Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Elon Musk Says Mark Zuckerberg's Understanding of AI Is Limited (ndtv.com)

Posted by msmash on from the clash-of-billionaires dept.

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."

22 of 318 comments (clear)

  1. Elon is right. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Zuckerberg is just a glorified webmaster from the 90s, when you think about it.

    1. Re:Elon is right. by Luthair · · Score: 4, Insightful

      On the other hand Elon is what, a business guy who likes scifi?

    2. Re:Elon is right. by cyn1c77 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      On the other hand Elon is what, a business guy who likes scifi?

      Really?

      Musk is making a living developing innovative technologies for transportation on multiple platforms.

      Zuckerberg is profiting from selling information that YOU type into MySpace 2.0.

      Is there really any comparison between the two?

  2. In other news... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Everyone's understanding of AI is limited.

    1. Re:In other news... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I know your comment was kind of glib, but you are more correct than you know. Current AI frameworks should more accurately be called machine learning - expose the software to a large number of situations and let it learn how to react. Where the system falls down is for new, untested situations - the type of thing humans may be able to handle effectively - with no existing data points, current AI becomes a guess at best. It cannot anticipate or reason outcomes based on an understanding of the principles involved, it can only hope to match this situation to it's nearest analogue and extrapolate from there.

    2. Re:In other news... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 5, Funny

      At least the people working in AI understand we know nothing...

      Unfortunately, that's where the marketing department steps in.

    3. Re:In other news... by Opportunist · · Score: 3, Funny

      So marketing is selling the castles in the sky that engineers are then supposed to build somehow?

      You don't say.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    4. Re:In other news... by Big+Hairy+Ian · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Everyone's understanding of AI is limited.

      Trust me our understanding of Natural Intelligence is limited.

      --

      Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.

    5. Re:In other news... by PatientZero · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If you stick a bunch of toy blocks in front of a toddler, it will play with them and eventually teach itself to build more complex structures and games.

      If you stick those same blocks in front of an algorithm trained to detect spam or optimize investments or drive a car, it won't do shit.

      If you put them in front of a baby, it will eventually shit.

      --
      Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
      I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
  3. Oooh, goodie! by necro81 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Ooooh, goodie: a billionaires' pissing contest. And between techies, too. I'll get the popcorn!

  4. I'm with Zuckerberg and Facebook's Yann LeCun here by tempmpi · · Score: 4, Informative

    I think Elon Musk is the one that has either a limited understanding of current AI technology or just hypes AI on purpose, while being fully aware that AI still has major limitations and they are unlikely to disappear within the next few years. Important and very important progress has been made, but General AI is likely still very far away.
    Facebook's director of AI Yann LeCun gave a very good interview to IEEE spectrum: Facebook AI Director Yann LeCun on His Quest to Unleash Deep Learning and Make Machines Smarter

    --
    Jan
  5. Both of them by goose-incarnated · · Score: 3

    Both of them display a remarkable lack of knowledge about the limits of AI. Their respective knowledge about AI is purely from works of fiction, which is why at least one of them has, for the last five years, been bleating that self-driving cars are only five years away.

    --
    I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
  6. Wait, what? by sciengin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Wait, what? by JoshuaZ · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It is true that we don't have human-level AI. However, we also don't in general know how close we are to human-level AI and it isn't implausible that some highly clever tweak to deep learning will have a very large impact. Moreover, an AI does not need to be human-level in all skills to pose a threat. An AI that doesn't understand poetry can still create real problems.

      Moreover, and this is really important, people like Musk who are concerned about general AI don't think it is likely that it will show up tomorrow or the day after. But when we do get it, if were not ready, then we might be facing an extinction level threat. The argument goes that we need to be thinking about AI safety issues *now* before the AI arises when we may not then have the time to get it right then.

    2. Re:Wait, what? by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "Extinction-level threat" how, exactly? Is someone insane enough to build a self-sustaining robot soldier factory and then give an AI system complete control of it? Or just give an AI complete launch control of our nuclear arsenal? I can't see humanity ever being quite that trusting.

      Musk may be a visionary, but he's also a bit loony on some topics. Don't forget he believes it's a near certainty that we're all living inside a massive computer simulation.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
  7. Nano AI by Latent+Heat · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  8. Zuck is right (this time) by ranton · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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. I'm not saying Zuckerberg is one of the world's experts but he most likely has a very firm grasp on the subject.

    And whether or not Zuckerberg is correct, it is certainly a reasonable opinion that those who drum up negative sentiment towards AI research are acting irresponsibly. It isn't to the level of Edison spreading fears about AC current by electrocuting animals, but spreading fear about new technologies is likely not a good thing. Instead of more reasonable debates over AI caused displacement of jobs or privacy concerns, Musk is doom-saying about a robot apocalypse. I wouldn't use the term irresponsible, but it's close enough to me to not disparage those who do accuse Musk of irresponsible behavior.

    --
    -- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
    1. Re:Zuck is right (this time) by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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
    2. Re: Zuck is right (this time) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      The original Microsoft Basic was written almost entirely by him personally. He did large amounts of work on the original Office software. He wrote a fair bit of the original MacOS software (you did know that Microsoft wrote a lot of the original Mac software, right?). There's stories of him showing up to investor presentations in desperate need of a shower because he'd been up all night coding.

      Now, if you're one of those idiots who says software "isn't engineering", as someone who started off as an EE and now does software, my opinion is your full of it. There's a hell of a lot of engineering that goes in to non-trivial software projects.

  9. Uh huh... by Vegan+Cyclist · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "I don't understand it. It's really negative and in some ways I actually think it is pretty irresponsible." - says the guy who's company has more deeply invaded the privacy of individuals, as well as the most people in history..I don't think he's a very good judge of what's 'irresponsible'.

  10. And Musk's is not, right? by OneHundredAndTen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  11. Lack of comprehension by lorinc · · Score: 4, Interesting

    but until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don't know how to react, because it seems so ethereal.

    Says the guy that lives in a country where every day dudes carrying big guns shoot at each others for no reasons...

    Seriously dude, I'll be worried when I see swarm of robots building killer robots factories, replicator style. Until then, humans worry me the most.

    --
    Video of some good progressive thrash music