionaire added that within five years the capability of AI would eclipse that of all humans.

AI has made extraordinary leaps in recent years and ChatGPT, the OpenAI chatbot, quickly became one of the most popular software applications in history after its release in November 2022.

At first the technology could produce human-like text from simple prompts, but already the latest models have moved far beyond the capabilities of the initial release.

Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI but sued the company for allegedly abandoning its original mission of developing its technology for the benefit of humanity, rather than for profit. OpenAI denies this.

Musk said development of his Grok AI model is being hampered by a lack of advanced chips that are essential for training the large language models.

He added that soon the issue could be the strain placed on electricity grids by the vast amounts of power needed by the technology. “Last year it was chip-constrained,” Musk said on X. “People could not get enough Nvidia chips.” He added that “in a year or two” electricity supply could be the issue.

Musk has repeatedly sounded the alarm for the potential dangers posed by AI, warning that it had the potential for “civilisation destruction”.

“Even if you say that AI doesn’t have agency, well, it’s very likely that people will use the AI as a tool in elections,” he told Fox News last year, while calling for government oversight of the technology. “And then, you know, if AI’s smart enough, are they using the tool or is the tool using them? So I think things are getting weird and they’re getting weird fast.”