Should We Pause AI Research? Muddu Sudhakar and Bret Kinsella Break Down the Musk Letter - Voicebot Podcast Ep 312

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!