Elon Musk, along with a group of AI experts and tech executives, have urged top AI labs to temporarily pause development of AI systems more advanced than GPT-4, in an open letter published Tuesday.
The open letter, issued by non profit the Future of Life Institute, counts around 1000 signatories including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, and Sapiens author Yuval Noah Hararias well as Musk. It calls for an immediate pause in training of systems for at least six months, which must be public, verifiable and include all public actors.
“AI systems with human-competetive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity as shown by extensive research and acknowledged by top AI labs,” the letter started with.
The open letter comes a couple of weeks after the public debut of OpenAI’s GPT-4, which is the large language model that powers ChatGPT. It is also the most advanced AI system to ever exist, which has managed to both stun and spook AI experts with its capabilities.
“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,” the letter says. “Unfortunately, this level of planning and management is not happening, even though recent months have seen AI labs 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.”
OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
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