Artificial intelligence experts have signed an open letter aimed at drawing attention to the risk the technology could pose to humanity.
Signed by industry figures including Sam Altman, chief executive officer at OpenAI, as well as the bosses of Google DeepMind and Anthropic, the statement reads: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
Geoffrey Hinton nicknamed ‘the Godfather of AI’, also signed the statement after he claimed that machine learning chatbots could soon outsmart humans.
In recent months, concerns over AI have increased with Elon Musk and other tech executives calling for a six-month pause on ‘chatbot’ developments to help mitigate any dangers.
Altman, whose company created ChatGPT, warned Congress that the technology can create “serious risks” and could be detrimental to society if placed in the wrong hands.
However, the OpenAI boss told EU lawmakers last week that he thought the upcoming bill being drafted by the union would make the technology “overregulated” and that he was expecting changes to be made.
Officials responded, saying that the bill would not “see any dilution happening anytime soon”.
Some experts have argued that there are more pressing, near-term issues with AI that should be fixed first, like the problem of inputting biases into the technology rather than the destruction of the earth.
Arvind Narayanan, a computer scientist at Princeton University, said to the BBC: “Current AI is nowhere near capable enough for these risks to materialise.
“As a result, it's distracted attention away from the near-term harms of AI.”