Musk joins call for pause on AI development

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: Agencies
31 Mar 2023 12:24

Elon Musk, among other prominent tech figures, requested a six-month pause on AI development in an open letter.

An AI supercomputer in California. (Reuters)

Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Andrew Yang, and more than 1,000 artificial intelligence experts, researchers, and backers have joined a call for an immediate pause on the creation of “giant” AIs for at least six months.

"Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks," warns the open letter, published on the website of Future of Life Institute.

"Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete, and replace us?"

📢 We're calling on AI labs to temporarily pause training powerful models!

Join FLI's call alongside Yoshua Bengio, @stevewoz, @harari_yuval, @elonmusk, @GaryMarcus & over a 1000 others who've signed: https://t.co/3rJBjDXapc

A short 🧵on why we're calling for this - (1/8)
— Future of Life Institute (@FLIxrisk) March 29, 2023

The Musk-backed futurist collective previously said in a 2015 open statement that they supported the advancement of AI for societal good but were aware of its possible risks.

As of Wednesday afternoon, 1,124 people had signed the most recent open letter, which points to OpenAI's GPT-4 as a red flag. The company brags that the most recent model is more precise, human-like, and capable of analyzing and responding to images. Even a mock bar exam was passed by it.

"At some point, it may be important to get an independent review before starting to train future systems, and for the most advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for creating new models," a recent post from OpenAI said.

"We agree. That point is now," the futurists stated. "This does not mean a pause on AI development in general, merely a stepping back."

"I'm a little worried about the AI stuff," Musk said earlier this month, Reuters reported.

Some people are concerned that people would utilize ChatGPT to saturate social media with fake articles that sound authoritative or to inundate Congress with letters from the "grassroots" that appear genuine.

Artificial intelligence (#AI) is revolutionizing how we interact with the world around us, from our smartphones to our homes and cars. But what does this imply for the future of education? pic.twitter.com/hPDdQbIq4l
— Al Mayadeen English (@MayadeenEnglish) January 4, 2023

"Society has hit pause on other technologies with potentially catastrophic effects on society. We can do so here," the letter concluded. "Let's enjoy a long AI summer, not rush unprepared into a fall."

This shortly comes after investment bank and financial services company, Goldman Sachs, warned that artificial intelligence (AI) could cause "significant disruption" to the labor market and put millions of jobs at risk.