By Andrea Hargraves 
A group of tech industry experts and leaders, including Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, have shared an open letter calling for a six-month pause in developing AI experiences that want to copy and improve the GPT-4 experience. It is the latest OpenAI AI Lab prototype that ChatGPT uses to produce text, program and analyze images like a human. Elon Musk was part of the founding group in 2015.
“[Estes] Strong AI systems should only be developed when we are confident that their effects will be positive and that their risks will be manageable,” the open letter states, published This Wednesday by the Institute for the Future of Life (Institute for the Future of Life, in free translation into Portuguese), a non-profit organization that works to reduce the risks of using new AI systems. In recent years, there has been a lot of writing on autonomous weapons.”
“We call on all AI labs to immediately stop, for at least six months, building AI systems that are stronger than GPT-4. Such a halt must be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such cannot be enacted, This moratorium quickly, governments must intervene and put a moratorium on it,” the co-signatories urged.
Specific risks with technology like GPT-4 include mass production of fake news and high unemployment. Should we let machines flood our media channels with propaganda and lies? Should we automate all jobs, including those that make people happy? Are some of the questions raised by the letter.
The statement comes days after the European Police Office (Europol). alerted For potential misuse of large language models such as ChatGPT in disinformation and criminal schemes Connected.
these The models are trained on huge databases to find patterns in the strings and figure out the best word to continue the idea. The architecture was behind this technology subscriber It was first reported by researchers at Alphabet (the parent company of Google) in a 2017 academic paper.
In recent months, many companies have developed tools similar to ChatGPT. a program of Snapchat messages came under fire after the launch of a Chat bot For young people who helped youngsters lie to their parents and gave advice on how to hide the smell of alcohol and drugs.
Society has paused the use of other technologies with potentially catastrophic effects on society. We can do it here,” concludes The Future of Life Message, giving the example of eugenics, the practice aimed at improving the human race by selecting for or eliminating certain hereditary characteristics that served as the basis for racial politics in the twentieth century.
By 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday, the letter had already been signed by more than 1,120 people. In addition to musk and Wozniak Among the co-signatories are British computer scientist Stuart Russell and a Canadian Joshua Benview, Known for his work with artificial neural networks (algorithms that mimic the human brain). Many experts from DeepMind (Google’s artificial intelligence company) also signed the document.
So far, none of the OpenAI executives have signed the letter. PÚBLICO contacted the lab for more information, but had not received a response at the time of this article’s publication.
Institute for the future of life is sponsored Largely by the Musk Foundation, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and Founders Pledge, an effective altruistic group based in London. This is a philosophical movement that calls for donations and support to be distributed based on evidence of where it will lead to the best benefit.
Elon Musk left the board of directors of OpenAI in 2018. During the time he supported the lab, he gave about $100 million (nearly €92 million) to develop various projects. In recent months, he has been complaining about the fact that OpenAI — initially a non-profit organization — has morphed into a for-profit company.