Here are the key sentences from your provided text, extracted based on their relevance to your request about Geoffrey Hinton, his warnings about AI, and the surrounding expert and public response:

- Hinton has been worried about the potential of AI to do harm and he often talks about the existential threat that AI might pose to the human species.

- He has used OpenAI’s ChatGPT and this has made him uneasy.

- When it started to succeed, no one thought it would succeed so quickly.

- Dr Hinton told the BBC: ‘Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell.

But I think they soon may be.’
- Josh, the Biden White House is concerned about AI being developed by the tech sector and then unleashed on the public with little to no guardrails on how it might be used.

- After hundreds of industry and science leaders warned that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” the U.N. Secretary-General recently echoed their concern.

- Among them is human-level AI, defined as an AI that can perform a broad range of cognitive tasks at least as well as we can.

- But bear in mind that as a society, we have barely begun to let the truth sink in: we are risking human extinction here.

- AI existential risk is still not taken as seriously as it should be.

But that is changing.

- Racing to develop and launch the most advanced technology
- Such work comes at a pivotal time for AI.

- The CMA chief executive said: “AI has burst into the public consciousness over the past few months but has been on our radar for some time.

- AI Could Match Human Intelligence In Five Years: Google DeepMind CEO
- Denis Hassabis, who is the CEO of DeepMind, a startup that was acquired by Google in 2014, has made a bold claim that AI could reach human-level cognition in as little as five years.

Here are the key sentences from your provided text, extracted based on their relevance to your request about Geoffrey Hinton, his warnings about AI, and the surrounding expert and public response:

- Hinton has been worried about the potential of AI to do harm and he often talks about the existential threat that AI might pose to the human species.

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Content: Wednesday, December 13, 2023
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A.I. doesn’t bleed

by John Clinton, Ramsay

New knowledge merges with old; what you know shapes what you learn. Artificial neural networks have been studied and computer algorithms have been generated to understand how artificial, computer-generated, neurons, would store a concept, and how it would revise that concept if it was flawed.

Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist often called ‘the godfather of AI,’ is a leading figure in neural networks; studies inspired by the way neurons are connected in the human brain. A New Yorker magazine piece describes his collaborative work in the 1960s and 1970s developing neural nets that couldn’t do anything better than a child. The technology suddenly improved about a decade ago with the large increase in processing speed and Internet data availability.

According to Google Scholar, Hinton is the second most cited researcher among psychologists and the most cited among computer and cognitive scientists.

Hinton has been worried about the potential of AI to do harm and he often talks about the existential threat that AI might pose to the human species. He has used OpenAI’s ChatGPT and this has made him uneasy. He wrote “Fox News is an oxymoron” asking ChatGPT to explain the joke. (Initial reading of this caused me to ponder – a moron full of oxygen??) The first reply told him that this implied Fox News was fake news. When he called attention to the space between oxy and moron, it explained that Fox News was addictive, like the drug OxyContin. To him, this level of understanding represents a new era in AI.

In nature, wildlife learns how to be intelligent without access to concepts expressed in words. They learn to be smart (survive) through experience. Learning, not knowledge, is the engine of intelligence. There is no use trying to explain complicated ideas that you do not understand. First, you must understand how something works. Otherwise, you just produce nonsense.

Because neural networks are so strange, no one can predict how useful – or dangerous – AI will become. OpenAI’s GPT models involve billions of artificial neurons (data) which are profoundly different than biological brains. They are not alive. Our intuitions tell us that nothing resident in a browser tab could really be thinking in the way we do.

Because a human brain can run on oatmeal, the world can support billions of brains, all different. Each brain can learn continuously, rather than being trained once, then pushed out into the world (ship it!).

If the brain dies, the knowledge dies. If a computer dies, load up another computer. Ten thousand neural nets can learn ten thousand different things at the same time and share what they have learned. This immortality (knowledge perpetuity) and replicability suggest we should be concerned about digital intelligence taking over from biological intelligence.

Current AI technology is talkative and intellectual. The problems of physical intuition will be the challenge of the next decade says Yann LeCun, a French computer scientist. A teenager can learn to drive a car in twenty hours of practice with little supervision. AI systems don’t come close to doing this – except self-driving cars – and they are over-engineered, requiring the mapping of whole cities, hundreds of engineers, and hundreds of thousands of hours of training.

And then there is the problem of what some researchers call AI ‘hallucination’, which Hinton names ‘confabulation.’ AI systems confabulate by making up plausible answers to questions that stump them. In the human mind, there is no boundary between just making it up and telling the truth. Telling the truth is just making it up correctly. ChatGPT’s ability to make things up is a flaw, but also a sign of its humanlike intelligence.

When Hinton began his research, no one thought the technology would succeed. When it started to succeed, no one thought it would succeed so quickly. He expects AI will contribute to many fields, but he fears what will happen when powerful people abuse it. Think autonomous weapons. Hinton warns that even benign autonomous systems could wreak havoc. Yann LeCun has said there is an idea that if a system is intelligent it is going to want to dominate. But the desire to dominate has nothing to do with intelligence – it has to do with testosterone.

Recently, Hinton did not sign a popular petition that called for at least a six-month pause in AI research.

“China is not going to stop development for six months.”

“So what should we do?”

“I don’t know. If this were like climate change where we either must stop burning carbon or find a way to remove carbon from the atmosphere, we know what the solution looks like. Here, with AI, it’s not like that.”

