Elon Musk, Other Tech Leaders Want to Hit Pause on “Giant AI Experiments”

Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and many other tech experts have signed an open letter calling all AI labs around the world to immediately pause the training of AI systems more powerful than OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4 “for at least six months.” The open letter has been published on the website of the Future of Life institute, a US-based apolitical non-profit aiming to “reduce extreme large-scale risks from transformative technologies.”

The open letter highlights the unpredictable ways contemporary AI systems could disrupt our societies including the destruction of various jobs and propaganda. It also points out that “recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.”

“Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. This confidence must be well justified and increase with the magnitude of a system’s potential effects,” the open letter says.

It’s true that since the release of Open AI’s ChatGPT last fall, “generative AI” has quickly web3 and the Metaverse as the next big thing in the tech industry. Microsoft was pretty quick to team up with OpenAI to integrate the company’s cutting-edge GPT-4 model into its new Bing chatbot, forcing Google to rush a response with its new Bard AI.

Microsoft has since announced new “Copilot” experiences in GitHub and its Office apps, and the company also unveiled yesterday a Security Copilot for cybersecurity teams. This is all happening very fast, and OpenAI isn’t resting on its laurels either as it announced support for plugins in ChatGPT last week.

“OpenAI’s recent statement regarding artificial general intelligence, states that “At some point, it may be important to get 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.” We agree. That point is now,” the open letter reads.

As of this writing, the open letter has 1123 signatures, and you can read it in full here.