Elon Musk calls for pause on AI research – 03/29/2023 – Tech

Elon Musk and hundreds of world experts signed, this Wednesday (29), an appeal for a six-month pause in research on AI (Artificial Intelligence) more powerful than ChatGPT 4, the OpenAI model launched this month. They say they could be “great risks to humanity”.

In the petition posted on the futureoflife.org website, they call for: a moratorium until safety systems are established with new regulatory authorities; surveillance of AI systems; techniques that help to distinguish between the real and the artificial; institutions capable of coping with the “economic and political disruption (especially to democracy) that AI will cause”.

The text is signed by personalities who expressed their fears about an uncontrollable AI that surpasses humans. Among them are Musk, owner of Twitter and founder of SpaceX and Tesla, and historian Yuval Noah Hariri.

The director of Open AI, which created ChatGPT, Sam Altman, acknowledged having a little fear that his creation will be used for large-scale disinformation, or for cyberattacks.

“The company needs time to adapt,” he recently told broadcaster ABCNews.

Petition signatories say that in recent months, AI labs have been racing wildly to develop and deploy increasingly powerful digital brains that no one, not even their creators, can reliably understand, predict, or control.

“Should we allow machines to flood our information channels with propaganda and lies? Should we automate all jobs, including rewarding ones? […] Should we risk losing control of our civilization? These decisions should not be delegated to unelected technology leaders.”

The list of signatories also includes Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak; members of Google’s AI lab, DeepMind; the director of Stability AI, Emad Mostaque, as well as American experts in AI, academics and executive engineers from Microsoft, partner of OpenAI.