The strange new world of AI power, politics and the ‘pause’
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In this week’s?AI Beat, I focused on what held the AI community's attention for days last week: The open letter signed by Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and others that proposed a six-month “pause” on large-scale AI development. It was a perfect example of how we appear to be entering a strange new world of AI power and politics that is becoming harder and harder to decipher.?
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— Sharon Goldman, Senior Writer, VentureBeat
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The noisy debates around AI risk and regulation got many decibels louder last week, while simultaneously becoming even harder to decipher.
There was the?blowback?from?tweets?by Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) about ChatGPT, including that “Something is coming. We aren’t ready.” Then there was the?complaint?to the FTC about OpenAI, as well as Italy’s?ban on ChatGPT. And, most notably, the open letter signed by Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and others that proposed a six-month “pause” on large-scale AI development. It was put out by an organization focused on x-risk (a nickname for “existential risk”) called the?Future of Life Institute?and, according to Eliezer Yudkowsky, it?didn’t even go far enough.
Not surprisingly, the fierce debate about?AI ethics?and risks, both short-term and long-term, has been amped up by the mass popularity enjoyed by OpenAI’s ChatGPT since it was?released?on November 30. And the growing number of industry-led AI tools built on large language models (LLMs) — from Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s Bard to a slew of startups —?has led to a far greater scale of AI discussion in the mainstream media, industry pubs and on social platforms.
But it seems like as AI leaves the research lab and launches fully-flowered into the cultural zeitgeist, promising tantalizing opportunities as well as presenting real-world societal dangers, we’re also entering a strange new world of AI power and politics. No longer are AI debates just about technology, or science, or even reality. They are also about opinions, fears, values, attitudes, beliefs, perspectives, resources, incentives and straight-up weirdness.
Read more from?Sharon Goldman, Senior Writer, on?VentureBeat.com.
This is?The AI Beat, one of VentureBeat’s newsletter offerings. Sign up here to?get more stories like this in your inbox?every week.
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