Dozens of artificial intelligence (AI) experts including the CEOs of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic, recently signed a public statement released by the Center for Artificial Intelligence Safety (CAIS).
The statement contains a sentence: "Mitigating the risk of AI extinction should be a global priority alongside other social-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." The document's signatories include a veritable who's who of AI, including AI's "Godfather" Geoffrey Hinton ; UC Berkeley's Stuart Russell; and MIT's Lex Fridman. Musician Grimes is also a signee, listed under the "Other Notable People" category.
While the statement appears innocuous on the surface, the underlying message is controversial in the AI community. A growing number of experts seem to believe that current technology may or will inevitably lead to the emergence or development of artificial intelligence systems capable of posing an existential threat to the human species.
However, their views were refused by a group of experts with diametrically opposed opinions. For example, Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, has repeatedly stated that he doesn't necessarily believe that AI will become uncontrollable. ho disagree with The "extinction" rhetoric, such as Andrew Ng, co-founder of Google Brain and former chief scientist of Baidu, AI is not the problem, but the answer.
On the other hand, experts such as Hinton and Conjecture CEO Connor Leahy believe that human-level artificial intelligence is inevitable, so now is the time to act. However, it was unclear what action the statement's signatories called for. and/or heads of AI of nearly every major AI company, as well as prominent scientists from academia are among the signatories suggests that their intention is not to prevent the development of these potentially dangerous systems.
Earlier this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (one of the signatories to the above statement) made his congressional debut at a Senate hearing to discuss AI regulation. His testimony made headlines after he spent much of his time urging lawmakers to regulate his industry.
Altman’s Worldcoin, a project that combines cryptocurrency and identity, also recently had a media round after raising a $115 million Series C, bringing its total funding after three rounds to $240 million.
