Does AI Pose ‘Risk of Extinction’ to Humanity? Top AI Executives Answer This Question

Top synthetic intelligence (AI) executives together with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday joined specialists and professors in elevating the “threat of extinction from AI”, which they urged policymakers to equate at par with risks posed by pandemics and nuclear war.

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” greater than 350 signatories wrote in a letter revealed by the nonprofit Center for AI Safety (CAIS).

As nicely as Altman, they included the CEOs of AI companies DeepMind and Anthropic, and executives from Microsoft and Google.

Also amongst them have been Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio – two of the three so-called “godfathers of AI” who received the 2018 Turing Award for their work on deep learning – and professors from institutions ranging from Harvard to China’s Tsinghua University.

A press release from CAIS singled out Meta, the place the third godfather of AI, Yann LeCun, works, for not signing the letter.

“We asked many Meta employees to sign,” mentioned CAIS director Dan Hendrycks. Meta didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark.

The letter coincided with the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council assembly in Sweden the place politicians are anticipated to speak about regulating AI.

Elon Musk and a bunch of AI specialists and trade executives have been the primary ones to quote potential dangers to society in April.

“We’ve prolonged an invite (to Musk), and hopefully he’ll signal it this week,” Hendrycks said.

Recent developments in AI have created tools supporters say can be used in applications from medical diagnostics to writing legal briefs, but this has sparked fears the technology could lead to privacy violations, power misinformation campaigns, and lead to issues with “smart machines” pondering for themselves.

The warning comes two months after the nonprofit Future of Life Institute (FLI) issued an analogous open letter, signed by Musk and a whole lot extra, demanding an pressing pause in superior AI analysis, citing dangers to humanity.

“Our letter mainstreamed pausing, this mainstreams exctinction,” said FLI president Max Tegmark, who also signed the more recent letter. “Now a constructive open conversation can finally start.”

AI pioneer Hinton earlier advised Reuters that AI may pose a “extra pressing” threat to humanity than climate change.

Last week OpenAI CEO Sam Altman referred to EU AI – the first efforts to create a regulation for AI – as over-regulation and threatened to leave Europe. He reversed his stance within days after criticism from politicians.

Altman has become the face of AI after his ChatGPT chatbot stormed the world. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will meet Altman on Thursday, and EU industry chief Thierry Breton will meet him in San Francisco next month.

(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed – Reuters)