More than 1,000 people, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk, have signed an open letter asking artificial intelligence labs to pause their work on AI systems for six months.
The letter is seeking an immediate six-month break or longer on any advanced AI systems that are more powerful than GPT-4, OpenAI's latest large language model that generates text.
The letter says that the progress seen in AI tools presents “profound risks to society and humanity.”
- Published by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute, the document argues that AI developers are “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."
- Pausing the development of AI tools more advanced than GPT-4, which has passed AP exams and the bar exam, will give time for experts to deploy “shared safety protocols” for AI, the letter says.
- Other high-profile signatories included entrepreneur and former U.S. presidential candidate Andrew Yang, AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio, Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, and MIT physicist and Future of Life Institute president Max Tegmark.
Meanwhile, GPT-4 has also already been powering Microsoft's Bing search engine.
- OpenAI, an AI research company, released the large language model earlier this month, noting that it accepts both text and images as input.
- Users can upload a photo and GPT-4 will respond with a text description or caption for what it "sees."
- GPT-4 is "still flawed, still limited, and it still seems more impressive on first use than it does after you spend more time with it," according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
