Musk Calls Humans ‘Incompetent Monkeys’ Without AI

Darwin, September 04 :

After several major artificial intelligence (AI) platforms experienced outages at roughly the same time, US billionaire and technology entrepreneur Elon Musk joked about humans’ ability to work without AI.

According to Musk, in the future, AI may view humans who write code themselves as something resembling inefficient and incompetent monkeys. India Today reported the matter.

Last night, ChatGPT, Claude and Grok all experienced service disruptions at around the same time. The outages caused problems for users who have become increasingly dependent on these AI tools for their work. While some joked about the situation, others expressed concern about how they would manage without AI.

Amid the discussion, Musk joined the conversation on X. He shared a meme featuring a viral video with the caption, “Humans writing code in the eyes of future AI.”

The video shows an orangutan attempting to hammer a nail using a rock. The animal appears to struggle while trying to imitate the work of a carpenter.

Musk’s joke suggests that in the future, AI may see humans writing code by hand as slow, inefficient and ineffective—much like the orangutan struggling to perform a task.

X users also joined in with their own jokes. Some humorously portrayed Claude as resembling renowned nature documentary narrator David Attenborough, as if an AI were observing humans writing code.

The video has since become widely popular. Developers and technology users in particular have been sharing it, joking that without AI, they too would become as inefficient as the orangutan in the video.

Why did the three AI services go down at the same time?

Although ChatGPT, Claude and Grok experienced problems at roughly the same time, there is no confirmed evidence that a single common cause was responsible for all three outages.

OpenAI said ChatGPT and Codex experienced higher-than-normal error rates on September 3. The company later identified and resolved the issue, restoring the services to normal.

In its final update, OpenAI said the cause of the errors affecting ChatGPT and Codex had been addressed. However, following the incident, some Codex users with remote-control features may need to reconnect their mobile devices.

Anthropic also reported problems affecting several Claude models. The company said it had identified the cause of elevated error rates affecting requests to Claude Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Opus 5 and was working to resolve the issue. Anthropic later said the fix had been implemented and the service had returned to normal.

Grok also experienced a separate outage. xAI’s status page initially reported that Grok was experiencing problems and that efforts were underway to restore the service as quickly as possible. The service became fully operational again after about three hours and 37 minutes. xAI later said the situation was under control and traffic had returned to normal.

Therefore, although the outages at the three platforms occurred at nearly the same time, there is no confirmed evidence that ChatGPT, Claude and Grok all went down because of a single technical failure.

All three AI services have since returned to normal. However, the incident has once again highlighted people’s growing dependence on AI in their daily work.

Developers use AI for writing and debugging code, writers rely on it for drafting and editing, while ordinary users increasingly turn to AI chatbots to find information and get answers to a wide range of questions.

As a result, when these services suddenly become unavailable, many people find themselves struggling with tasks they previously handled easily on their own.

Source: India Today