Elon Musk-led petition to halt AI development divides tech community

Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak have signed an open letter signed by more than 2,600 technology industry leaders and researchers. The open letter called for a temporary moratorium on future artificial intelligence (AI) development.

The petition shared concerns that AI, with intelligence that rivals humans, could pose serious dangers to society and humanity. It called on all AI companies to “immediately stop” developing AI systems stronger than Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 (GPT-4) for at least six months. GPT-4 is a multimodal large-scale language model created by OpenAI, his fourth in the GPT series.

The petition has a lot of support, but it has divided the larger tech community over the suspension of development. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong was one of many public figures to speak out against the petition.

Armstrong tweet, “Commissions and bureaucracies don’t solve anything,” he said. He added that there are no designated “experts” to decide on the issue, and that not everyone in the tech industry has agreed with the petition.

Armstrong reminded us that while new technology comes with some risks, the goal is to keep moving forward. He added that centralization in decision-making does nothing.

“Don’t let fear stop your progress and beware of anyone trying to seize central power,” Armstrong tweeted.

LA Times columnist Brian Merchant called The Musk-led petition is a “post-apocalyptic AI hype carnival.” He added that many of the concerns expressed are about the “robot work apocalypse.”

Satvik Sethi, former Web3 executive at Mastercard, said: called The petition is a “non-proliferation treaty for AI.” He notes that many of the popular signatories on the list have deep and personal vested interests in the AI ​​space and are probably “trying to delay their opponents so they can move on. “