The CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk and Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak, has joined several other technology experts in calling for the temporary halt of Artificial Intelligence experimentation in a statement titled “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter,” with about 1,332 signatories of tech experts who called on AI labs to pause the training of advanced AI systems for at least six months.
The statement notes that Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, flooding information channels with propaganda and untruth, automating fulfilling jobs, developing nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace humans and a risk to loss of control of civilization.
They further argued that decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders and that the development of powerful AI systems should only be considered when their creators are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable which must be well justified and increase with the magnitude of a system’s potential effects.
The experts called on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, an AI software trained on a large text data which allows it generate human-like text.They reiterate that the pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors and if such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.
Elon Musk, who currently owns Twitter, announced new measures to curb the proliferation of AI bots on the social media platform and says that starting April 15th, only verified accounts will be eligible to be in ‘For You’ recommendations as this is the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over which is otherwise a hopeless losing battle.
