By Hélio Costa Jr
Technology executives, including Elon Musk, co-founder of Tesla and SpaceX, and Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, called in a letter released Wednesday (29) for artificial intelligence labs to suspend the development of new systems for at least six months.
The document “Pause Giant Experiments in AI” was released by Future of Life, an institution that has Musk among its biggest funders, and has been signed by dozens of other tech executives.
The letter states that AI systems with intelligence competitive with human intelligence can offer profound risks to society and humanity.
The letter’s signatories recommend that the development of systems more advanced than GPT-4 is halted immediately and that the pause last until a global protocol for using this technology is created.
They also call for governments to act to “institute a moratorium” on the experiments.
The signatories’ concern is that the ability of robots to write computer code with “human sophistication” could generate dangerous autonomy.
“Contemporary AI systems are becoming competitive in general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and falsehood?”
“Should we automate all jobs, including the satisfying ones?”
“Should we develop non-human minds that eventually outnumber, outsmart, and replace us? Should we risk losing control of our civilization?”
“Such decisions should not be delegated to unelected technological leaders.”
“Powerful AI systems should be developed only when we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks manageable.”
The letter cites a recent comment from OpenAI, the company developing the GPT Chat:
“At some point, it may be important to get an independent review before starting to train future systems and for more advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of computation used to create new models.”
“That point is now,” the letter states.
“Therefore, we urge all AI labs to immediately pause for at least six months training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”
“This pause must be public and verifiable and include all key players. Governments should institute a moratorium if such a pause cannot be enacted quickly.”
The topic of artificial intelligence has become public in recent months after systems like ChatGPT, which mimics speech, and Midjourney, which develops perfect images based on text, were delivered to the consumer market.
Musk is an advocate and, at the same time, a critic of AIs, having already warned about the risks to the population.
With information from Brasil Sem Medo