Musk wants a halt to AI.

More than 1,100 AI researchers, tech luminaries, and other futurists have signed an open letter demanding a six-month moratorium on “giant AI experiments” since the text was posted by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute last week. The letter warns that AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, and suggests that stakeholders in the AI field should develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts. Developers should focus their energies on making today’s powerful state-of-the-art systems more accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy and loyal. If the developers can’t govern themselves, governments must step in, creating regulatory bodies capable of reining in runaway systems, funding safety research, and softening the economic blow when super intelligent systems begin gobbling up human jobs in earnest. Musk has long warned about the dangers of AI, predicting that the singularity – the point at which machine intelligence eclipses that of humans – would arrive by 2025.

He proposed the Neuralink brain-computer interface as a tool to give humanity a competitive edge against AI. He was also one of the founders of OpenAI, the company behind the breakthrough large language model ChatGPT. However, Musk left the company in 2018, dismissing it as a profit-milking venture co-opted by Microsoft. Bill Gates has embraced OpenAI, declaring that “the Age of AI has begun.” ChatGPT now powers Microsoft’s Bing search engine.