Elon Musk says Mark Zuckerberg's understanding of AI is 'limited'

http://money.cnn.com/2017/07/25/technology/elon-musk-mark-zuckerberg-ai-artificial-intelligence/index.html

by mcone • 9 years ago

59 83 9 years ago

money.cnn.com

TDL• 9 years ago

I question whether either of these guys have a good understanding of AI.

Dzugaru• 9 years ago

I'm pretty sure noone on planet Earth has a good understanding of AI yet. I stopped reading about "what AI is, what AI isn't" completely.

loceng4• 9 years ago

macmac• 9 years ago

Musk is being very generous in his assessment.

loceng4• 9 years ago

From my perspective, Mark has always seemed like a controlled thinker - including controlling his actions, behaviour, etc. in a very fixed way. In contrast, Elon's always seemed to be a holistic thinker, starting from founding principles and then understanding what his actions will lead to. Elon's openness to thought leads me to believe his thinking style would lead to understanding how AI could evolve better than Mark's more controlling behaviour.

euyyn3• 9 years ago

What makes you think so?

josh2600• 9 years ago

What does it mean to have an understanding of AI that's limited?

Have you ever talked to someone who is way smarter than you? Have you tried to imagine how they think? I suspect thinking about the future of AI is a little bit like that, insofar as it's hard to model the future state intelligently.

vowelless• 9 years ago

I would love to see a new Jobs Gates style rivalry. Maybe Musk - Zuckerberg?

maxerickson• 9 years ago

How about Elon vs Musk?

loceng4• 9 years ago

Elon's Musk would win.

Edit: No playfulness on HN allowed today apparently

austenallred• 9 years ago

Musk - Bezos

needlessly• 9 years ago

These two are very different and don't compete in the same space as Jobs vs Gates.

Musk is a generation above Zuckerberg. 13 years older. Musk is better as an innovator while Zuckerberg is better at business. Zuck has like 69 Billion while Musk has about 16 Billion

JustAnotherPat• 9 years ago

I don't trust Zuckerberg on any issue in which Facebook has much to gain from one side. We all know how much money he'd like to make by having some AI programs follow us around 24/7.

hourislate2• 9 years ago

One guy is trying to change the world and one guy is trying enslave it.

When you have the likes of people like Stephen Hawking agreeing with Musk, why wouldn't you listen and be wary. Mark doesn't seem like a very intelligent person, just a very lucky person.

icebraining• 9 years ago

Musk was the guy that created a car that can track and report everywhere you go using a permanent connection to his mothership, plus films and uploads the surroundings and even has an camera inside. The only protection being his word that they won't read it unless you allow them.

hndamien3• 9 years ago

Wow. Mark used an example of self-driving cars being good for humanity as his example of why AI will pose no danger; to make a point about his perspective in a feud with the guy that is leading self-driving car revolution pointing out that AI could potentially be dangerous. I hold great concerns for Facebook's future.

hourislate2• 9 years ago

Lets hope farcebook has no future....

infimum• 9 years ago

Elon Musk's recent comments on the topic makes me say that his understanding of AI is similarly 'limited'...

__s• 9 years ago

Seems this pivots on a disagreement of AI as a risk

Musk seems very anxious of existential threats-- it isn't surprising he may overestimate the danger of AI

It also comes off as very monkey-centric. Is it so bad if human intelligence isn't what proliferates the future? Perhaps AI is a kind of memetic evolution for our culture, evolving into a form of life which can achieve sustenance with much less waste

loceng4• 9 years ago

Elon's an open holistic thinker, his thoughts lead him to the end point of what could happen.

AI is automation, systems of automation. People could automate to the point of leading to a constant flow of horrific things happening, creating a highly efficient war machine - whether against another nation or your own people. This is likely what Elon is thinking about - other than the possibility that a real AI system is developed that is given the ability to manage resources, e.g. Ex Machina (film).

jdietrich• 9 years ago

It also comes off as very monkey-centric. Is it so bad if human intelligence isn't what proliferates the future?

For humans, it's an absolute disaster - look at what happened to the lesser apes when Homo Sapiens became dominant. The odds are very good that a sentient AI will decimate us or make us extinct, simply by adapting our habitat to its own needs.

