Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates on Wednesday called for lawmakers in Washington to regulate the development of artificial intelligence, weeks after the CEOs of some of the nation’s biggest AI labs agreed on the need to slow the pace of AI progress.“No one thinks self-regulation is enough,” Gates told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” in an interview set to air in full Sunday.Asked by moderator Kristen Welker whether there needs to be legislation passed in Washington, Gates said, “Absolutely.”“You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like,” he said.“And that has to be a required thing.
And it will be a little bit of overhead for the industry, but not a dramatic slowing of what they’re doing.”Earlier this month, the CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI, two of the nation’s biggest AI labs, agreed that the race to develop powerful AI systems should slow down.Their statements on the issue came after a whistleblower who recently resigned from Anthropic, Jacob Coxon, publicly declared that “neither company is acting responsibly.
They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Coxon added in a series of social media posts and interviews that week.In Wednesday’s interview, Gates didn’t downplay the risk that AI could wipe out humanity in several years, but called for Americans not to ignore the risks that AI could be used by bad actors to cause large-scale harm as soon as today.“AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths.You know, so even though it’s pretty hard to get to 100%, there’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools,” he said.In an interview with “Meet the Press” earlier this month, C...