The Future of Life Institute, an organization funded by the Musk Foundation, issued a letter calling for a pause of "giant AI experiments" for six months. Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, AI legend Yoshua Bengio, and many thousands of others signed the letter.

The idea behind the letter is that the risks posed by AI models such as GPT-4 are potentially so high that we must give policy-makers and technology leaders a chance to assess what guardrails are necessary. But is this a good idea? What are the risks of a pause? What are the objectives and conflicts of interest of the people that signed the letter?

Muddu Sudhakar, the CEO of Aisera, joined me to talk about the letter and all of the discussion it has sparked. We also discussed some alternative approaches, common misunderstandings, and how generative AI is rapidly changing assumptions about our world. 

Sudhakar previously appeared on Voicebot Podcast episode 280. He is a former senior VP and GM at ServiceNow, Splunk, VMWare, and Pivotal. He was CEO at Caspida when the company was acquired by Splunk, where he assumed leadership for machine learning, AI, and analytics-based solutions. Sudhakar was also the CEO and founder of the big data startup Cetas, which was acquired by VMWare, and founded Sanera Systems, which was acquired by Brocade/McData.

He began his career as an engineer at IBM and SGI and earned his PhD in computer science from UCLA. Go Bruins!