Elon Musk asks ‘where will AI be in 3 years?’ after Citadel CEO Ken Griffin’s stark warning

What watershed moment in the history of artificial intelligence would force a skeptic to finally admit that “AI is completely real”?

This is what happens with Citadel CEO Ken Griffin who once was an AI skeptic who called artificial intelligence “garbage” at a deeper level, though at a shallow level artificial intelligence related advancement looks “impressive.”

Recently, during a discussion with professors at Stanford Business School, Griffin took a starkly different view regarding the rapid evolution and efficiency of AI tools.

Citadel CEO talked about how he went home “fairly depressed” after watching AI agents performing work at great efficiency at Citadel. Earlier, the same type of work used to take a couple of months or weeks and teams of PhDs in finance to complete.

Now, with the advent of AI, “the work is being done by AI agents over the course of hours or days," Griffin said.

He added, “These are not mid-tier white collar jobs. These are extraordinarily high skilled jobs being automated by agentic AI.”

According to Griffin, AI had become “profoundly more powerful” than it was nine months ago and allowed the hedge fund to use technology for several purposes.

The stark warning regarding the “dramatic impact of AI on society” is coming from the head of one of the most successful hedge funds who is worried about how the highly skilled people, earning seven figures to assess financial markets, are being replaced by a machine. Unfortunately, this is also happening in my office too.

"The success in your career will be defined as to whether or not you will be a lifelong learner or not, and AI will just make this all the more important," Griffin said.

Responding to Ken Griffin’s stark viewpoint on AI, Elon Musk also raised a question regarding the future of AI in coming years.

Taking to X, the CEO of SpaceX asked, “Where will AI be in 1, 2 or 3 years?”

In response to the question, netizens also offered their viewpoints regarding the speech at which technology is evolving.

One user wrote, “I'd be happier if AI didn't come here at all. Life was good before it & will be fine without it. Too much technology will be our downfall.”

Another one commented, “Geoffrey Hinton had a vision before the world could even imagine it.”

Some offered an optimistic viewpoint, citing, “Costs for everything will be cheaper as the labor to produce it gets AI’d. Humans will reap the benefits while AI does all the work. Win win.”

Recently, the growing efficiency of agentic AI systems have raised concerns among tech moguls and employees who are wary of the disruptive impact of AI in the labour market. It is more evident with the fact, most companies, such as Meta, BlackRock, are laying off employees on the grounds of adopting AI tools.