Unfortunately the man has deluded himself into thinking he’s the savior of humanity.
He thinks AI is bad for humanity, but not if he controls it.
This is in the same vein that he thinks censorship is the worst thing ever unless he is the one doing the censoring.
It’s just sad that his ultimate goal for humanity is letting Grimes’ children live on a Mars space station while Earth is destroyed.
He constantly uses his grand plan as justification for why he should get to hoard obscene amounts of cash .. instead of paying taxes and contributing to the health of the society we currently live in.
Just as it isn’t inconsistent that Ron Paul put in “earmarks” for his constituents, while simultaneously voting against them all — it isn’t inconsistent for Elon to say “slow down” while accelerating AI R&D.
Any company/nation hobbling their AI programs will be lethally impaired in defence & commerce.
I'm interested to see what he does. From his public comments, he doesn't understand AI at all, but that's often helpful as a businessman, because you are not constrained by what the technology actually does.
Steve Job didn't "understand design", but he understood what a good design can do for his product, and knew what he liked.
So he put the design team as the highest in Apple, and had every other team answer to the constraints of the design. It worked.
Musk may not "understand AI", but he understands what AI can be made to do, and he knows what he likes.
Which frankly, for the boss, is more important than understanding the code. And, he knows how to find and hire the right talent, how to excite them, and how to keep them. And how to ship.
IMO it is unfair to say "his company did it" especially when his rivals in each of those industries failed where he succeeded (including OpenAI, which he gets at least some credit for). He understands enough of what he needs to about both AI and business to make it work.
So he simultaneously has limited competency in areas (AI, passenger vehicles, spacecraft, tunnel boring, computer/nerve integration, …) yet he is capable of isolating and hiring and keeping world-leading experts in (checks notes) EVERY one of these areas?
As painful as it may be to realize, Tony Stark is a comic book/movie character and not a real person.
Musk is a bullshitter who has bootstrapped his way to success, admittedly successfully. However, when you look at his well covered statements (too darned many of them :) post-Twitter, it’s obvious that he, for example, knows nothing about software, datacenter admin, nor the world of advertising. I’m willing to extrapolate to believe that he knows little more than the veneer of science and technology that’s necessary to persuade others to finance him.
It isn't pride. It's morbid fascination. Twitter Elon reveals the real competency of that guy. He's Howard Hughes and Starship is a steel Spruce Goose. Starlink has about two orders of magnitude fewer subs than it needs to be sustainable. Etc. So much drama is going to unfold in public. Can't look away.
His public comments on AI have left me with the same impression. He probably doesn't understand the technical details of neural nets or statistics. His capabilities are elsewhere (rockets, business, etc).
