Unsafe at any speed: AI optimists are turning cautious as safety concerns mount

OPINION It wasn't that long ago, like earlier this year, that AI leaders were doing their usual pie-in-the-sky proclamations of how everything would be so wonderful with AI. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei tweeted that AI "will actually be possible to cure most human diseases in ~5-10 years." While on a podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman proclaimed that AI would create "the greatest boom in people starting smaller businesses that we have ever seen."

So, what's not to love? Well, you see those same AI CEOs/cheerleaders have also been tactfully admitting that AI isn't all that safe. Altman, for example, recently admitted, "model capabilities were outstripping the pace of safety and alignment." Meanwhile, Amodei also said, "I worry that biology will have a strong attacker-defender asymmetry, where sufficiently capable models may be able to quickly weaponize pandemic-level viruses with widely available materials."

They're not the only...

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