Elon Musk and an array of public figures signed an open letter that went viral last week, calling for a six-month pause on training language models more powerful than GPT-4, the tech behind ChatGPT. The letter is odd. It criticizes the deployment of powerful chatbot technology as rash, but also over-hypes their capabilities, drawing on AI doom-mongering that has captivated some of the press and distracted us from more nuanced risks.
“Should we develop non-human minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us?” the letter asks. “Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?
Of course not, but there are issues we should be more worried about now, like the concentration of AI capabilities among a few increasingly secretive companies, inequality as artists find their work plagiarized without compensation, and all the risks to come from companies racing to plug ChatGPT into their systems.
On that last point, toothpaste is already out of the tube. OpenAI last week launched a new system that will allow businesses to plug ChatGPT into their proprietary databases, allowing its chatbot to carry out tasks on their systems like retrieving information, making bookings and even running new software that it creates.
While the plug-in announcement didn’t get much attention in the mainstream press, many technologists saw it as a stunning leap forward for ChatGPT. Not only could it search and synthetize information it had been trained on, it could take action.
