Key highlights
- Top tech founders including Elon Musk and co-founder of Apple Steve Wozniak are seeking to halt further research into powerful AI.
- They said AI now poses a great risk to society and humanity even as it competes with humans at general tasks.
- According to the petitioners, powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.
Moves to stop further research into AI more powerful than OpenAI’s latest ChatGPT-4 are gaining momentum as Elon Musk and 1,376 other stakeholders in the global tech industry have signed a petition to that effect.
The petition
Titled “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter”, the petition is being pushed by top tech founders and CEOs, AI labs, and members of academics, among others. Tesla and SpaceX CEO, Musk was the third to sign the petition after Founder and Scientific Director at Mila and professor at the University of Montreal, Yoshua Bengio, and Berkeley, Professor of Computer Science, and director of the Center for Intelligent Systems, Stuart Russell.
Apple’s Co-founder, Steve Wozniak, is number 4 on the list of the petition’s signees.
Grounds for the petition: One of the grounds of the petition is that AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research and acknowledged by top AI labs.
- “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,” the petition stated.
- “Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete, and replace us?
- “Should we risk the loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. This confidence must be well justified and increase with the magnitude of a system’s potential effects.
- “Therefore, we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.”
The petitioners said they align with OpenAI’s recent statement regarding artificial general intelligence, which states that “At some point, it may be important to get an 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.”
What you should know
AI labs and independent experts are advised to use the ‘pause’ moment to jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts.
- “These protocols should ensure that systems adhering to them are safe beyond a reasonable doubt. This does not mean a pause on AI development in general, merely stepping back from the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities,” the petition added.
OpenAI recently launched the higher version of its popular chatbot, ChatGPT-4 with higher capacity than the first version, which Elon Musk earlier described as “scary good”, while noting that the world was not far from “dangerously strong AI.” Musk also observed that AI is ‘one of the biggest risks to civilization and needs to be regulated.
