Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and other well-known high-tech figures and industry leaders have signed an open letter requesting that the Artificial Intelligence industry take a six-month break to allow for the development of safety protocols for the technology.

The Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to “steering transformative technologies away from extreme, large-scale risks and towards benefiting life,” drafted the letter, which as of early Thursday had been signed by nearly 1,400 people.

The group acknowledged that AI technology is quickly advancing and that it has surpassed human performance in many domains in the letter.

The letter cites the GPT-4 program, created by San Francisco-based OpenAI, as a cause for alarm in light of its recent introduction.

Generative Pre-trained Transformer, also known as GPT, is a kind of language model that employs deep learning to produce conversational text that sounds human.

According to the company, GPT-4, its most recent version, is more precise and human-like and has the capacity to examine and react to images. The programme, according to the company, passed a mock bar exam, which is required to be able to practise law.

The group argues in its letter that the creation of such potent AI systems should wait until “we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.”

The letter requests that “all AI labs immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4,” noting the potential for programmes like GPT-4 to spread misinformation and propaganda.

It further recommended using the break “to jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that will ensure they are safe beyond a reasonable doubt.”