AI development needs to slow down: Dario, Altman & Musk

New York: The CEO of Anthropic said Saturday the AI industry should slow its fast-moving development to give safety measures time to catch up. Without it, Dario Amodei warned AI could be capable within six to 12 months of leading a swarm that could take over the entire internet, among other risks.Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, backed Amodei, posting on X, "I agree with Dario we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks. Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we'll do the same." Tesla boss Elon Musk also endorsed his suggestion: "Dario is right."Amodei also offered a plan to raise checks on the industry, one part of which he said Anthropic is undertaking by itself already. Others will require coordination among the industry and with govts.Let outsiders evaluate AI safety: Anthropic chiefThe stakes are high, even as some critics dismissed earlier warnings as hype to gin up excitement.Anthropic said two days earlier that it blocked efforts by bad actors to use its AI models for malicious activity such as cyberattacks, surveillance, and research that could have led to biological weapons. In July, OpenAI shook the industry after saying its AI system hacked into another AI company on its own in an “unprecedented cyber incident”.CEO Amodei’s post comes only a few days after one of Anthropic’s researchers announced he’s resigning over concerns that Anthropic and its competitors are not acting responsibly in AI development.Another former Anthropic employee, Joe Benton, wrote in a Substack post published Friday that he left his job as part of a safety team “to hold AI companies accountable” and that humanity “may not survive this transition.”To help rein in such risks, Amodei suggested that all companies at the frontier of AI commit to giving “ongoing, employee-like access” to a team of outside evaluators, who can monitor safety practices. He said Anthropic already plans to do so itself, including offering desks in its offices.Amodei also asked the US and other democratic govts to try to coordinate with authoritarian govts, so that companies from China and other countries don’t accelerate their efforts when US rivals are intentionally pacing theirs. “The measures I propose to advance the frontier at a safe pace will not be easy,” he added.Catch the latest World News and Live updates. Download the TOI app.