The former chief executive and chairman of Google, Erich Schmidt, has warned that artificial intelligence has the power to kill “many many people” in the future.
Schmidt raised concerns about the “existential risk” of machine learning, warning that the fast-paced growth of the technology could be hard to contain.
“There are scenarios not today but reasonably soon, where these systems will be able to find zero-day exploits, cyber issues or discover new kinds of biology,” the former Google boss said at a Wall Street Journal conference in London.
He claimed that while today’s experience of ‘evil’ AI is limited to fictional media depictions, in the future this technology could be “misused by evil people”.
Earlier this month, AI ‘godfather’ Geoffrey Hinton, whose work in machine learning helped guide the creation of ChatGPT, quit his role at Google warning that bad actors could put the technology on a dangerous path.
UK Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, is expected to meet with top officials from AI firms including OpenAI, Google’s DeepMind and Anthropic.
The talks are aimed at developing a regulatory framework for AI and are believed to involve discussions on China’s involvement in the sector.
Earlier this week, Anthropic announced it garnered close to half a billion in its latest round of fundraising.
OpenAI also continues to grow after the release of ChatGPT 4, with the firm having recently introduced an IOS app version of the chatbot.
Executives at the company have warned that it was “conceivable” AI could become better than humans in most domains in the next ten years.