I still remember when I was a masters student presenting a paper at the Canadian Conference on AI 2014 in Montreal and Bengio was also at the conference presenting a tutorial, and during the Q&A afterwards, I asked him a question about AI existential risk. I think I worded it back then as concerned about the possibility of Unfriendly AI or a dangerous optimization algorithm or something like that, as it was after I’d read the sequences but before “existential risk” was popularized as a term. Anyway, he responded by asking jokingly if I was a journalist, and then I vaguely recall him giving a hedged answer about how current AI was still very far away from those kinds of concerns.
It’s good to see he’s taking these concerns a lot more seriously these days. Between him and Hinton, we have about half of the Godfathers of AI (missing LeCun and Schmidhuber if you count him as one of them) showing seriousness about the issue. With any luck, they’ll push at least some of their networks of top ML researchers into AI safety, or at the very least make AI safety more esteemed among the ML research community than before.
I still remember when I was a masters student presenting a paper at the Canadian Conference on AI 2014 in Montreal and Bengio was also at the conference presenting a tutorial, and during the Q&A afterwards, I asked him a question about AI existential risk. I think I worded it back then as concerned about the possibility of Unfriendly AI or a dangerous optimization algorithm or something like that, as it was after I’d read the sequences but before “existential risk” was popularized as a term. Anyway, he responded by asking jokingly if I was a journalist, and then I vaguely recall him giving a hedged answer about how current AI was still very far away from those kinds of concerns.
It’s good to see he’s taking these concerns a lot more seriously these days. Between him and Hinton, we have about half of the Godfathers of AI (missing LeCun and Schmidhuber if you count him as one of them) showing seriousness about the issue. With any luck, they’ll push at least some of their networks of top ML researchers into AI safety, or at the very least make AI safety more esteemed among the ML research community than before.