Elon Musk Draws Startling Parallel Between AI And Airplane Crashes

Artificial Intelligence or AI has been compared with the invention of the internet and mobile devices, but never with airplanes, right? Until now. 

What Happened: Just days after Elon Musk signed an “open letter” calling for a pause on training AI “more powerful” than OpenAI’s GPT-4, Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:CEO) got into a Twitter banter with Meta Platforms Inc.’s (NASDAQ:META) chief AI scientist. 

See Also: Elon Musk’s Bid To Control OpenAI Was Met With Resistance From Co-Founders, Report Reveals

Referring to people who are scared of Artificial General Intelligence or AGI, Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, said these people aren’t afraid of flying “because engineers have made airliners very safe.”

He then asked, “Why should AI engineers be more scared of AI than aircraft engineers were scared of flying?”

Responding to his tweet, Musk said, “airplanes used to crash frequently” until the Federal Aviation Administration or FAA was created so that “commercial aircraft makers & airlines didn’t cut corners on safety.”

LeCun again replied to Musk’s tweet, saying, “it took 50 years” for this development to happen. “Why be scared of AI when we don’t even have a blueprint (let alone a demo) of a system capable of human-level intelligence?”

Why It’s Important: The open letter signed by Musk, Steve Wozniak and more than 1000 other AI experts and tech leaders called for the immediate pause for training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least six months. 

Four AI experts have raised concerns about the citation of their research in the open letter. They criticized the letter, with one branding some of its claims “unhinged,” reported Reuters. 

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