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Editors Note: The following is a brief letter from Ray Kurzweil, a director of engineering at Google and cofounder and member of the board at Singularity Group, Singularity Hubs parent company, in response to the Future of Life Institutes recent letter, Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter.

The FLI letter addresses the risks of accelerating progress in AI and the ensuing race to commercialize the technology and calls for a pause in the development of algorithms more powerful than OpenAIs GPT-4, the large language model behind the companys ChatGPT Plus and Microsofts Bing chatbot. The FLI letter has thousands of signatoriesincluding deep learning pioneer, Yoshua Bengio, University of California Berkeley professor of computer science, Stuart Russell, Stability AI CEO, Emad Mostaque, Elon Musk, and many othersand has stirred vigorous debate in the AI community.

Regarding the open letterto pause research on AI more powerful thanGPT-4, this criterion is too vague to be practical. And the proposal faces a serious coordination problem: those that agree to a pause may fall far behind corporations or nations that disagree. There are tremendous benefits to advancing AI in critical fields such as medicine and health, education, pursuit of renewable energy sources to replace fossil fuels, and scores of other fields. I didnt sign, because I believe we can address the signers safety concerns in a more tailored way that doesnt compromise these vital lines of research.

I participated in theAsilomar AI Principles Conference in 2017 and was actively involved in the creation of guidelines to create artificial intelligence in an ethical manner. So I know that safety is a critical issue. But more nuance is needed if we wish to unlock AIs profound advantages to health and productivity while avoiding the real perils.

Ray KurzweilInventor, best-selling author, and futurist

Image Credit: DeepMind/Unsplash

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A Note From Ray Kurzweil on the Recent Call to Pause Work on AI More Powerful Than GPT-4 - Singularity Hub