August 30, 2019
Andrew Campbell
Jack Ma and Elon Musk debated at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference.
In China, Executive Chairman of Alibaba Group, Jack Ma, also Co-chair of the High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation, which was established by UN Secretary-General António Guterres on July 12, 2018 to strengthen digital cooperation among academia, countries, the private sector, the technical community, and other relevant stakeholders, has been leading Alibaba based on the belief that the Internet could democratize all types of businesses in China and abroad. China’s Megvii Technology Limited, a world-class AI company with core competency in deep learning, and SenseTime Group Limited, an artificial intelligence platform company with focuses on machine learning and face recognition, both are heavily supported by Alibaba, Ma is leading the way as de facto for the global information technology industry.
In the US, Co-founder and CEO of Tesla, Inc., Elon Reeve Musk, also founder and CEO of SpaceX, co-founder of Neuralink, founder of The Boring Company, co-founder and co-chairman of OpenAI, and co-founder of PayPal, is pioneering Tesla’s self-driving technology in its “Autopilot” function and invests multi-billion dollars to establish Tesla’s electric-car factory in Shanghai. It is noteworthy that Neuralink is a neurotechnology company and has been developing brain-computer interfaces since 2016, whereas OpenAI is a nonprofit research company that has aimed at friendly artificial intelligence with humanity since 2015.
Over the past two decades, China has transformed itself into an economical and technological superpower. China still has bigger ambitions that include the 2030 vision: China will become the world’s premier artificial intelligence innovation center. To foster the 2030 vision accordingly, the World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2019 (WAIC), the world's leading AI summit, was organized in Shanghai from August 29 to 31 with the theme of "Intelligent Connectivity, Infinite Possibilities".
The two of the world’s most prominent tech entrepreneurs, Ma and Musk as the headliner, attended at the opening ceremony and held face-to-face dialogues over AI development at China summit on August 29. Musk commented that AI technology was much smarter and evolving faster than humans on so many dimensions to understand and shared more on the car-manufacturing facility of the Tesla Gigafactory 3 in Shanghai with conference delegates. Musk also suggested finding a way to connect human brains to computers so as to go along for the ride with AI so that the risk in ending human civilization by future digital super-intelligence would be avoided. Apart from his view, Ma felt quite optimistic about AI and needless to be scared of. Mar encouraged human beings to understand AI better so as to improve the world better. In addition, Ma predicted AI would help create new kinds of jobs on creative tasks.
Photo:Webshot.