Elon Musk: Why Tesla CEO admitted 'pretty big AI mistake caused tragedy of errors'

Elon Musk is the tech tycoon behind numerous companies, including SpaceX, Tesla, Nuueralink, The Boring Company and OpenAI. Despite his vested interest in technology, the 49-year-old is also an advocate of the regulation of Artificial Intelligence, previously branding it “a very serious danger to the public”. However, Musk hinted during a chat with technology YouTuber Marques Brownlee, that he should have taken some of his own advise while setting up Tesla.

Over the years, many AI analysts have claimed that a significant amount of manual jobs are under threat from robots in the future, but Musk detailed why that may not be the case.

Asked how much of Tesla is automated, he responded: “It varies massively depending on what part of the production process.

“Some parts of it are like 80 to 90 percent automated and then some parts of it are like only 10 to 20 percent.

“Humans are really good at adaptation and rapid evolution and doing little fiddly things.

“For general assembly one of the mistakes we made, that was a pretty big mistake, was trying to automate general assembly, which is where you put the parts together.

“Some of the things, like trying to connect a hose that’s dangling around – the robot has got to find the hose, grab it, then connect it to another hose.”

Musk went on to detail the mistakes made in the early days of Tesla.

He added: “It’s really hard [for robots], but a person can just grab it and say done.

“When you see it, you’re like wow, that’s super obvious.

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In July this year, Microsoft invested $1billion (£823,825,000) into Musk’s AI venture that plans to mimic the human brain using computers.

OpenAI said the investment would go towards its efforts of building artificial general intelligence (AGI) that can rival and surpass the cognitive capabilities of humans. 

CEO Sam Altman said: “The creation of AGI will be the most important technological development in human history, with the potential to shape the trajectory of humanity.

“Our mission is to ensure that AGI technology benefits all of humanity, and we’re working with Microsoft to build the supercomputing foundation on which we’ll build AGI.”

source: express.co.uk