Elon Musk predicts smarter-than-humans AI in 2 years. The CEO of China's Baidu says it's 10 years away

PARIS — Robin Li, CEO of one of China's biggest tech firms Baidu, said artificial intelligence that is smarter than humans is more than 10 years away, even as industry staple Elon Musk predicts it will emerge very soon.

Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, broadly relates to AI that is as smart or smarter than humans.

Tesla boss Musk said this year that AGI would likely be available by 2026. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in January that AGI could be developed in the "reasonably close-ish future."

Li, whose company Baidu is one of China's leading AI players, signals this isn't realistic.

"AGI is still quite a few years away. Today, a lot of people talk about AGI, [and] they're saying ... it's probably two years away, it's probably, you know, five years away. I think [it] is more than 10 years away," Li said during a talk on Wednesday at the VivaTech conference in Paris.

"By definition, AGI is that a computer or AI can be as smart as a human right? Or sometimes ... smarter. But we would want an AI to be as smart as [a] human. And today's most powerful models are far from that. And how do you achieve that level of intelligence? We don't know."

Li called for the faster pace of development of AI.

"[My] fear is that is that AI technology is not improving fast enough. Everyone's shocked how fast the technology evolved over the past couple of years. But to me it's still not fast enough. It's too slow," he said.

Baidu last year launched its ChatGPT-style chatbot called Ernie, based on the company's same-named large language model.

Chinese firms including Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent are investing heavily in their own AI models, like U.S. counterparts.

Li said that there is a big difference between developing the technology in the U.S.,