Elon Musk and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak are among the prominent technologists and artificial intelligence researchers who have signed an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on the development of advanced A.I. systems.

In addition to the Tesla CEO and Apple co-founder, the more than 1,100 signatories of the letter include Emad Mostaque, the founder and CEO of Stability AI, the company that helped create the popular Stable Diffusion text-to-image generation model, and Connor Leahy, the CEO of Conjecture, another A.I. lab. Evan Sharp, a cofounder of Pinterest, and Chris Larson, a cofounder of cryptocurrency company Ripple, have also signed. Deep learning pioneer and Turing Award–winning computer scientist Yoshua Bengio signed too.

The letter urges technology companies to immediately cease training any A.I. systems that would be "more powerful than GPT-4," which is the latest large language processing A.I. developed by San Francisco company OpenAI. The letter does not say exactly how the "power" of a model should be defined, but in recent A.I. advances, capability has tended to be correlated to an A.I. model's size and the number of specialized computer chips needed to train it.

Runaway A.I.

Musk has previously been outspoken about his concerns about runaway A.I. and the threat it may pose to humanity. He was an original cofounder of OpenAI, establishing it as a nonprofit research lab in 2015, and served as its biggest initial donor. In 2018, he broke with the company and left its board. More recently, he has been critical of the company’s decision to launch a for-profit arm and accept billions of dollars in investment from Microsoft.

OpenAI is now among the most prominent companies developing large foundation models, mostly trained on massive amounts of text, images, and videos culled from the internet. These models can perform many different tasks without specific training. Versions of these models power ChatGPT as well as Microsoft’s Bing chat feature and Google’s Bard.