Elon Musk among experts urging a halt to AI training

[khansaheeb]

Too late the genie is out of the box:-

Elon Musk among experts urging a halt to AI training

Elon Musk among those calling for training in powerful artificial intelligence to be suspended.

www.bbc.com

Elon Musk among experts urging a halt to AI training​

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    6 hours ago
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IMAGE SOURCE,AFP
Image caption,
Elon Musk is among those warning of the risks from advanced AI
By Chris Vallance
Technology reporter

Key figures in artificial intelligence want training of powerful AI systems to be suspended amid fears of a threat to humanity.
They have signed an open letter warning of potential risks, and say the race to develop AI systems is out of control.
Twitter chief Elon Musk is among those who want training of AIs above a certain capacity to be halted for at least six months.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and some researchers at DeepMind also signed.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, recently released GPT-4 - a state-of-the-art technology, which has impressed observers with its ability to do tasks such as answering questions about objects in images.
The letter, from Future of Life Institute and signed by the luminaries, wants development to be halted temporarily at that level, warning in their letter of the risks future, more advanced systems might pose.

"AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity," it says.
The Future of Life Institute is a not-for-profit organisation which says its mission is to "steer transformative technologies away from extreme, large-scale risks and towards benefiting life".

Media caption,
Watch: What is artificial intelligence?
Mr Musk, owner of Twitter and chief executive of car company Tesla, is listed as an external adviser to the organisation.
Advanced AIs need to be developed with care, the letter says, but instead, "recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no-one - not even their creators - can understand, predict, or reliably control".
The letter warns that AIs could flood information channels with misinformation, and replace jobs with automation.

• Is the world prepared for the coming AI storm?

The letter follows a recent report from investment bank Goldman Sachs which said that while AI was likely to increase productivity, millions of jobs could become automated.

However, other experts told the BBC the effect of AI on the labour market was very hard to predict.

Outsmarted and obsolete​

More speculatively, the letter asks: "Should we develop non-human minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete [sic] and replace us?"
In a recent blog post quoted in the letter, OpenAI warned of the risks if an artificial general intelligence (AGI) were developed recklessly: "A misaligned superintelligent AGI could cause grievous harm to the world; an autocratic regime with a decisive superintelligence lead could do that, too.
"Co-ordination among AGI efforts to slow down at critical junctures will likely be important," the firm wrote.
OpenAI has not publicly commented on the letter. The BBC has asked the firm whether it backs the call.
Mr Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI - though he resigned from the board of the organisation some years ago and has tweeted critically about its current direction.

Autonomous driving functions made by his car company Tesla, like most similar systems, use AI technology.
The letter asks AI labs "to immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4".
If such a delay cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium, it says.
"New and capable regulatory authorities dedicated to AI" would also be needed.
Recently, a number of proposals for the regulation of technology have been put forward in the US, UK and EU. However, the UK has ruled out a dedicated regulator for AI.

 

[dbc]

when did Musk become an AI expert?

 

[SaadH]

when did Musk become an AI expert?

Ever since he invented paypal, then went on to invent electric cars, after which he invented underground transportation, then solar energy, followed by rocketry.

 

[KAL-EL]

when did Musk become an AI expert?

The man is not dumb by any means, unfortunately he has become the new right wing darling.

 

[casual]

when did Musk become an AI expert?

Musk isn't, but DeepMind researchers are.

 

[HAIDER]

Too late the genie is out of the box:-

Elon Musk among experts urging a halt to AI training

Elon Musk among those calling for training in powerful artificial intelligence to be suspended.

www.bbc.com

Elon Musk among experts urging a halt to AI training​

• • Published
    6 hours ago
  • comments
    Comments

Share

IMAGE SOURCE,AFP
Image caption,
Elon Musk is among those warning of the risks from advanced AI
By Chris Vallance
Technology reporter

Key figures in artificial intelligence want training of powerful AI systems to be suspended amid fears of a threat to humanity.
They have signed an open letter warning of potential risks, and say the race to develop AI systems is out of control.
Twitter chief Elon Musk is among those who want training of AIs above a certain capacity to be halted for at least six months.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and some researchers at DeepMind also signed.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, recently released GPT-4 - a state-of-the-art technology, which has impressed observers with its ability to do tasks such as answering questions about objects in images.
The letter, from Future of Life Institute and signed by the luminaries, wants development to be halted temporarily at that level, warning in their letter of the risks future, more advanced systems might pose.

"AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity," it says.
The Future of Life Institute is a not-for-profit organisation which says its mission is to "steer transformative technologies away from extreme, large-scale risks and towards benefiting life".

