Musk called for a pause on some of the largest artificial intelligence experiments in the world

A Response to the Future of Life Institute: AI Safety Standards and the Role of OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google in Artificial Intelligence

As noted in the letter, even OpenAI itself has expressed the potential need for “independent review” of future AI systems to ensure they meet safety standards. The signatories say that this time has now come.

A number of well-known artificial intelligence researchers and CEOs, including Stuart Russell, Gary Marcus, and Emad Most, are also signatories. The full list can be found here though there are some reports of names being added to the list as a joke.

The letter written by the Future of Life Institute states that all those who are working on advanced artificial intelligence models should be involved in the pause. It doesn’t suggest how a halt on development could be verified but adds that governments should institute a moratorium if it can’t be done in six months.

OpenAI, Microsoft, and others didn’t reply to questions about the letter. The signatories seemingly include people from numerous tech companies that are building advanced language models, including Microsoft and Google.

The pace of change—and scale of investment—is significant. Microsoft has poured $10 billion into OpenAI and is using its AI in its search engine Bing as well as other applications. Although Google developed some of the AI needed to build GPT-4, and previously created powerful language models of its own, until this year it chose not to release them due to ethical concerns.