STOCKHOLM, May 30 (Reuters) – Top artificial intelligence executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, joined experts and professors on Tuesday to raise the “risk of extinction from AI”. He urged policymakers to equate this risk with the risks 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 firms DeepMind and Anthropic, and executives from Microsoft (MSFT.O) and Google (GOOGL.O).
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 Tsinghua University in China. It also included professors.
The CAIS statement named Meta (META.O), where AI’s third godfather Yann LeCun works, for failing to sign the letter.
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.
Recent advances in AI have created tools that proponents say can be used for purposes ranging from medical diagnosis to preparing legal briefs, but the technology is fueling privacy violations and misinformation campaigns. , and concerns have arisen that it will lead to the problem of “smart machines” that consider: themselves.
AI pioneer Hinton earlier told Reuters that AI could pose a “more urgent” threat to humanity than climate change.
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.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will meet with Altmann on Thursday.
Report by Supantha Mukherjee, who lives in Stockholm. Additional reporting by Foo Yun Chee from Brussels and Martin Coulter from London.Editing: Jean Harvey
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