Weekend roundup: Debunking the 'Pause AI' letter

A recent open letter signed by Elon Musk and a few AI experts among others has people talking...

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The Future of Life Institute (FLI), a nonprofit organization that aims to “steer transformative technologies away from extreme, large-scale risks and towards benefiting life”, recently published an open letter that went viral.

Published on March 29, the piece entitled “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter” calls on AI labs to “immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4” citing significant misinformation, labor impact, and safety risks. Among the 2,400+ signatories, there are well-known names such as Elon Musk, Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell.

You guessed it, that’s a direct shot at OpenAI.

It’s not the first time FLI is generating buzz. Another letter “Autonomous Weapons Open Letter: AI & Robotics Researchers” has been signed by nearly 34,400 people since it was released in 2015 and received considerable media coverage.

Is all the hype warranted? Here are a few articles that analyzed and attempted to nuance the latest letter.

Elon’s Musk AI history (link)

Matt Novak, a Forbes contributor, notes Elon Musk’s past involvement with OpenAI, his financial backing of FLI and other factors that could explain his decision to call for the “pause”.

It’s a “huge mess” (link)

Chloe Xiang writes in Vice that, despite a verification process, some of the signatories were either fake or later backed away from some of the letter’s claims.

An impossible task? (link)

Mark Sullivan, Senior Writer at Fast Company, believes that while some concerns expressed in the letter are valid, the wishes are not realistic.