Artificial Intelligence (AI) has reached a milestone where it is no longer confined to labs. Knowingly or unknowingly, we are all using products or services powered by artificial intelligence. From a possible doomsday technology to one that can transform our society, AI has come a long way in our day to day conversation.
While AI continues to have its own challenges, the technology has been adapted and implemented in ways that we had not seen before. This transformation is mainly driven by the leaders at top-ranked universities, tech companies and technologists in general. Some of their public statements have helped people understand not only the impact of AI but also the benefits of using an AI-powered technology.
From the likes of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Alphabet CEO Sundar to late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, here is a look at some of the prominent minds in the world of AI and their quotes that have played an important role in moving the needle around public perception of artificial intelligence.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet (Google)
- AI is one of the most important things humanity is working on. It is more profound than, I dunno, electricity or fire.
- It is important to understand that tomorrow, whether Google is there or not, artificial intelligence is going to progress. Technology has this nature. It is going to evolve.
- It [AI] can make humans more productive than we have ever imagined.
Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA
- Software is eating the world, but AI is going to eat software.
- AI as a technology is complex, of course, but the capabilities and benefits of AI aren’t hard to understand.
- It’s very clear that AI is going to impact every industry. I think that every nation needs to make sure that AI is a part of their national strategy. Every country will be impacted.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and co-founder of OpenAI and The Boring Company
- If you’re not concerned about AI safety, you should be. Vastly more risk than North Korea.
- There certainly will be job disruption. Because what’s going to happen is robots will be able to do everything better than us. … I mean all of us.
- AI doesn’t have to be evil to destroy humanity – if AI has a goal and humanity just happens to come in the way, it will destroy humanity as a matter of course without even thinking about it, no hard feelings.
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft
- AI is the defining technology of our times.
- AI and machine learning is being infused into every experience in a deep way, and you’re going to see a lot of that.
- We’ve seen how AI can be applied for good, but we must also guard against its unintended consequences. Now is the time to examine how we build AI responsibly and avoid a race to the bottom. This requires both the private and public sectors to take action.
Stephen Hawking, late English theoretical physicist, cosmologist and author
- The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.
- I believe there is no deep difference between what can be achieved by a biological brain and what can be achieved by a computer. It, therefore, follows that computers can, in theory, emulate human intelligence — and exceed it.
- Perhaps we should all stop for a moment and focus not only on making our AI better and more successful but also on the benefit of humanity.
Andrew Ng, Computer Scientist and Global Leader in AI
- It is difficult to think of a major industry that AI will not transform. This includes healthcare, education, transportation, retail, communications, and agriculture. There are surprisingly clear paths for AI to make a big difference in all of these industries.
- Elon Musk is worried about the AI apocalypse, but I am worried about people losing their jobs.
- Despite all the hype and excitement about AI, it’s still extremely limited today relative to what human intelligence is.
Alan Turing, Computing pioneer
- It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers.
- A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.
- I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.
Geoffrey Hinton, Computer Scientist and Leading Expert in AI
- I have always been convinced that the only way to get artificial intelligence to work is to do the computation in a way similar to the human brain. That is the goal I have been pursuing. We are making progress, though we still have lots to learn about how the brain actually works.
- In AI, the holy grail was how do you generate internal representations.
- The future depends on some graduate student who is deeply suspicious of everything I have said.
Kai-Fu Lee, chairman and chief executive officer, Sinovation Ventures
- The gradual platformization of AI is very interesting to me. The efforts by Google, Amazon, Salesforce — they’re bringing AI down to a level of not needing to be an expert to use it. … I think the day that any good software engineer can program AI will be the day it really proliferates.
- It is the decision engine that will replace people
- Because AI is about taking data into insight and decision, so I anticipate [the] internet sector, entrepreneurial sector, to continue to grow and in many cases displace and even wipe out traditional companies in China.
Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of DeepMind
- I would actually be very pessimistic about the world if something like AI wasn’t coming down the road.
- I think about AI as a very powerful tool. What I’m most excited about is applying those tools to science and accelerating breakthroughs.
- Deep learning is an amazing technology and hugely useful in itself, but in my opinion it’s definitely not enough to solve AI, [not] by a long shot.
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple
- What all of us have to do is to make sure we are using AI in a way that is for the benefit of humanity, not to the detriment of humanity.
- Advancing AI by collecting huge personal profiles is laziness, not efficiency.
- For artificial intelligence to be truly smart, it must respect human values, including privacy. If we get this wrong, the dangers are profound.
Yann LeCun, VP and Chief AI Scientist at Facebook
- Most of human and animal learning is unsupervised learning. If intelligence was a cake, unsupervised learning would be the cake, supervised learning would be the icing on the cake, and reinforcement learning would be the cherry on the cake. We know how to make the icing and the cherry, but we don’t know how to make the cake. We need to solve the unsupervised learning problem before we can even think of getting to true AI.
- Perhaps we should call this ‘Cargo Cult AI’ or ‘Potemkin AI’ or ‘Wizard-of-Oz AI’. In other words, it’s complete bullsh*t (pardon my French).
- Our intelligence is what makes us human, and AI is an extension of that quality.
Fei Fei Li, Director of Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Lab
- AI is fundamentally an applied technology that’s going to serve our society. Humanistic AI not only raises the awareness of the importance of the technology. It’s a really important way to attract diverse students, technologists, and innovators to participate.
- If We Want Machines to Think, We Need to Teach Them to See.
- I imagine a world in which AI is going to make us work more productively, live longer, and have cleaner energy.
Jeff Bezos, Founder and Executive Chairman of Amazon
- We’re at the beginning of a golden age of AI. Recent advancements have already led to invention that previously lived in the realm of science fiction — and we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible.
- I predict that, because of artificial intelligence and its ability to automate certain tasks that in the past were impossible to automate, not only will we have a much wealthier civilization, but the quality of work will go up very significantly and a higher fraction of people will have callings and careers relative to today.
- We are now solving problems with machine learning and artificial intelligence that were … in the realm of science fiction for the last several decades. And natural language understanding, machine vision problems, it really is an amazing renaissance.
Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce
- We need to constantly be open to new ideas and approaches, such as artificial intelligence (AI), and be willing to challenge assumptions.
- AI is technology like none of us have ever seen, and none of us can truly say where it’s going. But we do know this: Technology is never good or bad. It’s what we do with the technology that matters.
- Artificial intelligence can be a force for good, but society needs to be careful to make sure its negative aspects do not outweigh its positives.