At his Substack, AI analyst Gary Marcus reminds us that Elon Musk — who certainly can boast of solid achievements — has a tendency to blow smoke when it comes to AI. He cites an example, with down-to-reality comments:

● At the annual Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh. Saudi Arabia, Elon Musk said, “I think by 2040 probably there are more humanoid robots than there are people”. Fat chance. As I told an outlet called Decrypt that asked me for comment, “Elon has a track record of overoptimistic predictions about AI, and this one is no different….There are only about 1.5 billion cars on the road; many people can’t afford one or don’t see the need. The same will be true for humanoid robots, and we aren’t going to see six humanoid robots for every car anytime soon. … Roomba, the best-selling consumer robot of all time, sells for a few hundred dollars and has sold around 50 million units. It’s just fantasy to imagine selling 200 times as many humanoid robots in the nearish term when nobody knows how to build a single safe, reliable, generally useful humanoid right now, at any price.”

● At the same venue, Elon Musk said confidently (after acknowledging that the future that is not fully knowable), “I feel comfortable saying that that AI is getting 10 times better each year” – never specifying any measure that supports this claim (is OpenAI’s o1 100 times better than GPT4? Certainly not by their own data), nor pointing to any source. He then went on to extrapolate that it would be 10,000 times better in 4 years, never considering potential bottlenecks around data, or compute, nor inherent problems with LLMs. From all this he went “I think it will be able to do anything that any human can do, possibly within the next year or two.” My offer to bet him a million dollars on this nonsense stands. “An epidemic of weirdly precise

AI butt facts,” October 30, 2024

Butt facts? These are facts pulled from a lower orifice in the human body cavity, apparently, not from observation of real life.

More seriously, Marcus notes that the investors at the annual Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh. Saudi Arabia, may not be unduly upset about the hokum because they are likely to be investing a lot of other people’s money and they get paid a percentage of what they invest.

One might add that media like it too because futurist hype attracts eyeballs. Many fewer people will take the time to think it all out as Marcus is doing.

You may also wish to read: The AI Hype machine just rolls on, living on exhaust. Even chatbot enthusiasts, are starting to admit that scaling up LLMs will not create genuine artificial intelligence. (Gary Smith)