Multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk picked a fight with Meta’s AI chief and “godfather” of AI Yann LeCun — and lost it in a big way.
Over the weekend, the two butted heads after Musk’s xAI startup raised $6 billion in a fresh round of funding.
“Join xAI if you believe in our mission of understanding the universe, which requires maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth, without regard to popularity or political correctness,” Musk tweeted on Monday.
LeCun, who already has a history of sparring with the mercurial CEO, shot back — and went for the throat.
“Join xAI if you can stand a boss who claims that what you are working on will be solved next year (no pressure),” he tweeted. “[Musk] claims that what you are working on will kill everyone and must be stopped or paused (yay, vacation for 6 months!), claims to want a ‘maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth’ but spews crazy-ass conspiracy theories on his own social platform.”
Naturally, Musk didn’t take kindly to LeCun’s assertions and reacted with a characteristically low-brow and below-the-belt jab, accusing the scientist of “going soft” after having only published “over 80 technical papers since January 2022.”
“Try harder!” Musk offered.
LeCun, however, had a far more tactful response.
“I like his cars, his rockets, his solar panels, and his satellite network,” he said, referring to Musk’s other ventures like SpaceX and Tesla. “I very much dislike his vengeful politics, his conspiracy theories, and his hype.”
Despite the Tesla CEO’s protests, LeCun makes plenty of valid points. Just last week, Musk made yet another brash and likely unsubstantiated claim that artificial general intelligence (AGI) was less than a year off (the consensus among actual experts appears to be a lot further off than that).
Musk has also repeatedly warned of the dangers of having an AI go rogue, his own billion-dollar AI venture notwithstanding, of course.
Finally, Musk’s pursuit of what he claims to be the “truth,” the solution to “woke” and “mind virus”-induced thinking, is arguably nothing less than a “crazy-ass conspiracy” theory, as LeCun puts it.
Over the last year, Musk has — inasmuch as a billionaire with as wide a sphere of power and influence as he has can, and then some — gone right off the deep end, making plenty of troubling statements, including racist outbursts and unhinged rants on his recently purchased social media platform.
In short, it shouldn’t come as a surprise at this point that users on X-formerly-Twitter, who have stuck with him and remain on the site, are siding with Musk.
But let the point stand: An actual refutation of LeCun’s jabs remains to be seen from Musk. The critiques were calculated, and have the distinct whiff of truth, especially given Musk’s long, detailed, public history of mercurial leadership (to say nothing of his petulant red herring response to LeCun’s points). The entire exchange should serve as a fresh reminder of Musk’s unshaken commitment to making unsubstantiated and largely self-serving claims, especially when it comes to his AI venture.
If your money’s on Musk, or even more, invested with him, here’s hoping his latest bluster has a better outcome than the last big campaign.
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