Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has finally broken his silence and weighed in on calls to press the pause button on the development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems that are more advanced than GPT-4. Launched in November 2022, the new large language model that powers ChatGPT of the chatbot developer OpenAI is capable of recognizing both texts and images, as well as solving complex problems with greater accuracy.
"I don’t think asking one particular group to pause solves the challenges. Clearly there’s huge benefits to these things… what we need to do is identify the tricky areas,” the billionaire said in a media interview on April 3.
Furthermore, he voiced the belief that enforcing such a "pause" globally might be replete with all sorts of difficulties.
“I don’t really understand who they’re saying could stop, and would every country in the world agree to stop, and why to stop... But there are a lot of different opinions in this area,” Gates said.
On March 29, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, along with a group of AI gurus and industry executives, called for a six-month pause in further work on AI systems potentially more advanced than chatbot developer OpenAI’s GPT-4. In an open letter, Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, among other signatories, argued that this immediate pause should be public, verifiable and include all public actors.
"AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research and acknowledged by top AI labs," the letter stated.
Furthermore, amid mounting concerns over fallout from the dramatic upsurge in AI use facing the global economy and society, the Italian Data Protection Authority (Garante per la protezione dei dati personali) has successfully slapped the first-ever government-imposed ban on ChatGPT, over privacy concerns. A "major breach" leading to the leakage of user data, including private conversations and payment information, was what the regulator cited as grounds for the move.