Technology

Coinbase CEO Thinks Halting AI Development Is a 'Bad Idea'

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Brian Armstrong, Chief Executive of crypto exchange Coinbase, opposed the calls for a temporary halt in artificial intelligence (AI) development. Earlier this month, several influential people, including Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and Andrew Yang, demanded a six-month moratorium on further technological developments powering the rapidly-growing chatbot ChatGPT.

AI Comes With Risks, But “Good Outweighs the Bad,” Says Armstrong

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said he thinks pausing AI development “is a bad idea,” responding to the open letter signed by Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, who called for a six-month moratorium on developing the technology underpinning the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT.

“There are no ‘experts’ to adjudicate this issue, and many disparate actors will never agree. Committees and bureaucracy won’t solve anything.”

– Armstrong wrote on Twitter.

Armstrong said that many technologies come with specific threats, but that shouldn’t stop progress “because the good outweighs the bad,” he added. “The marketplace of ideas leads to better outcomes than central planning.”

In an open letter, Musk, Wozniak, and the US entrepreneur Andrew Yang said that AI systems with human-competitive intelligence could present severe risks to society and humanity. Such robust systems “should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.”

ChatGPT is a generative AI solution that can respond to nearly any prompt with outstanding clarity and speed. The chatbot does this by running vast amounts of internet data through neural networks – machine learning algorithms that attempt to simulate how the human brain processes information. Just two months after its launch, ChatGPT reached 100 million active users, marking unprecedented growth. As a result, many global tech giants are now rushing to launch their generative AI chatbot solutions.

Coinbase Tested ChatGPT for Verifying Tokens

Armstrong’s words of support for ChatGPT and AI development come a few weeks after Coinbase tested the chatbot as a token verification tool and compared its results with the exchange’s manual security procedure. Coinbase said that in more than 50% of the cases, ChatGPT generated the same results as the manual review, though it could not recognize certain high-risk assets.

The fast-growing US crypto exchange said that while ChatGPT did not produce results accurate enough to be immediately integrated into the company’s asset review process, it showed enough potential to earn further evaluation.

The chatbot looked promising when boosting productivity across a broad range of development and engineering assignments, Coinbase said. Also, it added that ChatGPT helps optimize codes and detect vulnerabilities.

This article originally appeared on The Tokenist

 

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