Employees claim OpenAI, Google ignoring risks of AI — and should give them ‘right to warn’ public

A group of AI whistleblowers claim tech giants like Google and ChatGPT creator OpenAI are locked in a reckless race to develop technology that could endanger humanity – and demanded “a right to warn” the public in an open letter Tuesday.

Signed by current and former employees of OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic, the open letter cautioned that “AI companies have strong financial incentives to avoid effective oversight” and cited a lack of federal rules on developing advanced AI.

The workers point to potential risks including the spread of misinformation, worsening inequality and even “loss of control of autonomous AI systems potentially resulting in human extinction” – especially as OpenAI and other firms pursue so-called advanced general intelligence, with capacities on par with or surpassing the human mind.

“Companies are racing to develop and deploy ever more powerful artificial intelligence, disregarding the risks and impact of AI,” former OpenAI employee Daniel Kokotajlo, one of the letter’s organizers, said in a statement. “I decided to leave OpenAI because I lost hope that they would act responsibly, particularly as they pursue artificial general intelligence.

“They and others have bought into the ‘move fast and break things’ approach and that is the opposite of what is needed for technology this powerful and this poorly understood,” Kokotajlo added.

The letter drew endorsements by two prominent experts known as the “Godfathers of AI” — Geoffrey Hinton, who warned last year that the threat of rogue AI was “more urgent” to humanity than climate change, and Canadian computer scientist Yoshua Bengio. Famed British AI researcher Stuart Russell also backed the letter.