Former Google DeepMind researcher Bilal Chughtai warned that AI is developing at a pace beyond humans' capacity to control, warning that the technology has the potential to wipe out humanity.
"I earnestly believe that AI has the potential to kill us all, and that we might be running out of time to avoid this outcome," he wrote in an 'X' post.
Chughtai stated that the most prominent issue with relation to AI was the problem of alignment, i.e. aligning human values and ethics with AI's core directives.
"Alignment is the problem of preventing this, and is both difficult and unsolved. Our present understanding of how to train AI systems that deeply want what we want is extremely rudimentary. Worse, we are not on track to solve alignment in time: frontier AI capabilities are improving much faster than our understanding of AI alignment," he wrote.
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As per the researcher, AI capabilities were being developed faster than the guardrails required to contain the technology's worst externalities.
Chughtai's post echoed similar warnings from Anthropic's former researcher Jacob Coxon who stated that AI systems may cause the extinction of humanity by 2030.
This led to the company's Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Dario Amodei penning a blog calling for pumping the brakes on AI advancement resulting from competition between various AI firms, advocating for more guardrails and caution in the matter.
OpenAI's Sam Altman echoed the call within hours, pledging to match Anthropic's move to give independent evaluators employee-like access to its systems. SpaceAI's Founder Elon Musk, whose public disputes with both men are well documented, replied with three words: "Dario is right."
All three AI big tech figures agreed that the AI industry needs to slow down. Concerns began on Sept. 12 with a nearly 4,000-word essay warning that AI's growing ability to build its own successors, combined with a rogue AI agent swarm's cyberattack on Hugging Face in July, could spiral into far bigger damage within months.
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Chughtai agreed with this stance, stating that the tight competition between AI companies to advance the technology, has led to issues with AI safety and transparency, leading to the aforementioned apocalyptic possibilities.
"I am optimistic that navigating AI safely is possible. In order to do so, we need to coordinate to avoid this manic race between AI companies," he said.
"We need to pace AI development to a speed that society can handle, where emerging risks can be addressed before extreme harm is realised. We need much more transparency into AI development to ensure that AI companies are not imposing unacceptable levels of risk on us all," he added.
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