Elon Musk signs open letter to “pause” AI development

The AI development race has caused concern from tech giants, including Elon Musk. A new open letter is calling for a “pause” on new advancements, co-signed by the Twitter owner.

AI development has grown exponentially since the launch of a public version of GPT-3 and its viral application, ChatGPT. Microsoft increased its investment and has rolled out OpenAI’s GPT to its Office and Bing software suites. Google hastily launched Bard, and the rat race for the top of the pile doesn’t stop there.

However, despite the large number of people who are seeking to improve artificial intelligence daily, resistance has cropped up in recent weeks. Now, Elon Musk has joined multiple other tech giants and visionaries in calling for a “pause” in development due to concerns that AI labs could be going too far.

Others on the list of signatures include Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and leading researchers Yoshua Bengio, the head of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, and Stuart Russell, director of the Center for Intelligent Systems.

The letter comes with research and sources to back up its claims that AI could “pose profound risks to society and humanity”.

A crux of the letter’s reasoning for pausing development on AI passed GPT-4’s newfound skills is that a lack of “planning and management”. The open letter claims that this hasn’t taken place and that the ability to “reliably control” the ongoing advancements.

ChatGPT’s latest version has recently been studied. It was revealed that in a testing environment, it provided 100/100 false narratives when prompted to do so.

Musk vs AI

OpenAI

Musk originally was a major player in OpenAI, investing a large sum of cash before being ousted after an attempted takeover. This has included very public criticisms of OpenAI’s Microsoft partnership. He has even recently butted heads with Bill Gates over his understanding of AI.

His subsequent attempts to bring AI to the masses haven’t been successful either. Tesla’s autonomous driving is still considered dangerous by some, due to the ongoing crashes. Musk’s other venture, Neuralink, plans to utilize a concept like AI via a brain implant.

Neuralink hasn’t been successful, having been recently prevented from human testing after multiple monkeys allegedly were abused or died during testing.