AI is a technological marvel to some and an affront to others. However, it’s a potential revenue source for large companies, but that was to be expected. Companies are vying to control the lion’s share of AI going forward, and it’s led to some people butting heads. Now, Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind’s boss is pushing back against claims that the company is fearmongering to gain more control over AI.
This is an odd concept; it seems that large AI companies are stoking fears that AI will lead to the extinction of humanity… so that people will use their AI more. While that’s hard to grasp, it has a round-about way of actually working. A company can push the idea of how dangerous AI could be to get regulators to craft laws governing AI moving forward. These companies can get into bed with these regulators so that they could craft regulations more suited to their models. Thus, they’ll be more suited to operate under those regulations as compared to other companies.
This could give that company an advantage in the AI market going forward. The more control the company has in the AI market, the more money it can make. It always comes back to money.
Demis Hassabis opposes claims of fearmongering for AI dominance
Hassabis was on an interview with CNBC where he pushed back against claims made by Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun. “If your fearmongering campaigns succeed, they will *inevitably* result in what you and I would identify as a catastrophe: a small number of companies will control AI,” LeCun said in an X (formerly Twitter) post.
However, Hassabis disagreed with the comments during the interview and cited some pretty reasons as to why regulation is important. He talked about the long-term harm of misinformation, deepfakes, bias, bad actors, and AGI (artificial general intelligence). These strongly justify the need for regulation.
These are solid points. LeCun believes in a world where AI is open-sourced; where the language models are accessible to the public for research and general usage. Having freely open AI has some major benefits.
Hassabis, on the other hand, believes that AI should be regulated to avoid it getting out of control. That also has some major benefits.
At this point, we don’t know which AI will be best for humanity going forward, so we’ll have to wait to see its potential effects.
2023-11-01 15:05:09