Elon Musk’s Open Letter: The GPT-4 Pause Debate
Thoughts on the AI moratorium
While I don’t agree with every aspect of “Elon Musk’s open letter” (that’s how the mainstream media puts it), the debate it sparks is of utmost importance. The fact that key AI visionaries like Max Tegmark and Emad Mostaque have also signed on would be good for the headlines, which tend to favor the out-of-control AI robot narrative.
Here’s a link to the letter.
And here’s how I make sense of it:
Between Wonders and Worries
The central idea of the open letter to “all AI labs”: the development of language models that go beyond the capabilities of GPT-4 should be paused for 6 months, as we need to deal more intensively with risks and safety mechanisms. Some of those risks fall under the term “emergent capabilities,” i.e. those capabilities of an AI that seem to go beyond what it has been trained for.
Since AI models on the scale of GPT-4 are simply too complex to fully understand what is going on inside them (Black Box Problem), we can neither say how these emergent capabilities have arisen nor how many of them there are.
What sounds like science fiction is therefore part of the protocol at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and GPT-4: before its…
