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From Futurism.com:
Musk indicates that internet infrastructure is "particularly susceptible" to a method called gradient descent algorithm, a mathematical problem-solving process. Bad news is, AI is excellent at doing gradient descents, which can become devastating digital weaponry.
A screenshot of the tweet is provided below.
He is an intelligent man, so why would he say something like this? Does Musk know what gradient descent is?
I think Musk was using the terminology correctly though perhaps with hyperbole.
I believe this was tweeted in the context of the botnet attacks on name-resolution services that broke Netflix and a large number of other internet services for a time. He was expressing the idea that you could train a botnet-based system to attack the internet by giving it a toolbox of targets and hacks and using well-known machine-learning techniques to optimize the effectiveness of using the attacks in combination to take down the internet.
Gradient descent itself isn't harmful; it is using gradient descent to train a botnet that could theoretically result in a really devastating attack.
I also don't think he is necessarily implying that there is an actual machine learning system at work; rather that the hackers were training themselves with a methodology analogous to gradient descent.
