Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak call for moratorium on advanced artificial intelligence – deadline

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Twitter and Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Apple co-founder 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 urges tech companies to stop training AI systems that will be more powerful than the latest major language processing system known as GPT-4. According to Fortune magazine, AI power tends to correlate with the model’s size and the number of specialized computer chips needed to train it.

Musk has been outspoken about concerns about unlimited AI’s threat to humanity and was an original co-founder of the OpenAI nonprofit research lab in 2015. He parted ways with that company in 2018 and has since been critical of the company’s acceptance of billions of dollars in investment from Microsoft.

Other signatories to the open letter include Emad Mostaque, founder and CEO of Stability AI, and Connor Leahy, CEO of Conjecture. Evan Sharp, a co-founder of Pinterest, and Chris Larson, a co-founder of the cryptocurrency company Ripple, have also signed on.

Large basic models are often trained on large amounts of text, images and videos taken from the internet and can perform many tasks without specific training. ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s Bard are powered by the models.

The potential of these systems has struck fear in many who fear the potential for job losses, and is the subject of the Writers Guild of America’s ongoing contract negotiations with AMPTP. Earlier this month, the WGA said its proposal to regulate the use of material produced using artificial intelligence or similar technologies seeks to ensure that companies cannot use AI to undermine authors’ work standards, including compensation, residuals, separate rights and credits.

Read the open letter signed by Musk and Wozniak here.