Artificial intelligence poses ’risk of extinction,' tech execs and experts warn

Top artificial intelligence executives including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday joined other experts and professors in urging policymakers to see the technology as one of the most serious risks to humanity.

Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war, more than 350 signatories wrote in a letter (new window) published by the nonprofit Center for AI Safety (CAIS).

As well as Altman, they included the CEOs of AI firms DeepMind and Anthropic, and executives from Microsoft and Google.

Also among them were Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio — two of the three so-called godfathers of AI who received the 2018 Turing Award for their work on deep learning — and professors from institutions ranging from Harvard to China's Tsinghua University.

A statement from CAIS singled out Meta, where the third godfather of AI, Yann LeCun, works, for not signing the letter.

The letter coincided with the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council meeting in Sweden where politicians are expected to talk about regulating AI.

Bengio and Elon Musk, along with more than 1,000 other experts and industry executives, had already cited potential risks to society (new window) in April.

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• AI is having a moment. What should the government do about it? (new window)

Recent developments in AI have created tools supporters say can be used in applications from medical diagnostics to writing legal briefs, but this has sparked fears the technology could lead to privacy violations, powerful misinformation campaigns and lead to issues with smart machines thinking for themselves.

AI pioneer Hinton earlier told Reuters that AI could pose a more urgent threat to humanity than climate change.

Last week, Altman referred to EU AI — the first efforts to create a regulation for AI — as over-regulation and threatened to leave Europe. He reversed his stance within days after criticism from politicians.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will meet Altman on Thursday.

Watch | Canadian-British AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton on potential risks:

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He helped create AI. Now he’s worried it will destroy humanity

Canadian-British artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton says he left Google because of recent discoveries about AI that made him realize it poses a threat to humanity. CBC chief correspondent Adrienne Arsenault talks to the 'godfather of AI' about the risks involved and if there's any way to avoid them.

Supantha Mukherjee (new window) · Thomson Reuters ·