THE GREAT AI WAR OF 2018
ON A RECENT MONDAY MORNING, ELON MUSK BUSIED HIMSELF ON TWITTER BY PREDICTING HOW WORLD WAR III WOULD START.
Inspired by news that Vladimir Putin had told Russian students the country that leads in artificial intelligence will rule the world, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO declared the global race to dominate AI might turn into real war—and that the first strike could well be launched by an algorithm rather than a flesh-and-blood leader. Chastised by one of his followers for the gloomy prognostication, he apologized and then confessed, “I was depressing myself too. :-(”
Musk is a techno-provocateur with few equals. However, plenty of people share his take on AI. Even sunnier forecasts about the future of AI, detailing how self-driving cars might radically reduce highway carnage, are typically too long-range to offer much of a sense of comfort.
Meanwhile, as everyone muses about where AI might take us, the technology has arrived. First given its name by scientists at a seminal conference held at Dartmouth College in 1956 (they had predicted that programmers would be able to simulate the workings of the human brain in just a few years), AI now has a pervasive and obvious impact, particularly when it comes to the branch known as machine learning and, in especially advanced form, as deep learning. AI is how Google Photos knows that two snapshots taken 50 years apart are both of your great-uncle. It’s how Facebook weeds spam out of your feed. It’s even how the iPhone ekes as much life as possible out of a battery charge.
Increasingly, smartphones, smart-home gizmos, and other devices are morphing into front ends for AI-infused services, such as Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google’s Assistant. “If you unpack what’s behind Alexa, behind the Echo, it’s not just a speaker,” says Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Amazon AI. “It’s actually an intelligent, cloud-enabled digital assistant, using deep-learning-driven speech recognition and natural language understanding.”
As AI begins to touch every aspect of their businesses, the tech giants are jousting to recruit superstars in the field, pilfering brainpower from academia (New York University’s Yann LeCun is now at Facebook) and each other (Jia Li left Snapchat to co-run Google Cloud’s machine-learning group). “Because the technology is so powerful, there’s a large demand for talent that understands how to apply it,” says Scott Penberthy, director of applied AI for Google Cloud. Research firm Paysa released a study in April that showed
