One of the three 'godfathers of A.I.' feels 'lost' because of the direction the technology has taken | Fortune

ai-safetyai-regulationturing-awardai-riskai-pause

Abstraction: AI pioneers Bengio and Hinton warn of existential risk; LeCun dissents

Key points:

Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun shared the 2019 Turing Award ($1M); Bengio now says he "feels lost" watching AI become a potential threat, questioning his life's work
Bengio is first signatory on FLI's six-month AI pause open letter and signed a separate statement that AI extinction risk should be a global priority alongside pandemics and nuclear war
Bengio calls for AI companies to be registered, audited by governments, and developers to have ethics certification; compares to aviation, automotive, and pharmaceutical oversight
Hinton (ex-Google) switched views: now believes AI systems are close to human-level intelligence and fears survival-level risks if AI falls into bad actors' hands
LeCun (Meta chief AI scientist) strongly dissents: opposes regulating research, argues intelligence does not inherently generate a drive for dominance
Sam Altman co-signed the AI extinction-risk statement alongside Bengio and Hinton

Connections: Yoshua Bengio · Geoffrey Hinton · Yann LeCun · Openai · AI Safety · AI Regulation