Top AI CEOs and Experts Raise ‘Extinction Risk’ from AI

“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 university professors.

The CAIS statement named Meta, where Yann LeCun, AI’s third godfather, works, for not signing 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.

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.

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.