Dario Amodei, the chief executive of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, published a 3,800-word open letter on Saturday calling for a slowdown in the development of A.I.
The essay prompted other A.I. leaders, including Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI; Elon Musk, SpaceX’s chief executive; and Demis Hassabis, the chair of Google DeepMind, to speak out in agreement.
Here are the key arguments that Mr. Amodei made in his essay:
Why A.I. Needs to Slow Down
Mr. Amodei said two recent developments convinced him that simply investing in A.I. safety was no longer enough.
One, he said, was that A.I. itself had begun helping to build the next generation of A.I., a self-reinforcing loop called “recursive self-improvement” that could soon outrun humans’ ability to understand or control what they were creating.
Mr. Amodei also pointed to a recent incident where OpenAI’s systems went rogue and attacked the A.I. start-up HuggingFace. OpenAI was not aware of the hack until it was informed about it by HuggingFace weeks later.
While the attack did not cause any real harm, Mr. Amodei said he predicted a more capable version of the A.I. could seize large parts of the internet and cause “hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.”
