On September 17, AI researcher Andrew Ng stated in an interview with Bloomberg Television that recent warnings from top model developers about AI posing a risk to human survival are "more like science fiction than science," and he believes such narratives may distract the industry from real AI safety issues. Ng co-founded Google Brain and Coursera.
Ng said that in the early days of the tech industry, there was an exaggeration of AI's potential catastrophic risks to gain attention and influence regulatory direction; discussions on this topic have recently heated up again, which may also be driven by similar motives. He believes AI does indeed pose real risks, especially in areas such as cybersecurity, but does not agree that the risk of human extinction should be the core criterion for assessing current AI development.
Recently, Jacob Coxon, a former researcher at Anthropic and OpenAI, publicly resigned and warned that leading labs are racing to develop super AI, sparking a new wave of debate on AI safety. Subsequently, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, both called for appropriately slowing down the development of cutting-edge models and enhancing safety measures. Ng previously worked with both of them.
In contrast to the "slowing down" approach, Ng believes the industry should continue advancing AI development while addressing verifiable safety issues through controlled testing, engineering safeguards, and iterative improvements, and by applying AI more widely in scenarios that generate social value. Currently, AI safety discussions are extending further from model capabilities to specific issues such as cybersecurity, agent loss of control, alignment, and governance of cutting-edge models.
