Sam Altman, who CEO of openAIrecently said that China should play an important role in shaping the balustrades placed around the technology.
“China has some of the best AI talent in the world,” Altman speak in a talk at Beijing Institute of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) last week. “Solving the alignment for advanced AI systems requires some of the best minds from around the world—and so I really hope that Chinese AI researchers will make great contributions here.”
Altman is in an advantageous position to provide an opinion on these matters. Your company is behind ChatGPT, chatbots have shown the world how fast AI capabilities are evolving. Such advancements have led scientists and technologists to call for technological limits. March, many experts signed an open letter calls for a six-month pause on the development of AI algorithms that are more powerful than those behind ChatGPT. Last month, executives including Altman and Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, signed a statement warns that AI may one day pose an existential risk comparable to a nuclear war or a pandemic.
Such statements, often signed by executives working on the very technology they are warning of could kill us, can feel hollow. For some, they also miss the point. Many AI experts say it is more important to focus on the harm AI can cause by amplify social prejudices and create conditions for Spreading false information.
BAAI President Zhang Hongjiang told me that AI researchers in China are also deeply interested in the new possibilities emerging in AI. “I really think [Altman] are serving humanity by doing this tour, by speaking to different governments and organizations,” he said.
Zhang said that several Chinese scientists, including the director of BAAI, had signed the letter calling for a halt to the development of more powerful AI systems, but he pointed out that BAAI has long focused on more immediately AI risk. New developments in AI mean that we “will definitely put more effort into linking AI,” Zhang said. But he added that the issue is complicated because “smarter models can really make things safer”.
Altman is not the only Western AI expert attending the BAAI conference.
Also present was Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneer of deep learninga technology that underlies all modern AI, humans left Google last month to warn people about the risks that increasingly advanced algorithms could soon pose.
Maximum signA professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and director of the Future of Life Institute, which wrote a letter calling for a halt to AI development, also talked about the risks of AI, while Yann LeCunAnother deep learning pioneer, the current alarm about AI risks may be a bit overblown.
No matter where you stand in the apocalypse debate, it’s a good thing that the US and China share their views on AI. The usual rhetoric revolves around war of nations for domination The development of technology and it seems that AI has become hopeless in politics. For example, in January, Christopher Wray, head of the FBI, told the World Economic Forum in Davos that he is “deeply concerned” about the Chinese government’s AI program.
Given that AI will be crucial to economic growth and strategic advantage, international competition is not surprising. But no one benefits from unsafely developing technology, and the growing power of AI will require some degree of cooperation between the United States, China, and other global powers.
But as with the development of other “world-changing” technologies, such as nuclear power and the tools needed to fight climate changeFinding something in common can be up to the scientists who know the technology best.
