Soon after, prominent AI safety researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky – who has been commenting on the dangers of superintelligent AI since well before 2020 – took things a step further. Some of the AI luminaries who signed it expressed concern that AGI poses an existential threat to humans, and that ChatGPT is too close to AGI for comfort.
The same day that paper was submitted, The Future of Life Institute published an open letter calling for a six-month pause on training AI models more powerful than GPT-4, to allow everyone to take stock and plan ahead. Scientists are no more immune to group think than anyone else. Nonetheless, it added to the hype and furore, and it was hard not to get caught up in the panic. By the definitions of AGI I’m familiar with, this is certainly not true. Some immediately interpreted the Microsoft research as saying GPT-4 is an AGI. AGI is the subject of a variety of competing definitions, but for the sake of simplicity can be understood as AI with human-level intelligence.
In March, Microsoft researchers published a paper claiming GPT-4 showed “sparks of artificial general intelligence”. Forward to today, and ChatGPT has had an incredible impact on society.
It just wasn’t easily accessible online for everyone to play with.īack in 20, I and many others wrote papers discussing the capabilities and shortcomings of GPT-3 and similar models – and the world carried on as always. An early version of its underlying model, GPT-3, was released in 2020 with many of the same capabilities. The technology it’s based on is several years old. When ChatGPT was released late last year, people were delighted, entertained and horrified.īut ChatGPT isn’t a research breakthrough as much as it is a product. Upon close inspection, we see there are commercial incentives to manufacture fear in the AI space.Īnd as a researcher of artificial general intelligence (AGI), it seems to me the framing of AI as an existential threat has more in common with 17th-century philosophy than computer science. However, I’d argue a healthy dose of scepticism is warranted when considering the AI doomsayer narrative. This letter, published through the nonprofit Center for AI Safety, has been signed by industry figureheads including Geoffrey Hinton and the chief executives of Google DeepMind, Open AI and Anthropic. This week outlets around the world were plastered with news of yet another open letter claiming AI poses an existential threat to humankind. These three truths go some way towards explaining the oversimplification and dramatisation plaguing discussions about AI. It’s easy to fear what you don’t understand. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a complex subject.
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