On June 4, 2024, current and former employees of several American artificial intelligence (AI) companies published an open letter expressing concerns about the risks posed by this emerging technology. According to a report by Reuters on June 5, the open letter’s signatories include former and current employees of American AI startup OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind, totaling 13 individuals. The open letter warned about the risks of unregulated AI, such as spreading misinformation, losing AI system autonomy, and deepening social inequality. The letter suggested that these risks could lead to “human extinction” and criticized AI companies for only fulfilling a “weak obligation” to share critical information with the government, stating that one cannot rely on these companies to voluntarily share information.
Reuters described the open letter as the latest instance of industry insiders raising safety concerns about generative AI technology. The letter urged AI companies to allow current and former employees to voice concerns related to industry risks.
Recently, OpenAI has been criticized for silencing voices about industry risks. Last month, an article by Vox News revealed that OpenAI threatened to revoke employees’ equity if they did not sign an agreement prohibiting them from criticizing the company. However, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently stated on social media that he was unaware of such an arrangement and claimed that the company had never revoked anyone’s equity.
Amid the controversy over employee speech, OpenAI’s AI chatbot ChatGPT experienced service outages on June 4. According to Quartz News, the first outage occurred at 3 a.m. Eastern Time, with another outage at 10:33 a.m. the same day. OpenAI’s status page indicated that there had been a dozen outages in the past 90 days. The report noted that OpenAI’s service interruptions have become somewhat common, making it difficult for people to rely on ChatGPT for work. OpenAI claims that ChatGPT has about 100 million active users weekly, raising concerns about the consequences of its poor reliability.
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