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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."
Everyone's understanding of AI is limited.
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.
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
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.
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?