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Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has voiced his fears about the speed of Artificial Intelligence (AI) development – but does not think work on the new technology should be paused.
Gates said he believes AI is a game-changing technology, describing it as ‘pretty fundamental’ noting how its implications for the future are vast.
Microsoft-backed OpenAI fired the starting pistol on a technological arms race in November, when it made AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT available to the public.
It soon became the fastest-growing app in history, reaching 100 million monthly users in two months.
‘We’re all scared a bad guy could grab it,’ Gates said in an interview with ABC News, but he said the development of such tech should continue.
Bill Gates said he doesn’t believe AI falling into the wrong hands is a major concern, and has argued against pausing AI development out of fear
Last month, Twitter CEO Elon Musk joined thousands in signing an open letter calling for a six-month pause in the development of systems more powerful than OpenAI’s recently-launched GPT-4.
Signatories included Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, researchers at Alphabet-owned DeepMind, and fellow AI pioneers Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell.
Gates disagrees with the idea of pausing the development. ‘If you just pause the good guys, and you don’t pause everyone else, you’re probably hurting yourself,’ he explained.
Gates decided to voice some of his concerns regarding the rapid advance of the technology and the negative consequences if it were to be used with by bad actors.
Perhaps worryingly, the billionaire noted that governments were behind the curve when it comes to understanding the technology.
Neither are regulators are up to speed about the fast-developing tech or are prepared to make big decisions about its future, Gates suggested.
He acknowledged that AI continues to surprise with its capabilities while also highlighting its limitations. He believes that AI has the potential to bring about significant changes across various industries.
‘We’re often surprised how good it is. Sometimes we’re surprised at what it can’t do right. It’s early days, but revolutionary,’ Gates said.
Ultimately, he believes the positives of AI outweigh the negatives.
‘The field, more than any field I know, is actually putting in a lot of the smart people into, OK, what comes next and how do we make sure that’s beneficial,’ Gates said.
Microsoft-backed OpenAI fired the starting pistol on a technological arms race in November, when it made AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT available to the public
Despite the risks, Gates noted that the AI field attracts brilliant minds focused on ensuring its use for good
‘I see that AI, used properly, is providing a lot of benefits that I wouldn’t want to throw away.
‘In health and education, used properly, it will be fantastic,’ Gates said. ‘That’s a big deal. Improving education, you know, making sure students who are in private schools or even suburban schools, that they have this way of getting great feedback. You know, I’m excited.’
Gates praised OpenAI’s ChatGPT software and believed the significant improvements were made in the latest update from GPT-3 to GPT-4.
Despite the risks, Gates noted that the AI field attracts brilliant minds focused on ensuring its use for good.
Last week, Geoffrey Hinton, 75, who is credited as the ‘godfather’ of artificial intelligence warned that ‘scary’ chatbots like the popular ChatGPT could soon be smarter than humans
Last week, Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as one of the ‘godfathers of AI’, and who recently announced he had quit Alphabet after a decade at the firm, saying he wanted to speak out on the risks of the technology without it affecting his former employer.
Hinton’s work is considered essential to the development of contemporary AI systems.
In 1986, he co-authored the seminal paper ‘Learning representations by back-propagating errors’, a milestone in the development of the neural networks undergirding AI technology. In 2018, he was awarded the Turing Award in recognition of his research breakthroughs.
But he is now among a growing number of tech leaders publicly espousing concern about the possible threat posed by AI if machines were to achieve greater intelligence than humans and take control of the planet.
There is a great AI divide in Silicon Valley. Brilliant minds are split about the progress of the systems – some say it will improve humanity and others fear the technology will destroy it
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Hinton suggested that Artificial intelligence could pose a ‘more urgent’ threat to humanity than climate change.
‘I wouldn’t like to devalue climate change. I wouldn’t like to say, ‘You shouldn’t worry about climate change.’ That’s a huge risk too,’ Hinton said. ‘But I think this might end up being more urgent.’
He added: ‘With climate change, it’s very easy to recommend what you should do: you just stop burning carbon. If you do that, eventually things will be okay. For this it’s not at all clear what you should do.’
Hinton said chatbots can already hold more general knowledge than a human brain.
He added that it was only a matter of time before AI also eclipses us regarding reasoning.
At this point, he said, ‘bad actors’ such as Russian President Vladimir Putin could use AI for ‘bad things’ by programming robots to ‘get more power.’
ChatGPT is evidence of how fast the technology is growing.
In just a few months, it has passed the bar exam with a higher score than 90 percent of humans who have taken it, and it achieved 60 percent accuracy on the US Medical Licensing Exam.
The scariest AI developments so far: From ‘Balenciaga Pope’ to Fake Trump arrest and deepfakes
An image of Pope Francis wearing a shiny white puffer jacket, a long chain with a cross and a water bottle in his hand is the latest example of the dangers of AI.
The stylish pontiff was created by image-generator Midjourney, which was also behind the shocking fake scenes of Donald Trump being arrested by police officers in New York City.
Deepfake videos have also shown the evil powers of AI, allowing users to create clips of public figures spreading misinformation – and experts predict 90 percent of online content will be made this way by 2025.
These scary AI developments seem to be just the tip of the iceberg.
An image of Pope Francis wearing a shiny white puffer jacket, a long chain with a cross and a water bottle in his hand is the latest example of the dangers of AI
Elon Musk, Apple co-found Steve Wozniak and more than 1,000 tech leaders are calling for a pause on the ‘dangerous race’ to develop AI, which they fear poses a ‘profound risk to society and humanity’ and could have ‘catastrophic’ effects.
The AI-generated image of Pope Francis, published Friday on Reddit, made waves on the internet this week, ultimately because the public believed it was real.
‘I thought the pope’s puffer jacket was real and didn’t give it a second thought,’ tweeted model and author Chrissy Teigen. ‘No way am I surviving the future of technology.’
Experts have also weighed in on the realistic AI image.
Web culture expert Ryan Broderick said the pope image was ‘the first real mass-level AI misinformation case.’
The image, however, followed a gallery of fake photos showing what it could look like if Trump were arrested – but these were publicly known to be AI-generated.
Bellingcat journalist Eliot Higgins created the images this month, showing Trump being chased down the street by police officers while his wife Melania screams. Others show the former President in jail wearing an orange jumpsuit.
‘Legit thought these were real,’ one person tweeted, while another said: ‘We should really be putting watermarks on these that disclose they are AI-generated and not real.’
It comes after Trump claimed without evidence that he would be arrested today and called on his supporters to ‘protest, protest, protest’ in response to a possible indictment over the former president’s alleged hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.
The stylish pontiff was created by image-generator Midjourney, which was also behind the shocking fake scenes of Donald Trump being arrested by police officers in New York City
Deepfake videos and images have also seen a boom online, showing influential figures relaying misinformation.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was used in a clip where he thanked Democrats for their ‘service and inaction’ on antitrust legislation.
Demand Progress Action’s advocacy group made the video, which used deepfake technology to turn an actor into Zuckerberg.
More recently, in February, several female Twitch stars discovered their images on a deepfake porn website earlier this month, where they were seen engaging in sex acts.
Currently, no laws protect humans from being generated into a digital form by AI.
