Expert opinions on AI

For a long time many of us thought of RSI as the way AGI turns into superintelligence. [...] I was advocating what I called a semi-hard takeoff: a period where the self-improvement was real but not that fast, followed by a point -- once the AGI fully...

I do not think this will happen. I don’t think that automating AI R&D will rapidly produce domain-general superintelligence. I don’t think that a data centre of geniuses, largely separated from the rest of the economy, will figure out how to cure Alz...

AI is already on the verge of going rogue, but with legal person status, it could become an actual existential threat to humanity.

We have to change the way we talk about AI risk because for a very long time, it’s either existential and everything is going to die and the killer robots are coming, or it doesn’t really matter.

We do need to have some safeguards in place to make sure there are no unintended consequences, but, no, I do not think AI is going to imperil human existence.

There’s a common fear among people who work in Silicon Valley: snag one of the fast-growing, high-paying jobs in artificial intelligence, or get trapped in the “permanent underclass”, a phrase describing the fate of those who won’t have upward mobili...

Though a “permanent underclass” is not an imminent reality, in the near term AI could make some people richer and others worse off.

But each time humanity has come out with more people sharing greater prosperity, health, and freedom. We believe this will be true with AI as well, and the abundance of the future can be shared by everyone.

While estimates of the full impact of AI on the workforce differ widely, our base estimate indicates that automation could reduce labor demand by the equivalent of roughly 36 million jobs, while growth in the AI value chain and the broader economy co...

Do artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT eliminate jobs, create new ones, or both? There’s a lot of speculation regarding this question, but little solid data in the U.S. to answer it.

In the long run, it may just be both instead of one or the other: both forces that are making it harder and harder for people to get jobs initially and also ramp up in their career going forward.

Require independent embedded evaluations to close the internal deployment gap. Qualified independent third parties should test models throughout development and internal use, with employee-equivalent access.

the bad news: Dario estimates that in 6 months AI will have the ability to take over the internet the worse news: Anthropic's current commitment to stopping this is... putting independent evaluators in desks in their office have a great day

They really become part of the company, which makes it difficult to criticize it because the staffers become almost your friends.

I believe it’s an engineering problem ... and we all need to hope that’s an engineering problem. If it’s not an engineering problem, it’s not solvable.

Many AI researchers grant these concerns and recognize that the hard version of the alignment problem is unsolved; however, they generally believe that the better models of the future will help solve it. I fear we may already be near the point where ...

But alignment is no solution: it is an unsolved scientific and technical problem whose solutions—to the extent that we have them—cannot simply be imposed on every AI company operating on Earth.

The question that opens the next era is not who has the smartest AI, but who understands people best, and turns that understanding into experiences they can trust.

Yes—intelligence can probably be artificial. But artificial intelligence does not therefore have to possess an artificial version of the human mind. [...] What has not been established is that current AI possesses consciousness, subjective experience...

The AI cheerleaders also seem to have forgotten that many of our subjects involve distinctly human engagements and responses: beauty; value; obligation; virtue — they all presume human feelings, sentiments and perceptions that statistical aggregation...

To declare today’s AI conscious simply because it speaks fluently would go far beyond the available evidence. But to declare that a machine could never become conscious would also claim more certainty than science presently allows.

“I would be surprised if current AI models develop consciousness,” he said, “but we can’t entirely rule it out.”

Personally, I do not believe that AI can be conscious, and below I explain why.

With AI, although potential compensatory mechanisms such as new tasks and productivity gains are promised, history cautions us that such benefits are neither automatic nor equitably shared. [...] Prominent tax scholars have argued that a new, targete...

To date, BPC has not taken a position on whether AI should be taxed and does not endorse any particular option in this issue brief. [...] The code treats labor and capital differently: Employers owe payroll taxes on wages, while investments in equipm...

AI will most certainly change the labor market. But it has not yet changed the complementary relationship between workers and the tools that make them more productive. Taxing the machines is simply a softer version of the Luddite English textile work...

To address these issues, we need to build a CERN for AI-assisted science. [...] Canada and the EU have explicitly agreed to explore cooperation on fundamental AI research, agentic systems for scientific discovery, access to advanced AI infrastructure...

But the main regret I have with this talk is that I wish I had prepared a more for the section on a “CERN for AI.” The idea behind such a project is to pool many countries’ and companies’ resources into a single (possibly physically decentralized) ci...

There are many conceivable versions of a “CERN for AI.” But the version that seems politically realistic (a new catch-up lab) probably would not do much for safety, while the versions that would materially improve safety (e.g., pause + merge of all c...

Well, I do have a fundamental belief that AI is surprising. [...] I think that the way that things will change and how what we do with our time evolves and we clearly will be in a world of abundance and how do we ensure that that abundance is broadly...

The promise of artificial general intelligence is that it will provide unprecedented productivity gains that could allow all of humanity to achieve a standard of living greater than that experienced by those in the wealthiest nations.

AGI is generally understood as an AI system that can match or exceed human capabilities on most economically valuable tasks. In such a world, the automation of work would not be limited to specific industries or routine jobs. Instead, machines would ...

Today, the companies are being built elsewhere. Last year the United States produced 59 notable AI models and China produced 35. France and the United Kingdom produced one each. Along the rest of the AI value chain, the picture is the same: the Unite...

Europe should prioritize “code over concrete.”

AI isn’t going away. Barring unprecedented global government coordination, it isn’t even slowing down. The only real decision is whether to centralize power, or disperse it. Do you fear the technology? Or a small number of people controlling the te...

The “AGI-squashes-everyone” idea is unlikely, though not impossible. If American companies end up becoming dominant, my bet is that it will be because of the business ecosystems they build – not because they crossed a technological threshold that ren...

Companion chatbots will be prohibited across all grades.

Sweeping bans of anything are hard to enact and enforce, but the risks of generative AI are too great to dismiss bold measures as unfeasible. [...] In the absence of a wholesale ban on all interactions between juveniles and relational AI, a default s...

We all just want peace of mind that our kids will be okay growing up in this era of algorithms and AI. That’s why we need guardrails in place to keep up with ever-evolving technology like chatbots and make sure our kids’ safety, mental health, and we...

Middle powers should combine complementary national assets and pool the capabilities that require scale, while preserving national and commercial control over applications, deployment, language, and sector-specific use. Shared efforts could include m...

The answer isn't convergence for its own sake. We can push too hard on one thing. But if you have one standard, you could risk a lowest common denominator outcome that can cost us the innovation system as well and might have a risk on the national in...