Elon's training is in physics and economics. He understands linear algebra and programming perfectly well. He also understands that policy (economic or otherwise) won't be developed unless people put it on the government's plate. And he understands that government tends to be reactive - they are invariably way behind the curve in governing tech. So he's using his bully pulpit to get the troglodytes (a concept that maps nicely to many Republicans) and luddites (a concept that maps nicely to a lot of Democrats) in Congress to start working on the problem (for context, Ted Cruz of all people runs the Senate science and technology committee).

I'm worried about machine learning taking over corporate management. Optimizing for shareholder value is a goal a machine learning system can work on.

Yup. Machine learning driving the optimization loop, with humans working as smart sensors and actuators, responding to high-level commands. That's a pretty powerful AI right there.

Did he really say that specifically about the "current trend of deep learning using neural networks"? Surely he would have been speaking more generally about AI?

See the references I give below; if he is talking about general trends in AI and is giving an estimate of 7 or 8 years for emergence of AGI, where is he basing it on? Is he basing the estimate on unseen breakthroughs (i.e. unknown unknowns) to occur within that 7 or 8 years frame, or is he talking about current DL techniques pushed to their limits? For the former, nobody can make a reasonable estimate (nature of unknown unknowns) and for the latter, most experts in the field seem to agree that that current techniques do not lead to AGI. (Like have you seen how hard it is do things like visual question answering (VQA) or text summarization tasks? These are much much simpler than AGI but like AGI do not lend themselves easily to supervised learning.)

He talks about AI in those links, and does not mention specific approaches like DL etc. He's been around long enough to see the different approaches to AI, so as to not confuse it with a specific technology. I doubt it would even occur to him think AI=DL.

Many people have made estimates for human level AI, without relying on specific technologies. e.g. Vernor Vinge, Ray Kurzweil, Bill Joy. For example, the lower part of Vinge's range included the 2020's - for his prediction made a few decades ago.

Is Musk accurate? How can any of these be very accuracte, with so much unknown, as you note. Is he optimistic (er, predicting too early)? I guess so.

I'll note that even for Musk's own companies, upon which he is the expert, and upon which he wields more influence than anyone, he is notably optimisitic in his estimates...

Anyway, the answer to my question is: no, he didn't speak of those specific technologies, just AI.

BTW some more in my other comment in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16350798

He doesn’t say soon.

See e.g. Smerity reporting on Elon's talk in NIPS 2017: https://twitter.com/Smerity/status/938994837323259904 as well as https://goo.gl/trX8SJ & https://goo.gl/aTMqv6

What's your evidence for saying he does not say so? A bit mean of you to downvote without asking for evidence.

You don't know who downvoted you and who did not.

I assumed akvadrako downvoted that since the vote and the comment appeared very close to each other and both right after my comment. But of course, I surely could be mistaken.

And anyways, downvoting is not a big deal and they have the absolute right to do so. It's just that stating why you disagreed or downvoted would be helpful.

I don't know if it's still true, but it used to be the case that if your reply to a comment your downvote to that comment does not count. It was a pretty clever mechanism in that you could be certain any downvotes didn't come from people replying to you.

I don’t see why HN doesn’t require every down vote to have a comment. Judging from the sheets of gray on most threads, most down voted comments aren’t actually in violation of site policy, off topic, trolling, etc. It’s just a few little people disagreed. Which is fine! But it’s not constructive or interesting to just slap the commenter with your dick.

Because then every other comment would have a stream of replies justifying the downvotes - replies which, presumably, would be regular comments, and thus susceptible to further downvotes (with comments)!

In other words, this would be a huge noise generator.

With the exception that it could not have been the person you replied to. (Or yourself, for completeness)

I don't see any evidence in your links; why don't you provide a quote?

Asking me for evidence someone didn't say something is a bit absurd.