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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

> Last I checked

Might want to check again. He didn't create Tesla, he invested in it. ~Musk didn't create SpaceX, he invested in it.~ EDIT: the SpaceX one is wrong.

And IMHO, if he was really concerned about the existential risk for AI, perhaps he shouldn't have let the Ethical AI research team go from Twitter.

To be clear, Ethical AI - being able to trace an AI's decisions and vet that those decisions aren't being biased by improper input data - is a big topic in research groups right now. It's actually quite fascinating.

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> He didn't create Tesla, he invested in it. Musk didn't create SpaceX, he invested in it.

Even if true (Wikipedia disagrees), it's a distinction without a difference. Arguably, neither SpaceX nor Tesla would be where they are now without him.

> And IMHO, if he was really concerned about the existential risk for AI, perhaps he shouldn't have let the Ethical AI research team go from Twitter.

Arguably the kind of AI Twitter needs doesn't pose an existential risk. He's trying to make Twitter profitable so that's obviously a waste of money.

AI (let's be real, we're actually talking about ML here) doesn't need to pose an existential risk to harm people in the real world. And given that tweets are displayed and promoted using ML algorithms, the ethicalness of the ML algorithms matters to Twitter's userbase.

Sure, but is that what the Ethical AI research team was actually working on? Because that's not what AI ethics typically means, which is a broader focus on AI alignment problems. Even if so, that may not be the most effective or efficient way to do it. We'll just have to see how it turns out, it's all speculation now, and impugning is character based on such moves is premature.

This is pure speculation, but I'm guessing they were working on ensuring that the ML models built by Twitter to do things like content moderation, tweet promotion, identifying trending hash tags, customer service help, and more were behaving in an ethical manner.

More concretely: Helping the teams who actually build and maintain these models ensure that the behavior isn't biased, that the model isn't being exploited by adversarial data, that the decisions made by the model are explainable, that the decisions are fair, coming up with corporate-standard-definitions for those various mutable terms (like fair), etc.

The usual things handled by a team that is tasked with AI Assurance/Ethics.

Now for my opinion: When it comes to impugning Elon Musk's character, he's done enough of that himself. He doesn't need my help. Additionally, firing an AI Ethics team in a company which requires AI(ML) to even operate speaks for itself.

> This is pure speculation, but I'm guessing they were working on ensuring that the ML models built by Twitter to do things like content moderation, tweet promotion, identifying trending hash tags, customer service help, and more were behaving in an ethical manner.

Sure, but this is just a feature of the product in question, so if you have some metrics to measure such outcomes then the product developers themselves can do this checking as part of their development process. I'm not sure why this would need to be a separate division. Presumably Tesla's autonomous driving developers are also creating metrics to ensure they don't run over dogs and children, they don't need a separate ethics division to tell them this is important.

Why assume that they are merely "tell[ing] them this is important" and not actually "doing the job" as an independent validation?

I'm making the point that there's no a priori reason why that work has to be independent. No other feature has such a special status.

Literally from the second paragraph from Wikipedia: "Tesla was incorporated in July 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning as Tesla Motors. The company's name is a tribute to inventor and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla. In February 2004, via a $6.5 million investment, Elon Musk became the largest shareholder of the company."

How does Wikipedia disagree?

Look up the SpaceX entry.

Also you weren't wrong about Tesla. Elon did basically create Tesla (as well as Straubel). Quick summary:

Originally "Tesla" the brand, was started by Martin and Marc, but all they had was a brand and a vision but no physical product nor prototype.

At around the same time, Elon wanted to build an electric car based off the tzero by AC Propulsion. He was introduced to Martin and Marc who had a similar vision, and basically Elon invested money into Tesla Motors.

It wasn't until Elon put in money, that the first prototype was built (the tesla roadster). Arguably, if Elon didn't join the team and bring on Straubel, Tesla wouldn't be what it is today. Likely wouldn't even have a launched consumer product. Even Elon was the one that managed to get the trademark "Tesla Motors" which wasn't even owned by Martin or Marc originally.

Lengthy source: https://youtu.be/AeeeEDSekG8?t=900

Granted it's out of Elon's mouth but there's tons of other sources that corroborates with that story.

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MikKu6Juhok

source: https://interestingengineering.com/transportation/the-short-...

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqPsdlQDOYQ

source: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/27/with-jb-straubel-departure-t...

Mea culpa on SpaceX - I've already updated my post.

That’s true of Tesla, but if he didn’t found SpaceX I’m curious who you would credit with that

On SpaceX this is false as it was entirely his vision alone from the get-go. There was (is) a joke in aerospace. How do you become a millionaire? Be a billionaire and start an aerospace company. Until SpaceX it was just a blackhole of money in spite of plenty of very clever individuals, including John Carmack, trying to their hand at it.

On Tesla this your statement is technically true, but misleading. 7 months after the company was founded, and made up of just a handful of people, Musk invested and became the majority shareholder and chairman of the board. He would go on to eventually remove the original founders of the company (over disagreements that were never publicly revealed) before production began on their first product. The original founders played no meaningful role in the company we now know as Tesla.

The problem is that improper input data can come from data scientists, or it can be a result of the same issues that cause society's bias. In that later case it isn't improper data so much as data properly collected from an improper society. That is super complicated to adjust for even if you decide to do so. Children of poverty that are malnourished grow up with deficits that might make them less valuable employees, extending the cycle. But the data and AI were not wrong to correlate childhood poverty with performance levels.

  Then there is the far trickier case of the AI picking up on real things that we choose not to accept or talk about. Perhaps it is safe to give an example using white men?  When they go bald very early in life(prince William for instance), it generally is due to high testosterone. Which in turn leads to all sorts of predictable behaviors and health issues, good and bad. AI would spot all that from a simple picture, judging people on their appearance can occasionally work really well. But that doesn't mean we should do it.  And again, it isn't improper data, just data we choose not to act on.

Musk was the primary initial investor in Tesla when it was company with 3 "employees", was chairman of the board and directly involved in the design of the Roadster. He didn't take on an operational role until he forced out the first CEO for allegedly lying about the financials. Musk is certainly more than just an investor in Tesla, it seems pretty nitpicky to argue he is not one of it's creators.

Musk has been the only CEO of SpaceX since he founded the company. Gwynne Shotwell often doesn't get enough credit for her huge role in making SpaceX what it is today, but to say Musk isn't one of the creators of SpaceX is absurd.

Musk has made plenty of bad choices and done unethical things that deserve to be criticized, but that is no excuse for the level of ignorant, misinformed hatred that is directed at him.

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