- Elon Musk spoke out about the dangers of AI and ChatGPT.
- Musk was previously on the board of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.
Billionaire Elon Musk forewarned that unchecked artificial intelligence poses a threat to society.
On Wednesday, Musk, who co-founded OpenAI, the company that created the ChatGPT tool, said during World Government Summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates that AI is "one of the biggest risks to the future of civilization," CNBC reported.
ChatGPT, a viral AI chatbot, has sparked discourse about the future of AI and how the technology will impact humans.
"It's both positive or negative and has great, great promise, great capability," Musk said of AI, adding that "with that comes great danger."
Musk said Wednesday that the bot "has illustrated to people just how advanced AI has become," according to Musk.
"The AI has been advanced for a while. It just didn't have a user interface that was accessible to most people," he added.
Lawmakers and tech industry leaders have frequently discussed the importance of regulating AI as a means to curb discrimination and prevent it from making flawed decisions, Insider previously reported.
Even the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, has said that possibility of ChatGPT and other AI technologies could mean "lights out for all of us."
"I'm more worried about an accidental misuse case in the short term," Altman said. "So I think it's like impossible to overstate the importance of AI safety and alignment work. I would like to see much, much more happening."
Musk, who hasn't been on the board for OpenAI since 2018, reiterated Altman's point.
"I think we need to regulate AI safety, frankly," Musk said Wednesday. "It is, I think, actually a bigger risk to society than cars or planes or medicine."
He added that regulation "may slow down AI a little bit, but I think that that might also be a good thing."
As the founder of Neuralink and CEO of Tesla, both of which utilize AI, Musk has previously spoken out about AI.
"Until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don't know how to react because it seems so ethereal," Musk said at the 2017 National Governors Association Summer Meeting, according to Futurism.
"AI is a rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation instead of reactive. Because I think by the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it's too late," he continued.
In 2018 at SXSW, he said AI has the potential to be more dangerous than nuclear weapons. And in 2020, he said that he feared the Google-owned DeepMind project and insinuated that AI could take over the world.
—Dubai Media Office (@DXBMediaOffice) February 15, 2023