It's somewhat reassuring to see prominent names in tech pushing back on the notion AI will wipe out the human race.
"There is NO realistic scenario where AI wipes out all of humanity," Recursive CEO and well-respected tech entrepreneur Richard Socher said in an X post on Wednesday.
Socher is also the co-founder of AI-powered search engine You.com, which has raised capital from prominent names including Nvidia (NVDA), Salesforce (CRM) Ventures, and DuckDuckGo. You.com currently has an estimated valuation of more than $1.5 billion.
Added Socher, "I've talked to many AI safety experts about existential risks. Some of the 'experts' are just phenomenal sci-fi authors. There are also real researchers working on realistic risks. They point out real and likely harms, and I'm explicitly not arguing that there could be no such harm. We need to take these seriously. However, whenever I ask for an actual detailed scenario that would kill every single human, i.e. extinction, it usually starts and ends with "just look at current progress and use your imagination". No science, no scenario planning, just handwaving probabilities without data, based on gut feelings, often little expertise, sometimes real expertise combined with a huge amount of technological optimism turned into fear and then trying to quantify it post hoc."
Within the course of three days, Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) CEO Sam Altman have managed to scare the hell out of the human race with the powerful technology they created and pushed their teams of pioneering supercoders to supercharge.
"Over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence — not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up," Amodei stated in a 3,800-word essay on Saturday. "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of A.I. models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain."
Amodei doubled down on his comments at Salesforce's annual Dreamforce event on Tuesday afternoon.
Altman said right after Amodei's weekend post that he agreed with his rival.
He then followed that up on Monday with a dark X post of his own.
"There are two ways AI progress could go very badly, and that we must avoid. First, we could lose control of the future to AI. This is unacceptable; we are unapologetically on Team Humanity, and AI must always serve people. To ensure that, we need ways to ensure that alignment and safety techniques stay ahead of progress in model capabilities," Altman said in an X post around 12:57 a.m. ET.