Twitter and Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak are among the more than 1,100 signatories of an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on the development of advanced AI systems.
The letter calls on all AI labs to immediately pause, for at least 6 months, the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, citing the risk of creating nonhuman minds that could eventually outsmart humans.
It also said that AI labs have become locked in an “out-of-control” race to develop “ever more powerful digital minds” that cannot be understood or controlled even by their creators.
Other signatories to the open letter include Emad Mostaque, the founder and CEO of Stability AI, and Connor Leahy, the CEO of Conjecture. Evan Sharp, a cofounder of Pinterest, and Chris Larson, a cofounder of cryptocurrency company Ripple, have also signed.
Large foundation models are often trained on large amounts of text, images, and videos culled from the internet and can perform many tasks without specific training.
ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s Bard are powered by the models.
“Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,” reads the open letter, posted on the website of Future of Life Institute, a non-profit.
It added, “Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?”
