Tesla CEO Elon Musk Criticized By Google Executive Over AI Fears

At this point, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has become the poster boy of cautious artificial intelligence development within the tech community. This has made him a target of those invested in the rapid development of AI such as Google’s head of AI research, John Giannandrea. Recently, the Google executive basically called Musk “irresponsible” for promoting a more careful approach in AI.

As Bloomberg notes, Musk is basically the main Cassandra in the tech industry when it comes to machine intelligence. That is to say, he is telling people of the dangers of AI, and yet his words are doomed to fall on deaf ears. This is largely because of people like Giannandrea who called Musk out during a recent TechCrunch Disrupt speech.

“There’s a huge amount of unwarranted hype around AI right now," Giannandrea said during the conference. "This leap into, ‘Somebody is going to produce a superhuman intelligence and then there’s going to be all these ethical issues’ is unwarranted and borderline irresponsible."

He also added that he is “definitely not worried about the AI apocalypse" and that he is simply objecting to “the hype and the sound bites that some people have been making.” That “some people” being Musk and those like him.

When it comes to the concerns that people have with regards to Google hoarding mountains upon mountains of data, which makes it one of the select tech firms capable of building machine learning technology thus leading to a dystopian future, Giannandrea was also quick to pacify these fears. He did this by basically assuring the public that Google is actually trying to level the playing field, TechCrunch reports.

“You don’t need quite as much data as you think you do. There are large data sets that are open,” Giannandrea said. “We publish data sets around videos, imagery. Other companies do the same thing.”