Parmy Olson, Columnist

Elon Musk Wants to Pause AI? It’s Too Late for That

A petition on OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology ignores the risk already unleashed.

March 30, 2023 at 10:49 AM UTC

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.”

Too late.
Photographer: STEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP

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Elon Musk and an array of public figures have signed their names to an open letter that went viral this week, calling for a six-month pause on training language models more powerful than GPT-4, the technology underpinning ChatGPT.

Some strange inconsistencies with the signatories aside, the letter is odd. It criticizes the deployment of powerful chatbot technology as rash, but also over-hypes their capabilities, drawing on the doom-mongering about AI and killer robots that have captivated the press and distracted from more nuanced, real-world risks.