AndrewKemendo5• 9 years ago

Are you expecting that Sapiens Sapiens would somehow last as a species forever?

hospes• 9 years ago

> It also comes off as very monkey-centric. Is it so bad if human intelligence isn't what proliferates the future? > Perhaps AI is a kind of memetic evolution for our culture, evolving into a form of life which can achieve sustenance with much less waste

Is that what humanity should strive for? Create form of Intelligence that can sustain itself with less waste?

Calling someone who is trying to create better future for his 5 kids "monkey-centric" is pretty offensive. I wish there were more "monkey-centric" people out there.

josefresco• 9 years ago

Zuckerberg sells / appeals to a mass-audience who needs reassurance that AI will not take over the world and murder their grandkids.

Musk sells / appeals to techies, and those seeking to embrace cutting edge technology and are not scared by "AI is dangerous" talk.

Different audience, different messaging.

mindcrime2• 9 years ago

Is there any particular reason to think that Musk's understanding of AI isn't also "limited"? I don't recall him being known as an AI researcher.

I mean, there's no doubt he's smart, even brilliant... but being brilliant in one field doesn't necessarily mean you are an expert in others.

wwwhatcrack• 9 years ago

I'd say both of these guys have limited understandings of everything.

gonehome5• 9 years ago

They're talking past each other because "AI" has become a useless term.

Musk's comments are about a potential (maybe conscious) artificial super intelligence and the risks that could come from that if we enable one somehow without understanding the preconditions.

Zuckerberg is just talking about "AI" in the sense that machine learning can solve a valuable class of problems.

The super intelligence risk could be serious or not - it's hard to know since we haven't really dealt with an intelligence that wasn't created through natural selection with those biases for survival. We also don't really understand how consciousness works either.

One risk of AI is that if Musk's argument is right we won't be as 'lucky' as we were with nuclear weapons. Enriched uranium is hard to get so nuclear weapons are easier to control and hard for an individual to make. Turning on an AI or copying the code for one and spreading it would probably be easier. If it does end up being dangerous that's not a great situation.

arethuza• 9 years ago

"Turning on an AI or copying the code for one and spreading it would probably be easiear. If it does end up being dangerous that's bad."

That scenario reminds me of the opening of Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep.

6d6b735• 9 years ago

Turning on an AI or copying the code for one and spreading it would probably be easiear.

What people never mention in any discussion with AI is that the AI will be as limited by physical world as we are. AI It's not just code, it's also the hardware that will run the code. That hardware has theoretical and practical limits, and requires a lot of power. It's not like AI running on some peta/exascale supercomputer will be able to jump to your laptop and take it over and spread itself to every electronic device in the world.

mindcrime2• 9 years ago

Exactly. And that's one big reason I find so many of these "doomsday" scenarios less than useful. They're largely based on a view of AI that's rooted in science-fiction, not reality.

AndrewKemendo5• 9 years ago

It's not like AI running on some peta/exascale supercomputer will be able to jump to your laptop and take it over and spread itself to every electronic device in the world

That's exactly a proposed scenario - with the form of "jumping" being any kind of communication. See: The AI Box problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_box

gonehome5• 9 years ago

I think the main argument against this is once you're in the world of "super intelligence" you're severely outmatched. If for some reason it had an interest in staying on it might not be easy to stop.

euyyn3• 9 years ago

But how can one think that Mark's understanding of "sci-fi AI" is limited? We're so far from any of it that at this point it's all speculation about what could or could not happen.

If I have a theory that humans will evolve into separate species, I can't say someone else's understanding on the matter is limited.

gonehome5• 9 years ago

Limited in a sense that he's saying Musk is being irresponsible and then talking about the simpler machine learning problems that can be solved [1] when Musk's warning is really about the super intelligence piece.

The main problem is the term AI is overloaded and overused so it creates confusion.

Musk is not against the machine learning approach to solving a new class of useful problems (though replacing a lot of current human jobs and the political risk associated with that is an issue to think about)

[1] http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/24/mark-zuckerberg-elon-musks-do...

JCzynski2• 9 years ago

Surveys of the field consistently show a majority expecting less than a century, and people focused on the problem less than 50.

naveen99• 9 years ago

But AI is not just bits in cold storage. It would need a lot of computing power and or bandwidth. it would need money and power also.

