A couple of weeks ago, I was at this splashy AI conference in Montreal called All In. It was – how should I say this – a bit over the top. There were smoke machines, thumping dance music, food trucks. It was a far cry from the quiet research labs where AI was developed. 

While I remain skeptical of the promise of artificial intelligence, this conference made it clear that the industry is, well, all in. The stage was filled with startup founders promising that AI was going to revolutionize the way we work, and government officials saying AI was going to supercharge the economy. 

And then there was Yoshua Bengio. 

Bengio is one of AI’s pioneering figures. In 2018, he and two colleagues won the Turing Award – the closest thing computer science has to a Nobel Prize – for their work on deep learning. In 2022, he was the most cited computer scientist in the world. It wouldn’t be hyperbolic to suggest that AI as we know it today might not exist without Yoshua Bengio. 

But in the last couple of years, Bengio has had an epiphany of sorts. And he now believes that, left unchecked, AI has the potential to wipe out humanity. So these days, he’s dedicated himself to AI safety. He’s a professor at the University of Montreal and the founder of MILA - the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute.  

And he was at this big AI conference too, amidst all these Silicon Valley types, pleading with the industry to slow down before it’s too late. 

Mentioned:

“Personal and Psychological Dimensions of AI Researchers Confronting AI Catastrophic Risks” by Yoshua Bengio

“Deep Learning” by Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton

“Computing Machinery and Intelligence” by Alan Turing

“International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI” 

“Safetywashing: Do AI Safety Benchmarks Actually Measure Safety Progress?” by R. Ren et al.

“SB 1047: Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act”

Further reading:

“‘Deep Learning’ Guru Reveals the Future of AI” by Cade Metz

“Montréal Declaration for a Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence” 

“This A.I. Subculture’s Motto: Go, Go, Go” By Kevin Roose

“Reasoning through arguments against taking AI safety seriously” by Yoshua Bengio