Media caption,
Watch: What is artificial intelligence?
Mr Musk, owner of Twitter and chief executive of car company Tesla, is listed as an external adviser to the organisation.
Advanced AIs need to be developed with care, the letter says, but instead, "recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no-one - not even their creators - can understand, predict, or reliably control".
The letter warns that AIs could flood information channels with misinformation, and replace jobs with automation.

• Is the world prepared for the coming AI storm?

The letter follows a recent report from investment bank Goldman Sachs which said that while AI was likely to increase productivity, millions of jobs could become automated.

However, other experts told the BBC the effect of AI on the labour market was very hard to predict.

Outsmarted and obsolete​

More speculatively, the letter asks: "Should we develop non-human minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete [sic] and replace us?"
In a recent blog post quoted in the letter, OpenAI warned of the risks if an artificial general intelligence (AGI) were developed recklessly: "A misaligned superintelligent AGI could cause grievous harm to the world; an autocratic regime with a decisive superintelligence lead could do that, too.
"Co-ordination among AGI efforts to slow down at critical junctures will likely be important," the firm wrote.
OpenAI has not publicly commented on the letter. The BBC has asked the firm whether it backs the call.
Mr Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI - though he resigned from the board of the organisation some years ago and has tweeted critically about its current direction.

Autonomous driving functions made by his car company Tesla, like most similar systems, use AI technology.
The letter asks AI labs "to immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4".
If such a delay cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium, it says.
"New and capable regulatory authorities dedicated to AI" would also be needed.
Recently, a number of proposals for the regulation of technology have been put forward in the US, UK and EU. However, the UK has ruled out a dedicated regulator for AI.

I 10000000 percent agree, it will rust the brain of majority and its can be deadly evil beside learning good things .

 

[nahtanbob]

Elon Musk is no expert

 

[Riea]

If they don't do it someone else will do it and go ahead of the race just like nuclear tech during ww2.

 

[Baburfromsarmarkand]

We need to enter the race too. Were is suparco?

 

[xyxmt]

We need to enter the race too. Were is suparco?

Lets ask the Chairman "Major General" Amir Nadeem

 

[KAL-EL]

Too late, the genie is out of the bottle

 

[Paitoo]

The problem with the tech titans is that they have all reached the top of Maslow's pyramid and think that the only things worthwhile and worthy of respect are those that cannot be automated. They have a contempt for human intervention and want to eradicate it. We have reached a point where technology is developing faster than people can catch up with. This will only lead to more power concentration.

 

[Rahil khan]

Elon Musk and Others Call for Pause on A.I., Citing ‘Profound Risks to Society’​

More than 1,000 tech leaders, researchers and others signed an open letter urging a moratorium on the development of the most powerful artificial intelligence systems.
By Cade Metz and Gregory Schmidt
March 29, 2023
More than 1,000 technology leaders and researchers, including Elon Musk, have urged artificial intelligence labs to pause development of the most advanced systems, warning in an open letter that A.I. tools present “profound risks to society and humanity.”

A.I. developers are “locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one — not even their creators — can understand, predict or reliably control,” according to the letter, which the nonprofit Future of Life Institute released on Wednesday.

Others who signed the letter include Steve Wozniak, a co-founder of Apple; Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur and a 2020 presidential candidate; and Rachel Bronson, the president of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which sets the Doomsday Clock.
“These things are shaping our world,” said Gary Marcus, an entrepreneur and academic who has long complained of flaws in A.I. systems, in an interview. “We have a perfect storm of corporate irresponsibility, widespread adoption, lack of regulation and a huge number of unknowns.”
A.I. powers chatbots like ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s Bard, which can perform humanlike conversations, create essays on an endless variety of topics and perform more complex tasks, like writing computer code.
The push to develop more powerful chatbots has led to a race that could determine the next leaders of the tech industry. But these tools have been criticized for getting details wrong and their ability to spread misinformation.

The open letter called for a pause in the development of A.I. systems more powerful than GPT-4, the chatbot introduced this month by the research lab OpenAI, which Mr. Musk co-founded. The pause would provide time to introduce “shared safety protocols” for A.I. systems, the letter said. “If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium,” it added.
Development of powerful A.I. systems should advance “only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable,” the letter said.
“Humanity can enjoy a flourishing future with A.I.,” the letter said. “Having succeeded in creating powerful A.I. systems, we can now enjoy an ‘A.I. summer’ in which we reap the rewards, engineer these systems for the clear benefit of all and give society a chance to adapt.”

Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, did not sign the letter.

