This is not Musk's field of expertise. I do not give his words special weight.
The fact that he can sit in on some cutting edge tech demos, or even chat with CEOs, still doesn't make him an expert.
I have a technical background in AI; there's still massive hurdles to overcome; not 5-10 year hurdles. Nothing from Deepmind will "escape onto the internet" any time soon. It is very much grounded in the "Narrow AI" technologies like machine learning.
I feel pretty confident calling him a Cassandra.
DeepMind is very definitely AGI in the sense of the domain of problems its learners can learn and its agents can solve. If DeepMind is easily controlled and not very dangerous, that's not evidence for AGI being further away than we thought before we looked at DeepMind, it's evidence for AGI being more easily controlled than we thought before we looked at DeepMind.
Real AGI was never going to look like magic genies, so we should never fault real-life AI work for failing at genie.
Elon Musk submitted a comment to edge.org a day or so ago, on this article. It was later removed.
Now Elon has been making noises about AI safety lately in general, including for example mentioning Bostrom's Superintelligence on twitter. But this is the first time that I know of that he's come up with his own predictions of the timeframes involved, and I think his are rather quite soon compared to most.
We can compare this to MIRI's post in May this year, When Will AI Be Created, which illustrates that it seems reasonable to think of AI as being further away, but also that there is a lot of uncertainty on the issue.
Of course, "something seriously dangerous" might not refer to full blown superintelligent uFAI - there's plenty of space for disasters of magnitude in between the range of the 2010 flash crash and clippy turning the universe into paperclips to occur.
In any case, it's true that Musk has more "direct exposure" to those on the frontier of AGI research than your average person, and it's also true that he has an audience, so I think there is some interest to be found in his comments here.