Musk and experts call for halt in ‘giant AI experiments’

PARIS: Billionaire mogul Elon Musk and a range of experts called on Wednesday for a pause in the development of powerful artificial intelligence (AI) systems to allow time to make sure they are safe.

An open letter, signed by more than 1,000 people so far including Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, was prompted by the release of GPT-4 from Microsoft-backed firm OpenAI. The company says its latest model is much more powerful than the previous version, which was used to power ChatGPT, a bot capable of generating tracts of text from the briefest of prompts.

“AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity,” said the open letter titled “Pause Giant AI Experiments”. “Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable,” it said.