LONDON - On March 14, OpenAI launched GPT-4. People who follow AI closely were stunned by its capabilities. A week later, the United States-based Future of Life Institute published an open letter urging the people who run the laboratories creating large language models (LLMs) to declare a six-month moratorium so the world could ensure this increasingly powerful technology is safe.

The people running those labs - notably Sam Altman of OpenAI and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind - have called for government regulation of their industry, but they are not announcing a pause.

What is all the fuss about? Is advanced AI really that dangerous?

In a word: Yes.

No one can predict the future, so there is no way of knowing what future AIs will or will not be able to do. However, what can be deduced is that their capability depends to a large degree on the amount of computational power available to them, and the quantity - and to a lesser extent the quality - of the data they are trained on. The amount of computational horsepower that USD1,000 can buy has been growing exponentially for decades and, despite what some people say, it is likely to continue doing so for years to come. Though there are limits on what can be gleaned from the data available - since the latest LLMs have already been trained on most of the data on the internet - recently that has been doubling every couple of years and will probably continue to do so.

This means that AIs are going to carry on getting more powerful at an exponential rate, and that is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. One must also understand exactly what that word ‘exponential’ means. Imagine being in a football stadium - either soccer or American football will do - which has been sealed to make it waterproof. The referee then places a single drop of water in the middle of the field. One minute later he places two drops there. Another minute later, four dr