Generative AI has been a hot topic since OpenAI's ChatGPT made waves with its release last year—but the hype has been accompanied by doomsday warnings that predict the technology will soon outsmart people and supersede the human race.
Earlier this year, experts including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and deep learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio signed a letter calling for a six-month pause in the development of advanced AI systems, arguing the technology was becoming “human competitive.” That letter now has over 33,000 signatories.
But tech billionaire and investor Reid Hoffman, who co-founded LinkedIn and chatbot startup Inflection AI, is a self-described optimist when it comes to the technology. Speaking at the CogX Festival in London on Wednesday, he labeled the idea of halting AI’s advancement as “foolish” and “anti-humanist.”
If anything, the pace of development should be accelerated so it can help humans solve big societal problems, Hoffman insisted.
“As a government, I wouldn’t be saying … let me make sure you stop work for six months, as per something I thought was a little foolish earlier this year,” Hoffman told the audience at CogX Festival, referring to the six-month moratorium call made by tech luminaries back in March.
Hoffman, who wasn’t among the thousands who joined those calls, argued such a move would be “foolishness.”
“You think you’re going to issue a letter and every human being is going to stop,” Hoffman said. “Issuing a blanket six-month pause is an anti-humanist maneuver. They (supporters of the letter) think it’s from a human side, but it is, in fact, a mistake.”
During the conference, Hoffman agreed he was an “accelerationist” who believes in expediting the reach of AI in fields like healthcare and education—contrary to the calls for a development hiatus. He defended accelerating AI’s development as “valuable,” arguing larger scale models had the ability to be more sophisticated and therefore, safer.
Hoffman, a self-proclaimed “techno-optimist,” likened the development of AI to that of cars: limited awareness about things like the safety belt and crumple zones didn’t stop cars from being made, he said.
"If we'd said we won't allow ourselves to drive until we have all those things, we would’ve all arrived here [today] in horses and carriages," he told the crowd on Wednesday.
In the same sense, he said, if the expansion of AI systems were to stop, it would prevent related fields from flourishing.
Does the world have an AI problem?
Hoffman has been involved with AI for several years. He was among the early investors in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, and co-founded Inflection AI, which raised $1.3 billion in June from backers including Microsoft, Bill Gates and Nvidia.
At CogX Festival on Wednesday, Inflection AI co-founder and CEO Mustafa Suleyman emphasized the role of AI tools as a “reliable chief of staff” that could change how the future looks. He said the tech promised the “most prosperous and transformative decade that we’ve ever experienced as a species.”
By Suleyman's projections, a future where a personal AI could carry out a variety of tasks for humans is only about five years away.
“Unquestionably, many of the tasks in white-collar land will look very different in the next five to 10 years,” he said at a San Francisco forum earlier this year. “There are going to be a serious number of losers [and they] will be very unhappy, very agitated.”
Hoffman has echoed Suleyman’s views in the past on the revolutionary impact of AI on jobs. In May, he predicted personal AI assistants would be able to perform “informational tasks” in a matter of two to five years.
He told Fortune that “some jobs will disappear” because of AI advancements, but the tech could also offer answers to the problems it creates by reskilling the labor force—a stance he doubled down on at London's CogX Festival this week.
Inflection AI didn't immediately return Fortune's request for comment.
Divisive technology
While AI advocates like Hoffman have touted superintelligent machines as a catalyst for the next renaissance, many experts have warned it could be the trigger for humanity's extinction.
Musk, for instance, has said AI could hit people “like an asteroid,” while Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, warned AI could soon “eat up all of human culture” and compared it to “alien intelligence.” Geoffrey Hinton, who has been dubbed a “Godfather of AI” for his pioneering work in the field, said in recent months that the risk of the tech being used for “bad things” was real.
As AI continues to be deployed across different fields, calls for swift regulation that can help oversee how the tech is scaled up are increasing. Europe has already made headway in preparing laws that restrict risky uses of the tech, while U.S. regulations are still in the process of being crafted.
