Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, thousands of experts call to stop advanced AI development: What risks do they see?

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and thousands of artificial intelligence (AI) experts and industry leaders are calling for an end to the development of advanced AI. They see serious risks for modern society in the very rapid development of AI.

In an open letter published by the Future of Life Institute, experts ask AI labs to stop training systems more powerful than OpenAI's GPT-4 for at least six months until there are shared security protocols. And if it is not possible to stop the teaching of AI quickly enough, the authorities of the countries "should step in and institute a moratorium."

"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?" the letter reads.

The authors of this letter argue that powerful AI systems can only be developed when we are confident that their impact will be positive and the risks—manageable.

As reported by Reuters, this letter was also signed by Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, researchers at Alphabet-owned DeepMind—owned by Alphabet, and AI heavyweights Yoshua Bengio, often referred to as one of the "godfathers of AI," and Stuart Russell, a pioneer of research in the field. You can see the full list of signed professionals at the bottom of the letter.

Moreover, Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella, CEOs of Alphabet and Microsoft, did not sign the letter. Sam Altman, chief executive at OpenAI, also was not among those who signed the letter.

"AI stresses me out," recently said Elon Musk, whose name is one of the first in the list of signatories under the letter.

Interestingly, he was one of the co-founders of ChatGPT and the new GPT-4 development company OpenAI, and his Tesla company is actively using AI in the autopilot system of its electric cars.

Some experts, including James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell University, consider Musk's behavior and his decision to sign the aforementioned open letter to be hypocritical, given how active he has been fighting the “against accountability for the defective AI in its self-driving cars."

Other specialists note that the letter is not perfect, it is written too abstractly and "doesn't take the regulatory problems seriously," but its message is correct. According to Gary Marcus, a professor at New York University who signed the letter, experts still have to wait until it becomes clear where this whole AI story might lead us.