Tesla CEO Elon Musk just put into perspective why it's such a big deal Google's AI beat a professional Go player.
Google made history Wednesday when its AI beat Lee Sedol, one of the world's greatest Go players, at his own game. Go is known as an incredibly complex game that requires sophisticated pattern recognition for a computer to crack — something many thought was a decade away from being achieved:
Congrats to DeepMind! Many experts in the field thought AI was 10 years away from achieving this. https://t.co/5gGZZkud3K
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 9, 2016Musk is a proponent of AI and his keen understanding of how fast it's progressing has led him to call for regulatory oversight to ensure "we don't do something very foolish" when it comes to AI.
He's funded a number of research projects to ensure AI doesn't turn evil, and he's not afraid of hyperbole on the subject: "With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon," Musk said at MIT's Aeronautics and Astronautics department's Centennial Symposium in 2014.
More recently, Musk founded a new AI research company called OpenAI aims to "advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole," OpenAI wrote in a post introducing the company.
That's not to say Musk's viewpoints should prevent him from acknowledging this historic moment. If anything, it shows there's some weight to his arguments: AI is developing quickly, quicker than we previously believed, and maybe it's time to talk about what direction it should go in.
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