New York (EFE).- Artificial intelligence (AI) poses an “extinction risk” comparable to that of pandemics or nuclear war, a group of more than 300 industry experts and researchers warned in a letter Tuesday, including those who are the CEO of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis; Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, among others.
“Mitigate AI extinction risk should be a global priority along with other societal risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” the statement read in a paragraph released by the nonprofit Center for AI Safety. based in San Francisco.
Other signatories to the statement are Geoffrey Hinton -who was dubbed the “godfather” of AI and spent part of his career at Google- and Youshua Bengio, two of the three AI researchers who won the 2018 Turing Award -a well-known award popularly called the Nobel Prize in Computer Science – for his work on AI.
Consequences of AI
Since the OpenAI chatbot, ChatGPT, was launched in November 2023, concerns have grown about the consequences that the success of this technology could entail, with two of the biggest fears being the large-scale spread of misinformation and propaganda and the possible removal of jobs of all kinds.
For his part, Hinton, in a recent interview with The New York Times on May 1, went a step further and pointed out his concern that this technology exceeds the intellectual capacity of a human.
“The idea that these things could actually become smarter than people, some people bought into it,” he explained in that interview. “But most people thought it was too far away. I thought it was too far. I thought it was between 30 and 50 years away or even more. Obviously, I don’t think that anymore,” Hinton explained then.
This month, Altman, Hassabis and Amodei met with US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to discuss AI regulation.
In addition, the CEO of OpenAI testified before the Senate and warned that the risks of this technology were serious enough to justify government intervention.
In March, more than a thousand entrepreneurs and researchers from the technology sector -including Elon Musk, who is not signing today’s letter- requested in an apocalyptic letter that AI systems “more powerful than GPT-4” be suspended for six months. ” -the latest model of OpenAI-.
