Blog

My testimony in front of the U.S. Senate - The urgency to act against AI threats to democracy, society and national security

The capabilities of AI systems have steadily increased with deep learning advances for which I received a Turing Award alongside Geoffrey Hinton (University of Toronto) and Yann LeCun (New York University and Meta) in 2018. This revolution enables tremendous progress and innovation, but it also entails a wide range of risks.

FAQ on Catastrophic AI Risks

I have been hearing many arguments from different people regarding catastrophic AI risks. I wanted to clarify these arguments, first for myself, because I would really like to be convinced that we need not worry. However, sharing them and opening up the discussion more broadly might also be useful.

How Rogue AIs may Arise

The rise of powerful AI dialogue systems in recent months has precipitated debates about AI risks of all kinds, which hopefully will yield an acceleration of governance and regulatory frameworks.

AI Scientists: Safe and Useful AI?

There have recently been lots of discussions about the risks of AI, whether in the short term with existing methods or in the longer term with advances we can anticipate.

Slowing down development of AI systems passing the Turing test

I recently signed an open letter asking to slow down the development of giant AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 –those that currently pass the Turing test and can thus trick a human being into believing it is conversing with a peer rather than a machine.

Scaling in the service of reasoning & model-based ML

We must be cautious in pursuing research directions that build knowledge directly into AI systems at the expense of scalability. In fact, even nature builds intelligence on top of large-scale biological neural networks.

Generative Flow Networks

I have rarely been as enthusiastic about a new research direction. We call them GFlowNets, for Generative Flow Networks.

Superintelligence: Futurology vs. Science

We sometimes come across catchy headlines about AI that can scare or excite us, such as “By the middle of this century, artificial intelligence will be a billion times smarter than the human brain,” and “Artificial intelligence could surpass the human brain by 2029”

January 24 2022