We believe we can achieve trans-sapient performance by 2018
What does "trans-sapient performance" mean?
Well, achieving better than human performance on a sufficiently wide benchmark. Preparing that benchmark is almost as hard as writing the code, it seems. Of course, any such estimates must be taken with a grain of salt, but I think that conceptually solid AGI projects have a significant chance by that time (including OpenCog), although previously I have argued that neuromorphic approaches are likely to succeed by 2030, latest.
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.