China's AI Dominance A Threat For US? Former Google CEO Speaks Out Against Proposed Pause

Alphabet Inc.’s GOOG GOOGL former CEO Eric Schmidt does not favor proposed artificial intelligence or AI pause over concerns about competitors such as China getting the upper hand.

What Happened: After more than 1,000 tech moguls and researchers signed an "open letter" asking for an immediate pause on the development of AI systems "more powerful" than OpenAI's GPT-4, Schmidt argued taking this step would "simply benefit China," reported Bloomberg citing an interview published in Australian Financial Review.

The open letter in question was signed by the likes of Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk, with the latter even drawing a startling comparison between AI and plane crashes.

However, the former Google CEO said he opposed the at least six-month pause as it would give an advantage to competitors such as China, who are advancing at a rapid pace in this field.

According to Schmidt, while there are valid concerns regarding the pace of AI research, these can be addressed if technology companies collaborate to establish shared standards, the report noted.

"China is very smart, they know what they are doing. We need to get our act together," he said.

Why It's Important: Previously, Microsoft Corp MSFT co-founder Bill Gates and Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney also spoke against the ban on AI developments.

Chinese tech giant Baidu Inc. BIDU is working on its chatGPT-like product, Ernie Bot, but the highly anticipated public launch of the bot was canceled last month.

Microsoft's latest version of Bing is powered by the same technology behind ChatGPT. Soon after Bing Chat was launched, Google introduced its AI-bot called Bard, a language model for dialogue applications.

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Photo: Shutterstock

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