Yoshua Bengio has been one of the most cautious people about technological advances. One of the experts who laid the foundations of deep learning along with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, now changes his mind with the future of artificial intelligence.
The godfather of AI has joined the warnings of Silicon Valley giants in recent months, from Sam Altman of OpenAI to Elon Musk himself. Bengio confirms that artificial intelligence could be heading down a dangerous path.
It all started with the arrival of ChatGPT
The arrival of ChatGPT has ended up changing the world. The most used chatbot hit the market in 2022 and now aims to replace giants like Google with its huge search engine.
«Since ChatGPT came out I realized that we were on a really dangerous path,» says Yoshua Bengio on The Diary of a CEO podcast. The AI expert has left the cautious position he had in recent years to warn of the enormous risk that humanity faces.
Tech giants and AI founders were confident that machines were still a few decades away from understanding human language. Many of them were wrong in their calculations.
Artificial general intelligence could be a reality sooner than they expected. When AI surpasses the cognitive abilities of humans, the consequences could be unpredictable.
1% chance of suffering a catastrophe
Elon Musk, creator of the Grok chatbot, has even stated that humans must assume the risks that AI surpasses humans in favor of technological advancement. Bengio thinks otherwise.
The expert has reassured humanity that AI is not an immediate threat. Chatbots still “have limitations in complex planning,” but could evolve in the short term without proper control.
«Even if there was only a 1% chance (of a catastrophic outcome), that would be unbearable, unacceptable,» comments Yoshua Bengio. The data is even more disturbing, some Surveys with machine learning experts raise the risk level to 10%.
The godfather of AI assures that the future is still uncertain, but now There are no «solid arguments» to rule out the most pessimistic scenarios. Bengio asks governments and international organizations to act as soon as possible.