New OpenAI CEO Emmett Shear says AI ‘doom’ risk ‘should make you shit your pants’
Emmett Shear, the former Twitch CEO who was named interim head of OpenAI on Monday, warned that artificial intelligence is “inherently dangerous” and poses such a threat of causing “doom” that it “should make you shit your pants.” .”
Shear’s appointment at ChatGPT maker capped three whirlwind days that began with the sudden firing of Sam Altman, which caused his close ally and OpenAI president Greg Brockman to resign, and ended with the duo landing jobs at Microsoft, all between the market closing on Friday and reopening on Monday morning.
Now, a resurfaced interview from June when Shear appeared on “The Logan Bartlett Show” revealed that the new head of OpenAI shares a similar perspective on AI as his predecessor, Altman, who warned that the technology represents an “extinction risk.” ” for the humanity. on par with nuclear weapons and pandemics.
“In general, I’m very pro-tech and I really believe… that the pros generally outweigh the cons,” Shear, a self-described “techno-optimist,” told Bartlett, a software investor at Redpoint Ventures.
However, as AI gets smarter, the “circle will get tighter and tighter, and faster and faster, until it can completely self-improve. At that point, it will be very fast, very fast,” Shear said.
Shear said there is up to a 50% chance that AI could develop at such a speed that it becomes impossible to control.
“And that kind of intelligence is something inherently very dangerous,” he added. “Because intelligence is power.”
“That should make you shit your pants,” Shear said.
Altman has spoken about that “doomsday,” a topic he said he tries not to think about too much, although he is reportedly preparing himself with a stash of weapons, gold and other survival goods.
In May, Altman joined 350 prominent figures to sign a one-sentence open letter organized by the nonprofit Center for AI Safety that said AI poses an existential threat.
“Mitigating the risk of extinction due to AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” the report stated. the experts said in a 22-word statement signed by Altman, “godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, among others.
Altman, Hassabis and Amodei were part of a select group of experts who met with President Biden earlier this month to discuss potential AI risks and regulations, although AI-specific laws have not yet taken effect in USA.
In testimony on Capitol Hill at the time, Altman spoke in favor of government regulations for the technology, among other security measures.
Altman admitted at the Capitol Hill meeting in May that his worst fear is that AI could “cause significant harm to the world” without oversight.
Altman’s apocalyptic vision of AI gone wrong is common in Silicon Valley, where a growing number of tech billionaires have poured money into post-apocalyptic contingency plans, such as remote bunkers, in recent years.
Some, like former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel and Google co-founder Larry Page, have seized land in New Zealand.
Altman’s “backup plan” is reportedly to fly to New Zealand with Thiel if the partnership falls apart.
