Historic UN Security Council Briefing on AI

Yoshua Bengio, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Hugging Face CEO and cofounder Clement Delangue gave back-to-back speeches at the UN Security Council, according to an account by Gary Marcus, who said the briefing took place that afternoon.

The Associated Press reported that heads of major AI firms warned the UN that without intervention, AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole.

Marcus said he agreed with virtually all of Bengio's remarks and, with Bengio's permission, reprinted them in full. He added that he also agreed with almost everything the other three speakers said, as well as most of what followed from many other speakers from around the world.

Marcus listed points of convergence: the need for preflight safety testing, transparency auditing, liability, global dialogue and international cooperation, and immediate action. He wrote that with leading scientists such as Bengio and major CEOs reaching consensus, there is no excuse not to start implementing them.

Marcus identified one dissenting note, criticizing what he called self-congratulatory hype in the speeches of Altman and Amodei, especially Amodei's. He said Amodei overhyped an enzyme-related discovery announced earlier that day by likening it to the gene editing system CRISPR.

Marcus cited Dr. Angela Rasmussen, who said of the discovery: "They found the sequence, probably expressed a protein, but haven't done any meaningful functional characterization... It's not bad, it's just very premature to compare to CRISPR."

Marcus said the full session, which begins several minutes into the recording, could be viewed online and that a transcript would be available at the same location.