Open AI Dangerous Technology
The OpenAI CEO Disagrees With the Forecast That AI Will Kill Us All
An artificial intelligence Twitter beef, explained.
As the tech industry marches toward ever more dazzling artificial intelligence technology, there’s one unavoidable question for humanity: Is this good news, or bad news?
In Silicon Valley, there’s a small but powerful group of people who believe it could be very, very bad news — and that AI, if not handled correctly, could wipe out humanity within a couple decades. There’s also a crowd who thinks our AI future will be amazing — bringing about untold future capabilities, abundance and utopia.
This week in a feature for Bloomberg Businessweek, I dive into the faction of the tech industry that believes it’s scrambling to save the world from a killer. The saga involves the marriage of the charitable philosophy called effective altruism and AI doomerism, and features Sam Bankman-Fried, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and, believe it or not, Harry Potter. It also has an unsavory underbelly — allegations of sexual abuse and whiffs of an apocalyptic doomsday religion.
In the last few years, Silicon Valley’s obsession with the astronomical stakes of future AI has curdled into a bitter feud. And right now, that schism is playing out online between two people: AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky and OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman. Since the early 2000s, Yudkowsky has been sounding the alarm that artificial general intelligence is likely to be “unaligned” with human values and could decide to wipe us out. He worked aggressively to get others to adopt the prevention of AI apocalypse as a priority — enough that he helped convince Musk to take the risk seriously. Musk co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit with Altman in 2015, with the goal of creating safer AI.
In the last few years, OpenAI has adopted a for-profit model and churned out bigger, faster, and more advanced AI technology. The company has raised billions in investment, and Altman has cheered on the progress toward artificial general intelligence, or AGI. “There will be scary moments as we move towards AGI-level systems, and significant disruptions, but the upsides can be so amazing that it’s well worth overcoming the great challenges to get there,” he tweeted in December.
Yudkowsky, meanwhile, has lost nearly all hope that humanity will handle AI responsibly, he said on a podcast last month. After the creation of OpenAI, with its commitment to advancing AI development, he said he cried by himself late at night and thought, “Oh, so this is what humanity will elect to do. We will not rise above. We will not have more grace, not even here at the very end.”
Given that background, it certainly seemed like rubbing salt in a wound when Altman tweeted recently that Yudkowsky had “done more to accelerate AGI than anyone else” and might someday “deserve the Nobel Peace Prize” for his work. Read a certain way, he was trolling Yudkowsky, saying the AI theorist had, in trying to prevent his most catastrophic fear, significantly hastened its arrival. (Yudkowsky said he could not know if Altman was trolling him; Altman declined to comment.)
There you have it. A somewhat inscrutable, inside-baseball catfight between two AI thinkers — but it highlights the all-or-nothing, salvation-or-damnation context underlying much of the AI news you’ll see these days.
Then again, maybe the beef isn’t as beefy as we think. Last month, Altman tweeted a selfie in which he posed flanked by Yudkowsky on one side, and Elon Musk’s former partner, Canadian singer Grimes, on the other. So whether AI will kill us all in 20 years or not, at least for now, everyone can still hang out together at parties.
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Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
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