Godfather of AI: The next 5 years Will Change Humanity Forever | Yoshua Bengio

We have AIs since especially about a year ago, that can strategize in order to achieve their goal.

Can you draw the worst scenario for me? Because when you tell AI is going to pursue its own goals, what do you mean by that? Like, destroy humanity, or what is there?

We're building machines that maybe don't want to be shut down. Negatively to the point of doing things that go against our instructions, against our moral red lines, being willing to blackmail the lead engineer in charge of that transition to a new system.

Oh, that-- did that happen?

Yes, um-

This is Yoshua Bengio, one of the leading experts in artificial intelligence, who helped create modern AI.

When I started my career, I didn't care too much about politics and society, but as I grew older, I became more aware of how what I was doing would potentially impact society in both positive and negative ways.

How much time do you think we have?

Uh, it's doubling every 7 months, and right now, it's like at the child level, they can do, like, half an hour ahead. But if the curve continues, that means in about five years they are at human level, and the vast majority of workers could be in real trouble.

But if you talk to your kids or, like, think about your grandson, what would be your advice on how to prepare?

Um...

This video is sponsored by HubSpot. Hello everyone. Welcome to Silicon Valley Girl, a podcast where we bridge business and new technology. Uh, thank you so much for tuning in. Today, I have an amazing guest who is sometimes called Godfather of AI, Yoshua Bengio. Yoshua, could you please introduce yourself in sixty seconds, and for everyone who doesn't know you, why should they be listening to you when it comes to AI?

I've been doing research in AI for about four decades, contributing to how to make AI smarter. But in 2023, about three years ago, I realized that we were on a course that could be very dangerous for, uh, humanity, for democracy, and I decided to shift my activities to better understand the risks and to try to do what I could to mitigate them, both by speaking publicly about those risks and working on the technological question of how we can build AI that will not harm people.

I've heard you were lost and pessimistic, uh, in, in your past interviews, but now I've seen an article that says that you're increasingly optimistic by a big margin. Can you tell me what happened and why were you pessimistic?

So early on, when I realized we had reached a point... Three years ago, when I realized that we had reached a point that Alan, [clears throat] Alan Turing, one of the founders of the field of computer science and also of AI, uh, in 1950, thought would be the threshold to building machines, um, that could overtake us. Um, the threshold being machines that manipulate language as well as we do. Uh, I was quite concerned, and we were not really ready for, for this event. It came much earlier than people thought, and it wasn't clear to me how we could fix the problems. Knowing what I know about the technology, uh, neural nets, uh, we don't really understand what's going on inside and how they come to answers. And, uh, I had read a bit of, uh, some of the theoretical concerns regarding how we could lose control, uh, to AIs that strategize, that try to achieve goals, um, uh, that we didn't really, uh, want. And so I started s- studying that field of AI safety a lot more, and after some time, uh, of being a bit anxious, really focusing on-- emotionally focusing on what's going to happen to my children in ten, twenty years from now, uh, my grandchild was only one year old, you know, um, I realized that I could, you know, shift from this anxious stance to something much more positive by focusing on what I could do to mitigate those risks. And I think every one of us should be asking, you know, "What can I do to bring about a better world with what we have, what we can do?" So, so that's been the first positive shift, and, um, and I started thinking about scientifically, uh, what is the problem? Uh, is there a way to construct AI that will be safe by design? And I met people who have shared, shared similar ideas, and after some time, I realized that there could maybe be a way to, to do this. Uh, and I started talking about it with some of my colleagues. I started recruiting people who were interested in this, and last June, uh, I created a new nonprofit organization focused on the R&D needed to actually develop that methodology.