Microsoft’s chief scientific officer, Eric Horvitz, believes artificial intelligence will allow future humans to flourish, but he’s apparently hedging his bets.
Horvitz published a post entitled “Reflections on AI and the future of human flourishing” on the official Microsoft blog on May 30. The article discusses the future of artificial intelligence and announces a series of essays written by AI experts who were given early access to OpenAI’s GPT-4 before its public launch.
Per the blog post, Horvitz was surprised by the capabilities of OpenAI’s GPT-4 when he was given such access in 2022:
Specifically, Horvitz touted GPT-4's "ability to interpret my intentions and provide sophisticated answers to numerous prompts," which he said "felt like a ‘phase transition,’ evoking imagery of emergent phenomena that I had encountered in physics.”
Horvitz writes that, while testing GPT-4, it became “increasingly evident that the model and its successors […] hold tremendous potential to be transformative.”
Microsoft and OpenAI gave a litany of experts early access to GPT-4 and solicited essays from them in hopes of identifying the opportunities and challenges the technology posed across numerous industries.
Related: EU, US should push for AI code of conduct: EU tech chief
On the same day that Horvitz published the announcement post, however, his name also appeared as a signatory for a document published by the Center for AI Safety.
The document, which contained only a preface and a single-sentence statement, was signed by a list of signatories representing a veritable who’s who of AI experts (with a handful of notable holdouts including Meta’s Yann LeCun and Andrew Ng, cofounder of Google Brain).
The statement reads: “Mitigating
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