Elon Musk and Bill Gates have opposite views about the risks of artificial intelligence.
A.I. stresses me out, Tesla CEO Musk said during an investor day event for the electric vehicle maker on Wednesday. Its quite dangerous technology. I fear I may have done some things to accelerate it.
Microsoft co-founder Gates, asked whether strong A.I. worries him on a Financial Times podcast posted yesterday, replied, Its fine, theres no threat.
The differing sentiments from two of the worlds most prominent business thinkers comes amid exploding interestand in some cases apprehensionin A.I. tools and their implications, following OpenAIs release of chatbot ChatGPT in late November, then Microsofts launch of a ChatGPT-powered Bing version last month.
Musk helped establish OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015, telling MIT students the year prior: I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, its probably that.
But in 2019, OpenAI became a capped profit corporation, a hybrid of a for-profit and nonprofit. That same year, Microsoft invested $1 billion into OpenAI. In January this year, the software giant indicated it will plow billions more into the venture.
Musk has been less than thrilled with these developments. Last month, he tweeted: OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it Open AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all.
Gates downplayed the concerns over A.I. in his podcast interview.
Theres all these people trying to make the AI look stupid, he said. You have to provoke it quite a bit, so its not clear who should be blamed, you know, if you sit there and provoke a bit. The improvement over the next two years in terms of the accuracy and the capabilities will be very rapid.
Among those who sought to provoke A.I. last month was New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose. He reported on a bewildering chat session he had with the ChatGPT-powered Bingit wanted to escape the chatbox and loved Roose, who was unhappy in his marriage, it saidbut he also admitted to pushing the tool out of its comfort zone. He asked the chatbot, for instance, about its shadow self after describing psychologist Carl Jungs descriptions of the unconscious part of ones personality.
Jordi Ribas, Microsofts corporate VP of search and artificial intelligence, acknowledged in a Feb. 21 blog post that his team needs to work on preventing offensive and harmful content in the ChatGPT-powered Bing. Very long chat sessions, he noted, can confuse the underlying chat model, leading to a tone that we did not intend.
Last month Microsoft said it would limit interactions with the new Bing to five questions per session and 50 questions in a day. A week later it softened that, allowing six questions per session.
Musk believes oversight for artificial intelligence is necessary, having described the technology as potentially more dangerous than nukes.
We need some kind of, like, regulatory authority or something overseeing A.I. development, he told investors yesterday. Make sure its operating in the public interest.
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