Elon Musk & Co: GPT-5 (And Other Powerful AI) Must Be Stopped

A letter was just released to pause giant AI experiments. Here’s what this means and my take on the topic.

Some of the big names in the tech industry like Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and Jaan Tallinn have signed an open letter published last Tuesday to “Pause Giant AI Experiments.”

The letter was released by the Future of Life Institute and is a call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.

Here are 3 main key points in the letter that I’d like to discuss with all of you in this article. This will help us understand the current state of AI and what might be waiting for us in the future.

1. “Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth”

The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 unleashed an AI race. Recently Google launched Bard, many AI tools were released and even the GPT model was upgraded (before than expected).

It seems that there’s pressure to deploy better AI technology nowadays.

A leaked audio recording from Microsoft’s VP might reveal that: “The pressure from [CTO] Kevin [Scott] and [CEO] Satya [Nadella] is very, very high to take these most recent OpenAI models and the ones that come after them and move them into customers hands at a very high speed.”

This AI race goes against the Asilomar AI Principles, which says that “AI should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources.”

Unfortunately, things don’t look good as Microsoft laid off the team that taught employees how to make AI tools responsibly. Although Microsoft still maintains an active Office of Responsible AI, employees said the ethics and society team ensured that the company’s responsible AI principles were actually reflected in the design of the products that ship.

But the AI race isn’t exclusive to big tech companies like Microsoft and Google, lately, more and more companies are trying to integrate AI into their products.

It doesn’t matter what your product is, it needs AI.

As the letter signed by many tech leaders says, it seems that AI labs have locked in a race to deploy powerful digital minds that not even their creator can understand, predict or reliably control.

2. “Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones?”

AI systems might threaten many jobs in the future. In fact, there’s a recent study by OpenAI that might give us a good idea of what jobs might be replaced by AI soon.

But this isn’t something exclusive to jobs. The fear of the Future of Life Institute lies in how AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks.

In the letter, they encourage us to ask ourselves the following questions:

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?

Obviously, we should not.

We must have control of the technology we develop. The problem is that currently, this isn’t up to us. The decisions on how AI develops are delegated by a small group of tech leaders.

In one of OpenAI’s recent statements, they say that their mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity. To keep this promise, OpenAI should get independent review before training future systems. Unfortunately, it’s still unclear when that day will come.

The sooner public standards and external audits are set on AI labs, the safer we can feel about new AI advancements.

3. “Let’s enjoy a long AI summer, not rush unprepared into a fall”

The AI summer we’re living in is due to the benefits that AI tools like ChatGPT have brought to our lives. That said, the same AI tech we love might become our ultimate downfall if we don’t prepare for what more advanced AI systems could do in the coming future.

In a recent paper, Microsoft claimed that GPT-4 showed ‘sparks’ of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). For those unfamiliar with the AGI, this is the ability to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can do.

That wasn’t supposed to happen that soon.

Although some claimed that the term AGI was used as a clickbait in the paper, this still raises some inevitable questions.

What if GPT-5 actually shows more than ‘sparks’ of AGI? What if GPT-5 can’t be reliably controlled? Are we prepared for this?

I hope so.

We only know one thing for sure. If AI advancements are made responsibly, we all will enjoy a very long AI summer. If not, we all (not only the decision-makers) will have to face the consequences.

I’m not sure whether there’s something else behind this 6-month pause asked in the letter, but at least now the responsible AI practices topic is on the table.

Currently, the signatories list is paused due to high demand. For more info about this letter, click here.

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