- Hundreds of AI company leaders, including the CEO of OpenAI, expressed concern about the “extinction risk” posed by AI in a public letter, likening it to pandemics and nuclear wars.
- The letter was signed by 350 people through the Center for AI Security, and while many tech company CEOs supported the initiative, Meta Platforms did not.
- Earlier, Elon Musk and other experts had also warned about the potential risks of AI in a letter put out by the Future of Life Institute.
Almost all the highest executives of companies that develop products and services related to artificial intelligence, including the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, joined experts this Tuesday, May 30, to raise in a public letter the “risk of extinction” to which the AI can lead.
Specialists equate this risk to that of a pandemic and nuclear war.
“Mitigating the potential risk of extinction that AI can cause should be a global priority, just like other global problems such as a new pandemic and nuclear war,” says the text signed by 350 people through the Center for AI Security (CAIS), a recently created NGO.
In addition to OpenAi’s Altman, the letter is signed by the CEOs of DeepMind and Anthropic, two other companies specializing in the subject, and by the highest executives of Microsoft and Google.
Of the big tech firms, only Meta Platforms did not sign, publishes Reuters this Tuesday, May 30.
On the list of signatories are Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, two of the three people considered “godfathers of artificial intelligence”, who received the prestigious Turing Award in 2018 for their work on deep learning.
They are professors at different universities, from Harvard to Tsinghua, in China.
The statement expressly points to Meta, the company for which the third “godfather of AI”, Yann LeCun, works for not having signed.
The letter has now been published and this is not accidental. It coincides with the US-European Union Trade and Technology Council meeting in Sweden, where politicians are set to discuss AI regulations.
AI and “extinction risk”
It must be remembered that a couple of months ago, in April of this year, Elon Musk and another group of AI experts, in addition to industry CEOs, had also published a letter mentioning the potential risks for society.
The letter, prompted at the time by Future of Life Institutean organization created to monitor the way technology develops, had more than 1,100 signatures.
In the petition, the experts noted: “In recent months we have seen how AI labs have launched into an uncontrollable race to develop and deploy digital brains ever more powerful than anyone, not even their own creators, cannot reliably understand, predict, or control.
In addition to Musk, they signed leaders such as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak; Jaan Tallinn, co-founder of Skype; engineers from Meta and Microsoft among other large companies in the sector.
In parallel, a group of lawyers from the United States made a submission to the FTC to stop new releases of GPT by OpenAI, arguing risks to privacy and public safety.
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