STOCKHOLM/LONDON: Top artificial intelligence (AI) executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, joined experts and professors on Tuesday to raise the “risk of extinction from AI”, urging policy makers to urged to equate this risk with that posed by a pandemic or nuclear war.
“Reducing the risk of AI-induced extinction should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” said the more than 350 signatories to the nonprofit AI Safety. said in a letter issued by the Center (CAIS).
Attendees included Altman, CEOs of AI companies DeepMind and Anthropic, and executives from Microsoft and Google.
Among them are Jeffrey Hinton and Joshua Bengio (two of the three so-called “Godfathers of AI” who won the 2018 Turing Award for their work in deep learning), and Harvard University to China’s Tsinghua University. It also included professors.
The CAIS statement named Meta, where Yann LeCun, AI’s third godfather, works, for not signing the letter.
CAIS director Dan Hendricks said, “We asked a lot of Meta employees to sign it.” Mehta did not respond to a request for comment.
The letter coincides with a meeting of the US-EU Trade Technology Council in Sweden, where politicians are expected to discuss regulation of AI.
Elon Musk and a group of AI experts and industry executives first pointed out the potential risks to society in April.
“We have submitted an invitation to[Mr. Musk]and hopefully he will sign it this week,” Hendricks said.
Proponents say recent advances in AI have created tools that can be used for purposes ranging from medical diagnoses to legal dossier preparation, but the technology is fueling privacy violations and misinformation campaigns. , and even raises concerns that it poses problems for “smart machine” thinking. themselves.
The warning follows a similar publication signed by Musk and hundreds of others calling for an emergency halt to advanced AI research, citing risks to humanity by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute (FLI). It was issued two months after issuing the letter.
“Our letter mainstreamed moratorium, which mainstreamed extinction,” said Max Tegmark, president of the FLI, who signed the recent letter. “Now we can finally start a constructive and open conversation,” AI pioneer Hinton told Reuters earlier that AI could pose a “more urgent” threat to humanity than climate change. I said yes.
Last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman threatened to leave Europe, citing EU AI — the first effort to create regulation on AI — as over-regulation. He reversed his position within days after being criticized by politicians.
Altman became the face of AI after the ChatGPT chatbot took the world by storm. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will meet with Mr. Altmann on Thursday, and EU industry chief Thierry Breton will also meet Mr. Altmann in San Francisco next month.
