In a statement issued by the non-profit Centre for AI Safety (CAIS), more than 350 signatories said that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
Along with Altman, they also featured officials from Microsoft and Google and the CEOs of DeepMind and Anthropic, two AI companies.
They also included experts from universities including Harvard and Tsinghua University in China, as well as Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, two of the three so-called “godfathers of AI” who shared the 2018 Turing Award for their work on deep learning.
Yann LeCun, the third godfather of AI, works at Meta, which was singled out by CAIS for not signing the letter.
Director of CAIS Dan Hendrycks stated, “We requested signatures from several Meta workers. Requests for feedback from Meta did not immediately receive a response.
Also read: Alexa and Ring privacy infractions will cost Amazon $30 million.
Politicians are anticipated to discuss regulating AI during the US-EU Trade and Technology Council conference in Sweden, which the letter was sent to coincide with.
The first to mention possible threats to society were Elon Musk and a group of AI researchers and business executives in April. Hendrycks stated, “We’ve extended an invitation (to Musk), and hopefully he’ll sign it this week.”
Recent advances in AI have produced tools that proponents claim may be used for everything from authoring legal documents to medical diagnosis, but this has generated worries that the technology could result in privacy violations, fuel disinformation campaigns, and cause problems with “smart machines” thinking for themselves.
The alert comes two months after the nonprofit Future of Life Institute (FLI) published an identical open letter with Musk and hundreds of other signatories calling for an immediate halt to advanced AI development due to hazards to humans.
FLI President Max Tegmark, who also signed the most recent letter, stated that “our letter mainstreamed pausing, this mainstreams extinction.” “An open and constructive discussion can now begin,”
AI pioneer Hinton previously warned Reuters that AI might be “more urgent” than climate change as a danger to civilization.
The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, vowed to quit Europe last week in reference to EU AI, the first attempt to build a legislation for AI. After receiving criticism from legislators, he quickly changed his position.
After his ChatGPT chatbot took the globe by storm, Altman has emerged as the face of AI. Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, will see Altman on Thursday, and Thierry Breton, the EU industry commissioner, will visit him in San Francisco the following month.
