Musk discusses his new company xAI, ‘superintelligence,’ and China

In an hour-long dialogue on Twitter Spaces on Wednesday evening, Twitter proprietor and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk mirrored on the motivation behind his latest synthetic intelligence enterprise, China’s relationship with the U.S. and the probability of AI making a dismal future for humanity.

Musk participated within the dialogue with two key members of Congress who sit on the House Armed Services Committee and the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party: Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Mike Gallagher, R-Wisc. The occasion was billed as a dialog about the way forward for AI and got here on a day that Musk launched his personal new AI firm, xAI.

Toward the start of the dialog, Musk defined his objective of making xAI, describing it as a kind of if you cannot beat ’em, be part of ’em scenario.

“If I could press pause on AI or really advanced AI, digital superintelligence, I would,” mentioned Musk, who co-founded one of many main AI corporations OpenAI, however left its board in 2018 and now not holds a stake within the agency. “It doesn’t seem like that is realistic.”

As a outcome, he determined to “grow an AI in a good way.” To Musk, this implies coaching it in such a means as to be “maximally curious, maximally truth-seeking.”

“I think a maximally curious AI, one that is just trying to sort of understand the universe is, I think, going to be pro-humanity,” Musk mentioned. “From the standpoint that humanity is just much more interesting than not humanity.”

Musk mentioned he prefers this methodology to “trying to explicitly program morality into AI.” He mentioned that method requires judgment calls on whose morality is being programmed into the system and in addition creates an “inversion problem” the place the morality might be flipped on its head.

As far as regulating the expertise goes, Musk instructed that policymakers spend a couple of years studying in regards to the expertise earlier than transferring to “oversight, with consultation with industry.” He additionally instructed that some form of business group or self-regulatory physique akin to the Motion Picture Association could be helpful.

The three spent a major a part of the dialogue centered on the specter of China getting forward of the U.S. on AI and the potential for some sort of navy confrontation over the sovereignty of Taiwan, a self-ruled area that the Chinese authorities considers a part of its territory.

Musk mentioned that in his conversations with senior management in China on a current journey there, he spent a great period of time discussing AI security. He mentioned the concept that a “digital superintelligence” might supplant the Chinese Communist Party itself appeared to resonate.

“No government wants to find itself unseated by a digital superintelligence,” he mentioned. “So I think they actually are taking action on the regulatory front and are concerned about this as a risk.”

Musk even mentioned he believes the Chinese authorities could be open to collaborating on a world framework round AI regulation.

Gallagher, who chairs the choose committee on China, pushed again on the concept that the CCP could possibly be a constructive member of such a world framework. He warned that even when they took Musk’s warnings to coronary heart, he fears it would not be sufficient to sluggish their AI efforts and that China’s chief Xi Jinping would use it to cement “totalitarian control.”

After briefly altering the subject, Musk returned to Gallagher’s ideas and referred to as himself “pro-China.” Musk acknowledged he has “some vested interest in China” however in the end believes “China is underrated” and that “the people of China are really awesome.” Gallagher later mentioned he “fully supports the Chinese people,” however it’s the ruling get together he takes difficulty with.

“That’s not to say that there aren’t some very significant disagreements and that there’s obviously going to be a significant challenge on the Taiwan question,” Musk mentioned, referring to China’s acknowledged need to carry Taiwan again below its management. “I think ultimately, once the very difficult question of Taiwan is resolved, I am certainly hopeful that there will be positive relations between China and the United States and the rest of the world.”

While tensions between the U.S. and China stay excessive, the 2 powers have made some diplomatic headway by resuming in-person communications, with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen lately making a visit there and U.S. local weather envoy John Kerry set to take action later this month.

Still, Musk predicted that resolving the Taiwan query shall be troublesome.

“I do have this theory about prediction, which is that the most entertaining outcome — as seen by a third party, not the participants — is the most likely,” Musk mentioned. “Which does suggest it’s probably going to get hot in the Pacific. Hopefully not too hot. But it’s going to get hot.”

Musk predicted the world will see digital superintelligence, or a type of synthetic intelligence that’s “smarter than any human at anything” inside 5 – 6 years.

“That’s not necessarily smarter than the sum of all humans,” Musk mentioned. “That’s a higher bar to be smarter than several humans. And especially given that it’s the sum of all humans that are machine-augmented, in that we will have computers and phones and software applications. We already are de facto cyborgs, it’s just that the computers are not yet integrated with us.”

While he has centered on the existential dangers of AI, beforehand signing a letter for a pause on superior AI improvement and calling it one of many “biggest risks” to civilization, Musk mentioned he is in the end an optimist in regards to the expertise.

“If I were to assign probabilities, I think it is more likely to be a positive scenario than a bad scenario,” he mentioned. “It’s just that the bad scenario is not 0% and we want to do everything we can to minimize the probability of a bad outcome with AI.”

Musk at one level described the long run as if it had been a TV collection.

“If this was a Netflix series or something, I’d say the season finale would be a showdown between the West and China,” he mentioned, “and that the series finale will be AGI,” or synthetic normal intelligence.

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