Think of the AI story in which our intuitions about the specialness of the human mind are being dislodged by thinking machines, or, having stolen fire, we risk being burned.

Are we fooling ourselves, being taken in by our own machines and the companies that hope to profit from them? By seeking to re-create the knowledge systems in our heads, have we seized the forbidden apple? Have we risked exile from our charmed world? But who would choose not to know how knowing works?

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What did Hinton, the renowned British-Canadian expert reveal about AI that caused widespread concern?

Exposed serious AI risks, shocking the tech world and affecting major company stocks.

What future risk did Hinton warn about AI?

What risks did the global summit report highlight about AI?

Creating malicious software for cyberattacks, potentially posing an existential threat if humans lose control.

- He has used OpenAI’s ChatGPT and this has made him uneasy.

- When it started to succeed, no one thought it would succeed so quickly.

- Dr Hinton told the BBC: ‘Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell.

Title:

Content: The ‘Godfather of AI’ warns about potential dangers of the technology as he quits Google

British-Canadian computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton admits he has fears for the future of AI

In a Frankenstein-esque tale of maker and master, Geoffrey Hinton, 75, dubbed ‘the godfather of AI’, has left Google with a parting warning over the dangers of artificial intelligence.

In 2012, the British-Canadian computer scientist invented technology with two students at University of Toronto that would become the intellectual foundation for AI systems. Google purchased the rights to this neural network tech to the tune of $44 million, which also propelled Dr Hinton to receive the Turing Award in 2018, considered the Nobel Prize of computing.

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Yet now, Dr Hinton has packed in the day job at Google to join a chorus of anxious experts demanding a rollback of AI research until more robust safety measures are designed and deployed. Dr Hinton told the BBC: ‘Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be.’

While many look upon AI as a natural technological development akin to the internet that could lead to exciting breakthroughs for humanity, there are growing fears that AI is a Pandora’s box. Reflecting on the effects of his work, Dr Hinton said: ‘I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody would have,’ as he admitted, ‘it is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.’

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The scientist went on to warn that AI could be taught to ‘create sub-goals like “I need to get more power”’, and be harnessed by nefarious actors to wreak havoc. With innovation driven forward by the unstoppable competition between behemoths like Google and Microsoft, Dr Hinton warned innovation will only increase exponentially in the coming years.

There are those who are trying to apply the brakes to this runaway train. In March, an open letter was signed by over 1,000 tech leaders and researchers, including Elon Musk and fellow Turing Award winner Yoshu Bengio, calling for a six-month moratorium on AI development. A few days later, 19 leaders of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence released their own letter on the risks of AI. The signatures included that of Eric Horvitz, chief scientific officer at Microsoft.

The main outcry over AI lies in its ability to create and disseminate false news and images, which the public may find increasingly hard to identify. AI also poses a threat to academia and careers (see: Tatler’s foray into the world of ChatGPT). Dr Hinton believes that AI will fundamentally disrupt the workplace and take over the ‘drudge work’.

Read More
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The Crypto Fashion Week debutante on becoming VR’s favourite It Girl

However Google’s chief scientist, Jeff Dean, offered words of comfort, adding: 'We remain committed to a responsible approach to AI. We’re continually learning to understand emerging risks while also innovating boldly.’

What about AI makes regulation seen as premature, leading few countries to act despite global calls?

But I think they soon may be.’
- Josh, the Biden White House is concerned about AI being developed by the tech sector and then unleashed on the public with little to no guardrails on how it might be used.

Title:

Content: Meet the honorees ⭐ Mother's Day shopping Take our news quiz 📝 The Crossword
Proud Boys

4 Proud Boys found guilty of seditious conspiracy, latest AI warning: 5 Things podcast

Taylor Wilson
USA TODAY

On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: Proud Boys, including leader Enrique Tarrio, guilty of seditious conspiracy for Jan. 6

Several Proud Boys have been found guilty of seditious conspiracy for the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. Plus, banking anxieties continue, USA TODAY World Affairs Correspondent Kim Hjelmgaard reports on protests over proposed reforms in Israel, an autopsy reveals Tyre Nichols was killed by blunt force trauma to the head, and USA TODAY Domestic Security Correspondent Josh Meyer looks at the latest debate around artificial intelligence.

Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY podcasts right here

Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Taylor Wilson:

Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson and this is 5 things you need to know Friday, the 5th of May 2023. Today, a verdict for the Proud Boys. Plus, more bank anxiety, and we hear the latest from protests in Israel.

Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and three lieutenants were found guilty yesterday of entering a seditious conspiracy against the US government, leading to the January 6th, 2021 Capitol attack. A fifth Proud Boy was acquitted of the charge. Prosecutors said Tarrio was the leader of the plot, despite not being in Washington that day. His arrest two days before the insurrection on unrelated charges and the stabbing of several Proud Boys at a protest in December 2020 served as motivators to try and stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election, according to the government. Tarrio's attorneys argued that he was just the government's scapegoat. They said the true culprit of January 6th was former President Donald Trump.

PacWest Bancorp saw its shares plunge earlier this week, dropping more than 39% at one point. The bank said yesterday that it was considering asset sales and has been approached by several parties about a deal. The bank insists that it has not experienced a high number of customer withdrawals in the wake of the failure and sale of First Republic Bank after a modern day bank run. But anxiety over regional bank stability appeared to spread late this week. Comerica slumped more than 8% and TD Bank Group and First Horizon called off a planned merger citing regulatory hurdles.

