... “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war,” reads a one-sentence statement released by the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit organization. The open letter has been signed by more than 350 executives, researchers and engineers working in A.I. ...
Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, two of the three researchers who won a Turing Award for their pioneering work on neural networks and are often considered “godfathers” of the modern A.I. movement, signed the statement, as did other prominent researchers in the field. ...
Eventually, some believe, A.I. could become powerful enough that it could create societal-scale disruptions within a few years if nothing is done to slow it down, though researchers sometimes stop short of explaining how that would happen.
The brevity of the new statement from the Center for AI Safety — just 22 words in all — was meant to unite A.I. experts who might disagree about the nature of specific risks or steps to prevent those risks from occurring, but who shared general concerns about powerful A.I. systems, Mr. Hendrycks said. ...
See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/technology/ai-threat-warning.html