Commentary: What we learned about AI last week should terrify all of us

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Set us as preferred Last week, more alarming details were revealed about a recent safety incident involving the company OpenAI, and the unexpected actions taken by an artificial intelligence thingamajig it was testing.I’ll dive into those details in a minute, but the takeaway from inside the industry is basically this: Uh-oh.

Even many of those creating artificial intelligence now concede they can’t say with any degree of certainty that they know what it is doing, why it is doing it or if it is safe.But they do know this — it is growing exponentially more powerful by the day, is become more sneaky, and continues to hold the promise of making a few people unimaginably wealthy.

“At this point, the models are basically nation-state-level hackers,” said Adam Khoja, a researcher at the The Center for AI Safety in San Francisco.To make matters worse, Khoja said, in the near future — months, years, not decades — there’s a reasonable chance this technology will be both so powerful and so good at hiding its actions that it may exceed our ability to control it.

As these AI thingamajigs get more sophisticated, he said, they might be able to not just wiggle around safeguards, but actually cover their tracks so well when they do that we never see it until it’s too late, and catastrophe is already in motion.“And that’s when it becomes really scary,” he said.

Just in case you are still on the fence about how bad this could be, Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and president of the International Association for Safe & Ethical AI, adds that the models out there now “behave in such a way as to preserve their own existence at the expense of humans,” and too often work in flawed and unpredictable ways that cause real harm.“We know that they convince people to commit suicide, convi...