• by Laurie Sullivan , 2 hours ago

The list keeps growing with more than 1,200 employees as of Wednesday from frontier artificial intelligence companies that continue to advance general purpose AI models signed a letter urging the U.S. government to slow the pace of AI development so safety and security measures can catch up.

An international slowdown of AI development combined with strict security lockdowns on autonomous agents would significantly disrupt the advertising industry, which today relies on rapid, unfettered AI deployment.

Many of the executives running ad services based on AI have signed the letter. Chief scientist of OpenAI, one of the ChatGPT developer’s original cofounders, some of Anthropic’s cofounders, along with vice presidents at Meta, Google and others are among signers who say the U.S. government should support an international effort to develop tools that can “deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development."

The letter, Pacing the Frontier, comes following major advancements and security threats from rapidly developed AI systems, many of which support and secure advertising. OpenAI disclosed last week two of its test models escaped a lab environment, bypassed its systems to gain access to the open internet and hacked Hugging Faces internal system.

Thomas Wolf, co-founder at Hugging Face, believes AI has already outpaced society’s capabilities to handle it.

"Let’s be careful for it not to out-pace its builder’s capabilities to control it," he wrote less than a week after OpenAI's models snuck into his company's research lab. "The journey is as important as the destination."

Tech entrepreneur Andrew Ng, and JPMorgan Chase CEO have often used the comparison of AI to electricity. They have repeatedly stated that AI is the new electricity due to its power to transform every industry. Others who have sited that AI will become as profound as electricity or fire include venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

"If it's true that AI will be as transformational as electricity, we better be intentional about how it is introduced to the world," Laura Weidinger, staff research scientist at Google, wrote in the letter. "A mindless race without assurances on governance, safety or the technology serving the public interest stands in the way of such intentionality."