AI has been a hot technology topic in the last couple of years, beginning with the release of ChatGPT and now GPT-4. The discussion has moved to a completely different level, causing either tremendous excitement or worry about what generative AI can do.
The scientific and industrial communities have mixed sentiments about AI: just last March Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell and Elon Musk (to name just a few who initiated the Future of Life Open letter FLI_Pause-Giant-AI-Experiments_An-Open-Letter.pdf (futureoflife.org)) signed a letter asking to pause Giant AI experiments and raising serious concerns about AI, and in particular, generative AI tools such as GPT-4. They are worried about the impact generative AI may have on misinformation and human replacement, and are questioning AI’s whole purpose and the risks it may pose. On the other hand, Microsoft embedded ChatGPT in its Bing search engine, providing free access to the tool to a multitude of users, while another of the “fathers of AI” - Yann Lecun - does not share the same worries about AI and generative AI tools such as ChatGPT (Meta scientist Yann LeCun says AI won't destroy jobs forever - BBC News).