Elon Musk and the Riddle of the Artificial Intelligence Conference

This week, a story went viral on the Internet that American entrepreneur Elon Musk was supposed to come to Russia for an AI conference. The first mention of this can be found in the EU Reporter article “Will Elon Musk speak at the Russian AI Conference”. It is noteworthy that before the Newsweek tabloid investigation, the article had a different title and sounded like “Elon Musk will speak at the Russian AI Conference”.

In a nutshell: the article stated that entrepreneur and AI enthusiast Musk is expected to come to Russia at the end of November to attend the AI Journey 2023 international conference on artificial intelligence and machine learning and present his own neural network, called Grok. Naturally, all major and not so major media outlets picked up on such high-profile news, to which the conference organisers reacted and assured that Musk’s participation was not planned, but “if he wants to, he can join us”.

Russians are good-natured people – they are ready to welcome the foreign billionaire in their native land and were happy to invite Musk to Russia, but the Western edition of Newsweek was not very pleased with such openness – it is not far to violate sanctions, and Musk has long been suspected of pro-Russian views. After a short investigation, the journalists came to the conclusion that Musk may indeed take part in the AI Journey conference, but either secretly or, as they call it, “at the last moment”