Top AI pioneers backed an Anthropic researcher’s warning of potential human extinction. Paul Christiano — author of an influential 2016 paper on AI safety with future Anthropic founder Dario Amodei and a longstanding believer that the technology would take off relatively gradually and be made safe — said he now sees “meaningful risk” of “catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term.”
“Most people could die,” he warned, announcing he was joining OpenAI’s nonprofit safety team to reduce the risks. Meanwhile, Geoffrey Hinton, one of the three so-called “Godfathers of AI,” told the BBC that a 10% risk of human extinction “seems a not unreasonable estimate,” echoing a comment from one of Anthropic’s top AI alignment scientists yesterday.