Why stopping AI fails

In 2023, over 30,000 people, including Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, and Elon Musk, signed an open letter calling for a six-month halt on training anything more powerful than GPT-4. It received more than 30,000 signatures, including academic AI researchers and industry CEOs such as Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and Yuval Noah Harari.

A year later, a pause had not been realized — instead, AI companies had directed vast investments in infrastructure to train ever-more giant AI systems. Max Tegmark, who organized the letter, explained why afterward: pausing alone would be a disaster for any single company, because they just get outcompeted, and then that CEO will be replaced with someone who doesn't want to pause.

Too great to ignore

Everytime someone talks about stopping AI, I know they simply don't understand what they are asking.

Besides the fact that any given company slowing down on AI development gives competitors an advantage, in a general judgement, artificial intelligence holds greater benefits that spans multiple ecosystems and industries.

People look at the risks of job loss and come to the conclusion that the technology should be stopped just so people can keep working jobs they already hate for a pay considered "not enough."

Nobody stops to think about what the true cost of stopping a tech that could advance medicine research whilst at the same time reducing the cost of improving our health systems.

People only see the health workers that might not be able to work anymore. The world is buried so much in the concept of work and money that it's hard to imagine a different reality.

Stopping AI isn't the answer, decided how it should best be integrated into society is what people should be after.

There are greater benefits to pursuing responsible AI use across industries than attempting to halt advancement in said tech.