UNITED STATES: Billionaire Elon Musk and a group of artificial intelligence professionals and industry executives are urging for a six-month moratorium on the development of systems that are more potent than OpenAI’s recently released GPT-4 in an open letter, citing possible risks to humanity and society.
More than 1,000 people, including Musk, signed the letter, which was published by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute and called for a pause to the development of advanced AI until common safety guidelines for such designs were created, put into place, and independently audited by the experts.
“Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable,” reads the letter.
The letter outlined potential dangers posed to society and civilization by human-competitive AI systems, including the potential for political and economic upheaval, and urged developers to collaborate with regulators and lawmakers on governance and regulatory frameworks.
The co-signatories included Emad Mostaque, the CEO of Stability AI; researchers at Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O) DeepMind; and AI luminaries Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell.
The Future of Life Institute is mainly funded by the Musk Foundation, along with the Silicon Valley Community Foundation and the London-based effective altruism organisation Founders Pledge, as per the European Union’s transparency register.
The worries come as the EU police agency Europol on Monday joined a cacophony of ethical and legal worries over cutting-edge AI like ChatGPT, cautioning about the possible misusage of the system in phishing scams, disinformation campaigns, and cybercrime.
In the meantime, the UK government has disclosed plans for an “adaptable” legal framework for AI.
The government’s strategy, detailed in a policy paper released on Wednesday, would divide responsibility for regulating artificial intelligence (AI) among its regulators for human rights, health and safety, and competition, rather than creating a new body specifically for the technology.
Musk, whose automaker Tesla (TSLA.O) uses AI for an autopilot system, has expressed his worries about AI.
Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which was released last year, has led competitors to speed up the development of analogous large language models and businesses to incorporate generative AI models into their products.
CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman hasn’t signed the letter, said a spokesperson for Future of Life. Requests for comment from OpenAI were not immediately answered.
Gary Marcus, a professor at New York University who signed the letter, said, “The letter isn’t perfect, but the spirit is right: we need to slow down until we better understand the ramifications.”
Also Read: Elon Musk Reduces Stock Grants to Twitter Employees, Mandates Office Work
