One of the “godfathers” of artificial intelligence has attacked a multibillion-dollar race to develop the cutting edge technology, arguing the latest models are displaying dangerous characteristics such as lying to users.
Yoshua Bengio, a Canadian academic whose work has informed techniques used by top AI groups such as OpenAI and Google, said: “There’s unfortunately a very competitive race between the leading labs, which pushes them towards focusing on capability to make the AI more and more intelligent, but not necessarily put enough emphasis and investment on research on safety.”
The Turing Award winner issued his warning in an interview with the Financial Times, while launching a new non-profit called LawZero. He said the group would focus on building safer systems, vowing to “insulate our research from those commercial pressures”.