Global leaders should be working to reduce "the risk of extinction" from artificial intelligence technology, a group of industry chiefs and experts warned on Tuesday.
A one-line statement signed by dozens of specialists, including Sam Altman whose firm OpenAI created the ChatGPT bot, said tackling the risks from AI should be "a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war".
ChatGPT burst into the spotlight late last year, demonstrating an ability to generate essays, poems and conversations from the briefest of prompts -- and sparking billions of dollars of investment into the field.
But critics and insiders have raised the alarm over everything from biased algorithms to the possibility of massive job losses as AI-powered automation seeps into daily life.
The latest statement, housed on the website of US-based non-profit Center for AI Safety, gave no detail of the potential existential threat posed by AI.
But several of the signatories, including Geoffrey Hinton, who created some of the technology underlying AI systems and is known as the father of the industry, have made similar warnings in the past.
Their biggest worry has been the idea of so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI) -- a loosely defined concept for a moment when machines become capable of performing wide-ranging functions and can develop their own programming.The fear is that humans would no longer have control, which experts have warned could have disastrous consequences for the species.Dozens of academics and specialists from companies including Google and Microsoft signed the latest letter, which comes two months after billionaire Elon Musk and others called for a pause in the development of such technology until it could be shown to be safe.
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The Barron's news department was not involved in the creation of the content above. This story was produced by AFP. For more information go to AFP.com.
ยฉ Agence France-Presse
Comment: And, predictably - because Bill Gates never met a potentially destructive technology he didn't like - he
had this to say:
As CNBC reports, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates predicted that during the next few years, AIs will "be as good a tutor as any human ever could."
"At first, we'll be most stunned by how it helps with reading โ being a reading research assistant โ and giving you feedback on writing," he told a crowd during his keynote speech at a digital learning conference in San Diego last week.
"If you just took the next 18 months, the AIs will come in as a teacher's aide and give feedback on writing," he continued. "And then they will amp up what we're able to do in math."
Bill & AI 4Eva
It's far from the first time that Gates has voiced his excitement over the tech.
Just last month, Gates wrote on his blog that "the age of AI has begun," called OpenAI's GPT large language model "revolutionary," and predicted that "whatever limitations [AI] has today will be gone before we know it."
Nearly two decades before OpenAI released its blockbuster AI chatbot and scored a lucrative Microsoft deal, Gates talked up the then-futuristic-sounding field of machine learning to the New York Times.
"If you invent a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, so machines can learn, that is worth ten Microsofts," he told the paper back in 2004.
Investible
Then in 2019, Gates invested in the startup Luminous, which is building a light-based AI accelerator chip that will purportedly power the supercomputers necessary to sustain the AIs of the future.
If his comments in recent months are any indication, it's clear that Gates believes we really are on the precipice of a true quantum leap in AI tech โ and while he feels like the outlook is rosy, it's hard to say whether or not we agree with him.
Didn't we have that lately ?
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