Rep. Don Beyer Says Elon Musk Wants To Pause AI Development For His Own Benefit

Rep. Don Beyer says AI technology has the potential to help save the human race ... and he thinks Elon Musk and others who say it's a threat are just trying to protect their assets.

We got the Congressman from Virginia on Capitol Hill and asked him about the Tesla honcho, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and 1,100 others sounding the alarm in an open letter about AI.

The way Don sees it ... Elon and co. are mostly just concerned with pumping the brakes on developing large-scale language models like ChatGPT ... and he thinks the tech giants are really just trying to stifle development from competitors now that they've created their own algorithms.

Don is taking graduate-level courses on AI for a machine learning master's degree from George Mason University ... and he says he sees potential for AI to solve huge problems in medicine, biology and engineering ... and he thinks the chatter about robots writing papers for folks is just distracting from AI's real possibilities.

Another reason the open letter -- which says AI has morphed into a "dangerous race that could imperil our very existence and thus merits a 6-month moratorium on AI development to assess the risks -- didn't sway Don ... he says opponents aren't explaining any specific risks or downside to A