AI one of biggest risks to civilisation: Musk

SAN FRANCISCO: As ChatGPT shows that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has gotten incredibly advanced, tech billionaire Elon Musk has warned saying, one of the biggest risks to the future of civilisation is AI.

As per a report, Musk was one of the co-founders of OpenAI, the US firm which developed the popular generative AI chatbot ChatGPT.

“It’s both positive or negative and has great, great promise, great capability, but, with that comes great danger,” Musk told attendees at the World Government Summit in Dubai, UAE, when he was asked about how he sees technology developing 10 years from now.

ChatGPT is an advanced form of AI that is powered by the GPT-3 large language model. It is programmed to recognise human language and generate responses based on massive amounts of data.

Moreover, Musk said “ChatGPT has illustrated to people just how advanced AI has become. The AI has been advanced for a while. It just didn’t have a user interface that was accessible to most people”.

He noted that, unlike cars, planes, and medicine, AI has no regulations or rules keeping its development under control, according to the report.

“I think we need to regulate AI safety, frankly. It is, I think, actually a bigger risk to society than cars or planes or medicine,” said Musk.

Musk stepped down from OpenAI’s board of directors in 2018 and no longer owns a stake in the company.

“Initially it was created as an open-source nonprofit. Now it is closed-source and for-profit. I don’t have an open stake in OpenAI, nor am I on the board, nor do I control it in any way,” he mentioned.

As part of his decision to create OpenAI, Musk stated that Google wasn’t paying enough attention to AI safety.