Redacted correspondent challenges open-sourcing AI

From:: [redacted]
Date:: January 2, 2016 (Sent 10:12 AM CST)
To:: Elon Musk
Subject:: congrats on the falcon 9

Hi Elon Happy new year to you, ██████████! Congratulations on landing the Falcon 9, what an amazing achievement. Time to build out the fleet now! I've seen you (and Sam and other OpenAI people) doing a lot of interviews recently extolling the virtues of open sourcing AI, but I presume you realise that this is not some sort of panacea that will somehow magically solve the safety problem? There are many good arguments as to why the approach you are taking is actually very dangerous and in fact may increase the risk to the world. Some of the more obvious points are well articulated in this blog post, that I'm sure you've seen, but there are also other important considerations: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/17/should-ai-be-open/ I'd be interested to hear your counter-arguments to these points. Best, ████

About this email

A correspondent whose name is redacted congratulates Musk on the Falcon 9 landing and argues that OpenAI's open-sourcing approach is not a safety panacea and may increase risk, citing a Slate Star Codex post.

Notes

Sender name redacted in the published version. Musk forwarded this email, without recorded comment, to Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman on Jan 2, 2016 at 8:18 AM (Pacific); that bare forward is not listed as a separate entry.

Where it came from

Published by recipient; attribution confirmed.

OpenAI, executive & internal. Tags: open-source, safety, slate-star-codex, criticism

Earlier email Search all emails Later email