Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be “a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war”, the Center for AI Safety says.
The San Francisco-based nonprofit released the warning in a statement overnight after convincing major industry players to come out publicly with their concerns that artificial intelligence is a potential existential threat to humanity.
In just one sentence, the world’s biggest creators of artificial intelligence are screaming in unison.
The Center’s Executive Director Dan Hendrycks told the ABC via email that they released the statement because the public “deserves to know what the stakes are”.
“AI poses serious risks of human extinction, and the world needs to seriously grapple with them,” he said.
Who signed the warning?
Among the dozens of signatories from AI development across the globe are Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (the creators of ChatGPT), and Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind which has developed BARD.
Both met with US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in the White House earlier this month to discuss the risks associated with AI and potential regulatory actions.
Mr Altman followed that up with this testimony to the US Congress: “If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong; we want to be vocal about that, we want to work with the government to prevent that from happening”.
“This statement today shows that it is common knowledge, it is commonly accepted that the threat from AI are real, this is a thing that the real people actually working on this technology actually do take seriously and do think is a real problem,” Connor Leahy, CEO of London based AI company Conjecture, said.
Other noted signatories include the so-called godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, who left Google this year so he could voice his concerns, and Yi Zeng, the professor and director of the brain-inspired cognitive AI lab at the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The warning is loud and clear
The speed at which artificial intelligence is developing concerns those who are working in the field.
Generative AI models or apps which use large language models have been released and are openly being tested on the global public.
Including ChatGPT, AutoGPT, ChaosGPT, MidJourney and Dall-E — there are now dozens of powerful models for language, images, voices and coding.
Some have been released by major companies like Google and Microsoft which are integrating them into their existing products.
Others are open-source, meaning anyone can download them and create newer products and may be much harder to regulate.
But more concerning to industry insiders is just how little is known about how the new AI models and apps actually work, because unlike computer code they are “organically” created.
“I think what shocks me is not that we understand so little, it’s that [the general public] don’t know that we understand so little,” Mr Leahy said.
“It’s an open secret that no one in the field understands this AI.”
“It’s like we’re trying to do biology before we know what a cell is. We don’t know what DNA is. We don’t know what we don’t even have good microscopes,” he said.
Global work is needed
In its Hiroshima communique, the G7 leaders meeting in Japan recently agreed that discussions need to take place the rules for digital technologies like AI should be “in line with our shared democratic values”.
Many nations and global blocs like the EU are trying to determine what regulations are needed to reign in the AI race.
“I’m excited to see signatories from around the world,” Mr Hendrycks said.
“We’re going to need global coordination in order to mitigate these threats.”
“There’s a lot more work that needs to be done. Nonetheless, the fact that we’re seeing prominent AI experts from other nations recognise these risks is a promising sign.
“We’re going to need all parties to clearly acknowledge these risks. Just as everyone recognises that a nuclear arms race is bad for the world, we need to recognise that an AI arms race would be dangerous.”
Mr Leahy agreed, saying it’s not something that will go away, and that regulators needed to be pressured now.
“And we have the explicit statement from the people involved in industry that they are willing to be regulated, they want to be regulated,” he said.
“And this is something that shouldn’t be regulated, there couldn’t be a more perfect storm, we now just have to act”
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