Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla. Chesnot/Getty Images
Elon Musk made waves in March by calling for a moratorium on AI development and joining hundreds of other tech luminaries in signing an open letter warning of the dangers of advanced artificial intelligence.
But he didn’t think anyone would listen to his call.
“I mean, I didn’t think anyone would actually agree to the suspension, but I wanted to say for the record, ‘I think it should be suspended,'” said Tesla’s chief executive. CEO) told Vivatech Technology yesterday. Conference in France.
Of course, many people, including signatories and critics, took the letter seriously. He warned of the dire consequences of advanced AI for mankind and called for a six-month moratorium on development of anything more advanced than OpenAI’s GPT-4 chatbot.
Critics included Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, U.S. Senator Mike Roundes and even the “godfather of AI” Jeffrey Hinton, who left Google earlier this year.
Hinton, like others, felt the call for a moratorium didn’t make sense because, as he explained to NPR, “If the research isn’t done here, the research will be done in China.” was
“It’s kind of a collective action problem,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai agreed. hard fork A March podcast said the people behind the letter “probably intended it as a conversation starter.”
Aidan Gomez, CEO of $2 billion AI startup Cohere, said: financial times It said this week that the call was “not feasible”. He added, “It is a ridiculous use of our time and public mental space to spend all our time debating whether our species will be wiped out by a superintelligent AGI takeover.”
But Mr. Musk said yesterday, “For the first time, there will be someone smarter than the smartest man, just like, much smarter than the smartest man.” He warned that if mankind were not “cautious about creating artificial general intelligence,” it “could have catastrophic consequences.”
The world’s richest man called advanced AI a “risk to the public” and repeated his call for stronger regulation of the technology. The most likely outcome with AI is positive, he added, but “that’s not all possible outcomes, so we need to minimize the chances of something going wrong.”
If there really were to be “some kind of AI apocalypse,” he added, he would want to live to see it.
