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Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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