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Dozens of technology leaders are calling for a pause in the development of %ArtificialIntelligence (AI) systems that they say pose high-level risks to humans and society.

An open letter from the Future of Life Institute has been signed by %Tesla (NASDAQ: $TSLA ) CEO Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, among others. It calls on AI labs to cease training models more powerful than GPT-4, the latest version of the large language model created by %OpenAI.

The Future of Life Institute is a non-profit organization based outside Boston that advocates for the responsible and ethical development of artificial intelligence. Its founders are MIT graduates and professors.

The institute’s letter states: “Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth?”

The letter adds: “Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us?”

The Future of Life Institute is calling on all AI developers to immediately pause, for at least six months, the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.

GPT-4 was released earlier in March by OpenAI and is more advanced than its predecessor ChatGPT.

After being released publicly last November, ChatGPT quickly went viral. By January of this year, ChatGPT had 100 million monthly active users, making it the fastest-growing app in history.

The new AI technology is being used to create everything from poetry to video games. But ethicists have also raised concerns with potential abuses of the technology, such as plagiarism and the proliferation of misinformation, notably online deep fakes.

In their letter, the technology leaders state that AI systems with human intelligence pose “profound risks to society and humanity.”

Privately held OpenAI has received a $10 billion investment from %Microsoft ($MSFT ), which has integrated the company’s AI systems into its Bing search engine.

Google subsequently announced its competing AI product for consumers called “Bard.”

Musk has previously said that AI represents the biggest risk to human civilization. Yet Musk himself co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with Sam Altman, though he left its board of directors in 2018 and no longer holds a stake in the company.

Governments around the world are racing to regulate AI, with the U.K. government publishing a white paper on the technology earlier this week that calls for regulators to supervise the use of AI tools in jurisdictions around the world.