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🤖Elon Musk's Fight for AI

At a conference in 2012 Elon Musk met Demis Hassabis, an artificial intelligence researcher who had co-founded a company named DeepMind. DeepMind was on a mission to design computers that could learn how to think like humans. Hassabis talked to Elon about the potential threat of artificial intelligence which made Musk invest $5 million in DeepMind as a way to monitor what it was doing.

This issue became a topic Musk would raise obsessively to friends, including Larry Page, the co-founder and then-CEO of Google. Musk contended that without proper safeguards, AI had the potential to replace us and make us extinct.

However, Larry wasn’t fazed by that. He questioned why it would matter if machines surpassed humans in intelligence or even consciousness. “It would simply be the next stage of evolution.” He even accused Musk of being a “specist”.

When Google expressed interest in acquiring DeepMind in 2013, Musk approached Hassabis with a counter-offer, hoping to prevent the acquisition. “The future of AI should not be controlled by Larry,” Musk told him, but despite Elon’s efforts, the deal went through.

In response, Musk started a series of dinner discussions on ways to counteract Google and promote AI safety. He even reached out to President Obama.

Wanting to do more, Elon co-founded a nonprofit AI research lab with Sam Altman, naming it OpenAI. Their vision was to offer open-source software and provide an alternative to Google's growing dominance.

Elon even managed to poach a top AI scientist from Google, which soured the relationship between him and Larry.

In 2018, Musk proposed that OpenAI be integrated with Tesla. He wanted to develop artificial-intelligence capabilities at his own companies. However, the OpenAI team rejected that idea, and Elon got less involved. The circumstances of Musk’s departure aren’t entirely clear to this day. Altman stepped in as president of the lab, starting a for-profit arm to finance the development costs of their AI systems.

After the release of ChatGPT to the public last year, Musk challenged Altman, seeking justification for converting a nonprofit sustained by donations into a for-profit entity. Altman tried to show that it was all legitimate, but Musk was displeased.

Alarmed by the capabilities of the chatbots released, he decided he needed to do something. In July he created xAI, his own AI company. Although they might be lagging in chatbot technology, Tesla’s autopilot AI and real world data collected from its cars offer a significant advantage for creating the type of AI needed to navigate in the physical world. If xAI is successful in developing real-world AI it can make Elon a powerful player in the AI field and provide him with the power to influence the development of this crucial technology.

Musk, perhaps naively, envisions that one day, his AI would evolve into a "maximum truth-seeking AI" that values understanding the universe. Such an entity, he believes, would likely prioritize the preservation of humanity “because we are an interesting part of the universe.”

ONE IDEA

“I have developed a view in life to not second guess Elon Musk.”

Marc Andreesen co-founder of Netscape; and co-founder of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

⌚ If you have one more minute:

• How to create your own comic books with AI

• More writers sue OpenAI for copyright infringement over AI training

• Self-publishers must declare if content sold on Amazon’s site is AI-generated

• Google Launches Digital Futures Project To Study Impact Of AI

AI Art of the day 🎨

Sitcom “Friends” According to AI by Pika Labs user u/Theblasian35. Watch the video here.

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