GPT-4: Commotion And Controversy

On the day that a London Futurists Podcast episode dedicated wholly to OpenAI's GPT-4 system dropped, the Future of Life Institute published an open letter about the underlying technology. Signed by Stuart Russell, Max Tegmark, Elon Musk, Jaan Tallinn, and hundreds of other prominent AI researchers and commentators, the letter called for a pause in the development of the large language models like OpenAI's GPT-4, and Google's Bard. It was surprising to see the name of Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, on the list, and indeed it soon disappeared again. At the time of writing, there were no senior signatories from either of the two AGI labs, OpenAI and DeepMind, or from any of the AI-driven tech giants, Google, Meta, or Microsoft, Amazon or Apple. There was also no representation from the Chinese tech giants, Baidu, Alibaba, or Tencent. Whatever you think of the letter's prospects for success, and even the desirability of its objective, it was a powerful demonstration of the excitement and concern being generated in AI circles about GPT-4 and the other large language models.