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