On May 30, 2023, hundreds of artificial intelligence experts and other notable figures signed the following short Statement on AI Risk:
Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.
At release time, the signatories included over 100 professors of
AI including the two most-cited computer scientists and
Turing laureates Geoffrey Hinton
Geoffrey Everest Hinton (born 1947) is a British-Canadian computer scientist, cognitive scientist, and cognitive psychologist known for his work on artificial neural networks, which earned him the title "the Godfather of AI".
Hinton is Univer ...
and
Yoshua Bengio
Yoshua Bengio (born March 5, 1964) is a Canadian-French computer scientist, and a pioneer of artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is a professor at the Université de Montréal and scientific director of the AI institute Montreal In ...
, as well as the scientific and executive leaders of several major AI companies, and experts in pandemics, climate, nuclear disarmament, philosophy, social sciences, and other fields.
Media coverage has emphasized the signatures from several tech leaders;
this was followed by concerns in other newspapers that the statement could be motivated by public relations or regulatory capture. The statement was released shortly after an open letter calling for a
pause on AI experiments.
The statement is hosted on the website of the AI research and advocacy non-profit
Center for AI Safety
The Center for AI Safety (CAIS) is a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, that promotes the safe development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI). CAIS's work encompasses research in technical AI safety and AI ethics, advoca ...
. It was released with an accompanying text which states that it is still difficult to speak up about extreme risks of AI and that the statement aims to overcome this obstacle.
The center's CEO
Dan Hendrycks stated that "systemic bias, misinformation, malicious use, cyberattacks, and weaponization" are all examples of "important and urgent risks from AI... not just the risk of extinction" and added, "
cieties can manage multiple risks at once; it's not 'either/or' but 'yes/and.
Among the well-known signatories are:
Sam Altman
Samuel Harris Altman (born April 22, 1985) is an American technology entrepreneur, investor, and the chief executive officer of OpenAI since 2019 (he was Removal of Sam Altman from OpenAI, briefly dismissed and reinstated in November 2023). He ...
,
Bill Gates
William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American businessman and philanthropist. A pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, he co-founded the software company Microsoft in 1975 with his childhood friend ...
,
Peter Singer
Peter Albert David Singer (born 6 July 1946) is an Australian moral philosopher who is Emeritus Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. Singer's work specialises in applied ethics, approaching the subject from a secu ...
,
Daniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett III (March 28, 1942 – April 19, 2024) was an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. His research centered on the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of biology, particularly as those ...
,
Sam Harris
Samuel Benjamin Harris (born April 9, 1967) is an American philosopher, neuroscientist, author, and podcast host. His work touches on a range of topics, including rationality, religion, ethics, free will, determinism, neuroscience, meditation ...
,
Grimes
Claire Elise Boucher (; born March 17, 1988), known professionally as Grimes, is a Canadian musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer. Her lyrics often touch on science fiction and feminist themes. The visuals in her videos are elabora ...
,
Stuart J. Russell,
Jaan Tallinn
Jaan Tallinn (born 14 February 1972) is an Estonian computer programmer and investor known for his participation in the development of Skype and file-sharing application FastTrack/Kazaa.
Recognized as a prominent figure in the field of artificia ...
,
Vitalik Buterin
Vitaly Dmitrievich Buterin (; born 31 January 1994), better known as Vitalik Buterin (), is a Canadian computer programmer and co-founder of Ethereum. Buterin became involved with cryptocurrency early in its inception, co-founding ''Bitcoin Ma ...
,
David Chalmers
David John Chalmers (; born 20 April 1966) is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist, specializing in philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University, as well ...
,
Ray Kurzweil
Raymond Kurzweil ( ; born February 12, 1948) is an American computer scientist, author, entrepreneur, futurist, and inventor. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), speech synthesis, text-to-speech synthesis, spee ...
,
Max Tegmark
Max Erik Tegmark (born 5 May 1967) is a Swedish-American physicist, machine learning researcher and author. He is best known for his book ''Life 3.0'' about what the world might look like as artificial intelligence continues to improve. Tegmark i ...
,
Lex Fridman
Alexei "Lex" Fridman (; born 15 August 1983) is an American computer scientist and podcaster. Since 2018, he has hosted the ''Lex Fridman Podcast'', where he interviews notable figures from various fields such as science, technology, sports, and ...
,