International report warns against loss of control over AI
PARIS
A frantic race by tech giants to develop ever more powerful artificial intelligence (AI) could have "harmful" effects, leading researcher Yoshua Bengio has warned as scientists gathered in Paris for a global summit on the technology.
The computer scientist and 2018 winner of the prestigious Turing Prize presented the first-ever International AI Safety Report, compiled under his supervision, at Paris's ENS university.
Bengio pointed to AI risks that are already widely acknowledged, such as its use to create fake or misleading content online.
But the University of Montreal professor added that "proof is steadily appearing of additional risks, like biological attacks or cyberattacks".
In the longer term, he fears a possible "loss of control" by humans over AI systems, potentially motivated by "their own will to survive."
The emergence last month of the low-cost, high-performance Chinese AI model DeepSeek had "sped up the race, which isn't good for safety," Bengio added.
He called for heavier international regulation and more extensive research on AI safety, which for now accounts for "a tiny fraction" of the massive investments being made in the sector.
"Without government intervention, I don't know how we're going to get through this," Bengio said.
When OpenAI's ChatGPT burst onto the public scene two years ago, "I felt the urgency of thinking about this question of safety," Bengio said as he presented the report -- designed to match now-familiar documents from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
"What scares me the most is the possibility that humanity could disappear within 10 years. It's terrifying. I don't know why more people don't realise it," he said.
