• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 30, 2023

A 23-word statement signed by many top artificial intelligence business leaders, engineers, policymakers, experts and researchers states that reducing the "risk of extinction" posed by AI should be an international priority, and issues a new warning about the existential threat they believe AI poses to humanity.

The statement reads as follows: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott are among those who signed the statement published by a San Francisco-based non-profit, the Center for AI Safety.

Geoffrey Hinton, known as the Godfather of AI, is on the list of those who signed the statement. He announced his resignation from Google in a statement to the New York Times, pointing to “bad actors” that would use AI to do “bad things.”

Hinton told the BBC that the dangers of AI chatbots were "quite scary," and that today they are not more “intelligent than us,” as far as he can tell,” but they “soon may be."

Hinton resigned from Google, with the desire to communicate about the dangers of ChatGPT and similar products freely and openly.

The statement is the latest attempt to slow the development of the controversial and complex technology. In March, Elon Musk, one of the initial board members and financial backer of OpenAI, signed a proposal recommending that companies training and developing AI tools should pause all work for at least six months.

Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and more than 1,000 others signed an open letter that was posted online. This letter calls for “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai committed to an “AI Pact” in a meeting last week with Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for Internal Market.

The meeting with top European Union officials, which took place on Wednesday, involves creating a set of voluntary rules or standards while formal regulations for applying AI are underway.