Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak signed an open letter signed by more than 2,600 tech industry leaders and researchers. The open letter calls for a temporary moratorium on any further artificial intelligence (AI) development.
The petition expresses concern that artificial intelligence with human-competing intelligence could cause serious harm to society and humanity. It urges all AI companies to "immediately stop" developing AI systems more powerful 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 - the fourth in its GPT series.
The petition, while supported by many, has divided the larger tech community over the issue of halting development. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is one of many prominent figures opposing the petition. "Nothing is going to be solved by committees and bureaucracy," Armstrong said in a tweet, adding that there were no designated "experts" who could decide the issue and that not everyone in the tech industry agreed with the petition.
Armstrong said any new technology carries certain dangers, but the goal should be to keep moving forward. Centralization of decision-making would not do any good, he added.
"Never let fear hold back progress, and be wary of anyone trying to wrest control of central authority," Armstrong tweeted. Los Angeles Times columnist Brian Merchant called the Musk-led petition "an apocalyptic AI hype carnival." He added that many of the stated concerns were the stuff of a "robot jobs apocalypse".
Satvik Sethi, a former Web3 executive at Mastercard, called the petition a "non-proliferation treaty, but for AI." He added that many of the popular signatories on the list have deeply personally vested interests in the AI field and may just be "trying to slow down their peers so they can succeed."
