Elon Musk thinks the world is woefully unprepared for the impact of artificial intelligence. Sunday he agreed that the technology will hit people “like an asteroid,” and he revealed that he used his only one-on-one meeting with then-President Barack Obama to push for AI regulation.
The Twitter And Tesla CEO made the comments in response to a tweet from AI software developer Mckay Wrigley, who wrote on Saturday: “I’m surprised that people can’t apply exponential growth to the capabilities of AI. You would have been called a *crazy* a year ago if you said we would now have GPT-4 level AI. Now think another year. 5 years? 10 years? It will hit them like an asteroid.”
Musk replied, “I saw it happen way before GPT-1, which is why I spent years trying to warn the public. The only one-on-one meeting I’ve ever had with Obama as president, I used to not have to promote Tesla or SpaceX, but to encourage AI regulation.” Obama had dinner with Musk in February 2015 in San Francisco.
This week, Musk responded to news about Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to lay the foundation for Congress to regulate artificial intelligence.
“Good news! AI regulation will be much more important than it seems now,” said Musk tweeted.
According to the Financial timesMusk is developing plans to launch an AI startup called X.AI to compete with Microsoft-backed OpenAI, which creates generative AI tools, including the AI chatbots ChatGPT and GPT-4 and the image generator DALL-E 2.
Musk is also reportedly working on one AI project on Twitter.
A few weeks ago, Musk called for a six-month break about developing AI tools that are more advanced than GPT-4, the successor to ChatGPT. He was joined by hundreds of technology experts, including the Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. The letter warned of massive disinformation and the massive automation of jobs.
There is little doubt about the power of AI systems to automate some administrative tasks. A Wharton professor recently conducted an experiment to see what AI tools can accomplish for a business project in 30 minutes and called the results “superhuman.” Meanwhile, some home workers are apparently taking advantage of productivity-enhancing AI tools to hold multiple full-time jobs, with their employers none the wiser. But fears that AI will replace many jobs in the long run are mounting.
Musk co-founder of OpenAI in 2015 as a non-profit, but he parted ways with it after a power struggle with CEO Sam Altman over its control and direction, according to the Wall Street Journal.
He tweeted on February 17 that OpenAI was established as an open-source non-profit organization “to act as a counterbalance Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not at all what I intended.”
Altman himself has regularly warned of the dangers of artificial intelligence. Last month, he said in an ABC interview that other AI developers working on ChatGPT-like tools don’t enforce the kind of security limits his company has — and the clock is ticking.
Musk has long believed artificial intelligence oversight is necessary, after describing the technology as “potential”. more dangerous than nuclear weapons.”
“We need some kind of regulatory authority or something that oversees the development of AI,” he said told Tesla investors last month. “Make sure it operates in the public interest.”