Months long protests for and against proposed judicial reforms in Israel will continue this weekend, with tens of thousands expected on the streets of Tel Aviv and elsewhere. Many of the protests are accusing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right wing coalition of using the reforms to get around the checks and balances of government, and of turning Israel into more of a religious state that could even amount to a dictatorship. Others say they just want their views reflected by a parliament they elected. I sat down with USA TODAY World Affairs Correspondent Kim Hjelmgaard, who recently traveled to Israel, to learn more. Kim, thanks for hopping on 5 Things.

Kim Hjelmgaard:

Thanks for having me.

Taylor Wilson:

Protests have erupted across Israel over these proposed judicial reforms. Some folks opposed to the reforms have said if they're enacted, Israel will not be a democracy anymore. Others even suggest the reforms would make Israel a dictatorship. What's your general perspective on that?

Kim Hjelmgaard:

My general perspective is that Israel is a pretty healthy democracy. Like all democracies, it's not perfect. Constitutional legal scholars say there is space for reform. And this is one of the things that the people who are leading these reforms are saying, look, we can't get laws passed that sort of reflect what our constituents want. The ability to, for example, have separate concerts for men and women, or we can't get laws passed that would allow us to kind of sufficiently build the infrastructure of settlements in the West Bank.

However, it's kind of problematic because if you look at something like a settlement in the West Bank, these things are not legal by international standards. They're often built on Palestinian land.

One of the things about these proposed reforms that the protestors are so angry about has to do with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He's in the middle of a corruption case and he's on trial for it. He's suddenly taken an interest in these reforms because they kind of essentially enable him, through a majority in parliament which his government controls, to kind of get a get out of jail free card a bit. So let's say Netanyahu's convicted, there is the possibility that he can't be removed from power. So the protestors are kind of saying this is just not a healthy thing for a democracy.

Taylor Wilson:

Kim, you mentioned the international community. What is the US government's stance on these reforms and on all of the protests that have happened in recent months?

Kim Hjelmgaard:

US government, as some listeners may be aware, is Israel's biggest source of foreign military aid. The US was the first country in the world to recognize Israel as a country, and the Biden administration has expressed quite publicly, quite loudly, that it does not like the look of these reforms. It feels that they are not democratic, that they're problematic for various reasons.

Taylor Wilson:

And finally, Kim, what's next for these reform proposals and the protests in the coming months?

Kim Hjelmgaard:

Well, things have kind of been stalled since before the Passover holiday, which was last month, when essentially the Parliament went on recess. And Netanyahu, he was kind of faced with this growing escalating insurrection from the Israeli public. There was a series of kind of walkouts from different labor unions, teachers, airport workers went on strike. And they kind of reached this moment where Netanyahu was like, whoa, he needed to calm things down before all of Israeli society kind of unraveled. And so he paused it.

Parliament came back last week. The protestors are still there. The political establishment in Israel is kind of talking about how they're going to try to reach some kind of compromise on this. And nothing has really changed, and it is a kind of standoff where both sides are digging in. But over the last couple of weeks, pro-reform people have started to protest in bigger numbers. A week ago there was about 200,000 of them that showed up outside of the Knesset, which is the Israeli parliament.

So I think everyone in Israel, as far as I can tell, is kind of scratching their heads going, this is not getting any better. In fact, it's getting worse. And one of the places where it could go is another election. And Israel has had five elections since 2019, I believe it is, because they couldn't agree with each other about exactly how to move this country forward. So who knows where that would end up.

Taylor Wilson:

All right. USA TODAY World Affairs Correspondent Kim Hjelmgaard. Thanks so much.

Kim Hjelmgaard:

Thanks for having me.

Taylor Wilson:

An autopsy revealed yesterday that Tyre Nichols was killed by blunt force trauma to the head. The 29-year-old motorist died earlier this year after being brutally beaten by Memphis Police Officers. Nichols' family viewed the autopsy report this week, some four months after Tyre's death. Their attorney, Ben Crump, said the manner of death was homicide. Attorneys said the report was similar to an independent January autopsy that found Nichols suffered extensive bleeding.

♦

Artificial intelligence. No matter how you feel about it, the technology is here. That includes chatbots like ChatGPT, which recently passed a hundred million monthly active users, according to Reuters and others. I spoke with USA TODAY Domestic Security Correspondent Josh Meyer to learn more. Hi there, Josh.

Josh Meyer:

Good to be here. How are you?

Taylor Wilson:

Good, thanks. Thanks for hopping back on. Josh, the Biden White House is concerned about AI being developed by the tech sector and then unleashed on the public with little to no guardrails on how it might be used. What did they say this week?

Josh Meyer:

The Biden administration did have a meeting at the White House, led by Kamala Harris, with some of these tech leaders to talk about some of the reforms that the White House says are needed, including more transparency in the way these companies develop these technologies, giving access to the work in progress by critics and the public, just so they can weigh in on what's happening.

And also, the Biden administration last October released what they called the AI Bill of Rights. That's designed to sort of put more safeguards in place. Right now, that's just a recommendation. And so some critics that say the Biden administration hasn't gone far enough say that that needs to be mandatory, that these companies aren't going to really do much on their own, and that they're going to have to be forced to comply more and to do more in terms of protecting the safety, security, and the privacy of Americans as we go forward.

Taylor Wilson:

And there have been several prominent tech leaders warning about this recently, including the so-called godfather of AI. So Josh, who is the godfather of AI?

Josh Meyer:

The godfather of AI is a guy named Geoffrey Hinton. He's a renowned researcher, vice president at Google. He's also a Toronto professor, and he's spent the last couple of decades at the forefront of innovating and research and development into artificial intelligence and related topics, including ChatGPT.

Taylor Wilson:

And what are some of his concerns about this technology?

Josh Meyer:

He said that his concerns have mostly come about in the last few months, and one of the concerns is that it is becoming so advanced so quickly. One of the things that it's learning to do is simple reasoning. He said that he's concerned that somebody could actually take over the world and push humanity toward extinction.

He was at a seminar yesterday and one of the things that jumped out at me, and everybody else that was there, was he was asked by the panel's moderator, "What's the worst case scenario that you think is conceivable?" And without hesitation, Hinton said, "I think it's quite conceivable that humanity is just a passing phase in the evolution of intelligence."

Taylor Wilson:

Strong words, I would say. Geez.

Josh Meyer:

Yeah. And then he went on to say that even if we think that we're in control of the technology and we can just turn it off, he said it could easily be brought back to life again on another machine if given the proper instructions. And this is another quote from him at the MIT Technology Review conference yesterday. Hinton said, "And it may keep us around for a while to keep the power stations running, but after that, maybe not." So food for thought.

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah, food for thought. So do other experts agree with this pretty pessimistic outlook?

Josh Meyer:

Actually, after he said that, I wanted to find people that would take exception to it, and I talked to a lot of people. I looked around and a lot of people share his concerns. I did find some people that are a little bit more skeptical, including a longtime trusted source of mine who said, "I think that it's overstated. People need to take a step back. Take a deep breath."

I talked to a guy named Michael Hamilton, who's the co-founder of Critical Insight Risk Management. He's a former advisor to the Department of Homeland Security on tech issues. And he said that computer assisted machine learning, including artificial intelligence, will never be the kind of sentient, self-aware and all-knowing technology that people are afraid of, and that created the Terminator of movie fame. He said basically, artificial intelligence is an extremely sophisticated programming platform that can only go as far as humans allow it.

Taylor Wilson:

Josh, one concern is that AI could wipe out thousands, maybe millions of jobs by making them obsolete. What does he say on that point?

Josh Meyer:

Oh yeah, he's very concerned about that. And so is the White House, as a matter of fact, when they rolled out this new initiative. They said that's one of their biggest concerns. And they want to make sure that the developers of AI, which include Google, Microsoft, and some other companies, that they keep that in mind and make sure that there's guardrails there to prevent that kind of thing from happening.

But we do live in a capitalist economy. According to Hinton, he actually spoke very specifically about it, and he said that, we live in a world where profit comes first and the rich could get richer and the poor get poorer because of ways in which AI is used to do menial tasks that are often done by human beings at a lower range of the pay scale. He said, "It's going to cause huge increases in productivity. My worry is for those increases in productivity to put people out of work and make the rich richer and the poor poorer. And as you do that," Hinton said, "you make that gap bigger and society gets more and more violent."

Taylor Wilson:

Josh Meyer, thanks so much.

Josh Meyer:

Sure.

Taylor Wilson:

And happy Cinco de Mayo. The date marks Mexico's victory over the French empire at the Battle of Puebla in 1862.

Thanks for listening to 5 Things. We're produced by Shannon Rae Green, and our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Special thanks to Cherie Saunders and Alexis Gustin. I'm Taylor Wilson back tomorrow with another episode of 5 Things.

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What does Hinton warn could happen to AI if companies and regulators fail to implement effective rules and controls?

- After hundreds of industry and science leaders warned that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” the U.N. Secretary-General recently echoed their concern.

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Otto Barten is director of the Existential Risk Observatory, a nonprofit aiming to reduce existential risk by informing the public debate.
Joep Meindertsma is founder of PauseAI, a movement campaigning for an AI Pause.

The existential risks posed by artificial intelligence (AI) are now widely recognized.

After hundreds of industry and science leaders warned that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” the U.N. Secretary-General recently echoed their concern. So did the prime minister of the U.K., who is also investing 100 million pounds into AI safety research that is mostly meant to prevent existential risk. Other leaders are likely to follow in recognizing AI’s ultimate threat.

In the scientific field of existential risk, which studies the most likely causes of human extinction, AI is consistently ranked at the top of the list. In The Precipice, a book by Oxford existential risk researcher Toby Ord that aims to quantify human extinction risks, the likeliness of AI leading to human extinction exceeds that of climate change, pandemics, asteroid strikes, supervolcanoes, and nuclear war combined. One would expect that even for severe global problems, the risk that they lead to full human extinction is relatively small, and this is indeed true for most of the above risks. AI, however, may cause human extinction if only a few conditions are met. Among them is human-level AI, defined as an AI that can perform a broad range of cognitive tasks at least as well as we can. Studies outlining these ideas were previously known, but new AI breakthroughs have underlined their urgency: AI may be getting close to human level already.

Recursive self-improvement is one of the reasons why existential-risk academics think human-level AI is so dangerous. Because human-level AI could do almost all tasks at our level, and since doing AI research is one of those tasks, advanced AI should therefore be able to improve the state of AI. Constantly improving AI would create a positive feedback loop with no scientifically established limits: an intelligence explosion. The endpoint of this intelligence explosion could be a superintelligence: a godlike AI that outsmarts us the way humans often outsmart insects. We would be no match for it.

More from TIME

A godlike, superintelligent AI

A superintelligent AI could therefore likely execute any goal it is given. Such a goal would be initially introduced by humans, but might come from a malicious actor, or not have been thought through carefully, or might get corrupted during training or deployment. If the resulting goal conflicts with what is in the best interest of humanity, a superintelligence would aim to execute it regardless. To do so, it could first hack large parts of the internet and then use any hardware connected to it. Or it could use its intelligence to construct narratives that are extremely convincing to us. Combined with hacked access to our social media timelines, it could create a fake reality on a massive scale. As Yuval Harari recently put it: “If we are not careful, we might be trapped behind a curtain of illusions, which we could not tear away—or even realise is there.” As a third option, after either legally making money or hacking our financial system, a superintelligence could simply pay us to perform any actions it needs from us. And these are just some of the strategies a superintelligent AI could use in order to achieve its goals. There are likely many more. Like playing chess against grandmaster Magnus Carlsen, we cannot predict the moves he will play, but we can predict the outcome: we lose.

But why would a superintelligence want to make humanity extinct? In fact, it might not explicitly want that at all. Humanity’s extinction might be a mere side effect of executing another goal to its extremity. When we are executing our own goals as humans, such as food production or growing our economy, we tend to not pay much attention to the effects this has on other species. This routinely leads to the extinction of animal species as a mere side effect of us maximising our goals. In a similar fashion, an uncontrollable superintelligence could lead to our extinction as a side effect of the AI pushing its goals, whatever they may be, to their limits.

Read More: The A to Z of Artificial Intelligence

So how can we avoid AI existential risk? Humanity now faces a stark choice: pause AI at a safe level, or continue development indefinitely. Unsurprisingly, the AI labs want the latter. To continue, however, means literally betting our lives on these labs being able to solve an open scientific problem called AI Alignment.

AI Alignment is the approach that leading labs such as OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic are currently taking to prevent human extinction. AI Alignment does not attempt to control how powerful an AI gets, does not attempt to control what exactly the AI will be doing, and does not even necessarily attempt to prevent a potential takeover from happening. Since the labs anticipate they will not be able to control the superintelligent AI that they are creating, they accept that such an AI will act autonomously and unstoppably, but aim to make it act according to our values. As Richard Ngo, a leading alignment researcher working at OpenAI, puts it, “I doubt we’ll be able to make every single deployment environment secure against the full intellectual powers of a superintelligent AGI.” There are large problems with their alignment approach, however, both fundamentally and technically.

What values should an AI have?

Fundamentally, there is of course no agreement on what values we have. What OpenAI founder Sam Altman wants a superintelligence to do may well be completely different from what, say, a textile worker in Bangladesh wants it to do. Aggregating human preferences has always been a thorny issue even before AI, but will get even more complicated when we have a superintelligence around that might be able to quickly, completely, and globally implement the wishes of a handful of CEOs. Democracy, however imperfect, has been the best solution we can find for value aggregation so far. It is, however, unclear whether our current combination of national political systems can control a godlike AI. In fact, it is unclear whether any organisation or system would be up to the task.

Beyond disagreement over current values, humans have historically not been very good at predicting the future externalities of new technologies. The climate crisis, for one, can be seen as an unforeseen outcome of technologies such as steam and internal combustion engines. Ever more powerful technology has the potential to create ever larger externalities. It is impossible to foresee what the negative side effects will be of actually implementing some interpretation of humanity’s current values. They might make climate change pale in comparison.

There are more unsolved fundamental issues with aligning a superintelligence, but currently, AI companies don’t even get that far. It seems that even making current large neural networks reliably do what anyone wants is a technical problem that we currently cannot solve. This is called inner misalignment and has been observed already in current AI: the model pursues the wrong goal when it is released into the real world after being trained on a limited dataset. For a superintelligence, this could have a catastrophic outcome. This problem is, according to OpenAI’s recent document Governance of Superintelligence, an “open research question.” But not to worry: they say they are “putting a lot of effort” into it.

Read More: The AI Arms Race is Changing Everything

Even if individuals such as Altman care about the existential threats of superintelligence, the current market dynamics of competing AI labs do not incentivize safety. The GPT-4 model built by OpenAI was tested and fine-tuned for seven months before being made public with a detailed report about its safety. Contrary to the safety efforts of OpenAI, a panicked Google released its competing PaLM 2 model just months later, without any mention of similar safety tests. Now even open-source models like Orca are performing at a ChatGPT level, without any safety analysis. The race is frantic, pushing these companies to take more risks to stay ahead. The scope of these risks is gigantic. As Jaan Tallinn, investor of the major AI lab Anthropic, puts it: “I’ve not met anyone in AI labs who says the risk [from training a next-generation model] is less than 1% of blowing up the planet”.

Let us be clear: continuing risky AI development, and eventually undergoing the intelligence explosion that leads to an uncontrollable superintelligence, is a terrible idea. We will not be able to navigate it safely. We lack the technical solutions, the coordination, the insight, the wisdom, and the experience to do something this complex right on the first try. As humans, we are good at solving problems with trial-and-error processes where we get lots of tries. But in the case of an intelligence explosion, we cannot use this strategy, since the first trial of uncontrolled superintelligence could be disastrous.

Why we should pause AI development

So what is the alternative? An AI Pause. This would mean that governments prohibit training any AI model with capabilities likely to exceed GPT-4. This can be determined by examining the amount of computation required for training, corrected over time for improvements in algorithmic efficiency. These leading models can only be trained at large AI companies or data centers, making the enforcement of such a pause realistic.

Since the leading labs are currently located in the U.S. and the U.K., implementing a pause at a national level in those two countries can be done on very short notice. In the medium term, the competitive dynamics between nations will require international legislation and collaboration, where an international AI agency would help. The U.K. is already planning to host an AI safety summit in autumn, which is a fitting moment to sign a treaty that implements an international AI Pause. Excluding important countries, especially China, from such a summit might not be wise, since they will be needed as well in the medium term. For the longer term, hardware regulation—such as making sure new consumer hardware cannot be used for large-scale AI training, while closely monitoring all hardware that can be—is a promising option to practically enforce a pause. Research into this topic needs to be scaled up rapidly to arrive at robust and implementable solutions.

Further AI development may continue only after regulating authorities are convinced that training and deploying a certain AI model will not risk an uncontrolled intelligence explosion or a takeover scenario. Second-order effects, such as making hard-to-control open-source development easier, should be taken into account in such decisions.

Read More: What to Know About Claude 2, Anthropic’s Rival to ChatGPT

Continuing beyond the red line, and thus risking an intelligence explosion or a takeover, should only be allowed after meeting the strictest of requirements. First of all, the technical alignment problem should be decisively solved. Other major issues, such as aggregating humanity’s different value systems, limiting unforeseen externalities, and many more, will also need to be addressed.

A pause may be seen by some as unrealistic. They might say that we cannot stop technological progress for a speculative scenario, that market forces are too strong to counter, or that opposing countries can never coordinate. But bear in mind that as a society, we have barely begun to let the truth sink in: we are risking human extinction here. AI existential risk is still not taken as seriously as it should be. But that is changing. Leading AI academics, such as ‘fathers of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, have sounded public warnings about AI’s existential risk, because they saw the technology getting more capable. This process is unlikely to stop: AI’s capabilities will grow further, and this will lead to more and more debate leaders sounding the alarm bells. When the full weight of our situation sinks in, measures that may appear unrealistic at present, could rapidly gain support.

As humanity, we will realise the situation that we are in. We will come together, and we will find a solution, as we always have. And, sooner than we think, we will implement an AI Pause.

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EDIT POST

What risks did the global summit report highlight about AI?

Creating malicious software for cyberattacks, potentially posing an existential threat if humans lose control.

- Among them is human-level AI, defined as an AI that can perform a broad range of cognitive tasks at least as well as we can.

- But bear in mind that as a society, we have barely begun to let the truth sink in: we are risking human extinction here.

What did Sam Altman admit about ChatGPT and the potential risks of AI?

Advanced AI could pose an existential risk to humanity.

What risks did the global summit report highlight about AI?

Creating malicious software for cyberattacks, potentially posing an existential threat if humans lose control.

- AI existential risk is still not taken as seriously as it should be.

What did Hinton, the renowned British-Canadian expert reveal about AI that caused widespread concern?

Exposed serious AI risks, shocking the tech world and affecting major company stocks.

What did Sam Altman admit about ChatGPT and the potential risks of AI?

Advanced AI could pose an existential risk to humanity.

What does Hinton warn could happen to AI if companies and regulators fail to implement effective rules and controls?

What risks did the global summit report highlight about AI?

Creating malicious software for cyberattacks, potentially posing an existential threat if humans lose control.

But that is changing.

- Racing to develop and launch the most advanced technology
- Such work comes at a pivotal time for AI.

Title:

Content: Google seeks to fix fairness in AI technology

By Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press, Toronto

Automation / Robotics Electronics AI artificial intelligence Google Technology

But artificial intelligence still has biases echoed by society

An artificial intelligence researcher at Google says fixing fairness in the technology “isn’t a simple thing,” but the world has an opportunity to get it right as the software explodes in popularity.

“It’s as though we have been given a second chance on how we use this technology to dismantle some of the biases we see in society,” Komal Singh, a senior product manager at the tech goliath, said in a Tuesday media briefing in Toronto.

Her optimism comes as the tech sector – and nearly every other industry – have spent the year abuzz about AI’s promise and perils.

Source: Getty Images

Some see the technology as a game changer bound to disrupt everyday life and bring expediency, efficiency and solutions to some of the globe’s biggest challenges. Others, including Tesla owner Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, warn advances in the technology are moving too fast and guardrails are needed before wide-scale deployments.

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Geoffrey Hinton, the British-Canadian computer scientist widely considered the `godfather of AI’, is so concerned with the technology he left Google so he can more freely discuss the dangers, which he has said include bias and discrimination, joblessness, echo chambers, fake news, battle robots and existential risk. Singh acknowledged AI is not without risks. She’s even seen them firsthand. For example, she said if you ask an AI model to generate an image of a nurse it will often return a woman, while a request for an image of a CEO typically brings up a white man and a query for a software engineer delivers racialized men.

A lot needs to happen to fix the fairness

“In a nutshell, I think the takeaway is a lot needs to happen to fix the fairness problem,” Singh said.

At Google, some of that work has come from studying skin tones because dark and medium tones often can’t be deciphered by computer vision systems, which allow computers to “see and understand” images of people and environments.

“This is problematic because a lot of the social disparities around colourism then get populated into social technical systems, which then end up reinforcing them,” Singh said.

To break the cycle, Google partnered with Harvard University professor, Dr. Ellis Monk to design an open-source skin tone scale that can better detect darker tones and be used by AI models to reduce biases. It’s already been deployed within its camera detection technology, on Pixel phones and in search tools, helping to diversify results so keywords bring up a range of skin tones and hair textures. The company also has a project called Media Understanding for Social Exploration, which studied 12 years of American television shows to analyze representation across skin tones.

Racing to develop and launch the most advanced technology

Their findings were “stark,” Singh said. Over the past 12 years, there was a slight increase in the screen time given to those with dark and medium skin tones, while the amount of time those with lighter skin spent on screen was slightly lower. Such work comes at a pivotal time for AI. Top tech companies are racing to develop and launch the most advanced technology, competing with one another for billions of dollars pouring into the industry.

In Canada, Google estimates generative AI could increase the economy by $210 billion and save the average worker over 100 hours a year. Google leaders accompanying Singh said they’re already using AI to improve breast cancer detection, sequence genomes and develop systems that medical clinicians can plug questions into to generate health guidance. E-commerce giant Shopify Inc. is using the technology to reduce search abandonment, while Canadian National Railway Co. is building a digital supply chain platform with automated shipment tracking, Google workers said.

At Google, AI underpins the company’s search engine, maps and cloud storage and is the basis for Bard, its rival product to ChatGPT, that has yet to launch in Canada. Sam Sebastian, the head of Google Cloud’s Canadian operations, promised it would make its Canadian debut “very soon,” but offered no specific timeline. Instead, he discussed his overall outlook on AI, saying it was a technological shift unlike anything he’s seen in his 25 years working in the industry.

“The only thing close to it is the advent of the mobile phone,” he said.

The transformative nature means anyone in the space needs to balance AI’s potential with its risks, he said. For its part, Google has committed to abide by a series of principles as it delves deeper into AI. It has so far promised not to design or deploy AI technologies that cause or are likely to harm, including weapons or systems used to inflict injuries. It also says it will not work on AI-based “surveillance violating internationally accepted norms” or systems which will contravene laws and human rights.

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- The CMA chief executive said: “AI has burst into the public consciousness over the past few months but has been on our radar for some time.

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UK and US intervene amid AI industry’s rapid advances

Competition and Markets Authority sends ‘pre-warning’ to sector, while White House announces measures to address risks

The UK and US have intervened in the race to develop ever more powerful artificial intelligence technology, as the British competition watchdog launched a review of the sector and the White House advised tech firms of their fundamental responsibility to develop safe products.

Regulators are under mounting pressure to intervene, as the emergence of AI-powered language generators such as ChatGPT raises concerns about the potential spread of misinformation, a rise in fraud and the impact on the jobs market, with Elon Musk among nearly 30,000 signatories to a letter published last month urging a pause in significant projects.

The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said on Thursday it would look at the underlying systems – or foundation models – behind AI tools. The initial review, described by one legal expert as a “pre-warning” to the sector, will publish its findings in September.

On the same day, the US government announced measures to address the risks in AI development, as Kamala Harris, the vice-president, met chief executives at the forefront of the industry’s rapid advances. In a statement, the White House said firms developing the technology had a “fundamental responsibility to make sure their products are safe before they are deployed or made public”.

The meeting capped a week during which a succession of scientists and business leaders issued warnings about the speed at which the technology could disrupt established industries. On Monday, Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI”, quit Google in order to speak more freely about the technology’s dangers, while the UK government’s outgoing scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, urged ministers to “get ahead” of the profound social and economic changes that could be triggered by AI, saying the impact on jobs could be as big as that of the Industrial Revolution.

Sarah Cardell said AI had the potential to “transform” the way businesses competed, but that consumers must be protected.

The CMA chief executive said: “AI has burst into the public consciousness over the past few months but has been on our radar for some time. It’s crucial that the potential benefits of this transformative technology are readily accessible to UK businesses and consumers while people remain protected from issues like false or misleading information.”

ChatGPT and Google’s rival Bard service are prone to delivering false information in response to users’ prompts, while concerns have been raised about AI-generated voice scams. The anti-misinformation outfit NewsGuard said this week that chatbots pretending to be journalists were running almost 50 AI-generated “content farms”. Last month, a song featuring fake AI-generated vocals purporting to be Drake and the Weeknd was pulled from streaming services.

The CMA review will look at how the markets for foundation models could evolve, what opportunities and risks there are for consumers and competition, and formulate “guiding principles” to support competition and protect consumers.

The leading players in AI are Microsoft, ChatGPT developer OpenAI – in which Microsoft is an investor – and Google parent Alphabet, which owns a world-leading AI business in UK-based DeepMind, while leading AI startups include Anthropic and Stability AI, the British company behind Stable Diffusion.

Alex Haffner, competition partner at the UK law firm Fladgate, said: “Given the direction of regulatory travel at the moment and the fact the CMA is deciding to dedicate resource to this area, its announcement must be seen as some form of pre-warning about aggressive development of AI programmes without due scrutiny being applied.”

In the US, Harris met the chief executives of OpenAI, Alphabet and Microsoft at the White House, and outlined measures to address the risks of unchecked AI development. In a statement following the meeting, Harris said she told the executives that “the private sector has an ethical, moral, and legal responsibility to ensure the safety and security of their products”.

