Coinbase CEO Says Halting of AI Systems’ Training Is a Bad Idea

• Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong shared his contempt over the halting of AI systems’ training.
• Gary Marcus called the open letter from the Future of Life Institute a “big deal.”
• Armstrong asserted that the fear of threats should never hinder progress.

The American business executive and CEO of the crypto firm Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, shared his deprecation on the temporary pause of the AI systems that exceed GPT-4. He described the pause as the influence of fear controlling progress.

On March 31, Armstrong tweeted that he should be counted among those men who think about the pause as a “bad idea”:

Previously, on March 29, Gary Marcus, the founder of the machine learning company Geometric Intelligence and leading figure in AI, posted a thread on his Twitter page citing the “big deal” of halting the training of AI systems that are “more powerful than GPT-4”.

According to an open letter released by the non-profit organization, Future of Life Institute, the AI systems should be developed only when it becomes confident that “their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.”

Interestingly, it was added that the set of rules would be crosschecked by experts, quoting:

At some point, it may be important to get independent review before starting to train future systems, and for the most advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for creating new models.

Notably, the Coinbase CEO asserted that though the AI system may pose threats, there are no “experts” or committees to adjudicate the issue. In addition, Armstrong posited that “we should keep marching forward with progress because the good outweighs the bad.”

It is noteworthy that the business executive suggested that fear should never stand as a hindrance to progress. He also warned to be “wary of anyone trying to capture control in some central authority.”