Musk, Wozniak, join thousands calling for AI slowdown

More than 1,000 artificial intelligence experts, researchers and backers, including Musk and Wozniak, sign an open letter calling for an immediate pause on the creation of ‘giant’ AIs for at least six months, so the capabilities and dangers of systems such as GPT-4 can be properly studied and mitigated.

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…Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable…

We agree [with Sam Altman that 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.] That point is now.

If researchers will not voluntarily pause their work on AI models more powerful than GPT-4, the letter’s benchmark for “giant” models, then “governments should step in”, the authors say.

“This does not mean a pause on AI development in general, merely a stepping back from the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities

[Link to letter]