Father of ChatGPT Warns AI Could Exterminate Humanity

More than 350 industry executives, experts and professors in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) have signed an open letter in which they warn that AI could pose a risk of human extinction. The letter, published on May 30 local time on the website of the nonprofit Center for Artificial Intelligence Security (CAIS), was signed by Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, the "father of ChatGPT," Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, and Microsoft, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and executives from Microsoft and Google, among others.

The letter is one paragraph long: "Mitigating the risk of extinction posed by AI should be a global priority, along with other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." It's 22 words in all. 

Some of the signatories, who earlier this year signed another open letter calling for a "moratorium" on the development of AI more advanced than GPT-4 for at least six months, have been criticized on several levels, with some experts arguing that it exaggerates the risks posed by AI, while others agree that such risks exist but disagree with the letter's suggested measures.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (file photo)

Dan Hendrycks, executive director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence Security, told The New York Times that the May 30 statement was succinct and did not suggest any potential ways to mitigate the AI threat, aiming to avoid such disagreements. "We don't want to push for a huge menu of 30 potential interventions." Hendrycks said, "When that happens, it dilutes the message (of what it wants to convey)."