Respected members of the advanced tech community are going on record opposing the faction calling for a “pause” in large-model artificial intelligence development. Meta Platforms chief AI scientist Yann LeCun and DeepLearning.AI founder and CEO Andrew Ng, formerly at Alphabet where he helped launch Google Brain, were joined this past week by Bill Gates and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt in opposing the proposed six-month halt to development of AI models more advanced than OpenAI’s GPT-4, which is said to train on a trillion parameters — more than 500 times that of GPT-3.

Speaking together on a YouTube discussion titled “Why the 6-Month AI Pause Is a Bad Idea,” Ng and LeCun agreed it is “premature” to implement a pause. Ng estimates mankind is “30 to 50 years” from arriving at artificial general intelligence (AGI), defined as AI with the ability to perform any intellectual task of which a human is capable. Given that timeframe, Ng said he saw no point to a half-year pause, while LeCun compared it to “inventing the seat-belt before the car.”

The open letter calling for a pause to take stock and get priorities straight around AI has amassed thousands of signatures since being posted March 22 on the Future of Life Institute website.

Fond of automotive analogies, LeCun took a jab at Elon Musk — who along with Steve Wozniak is among the first five signatories — saying with a chuckle “clearly we’re not anywhere close to human intelligence, otherwise we’d have level 5 autonomous driving, and we don’t.”

Tesla CEO Musk initially promised level 5 autonomy by 2018, then punted to 2020, eventually saying it would be “widely available” by the end of 2022.

“Ng first explained that the field of AI had seen remarkable advances in recent decades, especially in the last few years,” citing the deep learning techniques that have fueled generative AI systems “that can produce realistic texts, images and sounds, such as ChatGPT, LLaMA, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and Dall-E,” writes VentureBeat.

Ng said some concerns, such as AI bias, are valid, but would not be helped by a six-month moratorium, which he indicated “would actually cause significant harm.”

LeCun agreed, asking “why slow down the progress of knowledge and science?” and adding that he’s “all for regulating products that get in the hands of people” but not for regulating research and development. “I don’t think that serves any purpose other than reducing the knowledge that we could use to actually make technology better, safer,” LeCun said.

Across the science and tech community, the open letter has inspired a diversity of opinions, writes IEEE Spectrum, the official publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which says the response within its own membership runs from a pause “not going far enough” to the call being “an alarmist distraction that overlooks the real AI challenges ahead.”

Meanwhile, “prominent AI ethicists and even Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates have spent the past week defending their work” against the Future of Life letter, writes CNBC. Microsoft is an investor in GPT-4 creator OpenAI, and is using a modified version of GPT-4 in its new Bing search engine, available free.