Elon Musk Agrees AI Could Pose Risk to Humanity

Elon Musk has called for a halt to advanced artificial intelligence development and agrees with Geoffrey Hinton, nicknamed the "Godfather of AI," that AI could pose a danger to humanity.

Hinton knows what he's talking about, Musk tweeted.

In an interview with The New York Times, Hinton said: "As individuals and companies allow AI systems not only to generate their own computer code but actually run that code on their own, truly autonomous weapons — those killer robots — become reality," Dr. Hinton said.

"The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that. It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things," he warned.

Hinton, a British expatriate academic, who formerly worked at Google, quit his job to warn of the dangers that advanced AI may pose. He is vehemently opposed to the use of AI in the military.

Hinton's immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false information, and the average person will "not be able to know what is true anymore."

He also worries that AI technologies like ChatGPT will in time upend the job market.

Musk has been warning of the potential dangers of AI for years, Business Insider noted. Recently, he co-signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on advanced AI development, citing "profound risks to society and humanity."

Musk was an early investor in OpenAI — the startup behind ChatGPT — and co-chaired its board upon its 2015 founding as a nonprofit AI research lab, Yahoo Finance reported. But Musk resigned from the board in early 2018 in a move that the San Francisco startup tied to Tesla's work on building automated driving systems.

The South African-born entrepreneur has been forging ahead with his own generative AI project, which involves a large language model like the one that powers ChatGPT, Business Insider wrote.

Google launched its AI chatbot, which many saw as the company's answer to Microsoft-backed ChatGPT, in March. Since then, several employees have expressed concern about the new tech. Two workers even tried to block the company from releasing the bot, citing concerns about inaccurate and dangerous responses, the New York Times reported last month.

But industry leaders said the new AI systems could be as important as the introduction of the web browser in the early 1990s and could lead to breakthroughs in areas ranging from drug research to education, The New York Times wrote.