WhatIsDukkha• 9 years ago

It's not useless as a term but AI has become a catchall for anxiety about the future.

I'll add another set of concerns you see in these discussions.

People know that the current version of predatory Capitalism we've created so far would happily mass unemploy everyone (possibly all the white collar workers reading this much sooner then you think). This would leave no workers and no consumers with money outside of the ultrawealthy.

I agree. I don't trust the current version of capitalism to program these AI of the future. I think they will burn the house down in their greed.

gmarx• 9 years ago

I'll add another concern which is already occurring (the thing I'm concerned about, not the concern, although I guess the concern is already occurring)

AI is being used as a workaround to existing anti-discrimination laws. The core of anti-discrimination law is that it doesn't matter if you think on the average my group of people is a worse credit risk or more likely to rob your taxi or more likely to trash your rental property; you need to judge me by the risk of the general population.

AI allows you to create a black box which will inevitably find proxies for race and spit out a higher risk for some races than others. Race won't directly appear in the model but what does will be strongly correlated with race.

convexfunction4• 9 years ago

We also don't really understand how consciousness works either.

Sort of a nitpick, but people concerned about AI risk usually don't postulate that an AI needs to be """conscious""" to be dangerous; it just needs to be a thing that can apply a lot of optimization power in unexpected ways toward goals that aren't perfectly aligned with what humans generally want.

circlefavshape2• 9 years ago

Oh! Good insight!

... but we already have that, right? Undesirable outcomes from rulesets that govern the behaviour of a large number of (conscious or unconscious) actors are a pretty standard feature of civilisation

ankushnarula• 9 years ago

It doesn't even need to be a superintelligence - Musk explains a scenario that isn't very far on the horizon here at the Governor's meeting: https://youtu.be/OYJ89vE-QfQ?t=2959 (from 51:45 to 53:50)

sebular2• 9 years ago

I think that they're actually talking right at each other, but Zuckerberg is thinking of the possibilities, while Musk is thinking of the implementations.

"AI is the future" really means that Zuckerberg sees the massive potential of automation, and how it's going to change the face of the world.

"We should be worried about AI" really means that Musk has had to think long and hard about the fact that the software written by Tesla is navigating living human beings around obstacles at high speeds.

This isn't about some accidental super intelligence that becomes self-aware and murders all humans, it's about the consequences of applying today's standards of "let's ship this code" to technology that we're expected to entrust with our lives.

This is two things, combined: "AI" means that code will have more complex emergent behavior that's harder to debug than current code, which is already nearly impossible to completely debug. "AI" also means that this code will run very complex systems that often have powerful hardware components, unfortunately including weapons.

To put it another way: Both men agree that the code of the near future is going to make a massive leap in effectiveness and real-world applications. But Musk has to grapple with being held morally accountable for that code, while the only thing Zuckerberg's ever had to care about is performance. Say "AI" to Mark Zuckerberg and he sees all of the money in smarter data mining and fun home appliances. Say "AI" to Elon Musk and he has nightmares of deploying a wireless update that causes Teslas to confuse people wearing green clothing with green traffic lights.

nibstwo• 9 years ago

Musk and Bezos are clearly smarter than Zuck and Dorsey.

AndrewKemendo5• 9 years ago

Mark Recruited Yann Lecun, arguably the top "AI" practitioner in modern times (backprop anyone?). Lecun agrees with Mark and I would be surprised if Mark wasn't taking most of his direction in AI from Lecun.

arcanus• 9 years ago

Good point. Another noted expert in "AI" is Andrew Ng (formerly Google and Baidu) who stated that, "Fearing a rise of killer robots is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars."

...For some reason Elon is really hung up on gradient-based descent methods terminating all of humanity. We just aren't close to that possibility yet. It is not even in sight.

AndrewKemendo5• 9 years ago

The problem is that both are potentially right.

The majority of the ML field still ignores entirely the AGI discipline - and in general rightly so as there are enough narrow problems to solve to fill a lifetime. That's the perspective of Lecun/Ng etc... because they are scientists.

The others Bostrom et al. are philosophers, so they approach it from a different perspective.

