Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak join call to pause most AI development
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Is it possible that there could be too much going on too quickly and too soon with artificial intelligence right now?
That seems to be the opinion of Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) and Twitter (TWTR) Chief Executive Elon Musk, Apple (AAPL) co-founder and computer-industry legend Steve Wozniak, and a handful of other tech officials, who on Wednesday used an open letter to call for a six-month pause in the development of many AI tools in order to develop new safety standards for the technology.
The call for tapping the breaks a bit on AI came in a letter titled "Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter" that was organized and supported by the Future of Life Institute [FLI] a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based nonprofit that says its mission is to "reduce global catastrophic and existential risk from powerful technologies." The institute is led by Max Tegmark, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and it lists Musk as an external adviser.
In addition to Musk, Wozniak and Tegnak, others signing the open letter include Pinterest (PINS) co-founder Evan Sharp, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn and 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidate, and current Forward Party co-chair Andrew Yang. Among issues addressed in the institute's letter are powerful AI systems that "should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive" and risks can be appropriately managed.
"We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than [OpenAI's] GPT-4," the group said in its letter. "This pause should be public and verifiable and include all key actors."
The institute said it doesn't believe "AI development in general" should be paused, but that AI players should step back from what it called "the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box [AI] models with emergent capabilities."
AI has become one of the hottest topics in the tech sector in recent months, in large part because of the popularity of the ChatGPT bot from OpenAI. Microsoft (MSFT) threw its weight behind ChatGPT with what was called a "multi-year, multi-billion-dollar" partnership with, and investment in OpenAI. Earlier this month, OpenAI came out with GPT-4, its latest chatbot update, and claimed the technology could do better on the SAT exam than 90% of all test takers.
Last week, AI was in the spotlight as graphics chipmaker Nvidia (NVDA) and digital-publishing technology giant Adobe (ADBE) used company events to highlight their newest AI advancements and plans.