Obama on Artificial Intelligence

I do not believe that this technology is overhyped. The commercial benefits of it may be overhyped. The valuations of AI companies may be overhyped. The technology itself is not overhyped. I've been tracking this for a long time. In 2015-16, in the last couple of years of my presidency, I actually was focused on this, pulled together a commission of the best minds in this area to talk about not just the technology but also the political, social, economic, ethical concerns around this, produced a terrific report, apparently it got put in the same bin as my pandemic proposal, it wasn't picked up by the administration that followed me. So we could see this coming, but part of what makes this profound is it accelerates. What is happening right now is we have reached this point of what's called recursive learning where essentially, and we had anticipated this but we're now seeing it, the machines are starting to be able to teach themselves. They don't have to wait for humans to start figuring things out. So if you think about it as, let's say humans are teachers and the AI models are students, as recently as let's say a year ago, 90% of the learning of these models was given to them by the teacher, humans, and maybe 5-10% they could fill in some gaps and figure stuff out. In less than a year, maybe even less than six months, we're now at a stage where it's 50-50 and if the trend lines continue, the expectation is it might be 90-10. What this means is that we're now, if the learning track of AI has been like this, we're now hitting the hockey stick trajectory where the models are going to get smarter and smarter and better and better at a much faster pace, at an exponential pace. What are the risks of that? There's the big science fiction risk of wow, these guys, these models get smarter than us and they decide humans are fine but not necessary, they start setting their own goals and the killer robots kill us, or we bow down to them. I do not want to exaggerate that particular risk, but I will say there is a non-zero chance of that happening. But that's not actually the risk that I'm most concerned about, although it's the risk that gets most attention. The reason that's a risk is not because the computer models are conscious necessarily, it doesn't mean that they are necessarily feel malice towards humans, it's just that if they start setting their own agendas, you may get a misalignment between what they want to do and what we want them to do and that gap can be dangerous.