Eric Schmidt Worries 6-Month Pause On AI Would Benefit China: Report

Last month, Elon Musk signed on to a proposal that companies currently developing artificial intelligence tools pause all work for at least six months. But Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, thinks a pause would just help China, according to a new interview with the Australian Financial Review.

“I’m not in favor of a six-month pause because it will simply benefit China,” Schmidt told the Australian newspaper.

While Schmidt is concerned about China getting ahead of the U.S. in developing a potentially revolutionary technology, he also recognizes artificial intelligence tools could have significant downsides. Schmidt said AI needs “appropriate guardrails” but stressed that most people currently in government don’t understand tech well enough to properly regulate its development.

AI tools like ChatGPT, created by OpenAI, are known as large-language models, which are trained on millions of pages of documents on the web to be able to answer questions in a conversational style. Users can ask questions and get to interact as though they’re talking with another human. Some people have already used programs like ChatGPT to write complex computer code or even start their own companies, but experts are concerned about the possible downsides.

For example, several journalists have reported odd interactions with AI tools. Kevin Roose from the New York Times wrote about his experience back in February with Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, which tried to insist that he didn’t actually love his wife. The chatbot even told him it had a secret desire to steal nuclear secrets.

And Schmidt recognizes how these tools could be used by geopolitical adversaries who would remove any guardrails that may have been put in place by programmers.

“Let’s imagine North Korea wants to use this to do a cyberattack. The first thing they’re going to do is take all those rules out of the system that say ‘Don’t talk about cyberattacks,’” Schmidt told the Australian Financial Review.

There’s no sign that OpenAI or any other company working on advanced AI tools plans to pause development. And some people who even signed the letter publicized by Elon Musk last month aren’t exactly playing by their own rules. In fact, the technology behind Musk’s car company Tesla, including Full Self Driving, is arguably a form of AI that’s rapidly evolving. And that’s why everyone should probably look at any calls for a pause with skepticism.

No one knows for certain what the future holds, but AI has the power to change the world in ways we haven’t seen since the introduction of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. And it’s coming whether you’re ready or not.