Gary Marcus：马斯克AI预测频繁跳票，媒体缺乏质疑
Elon Musk is on a prediction rampage, and most of the media can’t seem to figure out what to do about it.
Brace yourself for Elon’s bold new prediction:
做好心理准备，迎接埃隆的大胆新预测：
“AI is the fastest advancing technology that I've ever seen of any kind, and I've seen a lot of technology. You know barely a week goes by without some new announcement, and if you look at the amount of AI hardware, the computers coming online that are dedicated to AI, that is increasing what looks like at least by a factor of 10 every year, if not every 6 to nine months. So when you combine the hardware coming online really an order of magnitude increase every you know—call it at least every nine months—and many, many software breakthroughs, if you look at that curve it looks insane. My guess is that we'll have AI that is smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year, and then AI, the total amount of sort of sentient compute of AI, I think will probably exceed all humans in 5 years.”
“AI是我所见过的任何种类中发展速度最快的技术，而我见过的技术可不少。你知道的，几乎每周都有新的公告发布，如果你看看AI硬件的数量，那些专门用于AI、正在上线的计算机，其增长幅度看起来每年至少翻十倍，如果不是每6到9个月的话。所以，当你把真正以数量级增长的硬件（你知道的——姑且说至少每九个月一次）与许多、许多软件突破结合起来看时，那条曲线看起来简直疯狂。我的猜测是，我们很可能在明年年底之前拥有比任何单个都更聪明的AI，然后我认为AI那种总体意义上的感知计算能力，可能在5年内就会超过所有人类。”
Sorry, my bad. That’s one from April 2024. (Didn’t come true1) His new new prediction, is this:
抱歉，我说错了。那是来自2024年4月的一个预测。（并未实现1）他的最新预测是这样的：
Sound familiar? Essentially, all he did was quietly push back the date, from 2025 to 2027.
听起来很耳熟吧？本质上，他只是悄悄地把日期从2025年推迟到了2027年。
I serously doubt this prediction too. (Both times I offered to bet him a million dollars; neither time did he respond.) Here in 2026, as opposed to scifi dreamland. there are still a zillion things smart people can (usually) do that machines still struggle with.
我也严重怀疑这个预测。（两次我都提出跟他赌一百万美元；他两次都没有回应。）这里是2026年，而不是科幻梦境。仍然有无数聪明人能够（通常）做到机器仍在挣扎的事情。
Like not make stuff up. (Unless they choose to, or on drugs or have brain damage, etc.).
比如不胡编乱造。（除非它们选择这么做，或者处于药物影响下或存在脑损伤等）。
And the smartest people can do stuff like write Pulitzer Prize-worthy novels and articles and so on. Of the 10 sample challenges I raised with Miles Brundage at the end of 2024, some within reach of ordinary humans, some within the reach only of exceptional humans, the number AI has solved still looks to be approximately zero.
而最聪明的人还能写出获得普利策奖的小说和文章等等。我在2024年底向Miles Brundage提出的10个样本挑战中，有些普通人类力所能及，有些只有非凡人类才能胜任，目前看来AI解决的数目仍大致为零。
Of course making a new prediction that the same as the old prediction, just with the dates quietly moved back is Elon’s MO.
当然，做出与旧预测相同但只是悄悄推迟日期的新预测，正是埃隆的一贯做法。
Note the absolute confidence and sincerity, with phrases like “for sure”, “I am extremely confident”, “it’s looking quite likely”, etc.
注意其中绝对的自信和真诚，使用了诸如“肯定”、“我非常有信心”、“看起来相当可能”等措辞。
A lot of individuals have noticed this pattern by now, but the media very rarely calls him on it.
如今许多人已经注意到了这种模式，但媒体很少就此质疑他。
Instead, usually they just report his predictions, in perfect CEO said a thing style, without really questioning them, just like they platformed all his ridiculously overoptimistic driverless car predictions for the last decade.
相反，他们通常只是报道他的预测，采用标准的‘CEO说了某事’的风格，并不真正加以质疑，就像过去十年里他们为他那些荒谬过度乐观的无人驾驶汽车预测提供平台一样。
A perfect case in point arrived in my inbox this morning, from The Information:
今早我的收件箱里就出现了一个完美的例子，来自The Information：
The predictions here are outlandish. So far, the global economy has scarcely budged from the contributions of AI:
这里的预测荒诞不经。迄今为止，全球经济几乎没有因AI的贡献而发生丝毫变化：
and nobody has articulated a serious theory about what those billion humanoid robots might be doing. Unless we are counting “serve as remote control children’s toys”, the chance is approximately zero.
