Elon Musk Leads Joins Over 1,000 Experts Calling for Pause on Advanced AI Development

Twitter CEO Elon Musk has joined dozens of artificial intelligence (AI) experts and industry executives in signing an open letter calling on all AI labs to “immediately pause” training of systems more powerful than Chat GPT-4 for at least six months. The letter, issued by the non-profit Future of Life Institute, has been signed by more than 1,100 individuals, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Stability AI founder and CEO Emad Mostaque, and engineers from Meta and Google, among others. They argue that AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose “profound risks to society and humanity,” and change the “history of life on Earth,” citing extensive research on the issue and acknowledgments by “top AI labs.” Experts go on to state that there is currently limited planning and management regarding Advanced AI systems despite companies in recent months being “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.” “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 loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders,” the letter states.