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Artificial intelligence pioneer Andrew Ng said warnings about existential AI risks from researchers at top model makers are “science fiction” that may be detrimental to ensuring the technology’s maximum benefits to society.
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Ng, who helped start Google Brain and Coursera Inc., said the tech industry previously stoked fears about the potential catastrophic harms of artificial intelligence earlier in the AI boom in an apparent bid to bolster publicity and shape regulation.
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“I was quite dismayed over the past two weeks,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg TV on Thursday. “This wave of PR has kicked up again, for probably similar purposes.”
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The high-profile resignation this month of former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon helped bring a long-simmering discussion about AI safety into the mainstream. Coxon accused both his former employers of “gambling with our lives” by “racing toward super-intelligent AI,” and said the people building AI believe it could “kill us all by the end of the decade.”
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Earlier this week, an AI researcher who recently resigned from Google DeepMind also warned humanity is running out of time to prevent artificial intelligence from causing widespread harm.
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Against that backdrop, AI leaders including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman are calling for the industry to pace development of cutting-edge models and take additional steps to safeguard future development.
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Ng, who previously worked with both Amodei and Altman earlier in their careers, said there are certainly risks from AI, including with cybersecurity capabilities. But he described the concerns around human extinction as “much more science fiction than science.”
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He also said there are “practical engineering problems” the industry can focus on to continue to improve and safeguard the technology, while working to ensure that AI can be used for “many of the wonderful things it can do.”
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—With assistance from Ed Ludlow.
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