Eric Schmidt: Pause in AI Research Benefits Only China

A temporary pause in the development of artificial intelligence would only give an advantage to competitors in China. This was stated by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Bloomberg reports.

According to the expert, there are legitimate concerns about the speed of AI research. The tech companies should work together to ease them, he says.

Schmidt is confident that the pause in the development of large language models, proposed by the Future of Life Institute and supported by more than 1,000 signatories, will not solve the problem. Moreover, the pause “will simply benefit China,” the expert says.

“I advocate bringing everyone together as soon as possible and discussing what acceptable safeguards exist,” he said.

Schmidt did not support recent bans on the video service TikTok imposed by the US, the UK and Australia. However, he believes western governments need to act faster and not fall behind Chinese research and development.

“China is very smart, they know what they are doing. We need to act together,” Schmidt said.

In March, more than a thousand industry experts, including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, urged a six-month pause in training language models more powerful than GPT-4 from OpenAI.

Later, a number of other experts criticized the authors of the letter. They were accused of distorting scientific research to promote the idea of AI’s ‘excessive power’.

In April, Bill Gates also expressed doubts about the advisability of pausing AI research.