The danger that advanced AI systems ‘can pose profound risks to society and humanity’ has prompted key figures in artificial intelligence to call for training of powerful AI systems to be suspended.
The warning is contained in an open letter from the Future of Life Institute, a not-for-profit organisation which says its mission is to ‘steer transformative technologies away from extreme, large-scale risks and towards benefiting life’.
Twitter chief Elon Musk is among the letter’s signatories, who want training of AIs above a certain capacity to be halted for at least six months, according to the BBC.
The letter asks AI labs ‘to immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4’.
If such a delay cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium, it says.
‘New and capable regulatory authorities dedicated to AI’ would also be needed.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and some researchers at DeepMind have also signed the letter.
The BBC reports that OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, recently released GPT-4 – a state-of-the-art technology, which has impressed observers with its ability to do tasks such as answering questions about objects in images.
The Future of Life Institute and the signatories of its letter want development to be halted temporarily at that level, warning in their letter of the risks future, more advanced systems might pose.
‘AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity,’ the letter warns.
It says that advanced AIs need to be developed with care, but instead, ‘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 letter warns that AIs could flood information channels with misinformation, and replace jobs with automation.
The BBC notes that the letter follows a recent report from investment bank Goldman Sachs which said that while AI was likely to increase productivity, millions of jobs could become automated.
[Image: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay]