Elon Musk has joined a call by more than 1,000 experts to put a stop to the creation of giant AI “digital minds.” Tech leaders are urging to wait until the world is certain that “effects will be positive and risks manageable.”

More than 1,000 AI experts, researchers, and advocates have joined a call for the immediate pause of “giant” AIs for at least six months, so the capabilities and dangers of systems such as GPT-4 can be properly studied and mitigated, according to the Guardian. The demand was set out in an open letter signed by respected AI experts including Elon Musk, co-founder of OpenAI; Emad Mostaque, founder of London-based Stability AI; and Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple.

“Recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control,” the letter says. “Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.”

The authors cite OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman in support of their calls. In a February post, he wrote: “At some point, it may be important to get independent review before starting to train future systems, and for the most advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for creating new models.”

The authors of the letter wrote that if researchers do not voluntarily pause their work on AI models more powerful than GPT-4, then governments should intervene.

“This does not mean a pause on AI development in general, merely a stepping back from the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities,” they add.

Elon Musk has always been on guard when it comes to the risks posed by AI. Speaking at the US National Governors Association summer meeting in Providence, Rhode Island in 2017, Musk said: “AI is a rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation than be reactive. Nobody likes being regulated, but everything (cars, planes, food, drugs, etc) that’s a danger to the public is regulated. AI should be too.”

Article edited by @SmokeyShorts; follow him on Twitter