Elon Musk warns AI poses risk to civilisation at historic meeting with tech chiefs – including Zuckerberg amid feud
TECH titan Elon Musk has reportedly warned US senators that AI poses a threat to civilization while sitting alongside other industry leaders.
Senate Majority Leader Chuch Schumer convened a private meeting on unregulated artificial intelligence to help pass bipartisan legislation to support its development but mitigate its risks.
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The closed-door meeting, held on Capitol Hill in Washington, was attended by some of the industry’s biggest names.
These include Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (Facebook owner), Bill Gates of Microsoft, Sundar Pichai of Alphabet (Google owner) and OpenAi founder Sam Altman.
As he left the building a few hours later, Tesla and Twitter owner Musk called the potential consequences of AI “serious” and stressed that “we need to be proactive rather than reactive.”
“The question is really a question of civilizational risk,” he added, according to NBC News.
It’s not like… one group of people against another.
“It’s like, hey, this is something that’s potentially risky for everyone everywhere.”
Musk also reportedly called for the creation of a new government agency whose sole responsibility would be to address developments in the AI sector.
Musk and Zuckerberg sat clearly separated – by quite a distance – at the event, amid their infamous feud.
Zuckerberg’s thoughts on AI were more measured, noting in his prepared remarks that the two main themes for AI were “security and access.”
“New technologies often bring new challenges, and it is up to companies to ensure we develop and deploy products responsibly,” the Facebook co-founder continued.
“This is an emerging technology, there are important stocks to balance here, and the government is ultimately responsible for that.”
In addition to discussions about unregulated AI, lawmakers questioned tech bosses about the conditions of workers behind chatbots like Open AI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s Bard.
Lawmakers are also reportedly investigating the working conditions of data labelers, who categorize data used to train AI.
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