'You Should Try Tesla Self-Driving,' Says Elon Musk To Meta Chief AI Scientist

Tesla Inc TSLA CEO Elon Musk on Friday recommended Tesla’s self-driving to Meta Platforms Inc META Chief Artificial Intelligence scientist looking for the missing element in machine learning.

What Happened: “You should try Tesla self-driving,” Musk said in response to Yann LeCun‘s Twitter post on teaching machines how the world works.

“Obviously, we are still missing something big for machines to reach human-level intelligence,” LeCun wrote.

The scientist and researcher, also a professor at New York University, posed two questions to “those who think AGI is upon us”- on the unavailability of level-5 autonomous driving and the lack of domestic robots that can clear a dinner table. The two tasks could be effectively completed by a 17-year-old with 20 hours of driving training and a 10-year-old respectively, LeCun said.

In response to Musk’s recommendation, LeCun said he would try self-driving as soon as he received it on his 2023 Model S Plaid, confirming himself to be a Tesla user. “Also, I’ve been using autopilot since 2015, when I got my first Model S,” he wrote.

Musk replied again to LeCun saying, “Just tap the button for FSD Beta.”

Why It Matters: Last month, days after over 1000 parties including Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak signed an open letter calling for a pause on training AI systems exceeding OpenAI GPT-4, LeCun had responded to the “hyperventilation about AI” as “preposterously stupid” and “based on a complete misunderstanding.”

LeCun and Musk have refuted each other over AI previously too. "Why be scared of AI when we don't even have a blueprint (let alone a demo) of a system capable of human-level intelligence?" LeCun wrote to Musk in April.

Meanwhile, German newspaper Handelsblatt reported last week that customers filed more than 2,400 complaints regarding self-acceleration issues and 1,500 complaints about braking problems between 2015 and March 2022. While most of these incidents involving FSD features had minor consequences, some resulted in fatal outcomes, the report, based on data leaked from Tesla’s IT system, said.

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