A group of prominent individuals including Elon Musk (CEO of SpaceX, Tesla & Twitter) ,Yoshua Bengio (Founder and Scientific Director at Mila), Stuart Russell (Berkeley, Professor of Computer Science), Steve Wozniak (Co-founder, Apple) and many others have signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on the development of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. They believe that AI systems with human-competitive intelligence pose profound risks to society and humanity, and that a lack of planning and management could lead to an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one can understand, predict, or reliably control.
During this six-month pause, the signatories recommend that AI labs and independent experts jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts. These protocols should ensure that systems adhering to them are safe beyond a reasonable doubt. AI research and development should be refocused on making today’s powerful, state-of-the-art systems more accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy, and loyal.
In addition, the signatories call for policymakers to dramatically accelerate the development of robust AI governance systems, which should 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, 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 that AI will cause.
The signatories believe that humanity can enjoy a flourishing future with AI if we take the necessary precautions. They urge AI labs and policymakers to take a step back from the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities and to work together to ensure that the development of advanced AI systems is safe and beneficial for all.