TL;TR - Go home Mr. Musk and leave this to the adults please ...
Disclaimer - This open letter was written by Thomas Hansen the human being, and not Thomas Hansen the CEO of AISTA.
Today Elon Musk and more than 1,000 others signed an open letter about AI in an attempt at trying to stop further AI development, beyond ChatGPT version 4's current capabilities. My dear Mr. Musk, don't you have stuff to do with your cars or something? Aren't you busy buying Facebook or something man? Maybe ask your mom how she feels about this ...?
Seriously, I am in no way insensitive to the dangers of AI, and I tried to warn about AI already back in 2012, roughly 5 years before Elon could even spell A-G-I. However, we are now way past the gravitational pull of the singularity, the point of no return, and our best bet at this point is literally to fold our hands and pray for the best. Trying to stop AI development at this point will only allow North Korea, Russia, China and God knows who else to catch up with us, and deliver something that outperforms our stuff so badly that we're literally back in the stone ages before Musk's 6 months have passed. To illustrate that simple fact please realise that the following quote was given by Vladimir Putin in 2017.
Whoever controls AI controls the world
Do you think Putin is going to respect your "6 months of pause" Mr. Musk? You didn't really think this though did you? Dude, go home and smoke some OJ or Kush man, and leave this to the adults please. You're acting out of fear. Nothing good ever came out of the fear related parts of the limbic system. I suspect you can find dozens of quotes by yourself somewhere in your papers stating the same.
Elon you're too smart for this
I really respect Mr. Musk. I was never one of those critising him, and in fact I agree with most of the stuff Elon says. However, this is about as wrong as it's possible to go even in theory. If Mr. Musk had raised the alarm 10 years ago, when I was doing it, we could have thought this through, and had your little pause. Of course back then, everybody believed I was the fruitcake, even though what I was talking about was being echoed by literally every single Nobel Prize winner for the last 2 decades. At this point, we need to speed up and simply hope for the best. Everything else is literally madness!
Sometimes to avoid a car crash it's best to INCREASE the speed! This is one of those moments!
When it comes to AI about the only thing I agree with Mr. Musk with is that it needs to be open, more open than how OpenAI is currently doing it. However, this is a temporary problem. First of all there are dozens of open source projects trying to utilise GPT technology to deliver something similar. Secondly, I can pretty much guarantee you that both China, North Korea and Russia have looooong ago had their hands on stolen IP and AI models from OpenAI, and that they are currently trying to figure out how to use it for whatever purposes they want to use GPT tech for. So the lack of openness from OpenAI (pun!) is nothing but a temporary problem. If you want to fix this, I encourage you to either sponsor one of the existing open source projects Mr. Musk, or maybe initiate one yourself?
There are two types of companies, the ones who knows they've been hacked, and the ones who don't know they've been hacked. I suspect OpenAI is in the second category!
Putin, Kim Jong Il, and that Chinese Communist guy I never seem to remember the name of probably had access to GPT4 before it was even released amongst the academics for research purposes. Believing anything else is simply madness. This implies that if we do a "pause" on AI development in the west, China, North Korea and Russia is going to come out with GPT version 9 before OpenAI is even allowed to release version 5. At which point we'd be forced to wave to Putin on May the 1st and collectively wear Z t-shirts in Washington under the Russian flag, on the White House lawn, to "praise our beloved leader Il Duce, Putin the First" before the end of summer.
If you want to clean up your own mess, buy OpenAI and open source their models! Maybe that way you can get a good night sleep ...
Last time I checked it was half the price of Twitter and a tenth of the price of Facebook. The "6 months of pause on AI development" is a joke man! Somebody needs to b**ch slap you for even saying it out loud! You should be ashamed of yourself man! Go home man, and enjoy my 8 bucks and two cents, and don't come back before you sober up please ...