而且没有人提出过关于这十亿个人形机器人可能在做什么的严肃理论。除非我们将其算作“充当遥控儿童玩具”，否则这种可能性几乎为零。
The “five times more productive” thing comes, presumably, from thin air. Will they be able to fix plumbing leaks five times faster than human plumbers? Be five times more productive at taking care of elderly patients? When I asked Rodney Brooks about the humanoid robot part, he called it a “hallucination”, noting that “there are no deployed humanoid robots that are even on the same continent as 1% as productive as a human, and the derivative is not even 0.1 per year“.
"生产力提高五倍"的说法，大概是无中生有。它们能比人类水管工快五倍地修理管道泄漏吗？在照顾老年病人方面能提高五倍的生产力吗？当我问罗德尼·布鲁克斯（Rodney Brooks）关于人形机器人的部分时，他称之为一种“幻觉”，并指出“目前没有任何部署的人形机器人在生产力上能达到人类的百分之一，甚至不在同一个大陆上，而且其年增长率连0.1都不是”。
Alas, The Information didn’t even try to evaluate any of Musk’s predictions.
唉，《The Information》甚至没有尝试评估马斯克（Musk）的任何预测。
On the plus side, The Information gave Musk’s motivate for wanting to build the robots. But what they should have don't is to examine his track record on timeline predictions—hint, it is poor—and they should questioned his motive for making projections that so frequently are off the mark, invariablhy in the same self-serving drive-up-his-stock direction.
好在，《The Information》给出了马斯克想要制造机器人的动机。但他们本应该做的是考察他在时间线预测方面的记录——提示：表现不佳——并且他们应该质疑他做出如此频繁偏离事实的预测的动机，这些预测总是以推高自身股价的方向为特征。
Political reporters do this kind of questioning all the time; mainstream tech reporters, not so much.
政治记者经常进行这类质询；主流科技记者则不然。
And no doubt you can come back in two years (or two weeks) for more nearly identical predictions from Musk, with more dates silently shifted back. As long as it drives up his stock prices and the media doesn’t call him out, why should he stop?
毫无疑问，你可以在两年后（或两周后）回来，看到马斯克更多几乎相同的预测，以及更多被悄然推迟的日期。只要这能推高他的股价，而媒体又不点名批评他，他为什么要停止呢？
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Of course it’s not just Elon. Altman gets the same treatment, like in the softball interview TIME just ran with Altman, where Altman got say whoppers like this, happily retweeted by the interviewer, Alex Heath.
当然，这不仅限于埃隆（Elon）。奥特曼（Altman）也受到了同样的待遇，就像《时代》杂志（TIME）最近对奥特曼进行的轻松采访那样，奥特曼说了诸如这样的瞎话，而采访者亚历克斯·希思（Alex Heath）愉快地转发了这些内容。
In reality, literally thirteen months ago Altman was saying that GPT-5 could do anything a PhD could. The journalist couldn’t be bothered to look. People like Dario Amodei and Demis Hassabis often get a free ride in the mainstream media, too.
事实上，就在十三个月前，奥特曼还说GPT-5可以做任何博士能做的事。记者懒得去查证。像达里奥·阿莫迪（Dario Amodei）和德米斯·哈萨比斯（Demis Hassabis）这样的人，在主流媒体中也经常获得免检待遇。
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A few mainstream journalists do stand out. Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor of The Economist challenged Musk in a recent interview; Ronan Farrow, writing for The New Yorker, challenged Altman earlier this year. But examples like those remain all too rare.
少数几位主流记者确实脱颖而出。《经济学人》（The Economist）主编赞尼·明顿·贝德多斯（Zanny Minton Beddoes）在最近的一次采访中挑战了马斯克；罗南·法罗（Ronan Farrow）今年早些时候在为《纽约客》（The New Yorker）撰稿时挑战了奥特曼。但这样的例子仍然太过罕见。
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PS. Bonus from that same softball TIME interview:
附注。来自同一场轻松的《时代》杂志采访的额外内容：
For more detailed context, here Altman’s fuller, utterly risible comment:
为了更详细的背景信息，以下是奥特曼更全面、完全荒谬的评论：
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Technically Musk’s 2024 prediction is worded ambiguously, “My guess is that we’ll have AI that is smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year,” could mean (merely that) we will have AI that is smarter than the perpetually drunk guy at the bar across street. But I don’t think that’s what Musk meant. From the context I think that he meant AI would be smarter than even the smartest individual human being by the end of 2025, overtaking collections of humans a bit later.
从技术上讲，马斯克2024年的预测措辞含糊不清，“我猜我们很可能在明年年底之前就会拥有比任何单个都更聪明的AI”，这可能仅仅意味着我们将拥有比街对面酒吧里那个永远醉醺醺的家伙更聪明的AI。但我不认为这是马斯克的意思。根据上下文，我认为他的意思是到2025年底，人工智能将比最聪明的人类个体还要聪明，并在稍后超越人类群体。
更进一步：量化金融体系
看懂新闻只是起点——沿量化金融路径，把它变成能交付的工程能力