Elon Musk joins call for pause in creation of giant AI ‘digital minds’
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, so the capabilities and dangers of systems such as GPT-4 can be properly studied and mitigated.
The demand is made in an open letter signed by major AI players including Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI, the research lab responsible for ChatGPT and GPT-4; Emad Mostaque, who founded London-based Stability AI; and Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple.
Its signatories also include engineers from DeepMind, Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon, as well as academics including the cognitive scientist Gary Marcus.
“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,” the letter says. “Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.”
The authors, coordinated by the “longtermist” thinktank the Future of Life Institute, cite OpenAI’s own co-founder Sam Altman in justifying their calls. In a post from February, Altman wrote: “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,” the letter continues. “That point is now.”
If researchers will not voluntarily pause their work on AI models more powerful than GPT-4, the letter’s benchmark for “giant” models, then “governments should step in”, the authors say.
“This does not mean a pause on AI development in general,
Read more on theguardian.com
