OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Responds To Letter From Elon Musk And Others Calling For Pause On AI Research: Not 'The Optimal Way To Address It'

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has responded to Twitter CEO Elon Musk and other tech leaders who recently signed a letter calling for a six-month halt on artificial intelligence research.  

Speaking at an event last week at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Altman said he agreed with parts of the open letter signed by Musk, Steve Wozniak and over 1000 other signatories but noted that the letter needed to include technical nuances that specifically address which areas of AI research need to be paused. 

"I think moving with caution and an increasing rigor for safety issues is really important," Altman said. "The letter, I don't think, was the optimal way to address it."

"There's parts ... that I really agree with. We spent more than six months after we finished training GPT-4 before we released it, so taking the time to really study the safety of the model — to really try to understand what's going on and mitigate as much as you can — is important," he added. 

Altman said that an earlier version of the letter claimed OpenAI is currently training GPT-5, but he refuted the notion, claiming, "We are not, won't for some time, so, in that sense, it was sort of silly."

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Altman added that OpenAI would continue to be as honest as possible about its AI developments and encouraged the public to be involved in testing and learning more about them.

"We believe that engaging everyone in the discussion, putting these systems out into the world — deeply imperfect though they are in their current state — so that people get to experience them, think about them, understand the upsides and the downsides. It's worth the tradeoff even though we do tend to embarrass ourselves in public and have to change our minds with new data frequently," he said. 

Meanwhile, Microsoft Corporation co-founder Bill Gates and Google CEO Sundar Pichai have called a pause on AI research impractical and nearly impossible to enforce without government involvement.

According to a Business Insider report, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman also chimed in, saying that Musk's signature on the letter was a sign of jealousy. Hoffman said Musk and others wanted a pause so that they could catch up and offer their own AI products. 

The open letter was issued by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute and signed by people including Jaan Tallinn (co-founder of Skype), Evan Sharp (co-founder of Pinterest), and several other AI experts. 

The letter calls on "all AI labs to immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4" until "independent experts create, execute and evaluate safety protocols for such designs." 

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