Portugal Colonial - At UN, tech chiefs urge caution in AI development

"This moment calls for extreme care," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in New York at an emergency meeting of the 15-member council.

He warned that as AI systems become more capable and autonomous, they could move faster than institutions or concentrate power into too few hands.

Altman was among industry leaders briefing the council following weeks of global headlines about the risks of uncontrollable artificial intelligence and calls for a slowdown.

"The industry must not accept too much technological risk just because the benefits are too great and important to slow down," Altman told the United Nation's top body.

Speaking after Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said his company understands that as AI models become more powerful, "even more stringent standards of safety will be required."

He said Anthropic aims to improve its ability to prevent misuse of the technology.

"We will slow down as much as necessary in order to make sure that every successive AI technology that we release is actually safe," Amodei said in a video call.

Other speakers on Wednesday included Clement Delangue of Hugging Face, which was the target of a recent cyberattack by autonomous OpenAI software.

This marked the first in a series of incidents that have raised alarm bells over the rapidly evolving technology.

In early September, Jacob Coxon, a researcher who worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, decided to leave the industry and accused both companies of "gambling with our lives" in the race to develop AI models capable of self-improvement.

- 'Middle path' -

On Wednesday, Altman said his company would try its best to walk a "middle path."

"We don't want to fall into the trap of blind optimism," but he cautioned against falling into "doomerism" too.

Delangue of Hugging Face noted that while his company was targeted by AI, it also used the technology to fend off the attacks. "The world needs open-source AI more than ever to defend itself."

Altman, Amodei and several other leading AI executives have been calling for global oversight of the technology.

Recently, OpenAI urged for the United States to lead a global effort on establishing standards for artificial intelligence, noting that the US industry is at the technical frontier.

Ferreira--PC