#41: Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and Others Sign Letter to Pause AI, Italy Bans ChatGPT, and the Future of Prompt Engineering

AI leaders say slow down, Italy blocks AI, the United Nations implements global framework. But, other leaders keep finding ways to integrate ChatGPT, and new companies are launched. This dichotomy makes for an interesting episode. Paul and Mike break it all down.

“The Letter’ heard round the world made waves - but what does it really mean?

In an open letter published by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute, a number of well-known AI researchers and tech figures, including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, have called on all AI labs to pause the development of large-scale AI systems for at least 6 months due to fears over the profound risks to society and humanity that they pose. 

The letter notes that AI labs are currently locked in an “out-of-control race” to develop and deploy machine learning systems that no one can understand, predict, or reliably control. 

The signatories call for a public and verifiable pause and for the development of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development.

What does it mean, will other countries follow suit, is it a PR play, and at this point, does it even matter? Are we thinking about misinformation and job loss the right way?

At the same time, moves are being made internationally: UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) is calling for the immediate implementation of its Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, a global framework for the ethical use of AI. 

And, in a bold move, Italy has become the first Western country to block OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT, citing privacy concerns. The Italian data protection authority said it would ban and investigate OpenAI with immediate effect, following a data breach involving user conversations and payment information. Will other countries follow suit? 

Prompt engineering - a job, a function, or a skill? 

Paul recently wrote about one possible future he’s seeing for prompt engineering on LinkedIn, saying: “How soon until we have a Prompt Copilot that helps users write far more effective and optimized generative AI prompts? Think of it as a prompting assistant that improves and expands your prompts as you type them.”

He also talked about how the quality of human user prompts is crucial for the effectiveness and value of generative AI software—and that companies are motivated to reduce the friction in their products and speed up time to value for all users. 

The development of a prompting assistant that helps users write more effective and optimized prompts using AI seems like an obvious and achievable innovation to solve this problem and could render prompting as a career path or human skill less important beyond 2023.

Will it become a must-know in any career path?

BloombergGPT is announced

Bloomberg has announced the development of a new large-scale generative AI model specifically trained on a wide range of financial data to support natural language processing tasks within the financial industry. 

The model, called BloombergGPT, represents the first step in the development of a domain-specific model to tackle the complexity and unique terminology of the financial domain. 

The new model will enable Bloomberg to improve existing financial NLP tasks such as sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, news classification, and question answering while bringing the full potential of AI to the financial domain.

On top of this, Seth Godin and David Sacks are using ChatGPT. What’s next?

Rapid-fire topics include the All-In podcast, a Redditor loses his love of his career because of AI, Replit teams up with Google Cloud, Sam Altman chats with Lex Fridman, Sam Altman launches Worldcoin, and more. 

Listen to this week’s episode on your favorite podcast player, and be sure to explore the links below for more thoughts and perspectives on these important topics.