Its impossible to tell if Elon Musk is serious about anything anymore.
His image exists in a dichotomy between cartoonesque and genius.
Hes simultaneously the richest man in the world and the patron saint of meme war veterans and shitcoin shillers.
And hes also a brilliant engineer and one of the most talented technologists in generations.
All of this combines to make him, potentially, the worlds greatest social media troll.
There almost never is, especially when there should be.
Essentially, an AGI would be capable of anything a human is, given the same access.
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Heres an easy way to tell:its all parlor tricks.
GPT-3 is imitating human-like behavior, but its not acting like a human.
In essence, GPT-3 is no different than a parrot.
If you want it to say Polly wants a hand grenade youll still have to give it a cracker.
Except parrots are individually smarter than GPT3, which is in turn much faster.
Musk claims that Teslas Dojocouldbethe worlds most powerful supercomputer.
Its a bespoke system dedicated solely to training Teslas AI systems.
And if you believe thats whats happening at Tesla, youre out of touch with reality.
Thats not how machine learning works.
The sheer number of companies working in the robotics, autonomy, and machine learning space is staggering.
And Tesla is far from being a leader in the AI space.
And thats what makes Musks claims that Tesla could contribute to AGI all the more ludicrous.
AGI literally stands for artificial general intelligence.
In the computer science world general means the opposite of narrow.
A general intelligence would be capable of performing any feat a human can, given the same access.
Were essentially talking about the difference between a robotic arm that tightens screws and C3PO from Star Wars.
Credit where its due
Thats not to say what Musks companies do with AI isnt incredible.
How can you not be stunned by Teslas ability to brute force level 2 autonomy using a vision-only approach?
Alexa trains against the outside world as well.
Does Musk think its going to magically morph into an AGI on accident too?
And, laugh-out-loud, Elon Musk has already built an AI company solely dedicated to AGI.
Its OpenAI, the one that makes GPT-3!
He co-founded it for crying out loud.
Did he forget about that?
Musks almost certainly trolling his fans.
Will do our best.
Decentralized control of the robots will be critical.
A tale of two Elons
Maybe Im wrong.
Maybe Elons genius will strike again and hell shock us all.
Just remember, his predictions are traditionally more outlandish than Ray Kurzweils andMiss Cleoscombined.
Heres one from 2017:
This is nothing.
In a few years, that bot will move so fast youll need a strobe light to see it.
