by - Elon Musk spoke about the dangers of AI and ChatGPT.
- Musk previously served on the board of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.
- He said that regulating AI “could slow down AI a little bit,” but it “could also be a good thing.”
Billionaire Elon Musk warned that unproven artificial intelligence poses a threat to society.
On Wednesday, during the World Government Summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Musk, co-founder of OpenAI, the company that developed the ChatGPT tool, said that AI is “one of the greatest risks to the future of civilization,” CNBC reported.
ChatGPT, a viral AI chatbot, has sparked a discourse on the future of AI and the technology’s impact on humans.
“It’s both positive and negative and has big, big promise, big capability,” Musk said of AI, adding that “there’s a big danger with that.”
Musk said Wednesday that the bot “has shown people how advanced AI has become,” according to Musk.
“AI has been evolving for some time. It just didn’t have a user interface that was accessible to most people,” he added.
Lawmakers and tech industry leaders have often discussed the importance of regulating AI as a way to curb discrimination and prevent bad decisions, Insider previously reported.
Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that the possibility of ChatGPT and other AI technologies could mean “lights out for us all”.
“In the short term, I’m more concerned about an accidental abuse case,” Altman said. “As a result, I think it’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of the AI security and alignment work. I would like to see much, much more happen.”
Musk, who has not served on the OpenAI board since 2018, reinforced Altman’s argument.
“I think we honestly need to regulate AI security,” Musk said Wednesday. “I think it’s actually a bigger risk to society than cars or planes or drugs.”
He added that regulation “might slow down AI a bit, but I think that could also be a good thing.”
As the founder of Neuralink and CEO of Tesla, both of whom use AI, Musk has previously spoken out about AI.
“Until people see robots walking down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react because it seems so ethereal,” Musk said at the National Governors Association’s 2017 summer meeting, according to Futurism.
“AI is a rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation rather than reactive. Because I think by the time we’re reactive on AI regulation, it’s too late,” he continued.
In 2018 at SXSW, he said that AI has the potential to be more dangerous than nuclear weapons. And in 2020, he said he fears Google’s own DeepMind project and insinuated that AI could take over the world.
—Dubai Media Office (@DXBMediaOffice) February 15, 2023
