‘We’re all going to die’

A prominent Silicon Valley researcher is sounding the alarm over the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, saying that the consequences for humans could be dire.

“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,” AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky, who is viewed as particularly extreme by his tech peers, told Bloomberg News.

Yudkowsky echoed concerns voiced by the likes of Elon Musk and other tech figures who advocated a six-month pause on AI research.

Musk said earlier this year that there’s a “non-zero chance” that AI could “go Terminator” on humanity.

“Where we are right now is exciting,” Yudkowski, a research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, told Bloomberg.

“Where we are heading is a lot more important than that, I would say.”

Yudkowski said he was concerned that data analysts don’t fully grasp the component parts of the latest edition of GPT — the AI-powered language model developed by Silicon Valley firm OpenAI.

“It got a little further than I expected it to get,” Yudkowski, who wrote an essay in Time earlier this year advocating for airstrikes against “rogue” data centers, said of AI research.

“I think it gets smarter than us.”

Yudkowski said that AI is gaining knowledge at a pace that is faster than humans can grasp.

“Capabilities — how smart these things are — has been running way ahead of progress in understanding how they work and being able to shape their behavior in detail,” he said.

“We have no idea what’s going on inside GPT-4…If humanity was at all sensible, we’d be pouring $100 billion a year into figuring out what’s going on in there.”

“But the few people working on it are not making progress at a rate where even if we put half the graduating physicists on this, I wouldn’t have very much confidence that we’d know what was going on in there in three years [or] five years,” he said.

Worries about artificial intelligence systems outsmarting humans and running wild have intensified with the rise of a new generation of highly capable AI chatbots such as ChatGPT.

It has sent countries around the world scrambling to come up with regulations for the developing technology, with the European Union blazing the trail with its AI Act expected to be approved later this year.

Some critics have complained that dire warnings about existential risks voiced by makers of AI have contributed to hyping up the capabilities of their products and distracting from calls for more immediate regulations to rein in their real-world problems.

A new Netflix documentary reveals that world governments are in the midst of an arms race to develop AI-controlled weaponry.