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Elon Musk Says Mark Zuckerberg's Understanding of AI Is Limited (ndtv.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Elon Musk is a man of many characteristics, one of which apparently is not shying away from calling out big names when they are not informed about a subject. A day after Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Musk's doomsday prediction of AI is "irresponsible," the Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity founder returned the favour by calling Zuckerberg's understanding of AI "limited." Responding to a tweet Tuesday, which talked about Zuckerberg's remarks on the matter, Musk said he has spoken to the Facebook CEO about it, and reached the conclusion that his "understanding of the subject is limited." Even as AI remains in its nascent stage -- recent acquisitions suggest that most companies only started looking at AI-focused startups five years ago -- major companies are aggressively placing big bets on it. Companies are increasingly exploring opportunities to use machine learning and other AI components to improve their products and services and push things forward. But as AI is seeing tremendous attention, some, including people like Musk worry that we need to regulate these efforts as they could pose a "fundamental risk to the existence of human civilisation." At the National Governors Association summer meeting earlier this month in the US, Musk added, "I have exposure to the very cutting edge AI, and I think people should be really concerned about it. I keep sounding the alarm bell, but until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don't know how to react, because it seems so ethereal." Over the weekend, during Zuckerberg's Facebook Live session, a user asked what he thought of Musk's remarks. "I have pretty strong opinions on this. I am optimistic," Zuckerberg said. "And I think people who are naysayers and try to drum up these doomsday scenarios -- I just, I don't understand it. It's really negative and in some ways I actually think it is pretty irresponsible."
Zuckerberg is just a glorified webmaster from the 90s, when you think about it.
Everyone's understanding of AI is limited.
The guy who ignores the fact that no one is currently researching strong AI accuses the guy who uses actual AI (well, enhanced pattern matching really) of having a limited understanding of the subject??
Lets face it: To have killer robots and the like as Musks imagines, we need to have a strong AI, of course we need to also have it go off the rails for some mysterious reason (whatever reason that causes this behaviour in movies wont cause it in reality), but first of all we need human-like AI.
This is a bit of a problem as we only have very, very limited understanding of natural Intelligence and no plan or clue how to even start implementing artificial intelligence. People have been falling for the "ZOMFG AI nau!" hype since the creation of Eliza. But so far neither the formal knowledge systems pre-AI-winter nor the deep learning and neurnal nets approaches have yielded anything more than very sophisticated pattern matching algorithms.
Take Googles Go engine: Impressive but it can play Go and only Go. Proof: they now have to spend a long time to retrain it for other tasks. This is not at all what the general population (and Elon) understands by AI.
You had the same kind of thing with nano technology.
Everyone was worried about Grey Goo and being stuck with the kids while your wife, whom you suspected of cheating because she worked long hours at her engineering job wearing shoes that did not meet Speaker Ryan's dress code, was in fact becoming a nano-bot zombie.
Instead, nano was a term you needed to sex up your NSF proposal and pitch to private capital investors, but what you were doing had nothing to do with Drexler assemblers and pretty much mass fabrication materials tech.
I find it hard to believe the CEO of one of the largest tech companies in the world, whose services heavily rely on AI for recommendations, image recognition, etc, has a limited knowledge of the AI industry.
Honestly, I don't know what I think of Zuckerberg. Naturally, I don't know him personally. To me though, he often comes across as an idealistic but naive rich kid-got lucky and became mega-rich man.
He's probably more technically savvy than the average person, but I don't think he's necessarily even as tech savvy as the average Slashdot reader. He had a good marketable idea, got the right early staff to make it take off and is doing well for himself. I don't think he has the deep understanding of science and technology, nor the zeal, that someone like a Elon Musk has.
Zuckerberg is a businessman in the tech industry. Musk is a techie into business. That's not to say that Musk doesn't have his head in the clouds a lot either.
I think in order to be ridiculously successful, as both men are, you have to be an optimist that your wacky ideas will work- and then have the luck, and skill to make sure they really do.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Musk is falling for something that way too many before him did fall for: wild success in one area makes me an expert on just about anything.
Obvioulsy Musk works in the real world, and is a proven innovator, so he can make progress and money with or without AI.
A famous webmaster like Zuckerberg cannot afford any regulation on AI going into effect, since it would necessarily have to mean someone looking over your code, what you are doing, and risk exposing all the nasty government/advertisement ties behind Facebook and algorithms being used for population control.
Also, he truly doesn't understand AI even at a 1970s level, because anyone who knows about the singularity issue, and just how unavoidable it seems to be, wouldn't scoff at the idea.
I find it hard to believe the CEO of one of the largest tech companies in the world, whose services heavily rely on AI for recommendations, image recognition, etc, has a limited knowledge of the AI industry.
Three points: First, being a CEO of a successful company does not imply that you have a deep understanding of the tech the company deals with. It implies that you are good at corporate politics.
Second, the "AI" that is used for recommendations, etc., is really only barely AI.
Third, there's a pretty large difference between knowing an industry and knowing the tech the industry is based on.
Yep. Can you believe these kids think there will be a computer in almost every home soon. They clearly don't understand the obstacles and how much progress we would have to make for that to happen? - Almost every "expert" right before it happened
This is a popular but feeble argument on slashdot.
"People used to say man could never fly: now we have aeroplanes. Therefore time travel will be possible one day."
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it