Is Elon Musk Asking for an Artificial Intelligence Halt?

Twitter CEO Elon Musk is asking for an artificial intelligence halt to more information inside

In an open letter highlighting potential threats to society, Elon Musk and a group of artificial intelligence specialists and business executives are urging a six-month halt to the development of systems more potent than OpenAI's recently released GPT-4. In this article, we have explained Elon Musk asking for an artificial intelligence halt.

The GPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) AI program, which has dazzled users by engaging them in human-like conversation, creating songs, and summarising lengthy texts, was updated earlier this month by Microsoft-backed OpenAI.

The Future of Life Institute's letter stated that "powerful AI systems should only be developed after we are convinced that their benefits will be good and their hazards will be manageable."

According to the European Union's transparency register, the non-profit is principally supported by the Musk Foundation, together with the London-based organization Founders Pledge and Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

Musk admitted earlier this month that "AI freaks me out." Musk helped build the leading AI company OpenAI, and his vehicle company Tesla (TSLA.O) incorporates AI in its autopilot technology.

Musk has sought a regulatory authority to ensure that AI development serves the public interest. Musk has expressed displeasure over regulators who have been dismissive of efforts to control the autopilot system.

Elon Musk's participation is "extremely hypocritical" considering how Tesla has resisted taking responsibility for the AI flaws in its self-driving cars, according to James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell University.

A pause is a good idea, but the letter is ambiguous and downplays the regulatory issues.

Since U.S. regulators stated the driver assistance system might lead to crashes, Tesla last month had to recall more than 362,000 U.S. vehicles to update software. Musk responded by tweeting that the term "recall" for an over-the-air software update is "anachronistic and plain flat wrong!"

'Outnumber, Outsmart, Obsolete'

A request for the response to the open letter, which recommended a halt to advanced AI development until shared safety norms were defined by independent experts and asked developers to collaborate with policymakers on governance, went unanswered by OpenAI right away.

"Do we allow machines to saturate our news channels with misinformation and propaganda? Should we create non-human minds that could one day outnumber, smarter, replace, and supersede us?" Such decisions "must not be outsourced to unelected tech executives," the letter demanded.

More than 1,000 people, including Musk, signed the letter. OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman was not one of the signatories to the letter. The CEOs of Alphabet and Microsoft, Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella, were not signatories either.

Emad Mostaque, the CEO of Stability AI, DeepMind researchers, Yoshua Bengio, who is sometimes described as one of the "godfathers of AI," and Stuart Russell, a pioneer in the field of AI research, were co-signatories.

Concerns regarding ChatGPT's effects on national security and education have drawn the attention of American lawmakers. The European Union's police agency, Europol, issued a warning on Monday about possible system abuse in phishing scams, false information, and crimes.

The UK government announced suggestions for an "adaptable" legal framework for artificial intelligence in the meanwhile.

AI Race

Gary Marcus, a professor at New York University who signed the letter, stated that while it wasn't flawless, "the letter's ethos is correct: we need to slow down until we better grasp the repercussions."

The major parties are acting with greater secrecy, which makes it difficult for society to protect itself from potential dangers.

Since it was released last year, Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL.O) and other businesses have accelerated the development of comparable big language models in response to OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Investors who are leery of depending on just one business are warming up to OpenAI's rivals.

Alphabet did not answer calls or emails seeking comment on the letter, while Microsoft declined to comment on the letter.

Professor at Brown University and former assistant director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Suresh Venkatasubramanian said, "A lot of the power to create these systems has been constantly in the hands of few businesses that have the means to achieve it."