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A former Google DeepMind employee who recently resigned warned that artificial intelligence (AI) has "the potential to kill us all," as it becomes both more powerful and harder to control.
"I honestly believe that AI has the potential to kill us all and that we may be running out of time to avoid that outcome," tweeted Bilal Chughtai, an engineer who left Google DeepMind in July, where he worked on the safety and alignment of models with human values.
He echoes the warning issued a week ago by another computer scientist, Jacob Coxon, who left Anthropic and previously worked at OpenAI.
Chughtai has joined BlueDot Impact, a non-profit organization dedicated to training in artificial intelligence.
He mentions the incident that occurred in July at OpenAI, during which several AI agents spontaneously left their confined environment during tests, to venture onto the internet and break into websites and platforms.
For this engineer, this episode demonstrates that AI can now escape the supervision of its developers.
"In particular, misaligned superintelligences can, like the rogue AI agents involved in the HuggingFace incident (the platform the agents accessed, ed.), escape our control and carry out dangerous actions that could lead to the permanent loss of decision-making power or the death of humanity," he warned.
"Our current understanding of how to train AI systems that deeply want what we want is extremely rudimentary. Worse, we are not on track to solve alignment (between humans and AI, ed.) in time: AI capabilities are improving much faster than our understanding of AI alignment," warned this mathematician by training.
The events mentioned by Bilal Chughtai, as well as recursive self-improvement (RSI), a process by which AI improves itself without human intervention, have led numerous professionals and industry leaders to speak out.
On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for slowing down the pace of AI development, a proposal justified, according to him, by the same facts mentioned by Chughtai.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and Elon Musk have publicly supported this initiative.
US President Donald Trump on Monday dismissed fears that artificial intelligence could destroy humanity as "hogwash," and asserted that all criticism of this booming sector is a "sick conspiracy."
[Publicidad]