
Zuckerberg and Musk Are Fighting About Their Personal Brands, Not AI - mjn
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/07/musk-vs-zuck/535077/?single_page=true
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fosco
This article appears to have been removed from the frontpage despite the
points to support it.

just making an observation, I had to go back into my browser history to find
this when it was recently in the top list and visible.

I think making API calls available for reasons why an algorithm has done this
would be helpful in understanding why and how decisions are made.

in relation to this article, I am observing an algorithm making a decision for
me that I think I disagree with and I am not delighted about it.

[edit] : to extrapolate on this further, whether either of them is 'right' or
'wrong' I think this is an important conversation to have and design effective
means of review now, before we have built complex systems using this
foundation and lose understanding of why a machine may make a decision like
liquidating all hedges in a hedgefund (read "The Fear Index") or causing a car
to turn into oncoming traffic to avoid a deer, being able to have the
information readily available for review and improvement is necessary to
discuss now... not later.

a horrible analogy I am coming up with now is that the cause of climate change
does not matter right now, it is having an immediate impact on people around
the globe and we need to take action immediately. (it has impacted my ability
to obtain home insurance, I have been denied by every single one except a
small one that was recently purchased by geico -- the reason as quoted has
been "home is within three miles of the coast line" \-- I am on the east
coast)

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mjn
I noticed that as well. I think it may have been manual in this case, going by
what I've observed in the past. YC has some idea of what it doesn't want on
the front page of its forum, and has paid staff who remove it.

There are algorithms promoting and demoting content too, but afaik they don't
have this effect. They either flag posts e.g. if detected as spam (which isn't
the case here), or they penalize them, which might push them down to the
second or third page, but not remove them from being ranked entirely. A page
remaining unflagged but removed from ranking is more unusual, and I think in
the past has been manual intervention.

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rtx
People need adversity to have purpose. I think AI is Musk's way of coping.

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pm90
He has enough adversity managing his risky business ventures. I wouldn't say
that his intentions are purely philanthropic, but he has definitely shown that
he can grok the fundamentals of a completely different scientific field a lot
better than most people can. Zuckerberg _was_ pretty smart himself in his
younger days (lol...relatively young), but I'm not sure how much time he
spends in the nitty gritty technical stuff v/s big picture business stuff.

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mathattack
In Finance, they call this "Talking up your book." When people make
pronouncements, look how it lines up with their economic interests.

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orthoganol
I've always just assumed Musk knew something we didn't know. About a stealth
project or startup that already developed some form of what could be described
as 'general intelligence'.

If not, if he just knows what AI professionals in the field today know, and
such stealth project doesn't exist, then I really do think he's worrying about
"overpopulation on Mars" as Ng put it. Because there are zero indications in
publicly available AI research that we are even close to developing AI that
can think for itself, we can't even describe how that would work in theory
with any certainty (beyond guessing), let alone implement it.

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HellDunkel
Weak AI will accelerate inequality in the world. To what degree and how
quickly remains to be seen. I think we should be really careful and think of
ways to slow down this force. Shame on me for bringing up such matter on a
venture capital website...

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mtgx
How so? Musk is someone who's at the forefront of using "AI" for potentially
death-bringing self-driving cars. It would be to his disadvantage to call AI
dangerous while trying to use it in his cars, just as it would be for
Zuckerberg to say that, while using its on his site (which is why he doesn't).

So from that results that Musk isn't in fact doing this for "brand purposes"
but because he actually believes AI could be dangerous unless safeguards are
put in place, similarly to how someone could say CRISPR is dangerous - unless
safeguards are [put in place.

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rakibtg
At-least, someone got it

