Runaway AI Is an Extinction Risk, Experts Warn

Leading figures in the development of artificial intelligence systems, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, have signed a statement warning that the technology they are building may someday pose an existential threat to humanity comparable to that of nuclear war and pandemics. "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war," reads a one-sentence statement, released today by the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit. The idea that AI might become difficult to control, and either accidentally or deliberately destroy humanity, has long been debated by philosophers. But in the past six months, following some surprising and unnerving leaps in the performance of AI algorithms, the issue has become a lot more widely and seriously discussed. In addition to Altman and Hassabis, the statement was signed by Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, a startup dedicated to developing AI with a focus on safety.