By Kevin Collier - NBC News
Scientists and tech industry leaders, including top executives from Microsoft and Google, on Tuesday issued a new warning about the dangers artificial intelligence (AI) poses to humanity.
"Mitigating the risk of extinction by AI should be a global priority alongside other risks on a societal scale such as pandemics and nuclear war," the experts said in a statement.
The note was published on the website of the Center for AI Security, a non-profit organization based in San Francisco (California), and is signed by almost 400 people, including some of the most important in this sector such as Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT; as well as executives from Google and Microsoft; and 200 academics.
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This statement is the latest warning in a series of warnings issued by AI experts, although it has also fueled growing opposition to focusing on what some consider hypothetical exaggerated harms of AI.
Meredith Whittaker, president of encrypted messaging app Signal and chief adviser to the AI Now Institute, a nonprofit group dedicated to ethical AI practices, mocked the statement as overvaluing her product.
Clément Delangue, co-founder and CEO of the AI company Hugging Face, posted on Twitter an image of an edited version of the statement replacing the acronym AGI with AI. AGI stands for artificial general intelligence, a theoretical form of AI that is as capable or more capable than humans.
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The statement comes two months after another group of technology and AI leaders, including Tesla owner Elon Musk; Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple; and Grady Booch, IBM's chief scientist, signed a petition calling for a "pause" in all large-scale AI research open to the public. None of them has now signed the new declaration, and no such pause has occurred.
Altman, who has repeatedly called for AI to be regulated, wowed Congress earlier this month. He held a private dinner with dozens of House members and was the subject of a Senate hearing, where he became the only tech executive to receive bipartisan praise.
Altman's calls for regulation have had their limits. Last week it said OpenAI could leave the European Union if AI is "over-regulated."
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Although the White House has announced some plans to tackle AI, there is no indication that the United States has imminent plans to do so on a large scale.
Gary Marcus, a leading critic of AI and professor emeritus of psychology and neural sciences at New York University, said that while the potential threats from AI are very real, it's a distraction to worry only about the worst-case scenario.
"Literal extinction is just one of the possible risks, not yet well understood, and there are many other risks of AI that also deserve attention," he said.
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Some tech experts have said that the more mundane and immediate uses of AI are a greater threat to humanity. Microsoft President Brad Smith has said deep fakes and the possibility of them being used to misinform are his biggest concerns about this technology.
Last week, markets briefly fell after a fake, apparently AI-generated, image of an explosion near the Pentagon went viral on Twitter.