It seems like Elon Musk is as passionate with trading barbs with his competitors as he is with technology. When it comes to space exploration, he and Jeff Bezos are famous for it. And when it comes to artificial intelligence, he is butting heads with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.
Recently, Musk criticized Zuckerberg's Morgan Freeman-voiced pet AI, Jarvis saying that the automating one's household functions do not qualify as artificial intelligence. His statement came via a Vanity Fair interview when he was asked about his thoughts on it.
Observers note that while there might be some truth to Musk's observation since Jarvis' technology might not be groundbreaking, it is still an unfair assessment on his part.
Experts, however, note that the reason why Musk and Zuckerberg are taking a jab against each other regarding artificial intelligence is because no one has really got what AI means.
An article in Quartz said that AI can be divided into two school of thoughts: generalists and literalists.
Musk belongs to the literalists, a group which believes artificial intelligence understands everything from code, text, voice, and a range of other ideas instead of just following one algorithm.
Cognitive scientist and AI literalist Douglas Hofstadter even goes far into saying that no artificial intelligence has been invented yet, For him, for something to qualify as artificial intelligence, it should be able to understand a concept and construct a sentence to share the information.
On the other hand, generalists like Zuckerberg view AI as an umbrella definition for any system that can understand commands and accomplish tasks, just like Jarvis. Generalists believed that any type of software that can initiate an action is already considered as AI.
Therefore, no matter how Musk and Zuckerberg view AI, both of them are correct. More importantly, they are doing something to push AI to become more sophisticated and useful for humans.
