The senator earlier this summer teased plans for a series of "AI Insight Forums," which he says will serve as the bedrock for his efforts to craft bipartisan legislation to address the risks of artificial intelligence. The guest list for the first forum, slated for Sept. 13, includes many of the most powerful executives shaping AI, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Two of Silicon Valley's most powerful figures are officially in a war of words. To recap: During a Facebook Live Q&A session on Sunday, Mark Zuckerberg criticized Elon Musk for saying artificial intelligence is "the biggest threat we face as a civilization." "I think people who are naysayers and try to drum up these doomsday scenarios--I don't understand it," the Facebook CEO said. "It's really negative, and in some ways I think it's pretty irresponsible." Now, Musk has fired back.

Tech giants Elon Musk and Mark Zuckeberg have been engaged in a very public, somewhat silly and self-indulgent battle over artificial intelligence lately. Musk has warned AI-powered robots could usher in some form of automated war to give humanity its richly deserved demise, while Zuckerberg responded by saying he is "really optimistic" it could usher a golden age of lifesaving technology. Both have traded blows, with Zuckerberg saying the doomsaying is "pretty irresponsible," and Musk tweeting he thinks the Facebook head just doesn't understand the issue. The whole thing is a little eyeroll-inducing given true AI remains a pipe dream for now, and both men stand to benefit greatly from machine learning trends which automate jobs and concentrate control of the emerging digital economy in fewer hands. Coursera cofounder Andrew Ng, a real AI researcher who used to be chief scientist at Chinese tech company Baidu, weighed in on the latter issue Tuesday.

It sounds like a line from science-fiction: Two of the world's most famous technologists are butting heads over artificial intelligence. Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg have very different ideas on what qualifies as "AI," according to a recent Vanity Fair article detailing whether popular male tech figures believe in a forthcoming AI apocalypse. Their debate underlies a bigger one facing the industry: nobody can agree on what the term means. There are generally two schools of thought when talking about whether software today (read: not an imaginary future killer robot) is a form of artificial intelligence: literalists and generalists. When asked about Zuckerberg's Jarvis, a bot that mainly handles home-automation tasks like controlling the thermostat or picking music to play, Musk replied dismissively.

It's a bunch of algorithms working together to initiate a command, instead of one algorithm that understands voice, text, code, and an array of ideas. This is also true of Siri, Cortana, Google Assistant, and every other virtual personal assistant available today. They work by stringing together algorithms that determine what a human wants, and then either read from a script to give the answer or pull a canned response from Wikipedia. It's a marvelous feat of design--but not what AI researchers would call an "end-to-end" model, or one algorithm that learns to complete a task entirely by itself without human tinkering.