A group of business leaders and experts, including the creator of ChatGPT, Sam Altman, have warned in an online statement on Tuesday that humanity faces the risk of "extinction" following the rise of artificial intelligence (AI).
Combating AI-related risks should be "a global priority on par with other society-wide risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war," the signatories wrote on the website of the Center for AI Safety, a US-based non-profit organisation.
Geoffrey Hinton, considered to be one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence (AI) and also a signatory of the tribune, had already warned of its dangers when he left his post at the giant Google at the beginning of May.
Advances in the AI sector are inducing "profound risks for society and humanity," Hinton opined in the New York Times.
In March, billionaire Elon Musk – one of the founders of OpenAI, whose board he would later leave – and hundreds of global experts had called for a six-month pause in research into powerful AI, citing "major risks for humanity."
The high-speed deployment of an increasingly "general" artificial intelligence, endowed with human cognitive abilities and therefore likely to transform many professions, was symbolised by OpenAI’s launch of GPT-4 in March, a new, more powerful version of ChatGPT, open to the general public at the end of 2022.
The face of Chat GPT, Sam Altman, regularly issues warnings that AI could "cause serious damage to the world," by manipulating elections or decimating the job market.
Last week in Paris, he discussed with President Emmanuel Macron how to find "the right balance between protection and positive impact" of this technology.
