The Future of Life Institute has submitted an open letter citing experts, including Elon Musk, on the potential risks associated with conducting ‘giant’ Artificial Intelligence (AI) experiments.
The letter[1] calls for a six-month pause to assess the potential risks prior to conducting any further AI experimentation.
Elon Musk has been outspoken about the risks of AI for years. Who recalls the creepy Joe Rogan podcast?
When asked about the risks, he went still before ominously saying:
“I tried to convince people to slow down AI, to regulate AI. This was futile. I tried for years. Nobody listened. Nobody listened. Nobody listened.”
Yes, he repeated it thrice.
Recently, the world’s richest man took aim at Bill Gates.
Musk, who co-founded OpenAI back in 2015 and left the board three years later, said Gates had a “limited understanding of AI”.
The Future of Life Institute said AI systems with “human competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity.”
The institute raises several vital questions, such as:
Moreover, the team of researchers believe AI companies, such as OpenAI, are not prioritising the research and contingency plans required should AI get out of hand.
Soon after unveiling GPT-4, OpenAI said it’s important to get independent review “at some point”, with the institute replying:
We agree. That point is now.
The institute, along with the experts who support the petition, now calls on all AI labs “to immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”
OpenAI, however, says its mission has always been to ensure that “artificial general intelligence (AGI) – AI systems that are generally smarter than humans – benefits all of humanity.”
AGI, according to OpenAI, has the “potential to give everyone incredible new capabilities,” and describes it as a “great force multiplier for human ingenuity and creativity.”
However, if misused, AGI, could cause social disruption.
Signatories who support the petition include:
However, the petition might have come too late, and we are already in the middle of a full-fledged AI war as Microsoft and Google compete for dominance in the market.
Microsoft recently incorporated GPT-4 in its Bing Search Engine, while Google created a ChatGPT competitor named Bard.
Back in 2020, Future of Life warned that the “emergence of AI promises dramatic changes in our economic and social structures”.
At the time, the institute said the experts who signed the petition have been involved in core technologies for decades, and they would like to emphasise one point:
“While it is difficult to forecast exactly how or how fast technological progress will occur, it is easy to predict that it will occur.
“It is imperative, then, to consider AI not just as it is now, represented largely by a few particular classes of data-driven machine learning systems, but in the forms, it is likely to take.”
That was two years and the legislation governing the advancements is yet to be implemented.
[1] Future of Life Institute, Open Letter
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