Elon clearly doesn't know how AI works if he claims it'll be smarter than a human so quickly. But this statement is probably relying on the ignorance of the masses. What we call AI now doesn't think, it doesn't understand what it's being asked, it extracts sentiment from a prompt then goes through all the data its been trained on to calculate a response word by word based on the frequency of those words being used in the context of the given sentiment and alongside the previous calculated words.

And perhaps he doesn't actually know how it works, because I'm more and more of the mind that he's just a frontman or character - but regardless the simpler explanation is musk has always been pushing the "dangers of AI" but not in a way to shut down development but in a way to justify development on brain chips, claiming it's the only way humans will be able to compete. So him fluffing AI right now is just a gateway to transhumanism, like most of his actions despite the SUPER BASTE MEMES