Elon Musk and Others Call for Pause on A.I., Citing ‘Risks to Society’

“Humanity can enjoy a flourishing future with A.I.,” the letter said. “Having succeeded in creating powerful A.I. systems, we can now enjoy an ‘A.I. summer’ in which we reap the rewards, engineer these systems for the clear benefit of all and give society a chance to adapt.”

Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, did not sign the letter.

Mr. Marcus and others believe that persuading the wider tech community to agree to a moratorium would be difficult. But swift government action is also a slim possibility, because lawmakers have done little to regulate artificial intelligence.

Politicians in the United States don’t have much of an understanding of the technology, Representative Jay Obernolte, a California Republican, recently told The New York Times. In 2021, European Union policymakers proposed a law designed to regulate A.I. technologies that might create harm, including facial recognition systems.

Expected to be passed as soon as this year, the measure would require companies to conduct risk assessments of A.I. technologies to determine how their applications could affect health, safety and individual rights.

GPT-4 is what A.I. researchers call a neural network, a type of mathematical system that learns skills by analyzing data. A neural network is the same technology that digital assistants like Siri and Alexa use to recognize spoken commands, and that self-driving cars use to identify pedestrians.

Around 2018, companies like Google and OpenAI began building neural networks that learned from enormous amounts of digital text, including books, Wikipedia articles, chat logs and other information culled from the internet. The networks are called large language models, or L.L.M.s.

By pinpointing billions of patterns in all that text, the L.L.M.s learn to generate text on their own, including tweets, term papers and computer programs. They could even carry on a conversation. Over the years, OpenAI and other companies have built L.L.M.s that learn from more and more data.