More than a dozen lawmakers from the European Union (EU) recently called for a new set of regulations to govern the use and development of artificial intelligence (AI) applications and tools, such as ChatGPT. This comes as technology experts raise their concerns that some AI tools, such as general purpose AI or GPAI, might develop dangerously powerful capabilities if left unmonitored.
The group of lawmakers issued an open letter outlining their position, where they recognized that the EU’s proposed AI Act mainly focuses on high-risk AI use cases. The letter states that there is also a need for a “complementary set” of rules for the development and deployment of general purpose AI. The aim of these rules is to ensure that AI is used in a safe and trustworthy manner, with appropriate guardrails in place to protect users from harm.
This change in attitude came on the back of another open letter, signed by several prominent AI experts as well as Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and Andrew Yang. This letter urged Europe to strengthen its AI rules and even proposed a six-month pause on the development of AI tools more powerful than OpenAI’s most recent large language model, GPT-4.
In their letter, the lawmakers also called for international cooperation to draft global governing principles for AI development and deployment, which should be agreed upon in a summit attended by both European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and United States President Joe Biden. The group pledged to provide a set of rules within the AI Act framework to ensure that AI development will always add value to humanity, while encouraging tech labs and companies to act responsibly and to engage in transparent discussions with regulators.
Ursula von der Leyen, who is the President of the European Commission and hails from the Christian Democratic Union and is a member of the European People’s Party, is set to address the European Parliament in the near future. The topic of discussion is expected to be Ukraine.
The company mentioned in this article is OpenAI, a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research laboratory founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and others. Its primary objective is to develop AI technologies that promote and protect human values. OpenAI works to build safety, assurance, and trust into the development and operation of AI systems and its projects include natural language processing, advanced speech recognition, computer vision, and robotic physical manipulation.
The person mentioned in this article is Elon Musk, who is a South African-born Canadian-American entrepreneur, engineer and inventor best known for being the co-founder, CEO and Chief Product Architect of Tesla, Inc. Musk is also the founder and CEO of SpaceX, and the founder of The Boring Company, Neuralink, and OpenAI. He is a vocal advocate for the need to mitigate the risks of Artificial Intelligence and has called for Europe to strengthen its AI rules.
