Andrew Ng, DeepLearning AI founder and co-founder of Google Brain
Further, despite rapid generative AI gains over recent years, Ng emphasised that the technology remains a long way off from Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – the level where software can match human capabilities across every intellectual task. You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.
Speaking in an interview on The Economist’s “Inside Tech” podcast, the AI pioneer dismissed the notion that this technology presents an existential threat to society. So, efforts to stave off human existential risk seem unnecessary,” Ng said. His remarks are a counterweight to warnings by prominent tech executives and researchers who have embraced so-called “doomerism” – the belief that future super-intelligent machines will slip beyond human control, seize essential infrastructure and wipe out humanity. As per a report in The New York Post, Ng reflected on regulatory debates that gained momentum in 2023, saying that he was taken aback by “the intensity of the lobbying efforts to use made-up safety arguments by a handful of businesses to get regulators to pass bad regulations to stifle competition. ” According to Ng, technology firms pouring billions of dollars into proprietary, closed-source AI systems have an obvious financial incentive to suppress open-weight, downloadable models that developers can access and run for free. By focusing on extreme extinction scenarios, Ng warned that policymakers are being diverted from addressing clear, present-day digital harms: “Regulators are distracted fighting phantoms rather than looking at the actual problems of AI.”
Andrew Ng, the artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer who co-founded Google Brain, has pushed back against apocalyptic warnings that AI could cause human extinction. The founder of DeepLearning AI that provides technical training on Generative AI, Machine Learning, Deep Learning and other topics, accused the industry leaders of manufacturing existential safety arguments to lobby for regulations that crush open-source competition. “I think there are no meaningful human existential risks from AI. Ng, a former Stanford University professor who also co-founded Coursera, argued that catastrophic narratives are actively derailing sensible policy while serving the commercial interests of legacy tech incumbents. He also condemned the frequent comparison of AI to nuclear armaments, calling the comparison irresponsible. “One blows up cities; the other is intelligence. What’s [one have] to do with each other? Ng remarked.