AI might kill us all but we want it

While the West worries about AI wiping out humanity, the rest of the world is more interested in how to gain access to it.AI might kill us all but we want it nowLast week’s warning from former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon that there is a one in ten chance that AI will extinguish mankind by 2030 has generated more than a little anxiety about the risks involved. By Saturday, the company’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, was calling for a slowing of the pace at which companies like Anthropic and OpenAI improve the capabilities of their AI models.Around the same time that Amodei was publishing his call to “pace the frontier” of AI, Brics leaders issued a declaration at their summit in New Delhi that included a passage on AI. The group’s members are Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia“We recognise that artificial intelligence presents immense opportunity to stimulate economic growth and sustainable development for all,” they said. READ MORE“We further note that international co-operation in enhancing accessibility of AI resources while ensuring its safety, security, inclusiveness and reliability, for promoting energy efficiency of AI systems, fostering AI science and innovation, developing trustworthy AI technologies, leveraging AI for economic growth and social good and mitigating potential risks would be essential for promoting a just, fair, equitable and prosperous future of all countries, especially those of Global South.”The following day, Xi Jinping told the summit’s closing session that China would help to establish “a Brics AI open-source community”, support co-operation in developing and applying large language models, hold specialised AI seminars and training courses, and build “an open ecosystem for AI”. He also promised to help other Brics countries to build smart factories and to promote manufacturing transformation and upgrading.China’s AI models are open source, or more precisely open weight, which means that anyone can download the model, use and adapt it without having access to the underlying training data. American models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude are proprietary, so the companies keep the models on their servers and control access and pricing.In his essay calling for a deceleration pact between the big American AI firms, Amodei also urged Washington to further restrict China’s access to advanced semiconductors and take other steps to slow its progress. He suggested that a global effort to pace the frontier of AI would require China’s co-operation but added that “we should approach any global pacing decision, especially in the near term, in such a way that protects the lead of the US and its allies”.While the focus in the West is on frontier AI, China and other Brics countries are more interested in the application of the technology to manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare, logistics and public services. Developing countries hope that AI will allow them to leapfrog entire stages of development in the way that mobile telecommunications technology allowed them to skip landlines and credit cards and to go straight to mobile phones and payments.In his speech to the Brics summit, South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa backed Amodei’s call for external checks and government oversight of AI companies. But he said the technology had the potential to usher in a new era of productivity and human progress.“If used effectively and responsibly, artificial intelligence can support our efforts to reduce inequality, poverty and underdevelopment. It is showing that it has the capability to transform medicine, education, scientific discovery, agriculture, productivity and development,” he said.“We should therefore neither fear AI nor approach it recklessly. Our responsibility is to ensure that human governance advances as rapidly as artificial intelligence itself.” Please let me know what you think and send your comments, thoughts or suggestions for topics you would like to see covered to denis.globalbriefing@irishtimes.com