Elon Musk made waves in March when he called for a halt to the development of artificial intelligence, joining hundreds of prominent tech figures in signing an open letter warning of the dangers of advanced artificial intelligence.
But he never thought anyone would answer the call, it seems.
“Well, I mean, I didn’t think anyone would actually agree to a pause, but I thought, for the record, I just want to say, ‘I think we should pause,'” said the Tesla CEO. said yesterday in VivaTech technology conference in France.
took a lot letter Seriously, of course, including its signatories and critics. It warned of dire consequences for humanity from advanced artificial intelligence, and called for a six-month pause on development of anything more advanced than OpenAI’s GPT-4 chatbot.
Among the critics was Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, a US senator Mike Roundsand even Jeffrey Hinton — the “godfather of artificial intelligence” who left Google this year to sound the alarm about the technology he did too much to advance.
Hinton, like the others, felt the call for a pause was nonsensical because “the research would happen in China if it didn’t happen here,” to explain to NPR.
“It’s kind of a teamwork problem,” agreed Google CEO Sundar Pichai. hard fork Podcast in March, saying the people behind the letter “probably intended it as a conversation starter.”
Aidan Gomez, CEO of $2 billion AI startup Cohere, Tell the financial times This week that the call “wasn’t reasonably doable.” He added, “To spend all of our time debating whether our species is on the verge of extinction due to the takeover of AI’s superintelligence is an absurd use of our time and the mind of the public.”
However, Musk said yesterday: “For the first time, there will be something smarter than the smartest human being — like way smarter than the smartest human being.” He warned of a “potentially catastrophic outcome” if humanity is not “eager to create artificial general intelligence”.
The world’s richest person has reiterated his call for strong regulation around technology, calling advanced artificial intelligence a “danger to the public.” He added that the most likely outcome with AI is positive, but “that’s not every possible outcome, so we need to reduce the possibility that something will go wrong.”
He added that if there really was “some kind of AI apocalypse,” he still wanted to be alive to see it.
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