Focusing on doomsday scenarios in artificial intelligence is a distraction that plays down immediate risks such as the large-scale generation of misinformation, according to a senior industry figure attending this week's AI safety summit. Aidan Gomez, co-author of a research paper that helped create the technology behind chatbots, said long-term risks such as existential threats to humanity from AI should be "studied and pursued", but that they could divert politicians from dealing with immediate potential harms. "I think in terms of existential risk and public policy, it isn't a productive conversation to be had," he said. "As far as public policy and where we should have the public-sector focus – or trying to mitigate the risk to the civilian population – I think it forms a distraction, away from risks that are much more tangible and immediate." Gomez is attending the two-day summit, which starts on Wednesday, as chief executive of Cohere, a North American company that makes AI tools for businesses including chatbots.

This March, nearly 35,000 AI researchers, technologists, entrepreneurs, and concerned citizens signed an open letter from the nonprofit Future of Life Institute that called for a "pause" on AI development, due to the risks to humanity revealed in the capabilities of programs such as ChatGPT. "Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves ... Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us?" I could still be proven wrong, but almost six months later and with AI development faster than ever, civilization hasn't crumbled. Heck, Bing Chat, Microsoft's "revolutionary," ChatGPT-infused search oracle, hasn't even displaced Google as the leader in search. So what should we make of the letter and similar sci-fi warnings backed by worthy names about the risks posed by AI? Two enterprising students at MIT, Isabella Struckman and Sofie Kupiec, reached out to the first hundred signatories of the letter calling for a pause on AI development to learn more about their motivations and concerns.

Alarm over artificial intelligence has reached a fever pitch in recent months. Just this week, more than 300 industry leaders published a letter warning AI could lead to human extinction and should be considered with the seriousness of "pandemics and nuclear war". Terms like "AI doomsday" conjure up sci-fi imagery of a robot takeover, but what does such a scenario actually look like? The reality, experts say, could be more drawn out and less cinematic – not a nuclear bomb but a creeping deterioration of the foundational areas of society. "I don't think the worry is of AI turning evil or AI having some kind of malevolent desire," said Jessica Newman, director of University of California Berkeley's Artificial Intelligence Security Initiative.

Nearly half of Americans are very or somewhat concerned about the possibility that artificial intelligence, or AI, will cause the end of the human race on Earth, according to new YouGov polling.

After repeatedly warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence, and sparring with fellow tech billionaires on the issue, Elon Musk wants to create AI-powered humanoid robots. Speaking at his electric vehicle company Tesla's first AI Day event in California, Musk gave a preview of the Tesla Bot – a general purpose, bipedal, non-automotive robot. According to Musk, building a humanoid robot is the next logical step for Tesla because it has already become "the world's biggest robotics company." Our cars are semi-sentient robots on wheels. With the full self-driving computer, the inference engine on the car, which we'll keep evolving obviously… neural nets, recognizing the world, understanding how to navigate through the world… it kinda makes sense to put that into a humanoid form.