A group of experts and technology industry leaders, including Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, have shared an open letter calling for a six-month pause in the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) experiments that want to copy and improve on what GPT-4 already does.

This is the latest model of the OpenAI artificial intelligence laboratory used by the ChatGPT program to produce texts, program and analyze images like a human being. Elon Musk joined the group of founders in 2015.

"[These] powerful artificial intelligence systems should only be developed when we are confident that their effects will be positive and that their risks will be manageable," reads the open letter, published on Wednesday through the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit organization that works to reduce the risks of using new AI systems.

"We call on all artificial intelligence laboratories to immediately halt, for at least six months, the training of artificial intelligence systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause must be public and verifiable, and include all the key players. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should intervene and institute a moratorium," the co-signatories call for.

The risks identified with technology like GPT-4 include the mass production of fake news and rising unemployment. "Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and lies? Should we automate all jobs, including those that make people happy?" are some of the questions raised by the letter.

O announcement This comes days after the European Police Office (Europol) warned of the potential misuse of large language models, such as ChatGPT, in disinformation and online crime schemes.

These models are trained with huge databases to find patterns in sequences and figure out which is the best word to continue an idea. The architecture behind the technology was first shared by researchers at Alphabet (Google's parent company) in a 2017 academic paper.

In recent months, several companies have developed tools similar to ChatGPT. The messaging app Snapchat came under fire after launching a chatbot for young people that helped them lie to their parents and gave advice on how to disguise the smell of alcohol and drugs.

"Society has paused over other technologies with potentially catastrophic effects on society. We can do this here," concludes Future of Life's message, giving as an example eugenics, the practice aimed at improving the human species through the selection or elimination of certain hereditary characteristics that served as the basis for the racial policies of the 20th century.

By 12:30 p.m. on Friday, the letter had already been signed by more than 1,859 people. In addition to Musk and Wozniak, the co-signatories include British computer scientist Stuart Russell and Canadian Yoshua Benfio, known for his work with artificial neural networks (algorithms that simulate the human brain). Several experts from DeepMind (Google's artificial intelligence company) have also signed the document.

So far, none of OpenAI's executives have signed the letter.

O Future of Life Institute is largely funded by the Musk Foundation, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation and the Founders Pledge, an effective altruism group based in London. This is a philosophical movement that advocates distributing donations and support based on evidence of where they will work best.

Elon Musk left OpenAI's board of directors in 2018. During the time he supported the laboratory, he provided around 100 million dollars for the development of various projects. In recent months, he has complained that OpenAI - initially a non-profit organization - has become a for-profit company.