There are valuable reasons to think about it at both levels.

pesenti4• 9 years ago

A majority of the experts in AI would side with Zuckerberg on this one. See for example: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2017/07/18/artific.... It's not that we shouldn't worry about AI, it's that the issue Musk is raising - AI as an existential threat -, is distracting from the real issues.

caio19822• 9 years ago

Was Isaac Asimov being distracted from the real issues as well just a few decades ago? Food for thought :-)

pesenti4• 9 years ago

This is not about science fiction. It's about science today and in a near future and its consequence on policies and regulations.

convexfunction4• 9 years ago

You may be interested in http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/22/ai-researchers-on-ai-ri..., or more directly addressing your claim, http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/08/ssc-journal-club-ai-tim...:

50% of experts think there’s at least a ten percent chance of above-human-level AI coming within the next ten years.

(ten years!? sheesh)

And 40% of experts think that there’s a better-than-even chance that, once we get above-human level AI, it will “explode” to suddenly become vastly more intelligent than humans.
And 70% of experts think that Stuart Russell makes a pretty good point when he says that without a lot of research into AI goal alignment, AIs will probably have their goals so misaligned with humans that they could become dangerous and hostile.
... 5% think this is “among the most important problems in the field”. Only a tenth – 1.4% – think it’s “much more valuable” than other things they could be working on.

Not totally clear which of those Zuckerburg wouldn't agree with, but this isn't exactly a fringe concern anymore, even if most people think it's not worth thinking about yet.

notwhiteknight• 9 years ago

Even billionaires end up wasting their lives bikeshedding.

yumraj• 9 years ago

Is it "limited" or "biased" - as in biased so it serves the purpose one is trying to achieve.

It would apply to both though :)

mcmacintosh• 9 years ago

Honestly I'm pretty appalled by Musk's statements. There's no indication from recent research that we're close to the "dreadful super intelligence". I think he has an a very naive and scifi-ish understanding of the state of AI and his fear mongering is irresponsible at best. Or maybe he's right and private companies are so technologically advanced that they surpass academia by a wide margin. Somehow I highly doubt that.

danso• 9 years ago

As overloaded as the term "AI" has become, to the point where mainstream discussion is unlikely to be substantative, I'm glad a tech-business leader like Elon Musk is at least taking a public position of some skepticism. AI can be as empowering or as dangerous as we design and constrain it -- but to a layperson, AI and "algorithms" seem like inevitable magic, in the way that iPhones have steadily "improved" in hardware specs and in life-augmenting features.

rspeer2• 9 years ago

Musk's view of AI relies on AI being magic, too. He's using the definition of "AI" that exists only in hyped-up promises about the future, and evaporates when applied to present technology.

Musk dismisses AI experts who tell him that his claims bear no resemblance to real technology, because Musk isn't talking about the same AI as them. He's talking about sci-fi AI.

There are no experts in sci-fi AI because, if there were anything there that one could understand well enough to be an expert in it, it wouldn't be sci-fi AI anymore.

hndamien3• 9 years ago

Don't underestimate the exponential.

659087• 9 years ago

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

The possibility of using AI to surveil and manipulate Facebook users (and non-users) on a mass scale (and probably give his presidential campaign a boost along the way) is worth far too much money for Zuckerberg to admit to the potential downsides.

Zuckerberg isn't optimistic about AI, he's optimistic about the money and power AI will grant him.

tarr11• 9 years ago

Here is a pretty good article where many of the players are interviewed in depth.

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/elon-musk-billion-dol...

“If you want a picture of A.I. gone wrong, don’t imagine marching humanoid robots with glowing red eyes. Imagine tiny invisible synthetic bacteria made of diamond, with tiny onboard computers, hiding inside your bloodstream and everyone else’s. And then, simultaneously, they release one microgram of botulinum toxin. Everyone just falls over dead.

pesenti4• 9 years ago

That example has absolutely nothing to do with AI...

Asdfbla• 9 years ago

Musk maybe oversells the state of AI a bit when he says it's potentially an existential threat to mankind - but on the other hand, the advances of the recent years alone are enough to disrupt the daily lives of almost everyone. In that sense, some alarmism might be appropriate, especially considering control of the best machine learning systems will likely be concentrated in the hands of few powerful players.

JCzynski2• 9 years ago

FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!

drivelous• 9 years ago

I understand that Musk's ideas of doom and gloom concerning AI are far into the future (loceng drops the Andrew Ng quote that draws parallels to people worrying about the overpopulation of Mars) but even if that is the case isn't it still worth noting now?

My simple understanding of this all is that once we create AI that surpasses the intelligence of the human race, we as inferior beings will no longer be able to predict what they will do. If that's the case and the desire of AI (can AI have desire...?) runs contrary to human will, then there's no way to cut it that bodes well for the continued existence of the human race. And once that line is crossed, it's never going back.

Is that not a reasonable thing to be worried about even if it's 200 years away? Even On the Origin of Species was published only ~160 years ago.

phasnox• 9 years ago

I love Musk. He is brilliant and I think he has truly shaped the future.

But he is wrong.

Artificial Conscience(what he is referring to) is NEVER going to be achieved. I repeat NEVER. Its impossible.

Conscience is in the form and not in the matter. In one word, there is never going to be an AI with free will.

However, eventually we may build a super intelligent system with great power over our lives, that goes wrong, has bugs, or misbehaves. But, since the fact that such as system will never be conscious, we are always going to have power over it.

So yeah, Musk is being an alarmist, and I believe he is the one with a limited understanding of AI.

sebular2• 9 years ago

Let's put aside your absolute and close-minded certainty about the future for a minute. Unless you can provide some quotes, you're putting a lot of words in Elon Musk's mouth. He's made some goofy pop culture references during interviews, and it seems to be a calculated decision on his part to flirt with sensationalism in order to publicize the issue, but he's never seriously argued that the movie Terminator is a documentary about the future.

Call it conscience, intelligence, whatever you want. The danger isn't that some ominously calculating and murderous robotic mind is going to spring into being and hide from humans while plotting our downfall. In order to understand the danger, all you have to do is look at what the US military is already doing with autonomous weapons. Killer robots aren't hypothetical, they're historical.

In fact, you're the prime example of the danger of AI. You probably have a stronger than average understanding of computers, and maybe you know a lot about actual AI implementations, which is what makes you so self-assured that there's nothing magical about them. So you trust them, and you're a big fan of throwing an ever-increasing amount of trust into AI.

You even admit that there will be bugs (there always are) and misbehavior (now who's humanizing programs?), but you fail to see why that's a problem when the stakes are raised from "crap, an app leaked private data online" to "crap, the autonomous weaponized drone mistook backyard fireworks for an attack and bombed a family."

The way I see it, Musk is far from alarmist, and all the kidding about "summoning demons" is almost a way of coping with what's starting to seem like a terrifying inevitability. We've been building "dumb programs" for decades, and there's still a constant stream of breaking news about software that didn't do what it was supposed to. And you want to believe that there's no danger in building software that has increasingly fuzzy logic and connecting it to real-world I/O?

I'm guessing that Elon Musk saw this problem when he first started toying with the idea of self-driving cars. You say he has a limited understanding of AI, but Tesla autopilot says otherwise. And he probably became keenly aware of the stakes when he realized that people would willingly entrust their lives to the decisions made by his company's software, and that without regulation, it's entirely up to Tesla's QA process to make sure their cars don't accidentally kill people.

MarkMMullin• 9 years ago

Facebook is capable of monetizing current ML capabilities to do things like constantly tune individual news feeds so that its profit is maximized. Certainly counterproductive to some degree for modern society, but it is profitable. Straightforward goal. straightforward outcome.

Elon's claimed that Tesla will have level 5 autonomous vehicles in 2 years. Yeah, in your dreams Elon, that's a massive cognitive stack you can't fit in the vehicle, one we've never built out to such a degree, and your car's autonomy level is going to be a function of its bandwidth to the cloud anyway. The mean part of me wonders if Elon plans on covering this wild assertion with 'Well, we can't now. Regulations and stuff' - if he's just worried about putting a weapon on a solar powered drone that patrols some area and shoots baddies, yeah me too. But that's just human stupidity, it ain't AI, it ain't intelligent, it's just a dumb program with effectors. All ML really is these days is real big boundary relaxation systems, calculating the massive number of coefficients we need to make the equations work out the way we want. But come on, it's stupider than a rock. It's an equation solver and its brittle as hell. As a tool I love what we can now accomplish, but there's a long road from here to Hal. It's not bloody magic, it's just math.

Elon Musk says Mark Zuckerberg's understanding of AI is 'limited'

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