The three so-called godfathers of A.I. arent thrilled with how the technology is evolving.
The trio of computer scientistsProfessor Yoshua Bengio, Dr Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCunearned the nickname in 2019 when they won the prestigious Turing Prize and were awarded $1 million to share between them.
Now the group, who have reportedly been friends for more than three decades, have turned their attention not to furthering the course of artificial intelligence but to warning the industry that now is the time to put the breaks on.
In an interview with the BBC, Bengio said watching A.I. morph into an apparent threat has left him questioning his lifes work, and that his direction and identity is no longer clear to him.
It is challenging, emotionally speaking, for people who are inside [the A.I. sector], he said. You could say I feel lost. But you have to keep going and you have to engage, discuss, encourage others to think with you.
Bengio is one of many who is warning about the impact A.I. could have if it fell into the hands of military bodies, and is also the first signatory on an open letter also signed by the like of Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, calling for a six-month pause on the development of the technology.
Second letter
Bengio, formerly an advisor to Microsoft and a collaborator with IBM, also signed a second letter this week suggesting that mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.
Alongside Bengios name is OpenAIs Sam Altman, who has openly called for increased regulation of the sector, as well as fellow godfather Hinton.
Bengio believes companies working on powerful tools like ChatGPTa large language modelshould be registered: Governments need to track what theyre doing, they need to be able to audit them, and thats just the minimum thing we do for any other sector like building airplanes or cars or pharmaceuticals.
We also need the people who are close to these systems to have a kind of certificationwe need ethical training here. Computer scientists dont usually get that, by the way.
Currently a professor at the Université de Montréal, Bengio adds that its not too late to set the sector on the right path.
Its never too late to improve, he said. Its exactly like climate change. Weve put a lot of carbon in the atmosphere. And it would be better if we hadnt, but lets see what we can do now.
What the other godfathers think
Hinton is similarly nervous about the path A.I. is taking, saying he fears the technology will outstrip the intelligence of humans.
Previously a Google staffer, the award-winning computer scientist told the MIT Technology Review: I have suddenly switched my views on whether these things are going to be more intelligent than us. I think theyre very close to it now and they will be much more intelligent than us in the future How do we survive that?
The A.I. expert has similarly warned of the impact should the technology fall into the wrong hands.
It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things, Hinton told the New York Times in an interview published in May. I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadnt done it, somebody else would have.
The third member of the groupMeta Researchs chief A.I. scientistLeCun is far less worried about the negative impact of the technology.
LeCun has resoundingly rejected calls to delay A.I., telling a YouTube stream hosted by DeepLearningAI: Why slow down the progress of knowledge and science? Then there is the question of products. Im all for regulating products that get in the hands of people, I dont see the point of regulating research and development.
I dont think it serves any purpose other than reducing the knowledge that we could use to actually make technology better and safer.
LeCuns bullish position doesnt seem to have changed from four years ago, when he co-wrote a piece in Scientific American saying humans dramatically overestimate the threat of an accidental A.I. takeover.
He added: We tend to conflate intelligence with the drive to achieve dominance. This confusion is understandable: during our evolutionary history as (often violent) primates, intelligence was key to social dominance and enabled our reproductive success.
And indeed, intelligence is a powerful adaptation, like horns, sharp claws or the ability to fly, which can facilitate survival in many ways. But intelligence per se does not generate the drive for domination, any more than horns do.
