That's quite an assumption, because i (and many others) don't believe it is to be taken at face value. It looks like a ploy of Elon and others to catch up to their main competitor (openAI). It's known Elon hates openAI[1] and is competing with them. He also provides the majority for the organisation that published the letter. Some people on the letter are well meaning but misguided.
[1] https://www.semafor.com/article/03/24/2023/the-secret-histor...
Also just sort of a meta point but good lord to focus on one person out of a thousand who signed the letter, rather than the actual content of the letter has got to be one of the largest self-owns in the history of humanity. "We were gonna prevent the AI from eating us all but the bad man signed so heck with it, full speed ahead!"
[0]: Stuart Russell on why A.I. experiments must be paused https://www.cnn.com/videos/tech/2023/04/01/smr-experts-deman...
I can't see anyone on that list who can provide an empirical account of the breakdown of major job roles into tasks which can be automated by chatgpt, but not prior to it. I cannot see anyone providing an analysis of what that automation will do for those roles. Nor anyone providing an economic analysis of that impact; a sociological analysis of that, and so on.
"Experts in AI" are people who can describe gradient descent without prep, balance a binary tree, and compute a dot-product.
But that kind of expert is no more or less qualified to discuss the wider social ramifications of AI than any random person off the street.
Here are two links:
> Separate studies of both writers and programmers find 50% increases in productivity with AI, and higher performance and satisfaction.
https://mobile.twitter.com/emollick/status/16313979316044881...
> Salespeople with AI assistance doubled customer purchases & were 2.33 times as successful in solving questions that required creativity. Top agents gained most.
https://mobile.twitter.com/emollick/status/16428856052383989...
Spreadsheets had more impact
If the ideas in the letter are good, can’t we just run with them?
Like OpenAI did with all the publicly available research to build their products?
There's no reason to believe that the majority of the people on the letter aren't earnest in their support of it. But calling them "misguided" is pretty slanted. What you really mean is that you disagree with them.