Forging an unlikely friendship between shark and dog, Mark Cuban recently praised canines as catching on faster than Silicon Valley’s latest darling. Tech’s most recent puppy, generative AI, has some house-training to do, according to the billionaire investor.
“I think smart puppies are smarter than AI is today or in the near future,” Cuban said in a Wired interview to assumedly wagging tails.
Cuban asked the interviewer, Lauren Goode, if she’d trust a seeing-eye dog or a self-driving car more to take her three blocks on the condition that she was blind. It’s perhaps one of the lesser-known hypothetical scenarios. His response: “I would trust the dog.”
He explains that “a dog can sense issues,” whereas a self-driving car cannot wrap its mind around what is adversarial. And Cuban’s not alone in his skepticism. A whopping 93% of Americans report concerns about said vehicles, citing safety and technology malfunctions as main concerns in a Forbes Advisor survey by OnePoll of 2,000 individuals. Indeed, like cans on a “just married” car, smart vehicles leave a trail of recalls in their wake. Sharing the road with humans, these inventions struggle to navigate the chaos and often stop in their tracks when encountering an issue, per the Conversation.
Even so, self-driving cars have found themselves a little enclave in the Bay Area. Waymo, formerly known as the Google Self-Driving Car Project, has slowly rolled out its product over the course of 15 years, writes David Meyer for Fortune. Weekly rides reached 50,000 in L.A., Phoenix, and San Francisco, according to company data. But that incremental success has not come without bumps in the road, adds Meyer. As of this spring, U.S. regulators are investigating 22 reported accidents involving Waymo cars, as the vehicles crash into stationary objects and ignore road signs.
AI simply might not be the good boy that Cuban’s dog is. Citing his own mini Australian shepherd Tucks, Cuban praises his natural adaptability. “I can take Tucks and just drop him in a situation, and he’ll figure it out quick,” he says. “I take a phone with AI and show it a video, it’s not going to have a clue. And I don’t think that’s going to change for a long time.” That long time is at least a decade, he adds.
Despite AI’s persistent hallucinations and stoking of fear regarding obsoletism, investors and C-suite executives are rushing to implement and back said invention before competitors do. Even if he thinks Tucks is wiser, Cuban acknowledges that this AI race is high stakes.
“Our military dominance, our place in the world depends on our ability to invest in AI. Period. End of story,” he told CNBC late September. “Whoever wins AI has the best military. There’s no question about it.”
Cuban seems to still be baking his opinions regarding AI. While critical, he did an ad for Google’s Gemini AI feature, Wired’s Goode points out. That meant nothing though, he claims, and was only to promote Cost Plus Drugs. While doubting the true adaptability of self-driving cars, he dismisses the idea that companies like OpenAI are overhyped. Rather, he predicts they will be oversaturated one day, as people create competing and cheaper models.
Either way, it’ll likely take time for AI to catch up to humans, or at the very least, dogs. “Because wisdom doesn’t come with text,” according to Cuban.
