TECH titan Elon Musk has reportedly warned US senators that AI poses a risk to civilisation, while sat alongside other industry chiefs.
Senate majority leader Chuch Schumer called a private meeting on unregulated artificial intelligence to help pass bipartisan law to support its development but mitigate its risks.
The closed-door meeting, held at Capitol Hill in Washington, was joined by some of the biggest names in the business.
This includes Meta’s (Facebook’s owner) Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Alphabet’s (Google’s owner) Sundar Pichai and OpenAi founder Sam Altman.
Leaving the building several hours later, Tesla and Twitter owner Musk called the potential consequences of AI “severe”, noting that “we have to be proactive rather than reactive.”
“The question is really one of civilizational risk,” he added, according to NBC News.
It’s not like… one group of humans versus another.
“It’s like, hey, this is something that’s potentially risky for all humans everywhere.”
Musk also reportedly called for the creation of a new government agency, solely tasked with tackling developments in the AI sector.
Musk and Zuckerberg were notably sat separated – by quite a distance – at the event, amid their infamous feud.
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Zuckerberg’s thoughts on AI were more measured, with his prepared remarks stating that the two main issues for AI are “safety and access”.
“New technology often brings new challenges, and it’s on companies to make sure we build and deploy products responsibly,” the Facebook co-founder continued.
“This is an emerging technology, there are important equities to balance here, and the government is ultimately responsible for that.”
Alongside discussions about unregulated AI, lawmakers quizzed tech bosses on the conditions of the workers behind chatbots like Open AI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s Bard.
Lawmakers are also reportedly investigation the working conditions of data labelers who categorise data used to train AI.
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This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk