[D] Elon Musk has a complex relationship with the A.I. community

Update: Yann LeCun stepped in, and I think they made peace, after agreeing on the awesomeness of PyTorch 😂

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An article about Elon Musk and the machine learning research community leading to some interesting discussions between the head of Facebook AI research (apparently it is not Yann Lecun anymore, but some other dude), and Elon himself.

Quotes from the article:

Multiple AI researchers from different companies told CNBC that they see Musk’s AI comments as inappropriate and urged the public not to take his views on AI too seriously. The smartest computers can still only excel at a “narrow” selection of tasks and there’s a long way to go before human-level AI is achieved.

“A large proportion of the community think he’s a negative distraction,” said an AI executive with close ties to the community who wished to remain anonymous because their company may work for one of Musk’s businesses.

“He is sensationalist, he veers wildly between openly worrying about the downside risk of the technology and then hyping the AGI (artificial general intelligence) agenda. Whilst his very real accomplishments are acknowledged, his loose remarks lead to the general public having an unrealistic understanding of the state of AI maturity.”

An AI scientist who specializes in speech recognition and wished to remain anonymous to avoid public backlash said Musk is “not always looked upon favorably” by the AI research community.

“I instinctively fall on dislike, because he makes up such nonsense,” said another AI researcher at a U.K university who asked to be kept anonymous. “But then he delivers such extraordinary things. It always leaves me wondering, does he know what he’s doing? Is all the visionary stuff just a trick to get an innovative thing to market?”

CNBC reached out to Musk and his representatives for this article but is yet to receive a response. (Well, they got one now! 👇)

“I believe a lot of people in the AI community would be ok saying it publicly. Elon Musk has no idea what he is talking about when he talks about AI. There is no such thing as AGI and we are nowhere near matching human intelligence. #noAGI” (Jérôme Pesenti, VP of AI at Facebook)

“Facebook sucks” (Elon Musk)

Article: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/13/elon-musk-has-a-complex-relationship-with-the-ai-community.html