Before Jacob Coxon, Elon Musk And Other Experts Warned About AI's Existential Threat

Artificial intelligence was built to make machines smarter. But what happens when they become smarter than us? That question is moving from science fiction into a serious debate among some of the world's leading AI researchers and technology figures. The latest warning has come from Jacob Coxon, who announced that he was quitting Anthropic, having previously left OpenAI, because he believed neither company was acting responsibly enough. His stark accusation: AI companies were "gambling with our lives". Coxon went even further, warning that rapid advances in AI could lead to artificial superintelligence capable of killing all humans "within the next decade".

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It could be an extreme scenario, and far from consensus view. But it is not an isolated warning. Elon Musk, an early investor in ChatGPT creator OpenAI, has repeatedly cautioned that increasingly powerful AI could become impossible to control. The reason? Musk worries that AI will soon become much smarter than any human. He has also said in podcasts and interviews that AI can be weaponised and people can use it to hack power grids, shut down water supplies and design dangerous biological weapons.

However, these concerns are around artificial general intelligence (AGI) rather than normal, specific AI (like self-driving car software). This distinction is important for Musk since he is heavily invested in technology and his company Tesla is a leading producer of self-driving cars.

Geoffrey Hinton, widely regarded as the "godfather of AI", resigned from Google and speaks freely about how AGI can outsmart humans, manipulate information and independently develop dangerous sub-goals like acquiring power.

Another AI pioneer and Turing award winner Yoshua Bengio has been campaigning aggressively, demanding regulations on advanced training until strict safety parametres are proven.

Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, Pachocki, chief scientist at OpenAI, Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have vowed to work towards mitigating the risk of extinction from AI, calling it a global priority.