Dario Amodei, the CEO of $19 billion AI startup Anthropic, doesn’t suppose humanity is in any quick hazard from evolving synthetic intelligence fashions and instruments. However he has an issue with the justification some his friends use to pooh-pooh the dangers.
Talking at an AI convention in San Francisco on Wednesday, Amodei took problem with the concept that AI fashions are, and can at all times be, mere chatbots with restricted talents. He criticized particularly a model of this mindset espoused by Marc Andreessen, the famed enterprise capitalist and champion of unrestricted AI, who has famously dismissed considerations by arguing that AI is basically simply math. “Restricting AI means restricting math, software, and chips” Andreessen tweeted in March.
That logic doesn’t maintain up, in Amodei’s view; as a result of every part on the earth could be categorized as math, he stated.
“Isn’t your brain just math? A neuron fires and sums up calculations, that’s math, too,” he stated on-stage throughout Eric Newcomer’s Cerebral Valley convention on Wednesday. “Like, we shouldn’t be afraid of Hitler, it’s just math. The whole universe is math.”
Amodei, a former OpenAI vp who left in 2021 to start out rival LLM agency Anthropic, is amongst a gaggle of AI executives who brazenly warn of the know-how’s potential dangers, from rogue fashions to dangerous actors. The CEO helps some regulation of the AI business and Anthropic even backed a controversial California invoice to that finish, which was finally vetoed.
Andreessen, whose VC agency has invested billions of {dollars} in scores of AI corporations together with OpenAI and Elon Musk’s Xai, is on the opposite aspect: an AI “boomer,” demanding unfettered growth of AI know-how by particular person corporations. “’Regulation’ of AI (math) is the foundation of a new totalitarianism,” the VC wrote final yr. He additionally referred to as AI security critics, or doomers, “a cult.” A consultant for Andreessen declined to touch upon Amodei’s criticism.
Amodei acknowledged throughout the convention that the AI fashions of at this time “are not smart enough… not autonomous enough” to pose a lot severe danger to individuals. However he famous that the know-how is evolving shortly, with AI “agents” which are able to appearing autonomously on behalf of a human command. As these still-nascent instruments come to the forefront, Amodei stated that the general public can have a deeper sense of what AI is able to and of the potential harms.
“People laugh today when chatbots say something a little unpredictable,” Amodei stated. “But we’re gonna have to do a better job of controlling the agents than that.”
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