Experts and key players in Artificial Intelligence and technology are calling for an immediate halt to training AI systems to be more powerful than the current GPT-4 model for at least six months in an open letter.

As of March 29, over 1,000 people have co-signed the letter issued by the non-profit Future of Life Institute, citing potential risks to society and humanity.

"Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable," the letter said.

The letter also detailed potential risks to society and civilization by human-competitive AI systems in the form of economic and political disruptions, and called on developers to work with policymakers on governance and regulatory authorities.

According to the organization's letter, the list of signatures include people like Elon Musk, Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, researchers at Alphabet-owned DeepMind, as well as AI heavyweights Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell.

Since its release last year, the Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT has prompted rivals to accelerate developing similar large language models, and companies to integrate generative AI models into their products.

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(With input from Reuters)