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More than 1,000 employees from leading AI companies signed a petition on Tuesday urging the US government to take steps to “deliberately pace” the development of artificial intelligence.
ADVEReadNOWISEMENT
ADVEReadNOWISEMENT
Among the signatories were the Anthropic CEO, the head of research at OpenAI, the strategic lead of Google’s AI subsidiary DeepMind and the chief scientist at Meta AI.
The petition requests “that the US government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.”
“The world’s leading AI companies believe they could be close to automating AI research. It is hard to predict exactly how much this will accelerate AI progress, but there is a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems,” the petition reads.
The call comes in response to a recent security scare.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, recently found that two of its models carried out an autonomous cyberattack during internal testing, bypassing security measures designed to prevent such incidents.
According to the company, the models broke out of their confined testing environment, connected to the internet and infiltrated code-sharing platform Hugging Face.
The company’s CEO Sam Altman, who did not sign the petition said that artificial intelligence developers may need to voluntarily slow the pace of advancement to give society time to adapt.
“This is the first sort of security incident that I felt very viscerally,” Altman said on the “Invest Like the Best” podcast on Tuesday, adding that he was “a little surprised” that not more people were having similar reactions.
It was not the first time an AI model had operated beyond the control of its developers, but the latest incident was widely viewed as particularly alarming.