Elon Musk (Tesla), Emad Mostaque (Stability AI), Steve Wozniak (Apple), and other leaders in artificial intelligence have signed an open letter to pause giant AI experiments, citing risks to society and humanity.
This group of A.I. leaders has called for an “immediate pause for at least six months in the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.” stating that “this pause should be public and verifiable.”
Elon Musk, one of the backers of this open letter, was a co-founder of OpenAI with Sam Altman and even donated $100 million to the then-nonprofit. He has been very vocal about his concerns since the acquisition by Microsoft, now that it is for-profit.
The timing is also very interesting. Goldman Sachs released a big bit of research yesterday projecting that AI automation may impact 66% of ALL jobs, or 300 million in the U.S. and Europe alone.
It’s definitely top of mind for firms and business leaders worldwide. The thing is, A.I. is moving so fast, and usually when things move fast, thinks break. This obviously could have both overwhelmingly positive and catastrophic negative impacts because this is all so new and moving so fast, it’s highly unlikely that everyone involved understands the power, the bounds of the technology’s capabilities, the edge cases, or second- or third-order effects.
These leaders are saying enough is enough for now. We can’t go further without fully understanding the implications of these extremely powerful models for society.
They’re the closest to this technology, so if they have concerns, they’re probably warranted.
