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Elon Musk has called for tighter regulations in place for organizations that are developing advanced AI, including Tesla.
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Musk said his former organization OpenAI "should be more open.”
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Tesla's CEO has long been vigilant about AI's potential.
Elon Musk has once again signaled concerns over the and has called for tighter regulations in place for organizations that are developing advanced AI, including Tesla.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO, who has long been , remarked in response to a piece about OpenAI by MIT Technology Review, an organization co-founded by Elon Musk along with Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman.
The review claimed that OpenAI has shifted from its mission of developing and distributing AI safely and equitably into a secretive company obsessed with image and driven to constantly raise more money.
At first, OpenAI was formed as a non-profit backed by $1 billion in funding from its pooled initial investors, to pursue open research into advanced AI with a focus on ensuring it was pursued in the interest of benefiting society, rather than leaving its development in the hands of a small and narrowly-interested few (i.e., for-profit technology companies).
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Musk has been sounding alarms over the negative potential of AI for quite many years. In 2014, he had tweeted that it could be "". The same year, at an MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics symposium, he told the audience that "AI is our biggest existential threat".
"With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like yeah he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out."
- Elon Musk, CEO, Tesla
In the intervening years, much has changed – including OpenAI.
Musk’s most recent comments indicate that he’s quite distant from the organization he helped co-found both ideologically and in a more practical, functional sense. The SpaceX founder also noted that he “must agree” that concerns about OpenAI’s mission expressed last year at the time of its Microsoft announcement “are reasonable,” further saying that, "OpenAI should be more open.”
Musk has long been an advocate of some kind of government oversight of AI. In 2018, the same year he quit OpenAI to avoid conflict with machine learning technology used in Tesla's autonomous vehicles, he said -
"We ought to have a government committee that starts with insight, gaining insight. Spends a year or two gaining insight about AI or other technologies that are maybe dangerous, but especially AI."
- Elon Musk, CEO, Tesla
The committee would then come up with some regulations to ensure safer AI development.
While responding to a question kept by a follower, Musk also said that he believes advanced AI development should be regulated both by individual national governments as well as by international governing bodies, like the U.N. Time is not doing anything to blunt Musk’s beliefs around the potential threat of AI: Perhaps this will encourage him to ramp up his efforts with to give humans a way to even the playing field
It is surprising to see Musk include Tesla in a general call for regulation of the development of advanced AI, but it is in keeping with his general stance on the development of artificial intelligence.
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