Written by Lidia Vijga, co-founder at DeckLinks
Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, and politician Andrew Yang have joined forces with over 1,000 artificial intelligence experts and highly influential individuals in the tech. They’ve all signed an open letter requesting a six-month halt on the development of highly advanced AI systems.
“We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”
Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
In the letter, they encourage tech companies to stop working on AI systems that would surpass the capabilities of GPT-4 until the proper safety checks and regulations are put in place.
“The letter isn’t perfect, but the spirit is right: we need to slow down until we better understand the ramifications. The big players are becoming increasingly secretive about what they are doing, which makes it hard for society to defend against whatever harms may materialize” – said Gary Marcus, New York University professor that signed the letter.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, had a chat with the Wall Street Journal and mentioned that OpenAI hasn’t begun working on GPT-5 just yet. He also highlighted how OpenAI has always been committed to ensuring safety during development. According to Sam Altman, OpenAI dedicated over half a year to conducting safety checks on GPT-4 prior to its release.
“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.” – Asilomar AI Principles
Even OpenAI itself realizes that a third-party review may be necessary. “At some point, it may be important to get 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.”
The first Open Letter Artificial Intelligence
This is the second open letter that gained so much attention. The first Open Letter on Artificial Intelligence was signed in January 2015 by Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Elon Musk, and many other artificial intelligence experts.
As we are witnessing a huge shift in how humans and machines interact, it’s imperative that we remain proactive in its management and application to ensure AI can be our ally while maintaining safe ethical usage. We have reached an incredibly pivotal moment – yet it’s a moment where we still hold the power to act autonomously and decide how we want to go from here.
