Inflection AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman Criticizes Elon Musk's AI Views

According to Cointelegraph, Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Inflection AI and co-founder of Google’s DeepMind, criticized Elon Musk's views on artificial intelligence (AI) during a post-event interview with the BBC after the recent United Kingdom AI summit concluded on Nov. 2. During an interview with U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the close of the two-day event, Musk referred to AI as 'a magic genie' and warned that 'usually those stories don’t end well.' He also expressed concerns about AI taking over virtually every job and the need for a 'physical off switch' for AI systems.Sunak agreed with Musk's views, which seemed to be influenced by Hollywood movies like The Terminator. However, most AI systems created in the past decade would be resistant to attempts at 'turning it off' via a single physical switch due to the nature of distributed and cloud computing and server technologies. Suleyman dismissed Musk's commentary as pedestrian during an interview with the BBC’s Question Time, stating that Musk is 'not an AI scientist' and that his expertise lies more in space and cars.Suleyman is not the first AI expert to question Musk's grasp on AI at the scientific level. In 2022, NYU computer science professor Gary Marcus and distinguished fellow Vivek Wadha challenged Musk's assertion that artificial general intelligence (AGI) would be realized by 2029. They offered Musk a $500,000 wager, which he has yet to acknowledge or respond to. AGI is a nebulous concept with no agreed-upon benchmarks or measurement standards for achieving, and many experts in the field assert that current systems are not as intelligent or capable as humans or other animals due to their reliance on training, programming, procedure, and guardrails.