Elon Musk and a group of artificial intelligence experts and industry executives are calling for a six-month pause in training systems more powerful than OpenAI’s newly launched model GPT-4, they said in an open letter, citing potential risks to society and humanity.
The letter, issued by the non-profit Future of Life Institute and signed by more than 1,000 people including Musk, Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, researchers at Alphabet-owned (GOOGL.O) DeepMind, as well as AI heavyweights Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell, called for a pause on advanced AI development until shared safety protocols for such designs were developed, implemented and audited by independent experts.
“Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable,” the letter said.
The letter also detailed potential risks to society and civilization by human-competitive AI systems in the form of economic and political disruptions, and called on developers to work with policymakers on governance and regulatory authorities.
The letter comes as EU police force Europol on Monday joined a chorus of ethical and legal concerns over advanced AI like ChatGPT, warning about the potential misuse of the system in phishing attempts, disinformation and cybercrime. Musk, whose carmaker Tesla (TSLA.O) is using AI for an autopilot system, has been vocal about his concerns about AI.
Since its release last year, Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT has prompted rivals to accelerate developing similar large language models, and companies to integrate generative AI models into their products.
Sam Altman, chief executive at OpenAI, hasn’t signed the letter, a spokesperson at Future of Life told Reuters. OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to request for comment.
“The letter isn’t perfect, but the spirit is right: we need to slow down until we better understand the ramifications,” said Gary Marcus, an emeritus professor at New York University who signed the letter.
“They can cause serious harm … 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.”
Source: Reuters
Some of the signatories:
Yoshua Bengio, University of Montréal, Turing Laureate for developing deep learning, head of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms
Stuart Russell, Berkeley, Professor of Computer Science, director of the Center for Intelligent Systems, and co-author of the standard textbook “Artificial Intelligence: a Modern Approach”
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, Tesla & Twitter
Steve Wozniak, Co-founder, Apple
Yuval Noah Harari, Author and Professor, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Andrew Yang, Forward Party, Co-Chair, Presidential Candidate 2020, NYT Bestselling Author, Presidential Ambassador of Global Entrepreneurship
Connor Leahy, CEO, Conjecture
Jaan Tallinn, Co-Founder of Skype, Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, Future of Life Institute
Evan Sharp, Co-Founder, Pinterest
Chris Larsen, Co-Founder, Ripple
Emad Mostaque, CEO, Stability AI
Valerie Pisano, President & CEO, MILA
John J Hopfield, Princeton University, Professor Emeritus, inventor of associative neural networks
Rachel Bronson, President, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Max Tegmark, MIT Center for Artificial Intelligence & Fundamental Interactions, Professor of Physics, president of Future of Life Institute
Anthony Aguirre, University of California, Santa Cruz, Executive Director of Future of Life Institute, Professor of Physics
Victoria Krakovna, DeepMind, Research Scientist, co-founder of Future of Life Institute
Emilia Javorsky, Physician-Scientist & Director, Future of Life Institute
Sean O’Heigeartaigh, Executive Director, Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk
Tristan Harris, Executive Director, Center for Humane Technology
Marc Rotenberg, Center for AI and Digital Policy, President
Nico Miailhe, The Future Society (TFS), Founder and President
Zachary Kenton, DeepMind, Senior Research Scientist
Ramana Kumar, DeepMind, Research Scientist
Gary Marcus, New York University, AI researcher, Professor Emeritus
Steve Omohundro, Beneficial AI Research, CEO
Luis Moniz Pereira, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, Professor Emeritus, Doctor Honoris Causa T.U. Dresden, Fellow of EurAI, Fellow AAIA
Carles Sierra, Director Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, IIIA-CSIC; President of the European Association of AI, EurAI., Research Professor of the CSIC, EurAI Fellow
Ramon Lopez De Mantaras, Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, Research Professor, Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Award of the AAAI, EurAI Fellow, National Research Prize in Mathematics of the Spanish Government
Mark Nitzberg, Center for Human-Compatible AI, UC Berkeley, Executive Directer
Gianluca Bontempi, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Full Professor in Machine Learning, Cohead of the ULB Machine Learning Group
Daniel Schwarz, Metaculus, CTO, Metaculus
Nicholas Saparoff, Software Architect, Founder of ByteSphere Technologies and Phenome.AI
Alessandro Perilli, Synthetic Work, AI Researcher
Matt Mahoney, Hutter Prize Committee, Retired data scientist, Developed PAQ and ZPAQ, large text benchmark to evaluate language models using compression
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