Artificial intelligence will one day be smarter than humans, but there's no reason to fear the technology, according to a pioneer in AI technologies.

"I've been working on [AI] for several decades, since the eighties basically, and I still believe it will be possible to witness that AIs are going to be much smarter than myself, such that I can retire," Jurgen Schmidhuber, who is now co-founder and chief scientist of AI startup NNAISENSE.

He has been dubbed as the person that robots will most likely call "father."

But dire warnings about AI have been repeatedly sounded by Tesla's Elon Musk, who went as far as to claim that the danger of AI far surpasses that of nuclear warheads at a conference this year.

"I've talked to him for hours and I've tried to allay his fears on that, pointing out that even once AIs are smarter than we are, at some point they are just going to lose interest (in humans)," Schmidhuber told CNBC's Nancy Hungerford, on his conversations with Musk.