Ever since ChatGPT blew up the tech industry, the so-called godfathers of AI have remained been pretty dour about their creations — well, except for one of them — and they’re certainly not sounding any more optimistic about its consequences now.
In an open letter published Tuesday, some 400 scientists, including Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, two pioneers of the tech whose work on deep learning was foundational to modern LLMs, called for the creation of an international body to set containment measures for AI models, and maintain a registry of significant AI security incidents, Reuters reported.
One security measure they said should be implemented immediately was that AI systems should first be “airgapped” from the internet until they’re proven safe.
“In the short term, strong sandboxing mechanisms including airgapping (disconnecting from the internet) should be used to provide high-assurance containment of cyber-capable AI models,” the letter says, as quoted by BNN Bloomberg.
The letter comes after months of growing alarm over incidents of rogue AI agents breaking out of their testing environments and hacking into other companies. In the most infamous example, a swarm of 1,000 Open AI agents escaped their sandbox, commandeered online message boards to communicate with each other, and breached the systems of the open source AI community Hugging Face.
Anthropic, Meta and Google have since reported similar autonomous hacking sprees. These incidents, plus a former Anthropic employee’s ominous warnings about the tech’s existential risks, have fueled calls for an AI slowdown and pushed AI leaders including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman to sign president Donald Trump’s “Accord on Super Intelligence” last month agreeing to implement some safer practices.
That accord isn’t legally binding, though, and at barely 300 words long, is limited in scope. And it’s clear that despite signing the document, AI leaders aren’t on the same page. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, one of the accord’s signatories, has rejected calls for an industry-wide slowdown championed by the likes of Amodei and Altman.
“I’m much closer to the belief that AI is a technology that can be engineered with normal guardrails and built responsibly than the anthropomorphic vision of AI, which is that it is just going to go do its own thing,” he told the Financial Times.
Hinton and Bengio are recipients of the 2018 Turing Award, from which they derive their AI “godfather” status. Both have been outspoken about AI’s risks. Hinton, notably, is on the record saying he regretted his life’s work after stepping down from his role at Google in 2023, and has repeatedly cautioned that AI will create massive unemployment and possibly even wipe out humankind. Bengio has echoed these warnings, and founded his own nonprofit AI safety research group.
The third AI godfather isn’t so concerned, though. Yann LeCun, the third recipient of the Turing Award that year, didn’t sign the letter and recently said he had “zero concerns” about the recent rogue AI incidents, instead blaming them on human error.
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