Expert opinions on AI

Those who have created these technologies are now increasingly warning that AI risks developing darker capacities – perhaps even to take life. In this regard, if I may say so, there seems urgency in adequately considering the existential dangers of s...

Much has been said about whether AI poses an ultimate existential threat to humanity. The more immediate existential challenge may be whether technologies that simulate relationships weaken our capacity for the relationships that foster our own human...

I’m not a doomer. This talk about human extinction is over the top. [...] The idea that these swarms of AI agents might jump the fence and take over a banking system or take over a water system or, God forbid, take over a hospital.

Amodei proposed a generalized three-part plan of independent evaluators embedded inside frontier labs, coordination among companies, and global policy compatibility. [...] Implementing Amodei’s threshold idea for embedded evaluators, for instance, wi...

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.

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...

Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.

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...

The labour data are in from America and a trend is becoming clearer: on balance AI is starting to create more jobs than it hoovers up.

But credible experts disagree about AI’s economic impact.

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.

The problem with the pause is you've got China. So, what you really ultimately want is some sort of international agreement—international pacing, you might call it—which will require international coordination and understanding where all the compute ...

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...

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...

I think the studies are still at too early a stage. In general, however, I believe that human beings are mechanistic systems and that we will also see similar phenomena in computers. Therefore, at some point, we will be able to see conscious AI and w...

We will not just one day have an easy answer where everybody will agree.

AI cannot become conscious, nor can any machine aspect of technology or humanity.

Welcome to the AGI era.

Many leading companies are engaged in a single-minded pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI). [...] Rather than racing to replace people, we should build AI tools that amplify human expertise and expand opportunity.

Alignment cannot depend on one AI becoming perfectly trustworthy.

I think that could work. I don’t think we have a strong argument that the pragmatic mixture of approaches will get all the way there, but it just seems very dicey, and our understanding of the dynamics involved is very weak.

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.

Racing flat-out isn't inevitable; a negotiated mutual slowdown seems quite plausible.

The plan may be politically unrealistic. It may depend too heavily on compute remaining the main bottleneck. It may underestimate covert projects and overestimate international trust. But it is still a serious contribution because it makes the altern...

But total research transparency is a burdensome requirement, with a huge surface area to be monitored. It dovetails with other features of AI 2040 – in particular, the premise of an international deal to govern data centers and AI training. But total...

This means that in 2026-2027 we could end up in one of two starkly different worlds. In the US, multiple companies will definitely have the required millions of chips (at the cost of tens of billions of dollars). The question is whether China will al...

China consistently opposes any practice of overstretching the concept of national security and abusing export controls.

Here’s where I net out: equalize the tax treatment of labor and capital, which Congress could do next session, and route the proceeds into retraining and into topping up the pay of workers who land in lower-paying jobs.

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...

The proposals differ in detail, but they cite the same story: Labor’s share of national income has declined, and AI is accelerating workers’ losses by shifting more economic activity to capital. The tax code makes all of this worse by undertaxing cap...