A temporary pause on training extra large language models
Breaking news: The letter that I mentioned earlier today is now public. It calls for a 6 month moratorium on training systems that are “more powerful than GPT-4”. A lot of notable people signed. I joined in.
I had no hand in drafting it, and there are things to fuss over (e.g., what exactly counts as more powerful than GPT-4? and how would we know, given that no details of GPT-4’s architecture or training set have been published?)—but the spirit of the letter is one that I support: until we get a better handle on the risks and benefits, we should proceed with caution.
It will be very interesting to see what happens next.
Gary Marcus (@garymarcus), scientist, bestselling author, and entrepreneur, is deeply, deeply concerned about current AI but really hoping that we might do better.
Watch for his new podcast, Humans versus Machines, debuting later this Spring.
A honor-bound system will do absolutely nothing in a world where selfish actors prevail.
This is purely a political gesture on the part of those promoting this letter. And AI is not the only crisis facing us in this moment- we have MRNA-based technology(merck, others) proliferating in the food chain under continued emergency use authorizations(where rigorous testing is not required), and an increasingly global economy with all of the political implications that come with corporations engineering the media to ensure political success for individuals with the mouth of an elephant and the brain of a mouse. All anyone and everyone does is talk, because the only wealth generating potential anyone has in this modern world is to have and use their social influence. It's time to raise your hand. AI is a sign of the times, a sign that humanity needs to exit stage left.. before it is too late.
It's absolutely rich that the labs that are behind want OpenAI to slow down. Ohhh, that's really rich.....