Top AI experts sign open letter warning of ‘extinction’ risk

Hundreds of top Artificial Intelligence (AI) scientists, researchers, and others — including OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis — again voiced deep concern for the future of humanity, signing a one-sentence open letter to the public that aimed to put the risks the rapidly advancing technology carries with it in unmistakable terms.

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” read the statement which was signed by over 350 people and was published by the Center for AI Safety (CAIS).

The signatories' list includes names like Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, 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, news agency Reuters reported.

A statement from CAIS singled out Meta for not signing the letter. "We asked many Meta employees to sign," said CAIS director Dan Hendrycks.

This letter comes amid the US-EU Trade and Technology Council meeting in Sweden where the leaders are expected to discuss on regulating AI.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and a several other AI experts and industry executives were the first ones to raise concerns over potential risks from AI to society last month.

"We've extended an invitation (to Musk), and hopefully he’ll sign it this week," Hendrycks added.

Recent developments in AI have created applications which are used in varied domains from medical diagnostics to writing legal briefs, but on the other hand, it has sparked fears over privacy violations, power misinformation campaigns, issues with “smart machines”.

This warning comes two months after the nonprofit Future of Life Institute (FLI) issued a similar open letter, signed by Musk and hundreds more, demanding an urgent pause in advanced AI research, citing risks to humanity, the report added.

"Our letter mainstreamed pausing, this mainstreams exctinction," said FLI president Max Tegmark, who also signed the more recent letter.

Last week OpenAI CEO Sam 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.

(With inputs from Reuters)