Prominent AI researchers, including Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Andrew Yao, Daniel Kahneman, Dawn Song, and Yuval Noah Harari, have issued a call for concrete regulations to govern the development and deployment of AI.

This collective of experts, which includes three Turing Award winners, a Nobel laureate, and AI academics have called for immediate action, proposing that major organisations working on AI systems allocate at least one-third of their resources to ensure AI safety and ethical use, a commitment on par with their investment in capability development.

Geoffrey Hinton, widely regarded as one of the most influential AI scientists said: “There are companies planning to train models with 100x more computation than today’s state of the art, within 18 months. No one knows how powerful they will be. And there’s essentially no regulation on what they’ll be able to do with these models.” 

In advance of the first international AI Safety Summit in London, these experts have released a concise paper outlining their consensus on how governments should approach the risks associated with AI. It represents the most concrete and comprehensive set of demands from leading AI academics to date as per the official statement. 

The paper emphasizes that current AI models are potent and impactful, necessitating democratic oversight to prevent potential risks, including AI-generated misinformation, social injustice, power concentration, cyber warfare, and loss of control.

One of the 20 authors of the paper, computer scientist Yoshua Bengio stresses the urgency of these measures, given the rapid progression of AI technology.

“It’s time to get serious about advanced AI systems. These are not toys. Increasing their capabilities before we understand how to make them safe is utterly reckless. Companies will complain that it’s too hard to satisfy regulations— that “regulation stifles innovation.” That’s ridiculous. There are more regulations on sandwich shops than there are on AI companies,” stated Stuart Russell, professor of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley and a leading active voice in AI.