Tech Leaders from around the world sign AI open letter

Photo from Unsplash/Alexander Sinn

Bringing such rapid and drastic changes, Artificial intelligence makes even tech leaders want to have time to breathe. Just recently, Elon Musk and several prominent tech names signed a petition named Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter.

Over 1,000 tech experts aside from Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak have signed the petition.

The purpose of the letter is to convince AI laboratories to halt artificial intelligence development for at least six months. Indeed, the world could implement proper planning and management of the technology and somehow let the world slowly take in the “wonders” of AI.

The open letter sprouted weeks after the debut of the latest large language model of ChatGPT, GPT-4.

Truly, several people felt impressed by its promising capabilities. Think about how it understands and interacts with images and text. On the other hand, other people also felt rattled by its potential worldwide impact.

The petition recognizes the benefits of artificial intelligence by quoting Asilomar AI Principles:

“Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources.”

Nonetheless, the AI open letter emphasizes that this planning and management is absent nowadays, stating how “contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks.”

Consequently, the Elon Musk open letter urges readers to consider these questions:

Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth?
Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones?
Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete, and replace us?
Should we risk the loss of control of our civilization?

In addition, the AI open letter asserts that we should only develop more powerful AI once we know we can control their risks. It also shared a recent statement from OpenAI:

“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.”

Therefore, it calls on “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”