In recent days we have witnessed a proliferation of calls to control the pace of development of artificial intelligence (AI) models. While large companies pressure, especially the U.S. Administration and the EU, to maintain as much deregulation as possible to multiply their profits, some of their leaders acknowledge that the toy is getting out of their hands. It is not just employees deciding to dissociate themselves to avoid bearing the guilt of a modern J. Robert Oppenheimer, but bigwigs like Sam Altman (OpenAI), Elon Musk (X), or Demis Hassabis (Alphabet-Google), who have not exactly been known for their scruples, are already asking for someone to stop them in their race so they don’t all end up crashing.
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This is not about giving up a technological advance of such utility, but about advancing at a pace consistent with humanity’s capacity to adapt. Anyone who reads a newspaper today can appreciate the amount of information about the most diverse applications of AI and the problems it entails. Less than four years ago, the acronym AI was an exoticism. In that short time, we have gone from debating job losses or the hypothetical decline in creativity to making a disturbing leap. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has just warned that in six to twelve months a swarm of AI agents “could be capable of taking over the entire internet,” that is, the functioning of our world, from the small things of our daily lives to the financial system or the deadliest weapons.
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The successive warnings have not been denied by the owners of those big companies, except for the ineffable Mark Zuckerberg. Governments barely dedicate cooperative efforts to this matter. It seems inevitable to leave it in the hands of the U.S. and China. The suffering of millions of people in the two world wars led to the creation of the United Nations (now in decline), and the fears of the Cold War favored agreements to destroy nuclear arsenals. In this new era, will sufficient social pressure arise in time to create a global alliance to monitor and control AIs?
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