Oliver Haslam·

Musk, Wozniak, More Agree AI Development Should Be Paused Following The Release Of GPT-4

It isn’t every day that we find a way to get Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk into a single headline but the pair have joined others in writing an open letter saying that AI development should pause following the release of GPT-4.

The open letter asks for a minimum of a six-month pause on development of anything more powerful than the GPT-4 AI, suggesting that anything beyond this could prove to be a profound risk to our society.

As stated in the widely-endorsed Asilomar AI Principles, 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. 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.

AI has already been accused of putting jobs at risk and that’s something that has been brought up in the letter, with the group asking “should we risk loss of control of our civilization?”

Thankfully, OpenAI, the outfit behind GPT, says that it knows it might need help in the future. “At some point, 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,” its statement on artificial general intelligence reads.

Alongside Musk and Woz, others include AI academics and senior executives at tech companies. These are people who know what they’re talking about, it seems.

You may also like to check out:

You can follow us on Twitter, or Instagram, and even like our Facebook page to keep yourself updated on all the latest from Microsoft, Google, Apple, and the Web.