Billionaire investor, Warren Buffett, has weighed in on the rapid spread of AI, comparing it to the creation of the atom bomb – in the latest high-profile criticism of the burgeoning technology.
While he acknowledged the impressive capabilities of AI during the Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting, Buffett expressed skepticism over its ability to replace humans – pointing at the limits of what the technology can currently do and what it can’t do – like telling jokes.
“It can do all kinds of things. And when something can do all kinds of things, I get a little bit worried,” he said.
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“We did invent for very, very good reason, the atom bomb. And, World War Two, it was enormously important that we did so. But is it good for the next 200 years of the world that the ability to do so has been unleashed?”
The use of AI became prevalent since late last year, when OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT 3 – a chatbot that set off a frenzy of using AI language models to execute tasks – including writing codes and essays.
However, the invention has attracted excitement as much as it has attracted concern. Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk, who confounded OpenAI in 2015 but exited the company in 2018, has been loud about his concerns. He said AI poses a great “threat to civilization” and may be the end of human race.
Musk called for regulation of AI and has begun assembling a team of researchers and engineers to develop his own version of artificial intelligence that will be free of the concerns he raised.
Geoffrey Hinton, former Google AI chief, who’s also dubbed “Godfather of AI”, said last week that the invention presents bigger danger to the world than climate change. He made the disclosure weeks after Google unveiled Bard, its chatbot designed to counter ChatGPT 3. Hinton said he resigned from Google so that he could speak out freely about the danger of AI.
“I wouldn’t like to devalue climate change. I wouldn’t like to say, ‘You shouldn’t worry about climate change.’ That’s a huge risk too,” Hinton told Reuters. “But I think this might end up being more urgent.
“With climate change, it’s very easy to recommend what you should do: you just stop burning carbon. If you do that, eventually things will be okay. For this it’s not at all clear what you should do.”
Buffet who has opposed the idea of atomic bomb, which he said had “changed everything save our modes of thinking,” said “AI … can change everything in the world, except how men think and behave.”
While he expressed concern about AI’s ability to disseminate false information and eliminate jobs, Hinton in an interview with the Times, said he is not sure if it’s not too late to put the requisite checks on AI’s rapid momentum.
So far, the speed of AI has far outpaced governments’ response to calls for the regulation of the technology, lending credence to Hinton fears that it may be too late to rein in on its excesses.