Two of the three "Godfathers of AI" got into an argument on X, formerly Twitter, about the future of AI and humanity. While one of them thinks that the risks of AI are "overhyped", the other mocked attempts to dismiss the risks of AI as "science fiction".
What Happened: Godfathers of AI, Geoffrey Hinton and Meta Platforms Inc.'s META Yann LeCun got into a heated argument on X about the risk of AI leading to humanity's extinction.
Hinton and LeCun are considered "Godfathers of AI", alongside Yoshua Bengio. They were jointly given the 2018 Turing Award, also known as the "Nobel Prize of computing".
See Also: Could Open Source Have Thwarted Terminator’s Skynet? Here’s What Meta’s Llama 2 AI Thinks
Hinton has been vocal about the dangers of AI for a long time now. He even left Alphabet Inc.'s GOOG GOOGL Google to freely tell everyone of the risks that AI poses to humanity, essentially putting his money where his mouth is.
Hinton's comments come in the wake of LeCun asking if open source could have prevented Skynet from taking over in the Terminator series.
While Hinton's position on the risks of AI is well documented by now, he went nuclear with his disagreement – quite literally.
"Let’s open source nuclear weapons too to make them safer," Hinton said, clearly mocking LeCun's comments about an open source Skynet being unable to take over.
"The good guys (us) will always have bigger ones than the bad guys (them) so it should all be OK," he added.
However, LeCun did not take this lying down and came back with a sharp rebuttal.
"AI is designed to make humanity smarter, not wipe out entire cities. I fail to see how this analogy has any relevance," he replied.
Why It Matters: The dangers of AI have not been professed by just Hinton – several tech leaders, including Elon Musk, Satya Nadella and Bill Gates, and OpenAI's Sam Altman, have called for AI regulation.
In fact, following President Biden's executive order, Vice President Kamala Harris announced the setup of the US AI Safety Institute. This Institute is tasked with providing guidelines and best practices for examining potentially harmful AI systems.
Image source – WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
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