AI fears being overhyped by Silicon Valley, says former Google exec – Yahoo Finance
A professor who taught Sam Altman, the entrepreneur behind ChatGPT, has warned US tech giants are “hyping up fears” over artificial intelligence (AI) in order to suffocate potential rivals with regulation.
Andrew Ng, a former Google executive, said AI labs were using concerns around the nascent technology to raise funds so they can “fight phantoms that they conjure themselves”.
Despite concerns the technology could pose an existential threat to humanity, Mr Ng said some of the fears about AI were “overhyped”.
The biggest US labs were using these concerns to push for rules that would make it harder for challengers to emerge, he said.
Mr Ng taught Mr Altman when he was studying at Stanford University, before he dropped out in 2005.
After working for various start-ups and a career as a technology investor, Mr Altman went on to found OpenAI in 2015, which a year ago launched ChatGPT.
ChatGPT can generate text in human-like English from simple prompts, with uses such as writing emails or summarising reports.
OpenAI has worked on adding more capabilities to the tool, such as image and audio recognition.
The sudden popularity of these AI tools, and their new abilities, has prompted debate among scientific experts over the dangers of the technology.
Some have warned humans could lose control of powerful AI bots, which could threaten mankind’s future.
However, Mr Ng, who helped set up Google’s Brain division in 2011 and now leads online learning company Coursera, said: “I feel like being fearful that this piece of software which predicts the next word at a time could lead to human extinction is a massive leap that I just struggle to understand.
“For some companies there is the incentive to hype up fears and dangers as part of regulatory capture.”
Mr Ng said this could lead to strict requirements to new entrants, which would hamper competition and be a “tragedy” for the industry. “Regulatory capture is a standard, well-known, well-understood playbook,” that is playing out in AI, he said.
The UK has been a vocal outlet for concerns of the risks of AI. A paper commissioned by the Government warned that AI systems could seek to “reduce human control”.
Several advisers have warned over potentially dystopian scenarios that could be triggered by powerful AI bots.
Yoshua Bengio, a key adviser to the Government’s AI Safety Institute, was among the signatories of an open letter in May this year which warned the “risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority”.
The UK has so far not launched a major crackdown on AI companies, demurring from introducing new legislation despite calls from MPs for an AI bill.
Mr Ng said many of the concerns over AI were disconnected from his conversations with technology experts in Silicon Valley. He said the “vast majority” of his peers were not worried about AI safety. “It is a strange concept,” he said.
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