Even Elon Musk Is Calling For a Pause in the AI Arms Race

It looks like even innovation has its limits, especially when the innovation in question could potentially change the face of humanity as we know it. For months, artificial intelligence has grown leaps and bounds, but as tech companies engage in an AI “arms race,” tech leaders are cautioning against the unmitigated dangers of AI should it continue to develop without regulation.

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Among the tech leaders concerned about AI is billionaire Elon Musk, who helped co-found Open AI, the creator of ChatGPT. A petition titled Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter has garnered over 1,3000 signatories from tech’s most influential people in the industry and in the academe. They collectively agree that artificial intelligence labs need to stop the training of powerful AI systems like ChatGPT for at least six months, or else face “profound risks to society and humanity.”

“Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable,” said the petition. “We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”

The petition cites the “out-of-control” AI arms race, claiming that the AI labs behind products like Chat-GPT have not thoroughly planned or managed their products, so much so that the petition adds that the labs can’t even control these “powerful digital minds.” As such, the petition recommends an immediate pause so experts can use the time to implement agreed-upon protocols that will, in essence, protect society. Should a pause not occur, the petition suggests that the U.S. government step in and enforce it.

“Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: 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? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders,” said the petition.

Among the signatories in the petition are Yoshua Bengio, Founder and Scientific Director at Mila, Turing Prize winner and professor at University of Montreal; Stuart Russell, Berkeley, Professor of Computer Science, director of the Center for Intelligent Systems, and co-author of the standard textbook “Artificial Intelligence: a Modern Approach; Jaan Tallinn, co-founder of Skype, Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, Future of Life Institute; Evan Sharp, co-founder of Pinterest; Craig Peters, CEO of Getty Images, and much more.

At the moment, the biggest players in the AI arms race are OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google, the former of which recently announced GPT-4, which is even stronger than its predecessor. If AI continues at this rate, it could draft laws and run the media for us. Countries like Singapore and China already have an AI governing body, so it’s about time the U.S. caught up.

“AI developers must work with policymakers to dramatically accelerate the development of robust AI governance systems. These should at a minimum include: new and capable regulatory authorities dedicated to AI; oversight and tracking of highly capable AI systems and large pools of computational capability; provenance and watermarking systems to help distinguish real from synthetic and to track model leaks; a robust auditing and certification ecosystem; liability for AI-caused harm; robust public funding for technical AI safety research; and well-resourced institutions for coping with the dramatic economic and political disruptions (especially to democracy) that AI will cause,” said the petition.

That’s not to say the petition and those who signed it are against AI—they’re only against the lack of regulation and policies guiding them. AI is the Gamechanger of the decade and it could potentially rewrite the future, but with proper oversight and regulation, that future doesn’t have to be as dystopian as we initially thought.