Top figures in artificial intelligence railed against the dangers of the fast-advancing technology at the World Economic Forum this week, as hype swirled around a $500 billion AI infrastructure project announced by Donald Trump.
AI pioneers including Google Deepmind boss Sir DeMis Hassabis, Anthrop co-founder Dario Amodei and “Godfather of Ai” computer scientist Yoshua Bengio used the Davos gathering to reiterate Stark’s warnings about AI threats, such as from commercial interests and geopolitical rivals.
While Hassabis admitted that “the genie can’t be put back in the bottle,” he said Artificial general intelligence – When computers surpass human cognitive abilities – they can threaten civilization if they get out of control or are hijacked by bad actors. This is especially the case with large language models that are all “open source” and available to everyone.
“There is much more at stake here than just companies or products,” said the Nobel Prize winner in an interview with the Financial Times. “(It’s) the future of humanity, the human condition and where we want to go as a society.”
Amodei, whose start-up makes the chatbot claude i is Powered by Google And Amazon said it was concerned about authoritarian governments using AI and was “very concerned about a 1984 scenario, or worse.”
“Science does not know how we can control machines that are even at our level of intelligence, and even worse if they are smarter than us,” Bengio added during the panel. “There are people who say, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll figure it out.’ “But if we don’t get it, do you understand the consequences?”
Their stance has been criticized as hypocritical by Yann Lecun, chief AI scientist at the Met, who has spent billions developing an Open Source LLM called Llama. He said such concerns were tempered by fierce competition from his rival to build and sell the best models.
“Yoshua and Dario have expressed opinions against open source and that’s actually very dangerous,” he said in an interview. “Barriers to open source distribution would lead to regulatory capture of a few players, whether on the US West Coast or in China. . . (put) power in the hands of a small number of people.
“That’s very strange from people like Dario. We met yesterday where he said that the benefits and risks of AI are about the same order of magnitude, and I said, “If you really believe that, why do you keep working on AI? “, Lecun added. “So I think he’s a bit two-faced on this one.”
While scientists and engineers debated the risk of AI, business executives showed unbridled enthusiasm for the technology.
“There is no counter,” said Ervin Tu, chairman of Dutch technology investment group Prosus. “If you have any appreciation for what great language models and trainable agents can do, you’d be hard-pressed as a human not to conclude that they are transformational and will be incredibly disruptive in any industry.”
On Wednesday, the febrile atmosphere was additionally charged by Openai, SoftBank and Oracle the announcement of $500 billion in US infrastructure Called “Stargate”.
Trump hosted his top executives, Sam Altman, the son of Masayoshi and Larry Ellison, on Tuesday before signing executive orders this week that would eliminate many of the protections surrounding the technology’s development. The new US president said the moves would ensure America’s primacy in technology.
“At OpenAi, we believe that infrastructure is destiny,” said OpenAi Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar. “(Stargate) is about more computing. More computers build better models. Better models answer more complex problems and provide more benefits to people and companies.”
Stargate dominated the debate at Davos for the rest of the week, with many, including Elon Musk, taking to their social media site X to question how the trio financed the huge promised expenditures.
The FT reported on Friday that Stargate has not yet secured the funding it needs, will not receive any funding and will just serve Open after completion. So far, SoftBank and OpenAi intend to put up more than $15 billion for the project, hoping to raise a combination of capital from their existing grants and debt to finance Stargate.
The new venture was also taken as the latest evidence of a rift between Altman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and his top executive, Mustafa Suleyman, a former DeepMind co-founder who left his own startup to join Microsoft early last year.
“The tensions that arose between Mustafa Suleyman and Sam Altman in Davos last year were just the beginning,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, which competes with Microsoft to sell AI-powered agents.
“Microsoft is now accelerating its own AI development. . . This pattern reflects Microsoft’s history with its ‘partners,’ Benioff added. “This could mark the beginning of the end for the relationship, which would be critical for OpenAi to quickly expand to other platforms.”
“Marc has no idea what he’s talking about,” said Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw.
Microsoft has invested nearly $14 billion in OpenAi since 2019, and in return negotiated rights to its intellectual property and to be the exclusive provider of cloud computing services. But the latter agreement was terminated along with the announcement of Stargate.
At Davos, Nadella also cast doubt on the stargate spending pledge and touted Microsoft’s planned $80 billion in capital spending.
“All I know is that I’m good for my $80 billion,” he later said answering Moshu on social media platform X: “And all that money is not about AI, it’s about building useful things for the real world!”
Stargate is just the latest example of the US data center infrastructure race as it prepares for the next leg of the AI ​​economic boom. Musk’s Xai built a Supercomputer named “Colossus” It contained 100,000 interconnected Nvidia chips in just three months last year and has pledged to expand the number 10-fold.
BlackRock and Microsoft are preparing to launch a $30 billion investment fund to build data and energy projects to meet growing demands arising from the technology sector. On Friday, Meta Chief Mark Zuckerberg said the company would spend between $60 billion and $65 billion on capital infrastructure this year, while expanding its AI teams.
“I’ve had non-stop customer meetings, in every sector. I don’t think there’s a single executive with whom he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know that he needs to deploy AI,” said Friar OpenAi. “AI isn’t just on the agenda; It’s the agenda. It’s no longer just an abstract concept or a futuristic vision. It’s here.”
Additional reporting by Harriet Agnew in Davos
