Elon Musk’s new AI startup is as ambitious as it is doomed
Almost nothing is known about Elon Musk’s latest endeavor, an artificial intelligence startup named xAI. But “almost nothing” is still something. And we can glean a lot from what little we do know.
As Cointelegraph recently reported, Musk announced xAI on July 12 in a statement comprising three sentences,“Today we announce the formation of xAI. The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe. You can meet the team and ask us questions during a Twitter Spaces chat on Friday, July 14th.”
Based on this information we can deduce that xAI exists, it is doomed, and more information about how it will fail will be revealed on Twitter. The reason it is doomed is simple: The laws of physics prevent it.
According to a report from Reuters, Musk’s motivation for xAI is based on a desire to develop safe artificial intelligence (AI). In a recent Twitter Spaces event, he said:
This is a laudable goal, but any attempts to understand the “true” nature of the universe are doomed because there isn’t a ground-truth knowledge center somewhere where we can verify our theories against.
It’s not that humans aren’t smart enough to understand the nature of the universe — the problem is that the universe is really, really big, and we’re stuck inside of it.
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle tells us unequivocally that certain aspects of reality cannot be confirmed simultaneously through observation or measurement. This is the reason why we can’t just measure the distance between Earth and Uranus, wait a year, measure it again, and determine the exact rate of the universe’s expansion.
The scientific method requires observation, and, as the anthropic principle teaches us, all observers are limited.
In the case of the observable universe,
Read more on cointelegraph.com
