OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has joined forces with scientists and professors to emphasize the urgent need to confront the “risk of extinction from AI.”
Over 350 signatories stressed the need of putting this danger on par with pandemics and nuclear weapons in a statement issued by the nonprofit Center for AI Safety (CAIS).
The signatories, who included leading AI CEOs, professors, and experts, emphasized that reducing the risk of AI-induced extinction should be a global priority due to the potential societal-scale impact. Some notable signatories include Geoffrey Hinton, Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto; Yoshua Bengio, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Montreal; Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind; and Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, a company working on understanding and building safe AI systems.
Other signatories include Dawn Song, Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley; Ya-Qin Zhang, Professor and Dean at AIR, Tsinghua University; Ilya Sutskever, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of OpenAI; Shane Legg, Chief AGI Scientist and Co-Founder of Google DeepMind; Martin Hellman, Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Stanford; James Manyika, SVP of Research, Technology & Society at Google-Alphabet; and many others.
Separately, in a March statement supported by over 30,000 people, technology leaders and researchers asked for a six-month moratorium on training AI systems that outperform GPT-4, the newest generation of the ChatGPT chatbot. This request originated from the recognition that powerful artificial intelligence has the ability to cause dramatic changes in the history of life on Earth, necessitating precise preparation and resource allocation.
The sources for this piece include an article in Reuters.