Supervisor Elham AbolFateh
Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

Elon Musk Warns of Artificial Intelligence ... Threat to Society


Wed 29 Mar 2023 | 11:42 PM
Taarek Refaat

Twitter CEO Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak are among a number of known entrepreneurs to an open letter asking artificial Intelligence (AI) Labs to halt development immediately, for at least six months, according to Rueters.

The letter, posted on the Future of Life Institute's website, claims that AI Labs are "caught in an out-of-control race to develop more powerful digital minds that no one - not even their creators - can understand, predict, or reliably control."

They called for a pause on training any AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, OpenAI's latest large language model (LLM), which powers the popular ChatGPT chatbot.

The letter, published on Wednesday, coincided with the release of a separate report from Goldman Sachs, which estimated that 300 million full-time jobs could be exposed to generative AI globally.

The explosion of interest in AI started by the likes of ChatGPT and DALL-E, the image generator, has raised many questions about the ethics and impact of powerful new tools.

Even Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, has raised the alarm several times about the sudden rise of AI, recently stating that the world may not be far from potential AI tools.

Responding to this warning at the time, some AI experts told Euronews that instead of "scary" apps being around, we currently live in a "dystopian present" thanks to the proliferation of AI.

Sam Altman says "potentially frightening" artificial intelligence is on the horizon. This is what keeps AI experts up at night

Today, “in many ways, this is really where we are,” said Sarah Myers-West, managing director of the AI Now Institute, with AI systems exacerbating 'longstanding patterns of inequality' particularly in areas such as job demands and education. 

The open letter, which was released on March 28, had 1,123 signatures at the time this article was published, including author Yuval Noah Harari and Turing Award winner Yoshua.