AI R&D in a Dilemma: Pause or Continue

According to reports, over 1000 business leaders have jointly called for a slowdown in the development of ChatGPT, an updated and more powerful large language model. But this open letter has sparked doubts about the sincerity of the signers from the outside world, and people even suspect that many of them do not agree with the principles proposed in this open letter.
Many industry insiders do believe that powerful artificial intelligence like ChatGPT will indeed cause some harm to society, but suspending development for six months seems to be wishful thinking and has almost no practical basis.
Since OpenAI began public testing GPT-3 in November last year, high-speed trains developed through generative artificial intelligence have never stopped. At the moment when ChatGPT was released and the artificial intelligence arms race was launched, OpenAI opened the ‘Pandora’s Box’. Driven by market forces, even if OpenAI wants to stop the development of artificial intelligence, it is simply impossible to do so.
As individuals and businesses become accustomed to seeking answers to various questions from ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Microsoft’s New Bing, the demand is already strong enough to force technology giants to dominate this promising field.
Generative artificial intelligence has created something that we can’t even understand at the moment, so it’s really worth taking some time to understand these systems, “said Giuseppe Sette, president of startup company Trigger AI.” But we can’t do that. This field is too hot now, from technology giants to the Chinese market, where competition is everywhere.

Since at least November last year, generative artificial intelligence has become a hot topic in the technology industry. OpenAI seized the opportunity to expand its cooperation with Microsoft and introduced ChatGPT into the Bing search engine in January. In the following months, it launched an updated and more powerful version of ChatGPT – GPT-4. Soon, the company opened up its platform again and introduced plugins from companies such as Slack, Instacart, and Klarna.
In order to cope with competition, Google quickly launched the Bard big language model. Subsequently, China’s Alibaba and Baidu also announced that they will develop products that compete with ChatGPT.
In addition, there are also many image generation programs emerging on the market, some of which are also developed by OpenAI, and some are independent programs such as Stable Diffusion and DALL-E. They have sparked an AI storm in the art and fashion industries.
Business leaders called for a halt to the development of new artificial intelligence models in open letters, but did not elaborate on how to deal with existing models such as GPT-4.
Other developers believe this is unfair: suspending development for six months will only affect startups, while companies like OpenAI can take this opportunity to continue expanding their leading edge. Other startup companies believe that while business leaders who call for a slower pace of generative artificial intelligence development are right, they are unwilling to slow down as a result.
When a technology becomes popular and hype rises one after another, this situation is inevitable. Generative artificial intelligence has emerged, and people have also experienced the power of large language models. Unlike other fleeting technological innovations, this technology does indeed have a huge market demand.
There are also many obstacles to implementation.
Everyone is vying for market share in the free market, who would be willing to suspend development? “Said Jai Das, president and co founder of venture capital firm VC Sapphire.” The magic box has already opened and can’t stop
Das stated that there is no way to prevent companies from secretly developing big language models or technology giants from developing artificial intelligence technology. No organization will inspect every company one by one during these six months to investigate whether they are developing code related to algorithms.
This open letter argues that the entire society needs some time to better understand the impact of artificial intelligence. If this idea receives widespread support and slowing down development speed is not feasible, what should we do?
This is not an impossible task, but it does require relying on a relatively rare approach in cutting-edge technology: determining relevant standards through extensive industry agreements.
It’s impossible to pause anything at all, “Das said.” Why not let the entire industry start a dialogue and figure out how to avoid the issues mentioned in the open letter
Will technology companies sit down and develop relevant standards? This still needs further observation, but one thing is certain: we may hope that artificial intelligence can slow down and wait for us, but it is already ahead of us.