AI Industry Titans and Researchers Alert the World to Potential Extinction Risk from AI

Prominent leaders from the AI industry and academia advocate for global attention to AI safety concerns.

Key Takeaways

• AI leaders and researchers, including Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yoshua Bengio, have signed a statement warning about the potential extinction risk from AI.

• The statement, published by the Center for AI Safety, suggests that mitigating AI risks should be a global priority.

• This declaration contributes to the ongoing debate over AI safety in the backdrop of a controversial open letter earlier this year calling for a pause in AI development.

• Despite disagreements on the magnitude and nature of the risk, most experts concur that AI currently presents a range of threats, such as enabling mass surveillance and misinformation.

In a development that will intensify the ongoing debate about AI safety, several high-profile figures in the AI industry and research have issued a stark warning about the potential risks of AI. As reported by James Vincent in The Verge, these signatories have jointly declared that mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority. The succinctly crafted statement underscores the seriousness of AI-related risks akin to pandemics and nuclear war.

A Call for Global Action

The 22-word statement, designed to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, has been published by the San Francisco-based non-profit, the Center for AI Safety. Among the notable signatories of this statement are Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and renowned AI researchers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, recipients of the prestigious 2018 Turing Award. However, Facebook’s Chief AI Scientist, Yann LeCun, another Turing laureate, is absent from this list.

This warning serves as the latest high-profile intervention in the intricate and often controversial debate over AI safety. Earlier this year, a similar group of individuals proposed a six-month pause in AI development through an open letter. This suggestion was met with mixed responses, as some experts believed it exaggerated the risk posed by AI. In contrast, others agreed with the threat but disagreed with the proposed solution.

Dan Hendrycks, executive director of the Center for AI Safety, in a conversation with The New York Times, explained that the brevity of the recent statement was intentional, aimed at avoiding such disagreements. He elaborated that the message was more of a “coming-out” for those in the industry concerned about AI risk.

The AI Risk: Real or Hypothetical?

The ongoing debate about AI risks revolves around hypothetical scenarios where AI systems, with their rapidly increasing capabilities, cease to function safely. Proponents of this view cite rapid advances in AI systems, like large language models, as evidence of a projected increase in AI intelligence. They fear that once AI systems attain a certain level of sophistication, it could be impossible to control them.

Skeptics, however, question these dire predictions, highlighting the current limitations of AI technology in performing everyday tasks, like driving a car, despite years of research and investment.

Even amidst these disagreements, there is consensus that AI, even without further advancements, poses current-day threats, from enabling mass surveillance and flawed “predictive policing” algorithms to facilitating misinformation and disinformation.

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