AI doomsday scenarios gain  traction in Silicon Valley

The rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence has prompted calls for regulation and a pause in advanced AI systems training

Concern over AI’s potential for harm has gained traction at the highest echelons of the AI community.

Controversial AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky sits on the fringe of the industry’s most extreme circle of commentators, where extinction of the human species is the inevitable result of developing advanced artificial intelligence.

“I think we're not ready, I think we don't know what we're doing, and I think we're all going to die,” Mr Yudkowsky said. 

For the past two decades, Mr Yudkowsky has consistently promoted his theory that hostile AI could spark a mass extinction event. 

As many in the AI industry shrugged or raised eyebrows at this assessment, he created the Machine Intelligence Research Institute with funding from Peter Thiel, among others, and collaborated on written work with futurists such as Nick Bostrom.

To say that some of his visions for the end of the world are unpopular would be a gross understatement; they’re on par with the prophecy that the world would end in 2012. 

That prediction was based on a questionable interpretation of an ancient text, as well as a dearth of supportive evidence.

While Mr Yudkowsky’s views are draconian, concern over AI’s potential for harm has gained traction at the highest echelons of the AI community, including among chief executive officers of some of the leading companies in artificial intelligence, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Alphabet's DeepMind. The rapid rise of generative AI in just even the past eight months has prompted calls for regulation and a pause in training of advanced AI systems.

In May, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, and Dario Amodei joined hundreds of other leaders and researchers in co-signing a brief statement released by the nonprofit Center for AI Safety that said “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war".

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was a signatory, as was Mr Yudkowsky.

Meanwhile, Alphabet's Google released its Bard chatbot to users in the EU and Brazil, and said the artificial intelligence tool can now generate responses in more than 40 languages, including Chinese, Hindi, and Spanish.

The EU is among the last part of the world to get access to Bard, which launched in about 180 countries earlier this year. The delay was due to uncertainty around the AI service’s compliance with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, the company said.

However, the US tech giant had “very productive conversations with privacy regulators here in Europe”, Google senior product director Jack Krawczyk told reporters ahead of the EU rollout. 

He said Google will now give users clear notices about how their data is being used and stored, and let them choose not to allow the company’s employees to review conversations, which Google does to understand and improve the product. These control options will be available globally, not just in the EU. 

• Bloomberg