Paytm’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma ‘concerned’ after OpenAI blog says superintelligence AI can lead to human extinction

According to OpenAI, superintelligence, a hypothetical agent that possesses more intelligence than the brightest and most gifted humans, could arrive in this decade.

In a tweet, Sharma said: “Here is OpenAI blog post done this week: In less than 7 years we have a system that may lead to disempowerment of humanity and even human extinction. I am genuinely concerned with the power some set of people and select countries have accumulated – already.”

In a blogpost published on 5 July, OpenAI said: “Superintelligence will be the most impactful technology humanity has ever invented, and could help us solve many of the world’s most important problems. But the vast power of superintelligence could also be very dangerous, and could lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction.”

“While superintelligence seems far off now, we believe it could arrive this decade,” added OpenAI.

“Managing these risks will require, among other things, new institutions for governance and solving the problem of superintelligence alignment,” said OpenAI.

OpenAI said it is  planning to invest significant resources and create a new research team that will seek to ensure its artificial intelligence remains safe for humans – eventually using AI to supervise itself.

 “Currently, we don’t have a solution for steering or controlling a potentially superintelligent AI, and preventing it from going rogue. Our current techniques for aligning AI, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, rely on humans’ ability to supervise AI. But humans won’t be able to reliably supervise AI systems much smarter than us, and so our current alignment techniques will not scale to superintelligence. We need new scientific and technical breakthroughs,” the said OpenAI blog. 

Updated: 09 Jul 2023, 11:55 PM IST