Elon Musk called to suspend the training of new artificial intelligence systems “because of the threat to society”

According to Forbes magazine, the richest businessman in the world, Elon Musk, together with a group of technological experts, called for the suspension of the training of new artificial intelligence systems because of the possible threat that training models can pose to society. The letter was published by the Future of Life Institute, an American non-profit organization financed by Musk, and signed by more than a thousand people.

The text states that artificial intelligence systems can change the development of humanity and must be managed with attention and resources commensurate with the scale. “Powerful artificial intelligence systems should be developed only when we are sure that the effects of their work will be positive and the risks manageable,” the text says.

The authors note that modern AI systems are capable of competing with humans in solving a wide range of tasks, so humanity must decide whether jobs should be fully automated, whether people should risk “loss of control over civilization” and whether people should develop systems that will be smarter than people and make a person “hopelessly obsolete”.

The appeal states that such decisions should not be trusted to the leaders of the technological industry, who were not elected by anyone. The signatories propose to suspend for six months the development of any artificial intelligence systems more powerful than the GPT-4 model, developed by the OpenAI company, which has already been released for work in the public space.

Among the signatories of the text are well-known scientists in the field of artificial intelligence, the Canadian Joshua Bengio and the British Stuart Russell. In addition, there are developers of AI systems competing with OpenAI products. Musk himself was a co-founder of this company, but left it in 2018 and later sold his shares.