A recent open letter with more than 1,100 famous signatories demanded that “all AI labs immediately cease for at least 6 months.”
More than 1,100 people have signed an open letter that asks “all AI labs to immediately suspend for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4,” including Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and Tristan Harris of the Center for Humane Technology. The letter claims:
Now that modern AI systems are competitive with humans on most tasks[3], we must consider whether we should allow robots to saturate our media with propaganda and misinformation. Should all occupations, even those that are fulfilling, be automated away? Should we create non-human minds that could one day outnumber, outwit, replace, and supersede us? Should we run the danger of losing civilizational control? Such choices shouldn’t be left up to unelected technocrats. Only when we are certain that the outcomes will be good and the risks will be manageable should we create powerful AI systems.
The article goes on to claim that “levels of planning and management” are “not happening” and that, instead, unnamed “AI labs” have been “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” recently.
Public and verifiable
The letter’s signatories, some of whom are professionals in artificial intelligence, claim that the stop they are requesting should be “public and verifiable, and include all key participants.
Governments should intervene and impose a moratorium if the pause “cannot be swiftly implemented,” the letter reads.
This one is still settling in for us (while others are already tearing it to shreds).
It’s interesting for those who have signed as well as those who haven’t, including some engineers from Meta and Google, Emad Mostaque, founder and CEO of Stability AI, and non-technical individuals like a self-described electrician and an esthetician. For instance, no one from OpenAI, the company that created the GPT-4 big language model, signed this letter. Neither did anyone from Anthropic, whose team split off from OpenAI to create a “safer” AI chatbot.
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