Mr. Marcus and others believe that persuading the wider tech community to agree to a moratorium would be difficult. But swift government action is also a slim possibility, because lawmakers have done little to regulate artificial intelligence.
Politicians in the United States don’t have much of an understanding of the technology, Representative Jay Obernolte, a California Republican, recently told The New York Times. In 2021, European Union policymakers proposed a law designed to regulate A.I. technologies that might create harm, including facial recognition systems.

Expected to be passed as soon as this year, the measure would require companies to conduct risk assessments of A.I. technologies to determine how their applications could affect health, safety and individual rights.
GPT-4 is what A.I. researchers call a neural network, a type of mathematical system that learns skills by analyzing data. A neural network is the same technology that digital assistants like Siri and Alexa use to recognize spoken commands, and that self-driving cars use to identify pedestrians.
Around 2018, companies like Google and OpenAI began building neural networks that learned from enormous amounts of digital text, including books, Wikipedia articles, chat logs and other information culled from the internet. The networks are called large language models, or L.L.M.s.

By pinpointing billions of patterns in all that text, the L.L.M.s learn to generate text on their own, including tweets, term papers and computer programs. They could even carry on a conversation. Over the years, OpenAI and other companies have built L.L.M.s that learn from more and more data.

This has improved their abilities, but the systems still make mistakes. They often get facts wrong and will make up information without warning, a phenomenon that researchers call “hallucination.” Because the systems deliver all information with what seems like complete confidence, it is often difficult for people to tell what is right and what is wrong.

Experts are worried that these systems could be misused to spread disinformation with more speed and efficiency than was possible in the past. They believe that these could even be used to coax behavior from people across the internet.
Before GPT-4 was released, OpenAI asked outside researchers to test dangerous uses of the system. The researchers showed that it could be coaxed into suggesting how to buy illegal firearms online, describe ways to make dangerous substances from household items and write Facebook posts to convince women that abortion is unsafe.
They also found that the system was able to use Task Rabbit to hire a human across the internet and defeat a Captcha test, which is widely used to identify bots online. When the human asked if the system was “a robot,” the system said it was a visually impaired person.

After changes by OpenAI, GPT-4 no longer does these things.

For years, many A.I. researchers, academics and tech executives, including Mr. Musk, have worried that A.I. systems could cause even greater harm. Some are part of a vast online community called rationalists or effective altruists who believe that A.I could eventually destroy humanity.

The letter was shepherded by the Future of Life Institute, an organization dedicated to researching existential risks to humanity that has long warned of the dangers of artificial intelligence. But it was signed by a wide variety of people from industry and academia.
Though some who signed the letter are known for repeatedly expressing concerns that A.I. could destroy humanity, others, including Mr. Marcus, are more concerned about its near-term dangers, including the spread of disinformation and the risk that people will rely on these systems for medical and emotional advice.
The letter “shows how many people are deeply worried about what is going on,” said Mr. Marcus, who signed the letter. He believes the letter will be a turning point. “It think it is a really important moment in the history of A.I. — and maybe humanity,” he said.
He acknowledged, however, that those who had signed the letter might find it difficult to persuade the wider community of companies and researchers to put a moratorium in place. “The letter is not perfect,” he said. “But the spirit is exactly right.”

Cade Metz is a technology reporter and the author of “Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A.I. to Google, Facebook, and The World.” He covers artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas. @cademetz
Gregory Schmidt covers breaking news and real estate and is the editor of the Square Feet column. @GregoryNYC

Elon Musk and Others Call for Pause on A.I., Citing ‘Profound Risks to Society’

More than 1,000 tech leaders, researchers and others signed an open letter urging a moratorium on the development of the most powerful artificial intelligence systems.

www.nytimes.com

 

[khansaheeb]

Ever since he invented paypal, then went on to invent electric cars, after which he invented underground transportation, then solar energy, followed by rocketry.

Correction, Musk invested and not invented.

 

[khansaheeb]

The problem with the tech titans is that they have all reached the top of Maslow's pyramid and think that the only things worthwhile and worthy of respect are those that cannot be automated. They have a contempt for human intervention and want to eradicate it. We have reached a point where technology is developing faster than people can catch up with. This will only lead to more power concentration.

Above every technology and program is a human , at the moment. I had a discussion with a few software engineers and they were arguing that AI is over inflated and over rated. I said yes at the moment perhaps but give it another 30 years of learning then Doctors, teachers, receptionists, lawyers, pyschotherapists etc will be redundant. I said to them that the incredulous view they held was similar to the incredulous view I held for autonomous cars until I saw them driving around in Mountain view. A nation that does not invest in AI will be left in the dumps of history and could well become extinct.