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Elon Musk and hundreds of world experts on Wednesday signed a call for a six-month pause in research into artificial intelligences more powerful than ChatGPT 4, the OpenAI model launched in mid-March, citing “major risks for humanity”.
In this petition published on futureoflife.org, they call for a moratorium until security systems are in place, including new dedicated regulatory authorities, monitoring of AI systems, techniques to help distinguish the real of the artificial and of the institutions capable of managing the “dramatic economic and political disruption (especially to democracy) that AI will cause“.
The petition brings together personalities who have already publicly expressed their fears of uncontrollable AI that would surpass humans, including Elon Musk, owner of Twitter and founder of SpaceX and Tesla, and Yuval Noah Harari, the author of “Sapiens”. .
Also a signatory, Yoshua Bengio, Canadian pioneer of AI, expressed his concerns, during a virtual press conference in Montreal: “I don’t think that society is ready to face up to this power, the potential for manipulation of populations, for example, which could endanger democracies“.
“We must therefore take the time to slow down this commercial race which is underway“, he added, calling for discussion of these issues at the global level, “as we did for energy and nuclear weapons“.
Sam Altman, boss of OpenAI, designer of chatGPT, himself admitted to being “a little bit scared” by his creation if it was used for “large-scale disinformation or cyberattacks“.
“Society needs time to adapt“, he told ABCNews in mid-March.
“The past few months have seen AI labs locked in an uncontrolled race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital brains, which no one — not even their creators — can reliably understand, predict or control.“, they say.
“Should we let the machines flood our information channels with propaganda and lies? Should we automate all jobs, including rewarding ones? Do we need to develop non-human minds that may one day be more numerous, smarter, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk losing control of our civilization? These decisions should not be delegated to unelected technology leaders“, they conclude.
The signatories also include Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, members of Google’s DeepMind AI lab, OpenAI competitor Stability AI boss Emad Mostaque, as well as AI experts and American academics, Microsoft executive engineers. , an OpenAI ally group.