As concerns grow over the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI), Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy doubts that President Biden “has the capacity to get his arms around this issue.”
“I don’t think it’s going to be an issue that he or even his ambles in this administration are going to be able to wrap their heads around,” Ramaswamy said in an interview on Thursday with Fox News Digital.
Ramaswamy, a multimillionaire, best-selling author and conservative political commentator who launched his GOP presidential campaign last month, spoke in the wake of a letter signed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and other tech giants that cited “profound risks to society and humanity” and called for a six-month pause to advanced AI developments.
BIDEN ADMINISTRATION SILENT AID GROWING CONCERNS OVER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ADVANCEMENTS
The letter asked AI developers to “immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.” If the moratorium cannot be done quickly, “governments should step in and institute a moratorium,” the letter added.
The letter was issued by the Future of Life Institute and signed by more than 1,000 people, including Musk, who argued that safety protocols need to be developed by independent overseers to guide the future of AI systems. GPT-4 is the latest deep learning model from OpenAI, which “exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks,” according to the lab.
“Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable,” the letter said.
Since its release last year, Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT has prompted rivals to accelerate developing similar large language models and companies to integrate generative AI models into their products.
Ramaswamy emphasized that the concern with AI “is that in the name of advancing human flourishing and prosperity, we will create some of the greatest risks to human flourishing and prosperity.”
However, Ramaswamy noted, “I think the U.S. can take some basic steps towards limiting the risk.”
At the top of Ramaswamy’s list includes educating the U.S. public on a widespread basis against ceding authority to AI.
“We don’t allow visually human characteristics to be attached to AI,” he added. “If you’re creating AI to conduct interfacing with human beings, I think it’s very important that AI not assume human like characteristics in the user experience.”
He also stressed that “the U.S. does not apply constraints to the development of AI that China is not also adopting…. I think those are examples of basic, sensible steps, that we can take without putting ourselves at a competitive disadvantage.”
Other declared and potential 2024 presidential contenders did not respond to Fox News Digital’s requests for comment for this story.
This is a developing story that will be updated as more actual and potential 2024 Republican presidential candidates address the issue.