On the morning of July 6, 2023 Beijing time, the WAIC 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference was officially opened, and Tesla founder Elon Musk once again made an appearance, but this time in the form of remote video. Thinking back to 2019, at the same venue, Musk had a peak conversation with Alibaba founder Jack Ma.4 years later, a lot of things have changed, and one of the most important ones is that general intelligence seems to be one step closer to human beings because of the new wave of AI brought up by the big language model.
In his speech on the day, as one of the representatives of the “AI Destructionists”, Musk emphasized that General Artificial Intelligence AGI, or Deep Intelligence, may bring a positive future, but there is also a probability of a negative future, and people should make sure that the latter does not happen.
In the exhibition area of WAIC 2023, Tesla’s robot Optimus attracted a lot of attention. Musk believes that humanoid robots are still in the early stages of development, but in the future, the number of robots, or will exceed the number of humans. At the same time, as a kind of limited artificial intelligence, Tesla has been developing fully autonomous driving FSD may be realized by the end of the year. As for the host, Musk believes that “if China is determined to do something, they will be able to do it very well, and AI is no exception”. He believes “China will have great capabilities in AI”. The following is a transcript of Elon Musk’s speech at WAIC 2023:
Greetings from Shanghai! Artificial intelligence will play a very profound role in the evolution of human civilization. Currently. The number of computers and arithmetic power is exploding, and the ratio of digital computers to ‘biocomputers’ on Earth has been increasing. This means that over time, human intelligence will become a smaller and smaller percentage of the total thinking capacity on Earth relative to machines. This will be a profound change, and I believe that humanity is in the midst of one of the most profound periods of change.
In the future, there will be tons of robots on the planet. A question to ponder is what will be the ratio of robots to humans over time? At some point in the future, the ratio of the two could be more than 1:1, which means that there will be more robots than humans, if not a lot more. This trend is already evident. The bright side is that humans will live in an age of abundance, where any goods and services people want can be easily had. In a future with lots of robots, global productivity will increase to incredible levels. Of course, we need to be very careful to make sure that robots are beneficial to humans.
I believe that Tesla will play an important role in this process. The Tesla humanoid robot is being developed with the goal of helping people with menial tasks, boring, repetitive or dangerous tasks that humans don’t want to do. As such, it does not require a high level of intelligence to perform these tasks. One important application of artificial intelligence is self-driving cars. When it comes to self-driving, Tesla is more than happy to license its technology to other automakers. Autopilot technology will free people from boring driving and give them more freedom and time.
At the same time, Autopilot will greatly increase vehicle utilization. An average passenger car is used 10 to 12 hours a week, mostly in parking lots, while a fully self-driving car can be used 50 to 60 hours a week. A self-driving vehicle would be utilized five times as much as a non-driving vehicle. Tesla wants to share this type of technology for more businesses to use.
Currently, Tesla’s technology is very close to the goal of fully autonomous driving. Tesla vehicles tested on U.S. roads already require very little human intervention. So when we drive a Tesla with the latest version of the fully autonomous driving capability beta from one destination to another, we hardly need human intervention. Tesla could have full Autopilot capability at the L4 or L5 level as soon as later this year.
General Artificial Intelligence (AGI, Artificial General Intelligence) is very different compared to Artificial Intelligence like Autopilot and Tesla humanoid robots. AGI is a type of computer intelligence that can be smarter than all humans. This is not an area that Tesla currently specializes in; there are other companies working on it. But I think it’s an area we should be looking at. Especially in the face of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or millions of state-of-the-art computers with deep artificial intelligence, we need to have regulatory measures to ensure that all these computers can work together and in an orderly manner to achieve a single integrated ‘super intelligence’ (ASI, Artificial Super Intelligence).
In the future, superintelligence will be more capable than humans, and that carries risks. We should do everything possible to make sure that what we are worried about will not happen and to welcome the positive future. There are a lot of very smart and talented people in China, and I have always admired their talent and drive. I think China is going to be very good at anything it wants to do, and that’s reflected in many areas, whether it’s the economy or artificial intelligence. I believe that China will have very strong AI capabilities in the future. Finally, I would like to thank the conference for inviting me to share, and I very much look forward to meeting you all!