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Silicon Valley is in the midst of a civil war over the advancement of artificial intelligence – with the world’s greatest minds split over whether it will destroy or elevate humanity.
The growing divide comes after the extraordinary rise of ChatGPT, which has taken the world by storm in recent months, passing leading medical and law exams that take humans nearly three months to prepare.
Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and the late Stephen Hawking are among the most famous critics of AI who believe the technology poses a ‘profound risk to society and humanity’ and could have ‘catastrophic’ effects.
The tech tycoons on Wednesday called for a pause on the ‘dangerous race’ to advance AI, saying more risk assessment needs to be conducted before humans lose control and it becomes a sentient human-hating species.
At this point, AI would have reached singularity, which means it has surpassed human intelligence and has independent thinking.
AI would no longer need or listen to humans, allowing it to steal nuclear codes, create pandemics and spark world wars.
DeepAI founder Kevin Baragona, who signed the letter, told DailyMail.com: ‘It’s almost akin to a war between chimps and humans.
The humans obviously win since we’re far smarter and can leverage more advanced technology to defeat them.
‘If we’re like the chimps, then the AI will destroy us, or we’ll become enslaved to it.’
However, Bill Gates, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and futurist Ray Kurzweil are on the other side of the aisle.
They are hailing ChatGPT-like AI as our time’s ‘most important’ innovation – saying it could solve climate change, cure cancer and enhance productivity.
There is a great AI divide in Silicon Valley. Brilliant minds are split about the progress of the systems – some say it will improve humanity and others fear the technology will destroy it
Many have questioned whether a personal vendetta between Musk and Gates, who have argued over climate change and the COVID pandemic, is part of the rift in Silicon Valley. But Musk has been warning about the dangers of AI for years.
OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November, which became an instant success worldwide.
The chatbot is a large language model trained on massive text data, allowing it to generate eerily human-like text in response to a given prompt.
The public uses ChatGPT to write research papers, books, news articles, emails and other text-based work and while many see it more like a virtual assistant, many brilliant minds see it as the end of humanity
In its simplest form, AI is a field that combines computer science and robust datasets to enable problem-solving.
The technology allows machines to learn from experience, adjust to new inputs and perform human-like tasks.
The systems, which include machine learning and deep learning sub-fields, are comprised of AI algorithms that seek to create expert systems which make predictions or classifications based on input data.
From 1957 to 1974, AI flourished. Computers could store more information and became faster, cheaper, and more accessible. Machine learning algorithms also improved and people got better at knowing which algorithm to apply to their problem.
The fears of AI come as experts predict it will achieve singularity by 2045, which is when the technology surpasses human intelligence to which we cannot control it
However, Bill Gates, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and futurist Ray Kurzweil are on the other side of the aisle, hailing ChatGPT-like AI as the ‘most important’ innovation of our time
In 1970 Marvin Minsky told Life Magazine, ‘from three to eight years, we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.’
And while the timing of the prediction was off, the idea of AI having human intelligence is not.
ChatGPT is evidence of how fast the technology is growing.
In just a few months, it has passed the bar exam with a higher score than 90 percent of humans who have taken it, and it achieved 60 percent accuracy on the US Medical Licensing Exam.
‘Large language models as they exist today are already a revolution enough to power ten years of monumental growth, even with no further technology advances. They’re already incredibly disruptive, Baragona told DailyMail.com.
Not everyone who has opposed the technology would lose out on its advancement – the late Stephen Hawking also sounded the alarm back in 2014
‘To state that we need more technological advances right now is irresponsible and could lead to devastating economic and quality of life consequences.’
Hollywood may have sparked humans’ fears of AI which were typically shown as evil, such as in The Matrix and The Terminator, painting a picture of robot overlords enslaving the human race.
However, the idea is echoed throughout Silicon Valley as more than 1,000 tech experts believe it could become our reality.
This would be possible if AI reaches singularity, a hypothetical future where technology surpasses human intelligence and changes the path of our evolution – and this is predicted to happen by 2045. AI would first have to pass the Turing Test.
When it does, the technology is considered to have independent intelligence, allowing it to self-replicate into an even more powerful system that humans cannot control.
Meta’s Facebook also shut down a controversial chatbot experiment in 2017 that saw two AIs develop their own language to communicate.
