Should AI be stopped before it is too late?

Steve Wozniak is no fan of Elon Musk. In February, the Apple co-founder described the Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter owner as a "cult leader" and called him dishonest. Yet, in late March, the tech titans came together, joining dozens of high-profile academics, researchers and entrepreneurs in calling for a six-month pause in training artificial intelligence systems more powerful than GPT-4, the latest version of Chat GPT, the chatbot that has taken the world by storm. Their letter, penned by the United States-based Future of Life Institute, said the current rate of AI progress was becoming a "dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models". The "emergent capabilities" of these models, the letter said, should be "refocused on making today's powerful, state-of-the-art systems more accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy and loyal".