The administration said it would invest $140m (£111m) in seven new national AI research institutes, to pursue artificial intelligence advances that are “ethical, trustworthy, responsible, and serve the public good”. AI development is dominated by the private sector, with the tech industry producing 32 significant machine-learning models last year, compared with three produced by academia.

Leading AI developers have also agreed to their systems being publicly evaluated at this year’s Defcon 31 cybersecurity conference. Companies that have agreed to participate include OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Stability AI.

“This independent exercise will provide critical information to researchers and the public about the impacts of these models,” said the White House.

Robert Weissman, the president of the consumer rights non-profit Public Citizen, praised the White House’s announcement as a “useful step” but said more aggressive action is needed. Weissman said this should including a moratorium on the deployment of new generative AI technologies, the term for tools such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion.

“At this point, Big Tech companies need to be saved from themselves. The companies and their top AI developers are well aware of the risks posed by generative AI. But they are in a competitive arms race and each believes themselves unable to slow down,” he said.

The EU was also told on Thursday that it must protect grassroots AI research or risk handing control of the technology’s development to US firms.

In an open letter coordinated by the German research group Laion – or Large-scale AI Open Network – the European parliament was told that one-size-fits-all rules risked eliminating open research and development.

“Rules that require a researcher or developer to monitor or control downstream use could make it impossible to release open-source AI in Europe,” which would “entrench large firms” and “hamper efforts to improve transparency, reduce competition, limit academic freedom, and drive investment in AI overseas”, the letter said.

“Europe cannot afford to lose AI sovereignty. Eliminating open-source R&D will leave the European scientific community and economy critically dependent on a handful of foreign and proprietary firms for essential AI infrastructure.”

The largest AI efforts, by companies such as OpenAI and Google, are heavily controlled by their creators. It is impossible to download the model behind ChatGPT, for instance, and the paid-for access that OpenAI provides to customers comes with a number of legal and technical restrictions on how it can be used. By contrast, open-source efforts involve creating a model and then releasing it for anyone to use, improve or adapt as they see fit.

“We are working on open-source AI because we think that sort of AI will be more safe, more accessible and more democratic,” said Christoph Schuhmann, the organisational lead at Laion.

More on this story

More on this story

  • US aims to tackle risk of uncontrolled race to develop AI

  • EU urged to protect grassroots AI research or risk losing out to US

  • UK competition watchdog launches review of AI market

  • AI ‘could be as transformative as Industrial Revolution’

  • Chatbot ‘journalists’ found running almost 50 AI-generated content farms

  • ‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton quits Google and warns over dangers of misinformation

  • AI has better ‘bedside manner’ than some doctors, study finds

  • Fresh concerns raised over sources of training material for AI systems

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- AI Could Match Human Intelligence In Five Years: Google DeepMind CEO
- Denis Hassabis, who is the CEO of DeepMind, a startup that was acquired by Google in 2014, has made a bold claim that AI could reach human-level cognition in as little as five years.

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Content: Home » Tech » AI Could Match Human Intelligence In Five Years: Google DeepMind CEO
1-MIN READ

AI Could Match Human Intelligence In Five Years: Google DeepMind CEO

Curated By: Shaurya Sharma

News18.com

Last Updated: May 04, 2023, 11:18 IST

New Delhi, India

Experts believe A.I. could match humans very soon. (Representative image/Reuters)

Denis Hassabis, who is the CEO of DeepMind, a startup that was acquired by Google in 2014, has made a bold claim that AI could reach human-level cognition in as little as five years.

2023 is shaping up to be the year of Artificial Intelligence—generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Bing, and Google’s Bard are making headlines. Human jobs are at risk, with IBM halting hiring for 7,800 roles. And, the fear of AI surpassing human capabilities persists. Geoffrey Hinton, known as the ‘Godfather of AI,’ left Google citing concerns about its dangers. Despite the benefits that AI can bring, such as increased efficiency and productivity, the fear of AI outpacing humans and becoming too smart for its own good is a fear that has been discussed time and again.

Now, another Google executive, Denis Hassabis, who is the CEO of DeepMind, a startup that was acquired by Google in 2014, has made a bold claim that AI could reach human-level cognition in as little as five years.

Hassabis, speaking at Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything Festival in New York City, said that the developments in the Artificial Intelligence space shouldn’t be slowed down. “I think we’ll have very capable, very general systems in the next few years,” and he doesn’t “see any reason why that progress is going to slow down. I think it may even accelerate.” He added, “So I think we could be just a few years, maybe within a decade away.”

According to Fortune, Google announced last month that it was merging its core A.I. research team with DeepMind, the startup founded by Demis Hassabis, who would become the CEO of the newly combined unit. Google had acquired DeepMind in 2014.

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In related news, Geoffrey Hinton, who’s touted to be the ‘Godfather of AI, quit Google to express his concerns. Hinton, who has won the Turing award, the computer science equivalent of the Nobel prize, has expressed concern that future versions of AI could pose a threat because they often learn unexpected behavior from the vast amounts of data they analyze. This is particularly troubling as AI systems might soon generate and run their own code, which could lead to truly autonomous weapons and killer robots becoming a reality.

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first published:May 04, 2023, 11:18 IST
last updated:May 04, 2023, 11:18 IST