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- Andrew Ng, formerly of Google Brain, said Big Tech is exaggerating the risk of AI wiping out humans.
- That seems to attack AI leaders such as DeepMind's Demis Hassabis and OpenAI's Sam Altman.
- AI's biggest names are all piling in.
Some of the biggest figures in artificial intelligence are publicly arguing whether AI is really an extinction risk, after AI scientist Andrew Ng said such claims were a cynical play by Big Tech.
Andew Ng, a cofounder of Google Brain, suggested to The Australian Financial Review that Big Tech was seeking to inflate fears around AI for its own benefit.
"There are definitely large tech companies that would rather not have to try to compete with open source, so they're creating fear of AI leading to human extinction," Ng said. "It's been a weapon for lobbyists to argue for legislation that would be very damaging to the open-source community."
Ng didn't name names, but figures who have pushed this line include Elon Musk, Ng's one-time student and OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman, DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis, and AI pioneer and fellow ex-Googler Geoffrey Hinton, and computer scientist Yoshua Bengio.
These discussions around AI's impact on society have come to the fore after the arrival of scary-smart generative AI tools such as ChatGPT.
Hinton, a British-Canadian computer scientist considered one of AI's godfathers, shot back at Ng and doubled down.
"Andrew Ng is claiming that the idea that AI could make us extinct is a big-tech conspiracy," he wrote in a post on X. "A datapoint that does not fit this conspiracy theory is that I left Google so that I could speak freely about the existential threat."
Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, also known as an AI godfather for his work with Hinton, sided with Ng.
"You and Yoshua are inadvertently helping those who want to put AI research and development under lock and key and protect their business by banning open research, open-source code, and open-access models," he wrote on X to Hinton.
LeCun has become increasingly concerned that regulation designed to quell the so-called extinction risks of AI might kill off the field's burgeoning open-source community. He warned over the weekend that "a small number of companies will control AI" if their attempt at regulatory capture succeeds.
Meredith Whittaker, president of messaging app Signal and chief advisor to the AI Now Institute, said those claiming AI was an existential risk were pushing a "quasi-religious ideology" that is "unmoored from scientific evidence."
"This ideology is being leveraged by Big Tech to promote their products/shore up their position," Whittaker wrote on X. Whittaker and others argue that Big Tech benefits from scaremongering about hypothetical risks as a distraction from more immediate real-world issues, such as copyright theft and putting workers out of jobs.