Mistral CEO Calls Tech Leaders’ AI Obsession "Religious"

From Elon Musk to Sam Altman, tech’s biggest CEOs are warning that AI will soon surpass human intelligence.

Mensch described the obsession among Silicon Valley elites with AI superintelligence as a “very religious” fascination. I Photo: Lightspeed

But Arthur Mensch, the young CEO of Mistral AI—a rising French challenger to OpenAI—believes these predictions stem from a misguided “God complex,” Ryan Hogg reported for Fortune.

Speaking to The New York Times, Mensch described the obsession among Silicon Valley elites with AI superintelligence as a “very religious” fascination.

The rapid expansion of AI has stunned observers and fueled massive investments in the sector. However, it has also led to increasingly bold claims, particularly about artificial general intelligence (AGI)—AI that can perform tasks as well as or better than humans.

In an interview on Twitter/X earlier this week, Musk predicted that AI would surpass human intelligence by the end of 2026.

“My guess is that we’ll have AI that is smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year,” Musk told Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM). He added that within five years, AI would be more intelligent than every human on Earth.

Musk’s predictions—particularly in areas where he has financial stakes—should be taken with skepticism.

However, he is not alone in making such claims. At the 2024 World Economic Forum (WEF), OpenAI CEO Sam Altman struggled to define what humans could do better than AI, admitting,

“It does feel different this time. General-purpose cognition feels so close to what we all treasure about humanity.”

Meanwhile, AI pioneers like Geoffrey Hinton—the so-called “Godfather of AI”—and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis have both suggested AGI could be just a few years away. Mensch, however, remains unconvinced.

“The whole AGI rhetoric is about creating God,” he told The New York Times. “I don’t believe in God. I’m a strong atheist. So I don’t believe in AGI.”