Artificial intelligence has been a part of our everyday life for years in some shape or form, but the spectacular rise of ChatGPT and the resulting aggressive development pace of conversational and generative AI models is, for the first time ever, putting the core technology into the hands of the general public. Even though large language models currently in use are primarily able to guess the best-fitting next word in a sentence based on the corpus of content fed into them, CEOs, researchers and AI experts are now urging the industry to pump the brakes on training and developing models more capable than OpenAI's GPT-4. The latest large language model of the company is currently available in a limited capacity for ChatGPT Plus subscribers and will soon be integrated into Microsoft productivity and security products.
"Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable."
This is quoted in an open letter signed by influential figures like Elon Musk and Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque. The letter was released by a non-governmental organization, the Future of Life Institute, which was founded in 2014 by MIT professor Max Tegmark and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, among others. The Musk Foundation is a major donor to the organization.
As data from a survey conducted by KPMG Australia and the
University of Queensland shows, residents of India, China, South Africa and
Brazil, the biggest so-called emerging markets, are far less critical of the
continued implementation of AI systems. 75 percent of Indians surveyed between
September and October 2022 would place their trust in AI, followed by 67
percent of Chinese and 57 percent of South African respondents. According to
the additional study, the respondents claimed to trust AI used in healthcare
and security contexts the most compared to other possible use cases.
