Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has predicted that within the next five years, robots will be better than the best surgeons at performing surgical operations.

The tech billionaire, who owns Neuralink — a company developing implantable brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) — made this claim on his X account while retweeting a post by Mario Nawfal. Nawfal stated that the Hugo robot had conducted 137 real surgeries, including procedures on prostates, kidneys, and bladders, with results that exceeded doctors’ expectations.

“The robot achieved a 98.5% success rate, far above the 85% goal — meaning it didn’t just pass the test, it basically set the curve,” wrote Nawfal, founder of IBC Group Official.

The surgical achievement of the Hugo robot comes at a time when Google’s upgraded version of its experimental medical chatbot, the Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE), has been found to analyze and diagnose medical images — such as skin rashes — more accurately than human primary-care physicians.

In response to Nawfal’s post, Elon Musk said:

“Robots will surpass good human surgeons within a few years and the best human surgeons within ~5 years.” He added that Neuralink “had to use a robot for the brain-computer electrode insertion, as it was impossible for a human to achieve the required speed and precision.”

This is not the first time Musk has made predictions about the intellectual superiority of AI over humans in the near future. Last year, also while responding to a tweet, he claimed that AI is likely to “superset the intelligence of any single human by the end of 2025 and maybe all humans by 2027/2028.”

“Probability that AI exceeds the intelligence of all humans combined by 2030 is ~100%,” he added.

Aside from Neuralink, which is utilizing the capabilities of AI in various aspects of its operations, Musk runs other AI ventures — including Grok, his chatbot similar to the popular ChatGPT, and Tesla Optimus, a humanoid robot which the company claims is capable of performing tasks that are unsafe, repetitive, or boring.