Covering the recent round of AI apocalypse warnings, I’ve tried to reject this cult-like deference toward all-powerful computer systems and the inevitability rhetoric: If Silicon Valley doesn’t build them first, someone else — likely China — will.
Yet a recent spate of incidents in the U.S. has spurred a fresh, heated debate on the safety of allowing AI systems to act on their own. A growing number of researchers inside the companies involved are also warning of “existential” dangers, with Anthropic even flagging such concerns to investors in its initial public offering prospectus. For China, the risks of near-term hazards like labor market threats or the more alarming Sci-Fi scenarios such as hacks on critical infrastructure are making it harder to write off the furor as a distinctly American obsession.
Beijing has dismissed some of these warnings as “fearmongering,” seeing the calls to slow AI development as an attempt to hold China back. But voices inside the industry have also suggested that frontier risks simply aren’t being felt as acutely at home because they’re further behind the U.S. Huawei Technologies’ rotating Chairman Eric Xu wondered whether Chinese AI was advanced enough to encounter the “type of risk” U.S. providers were increasingly debating. AI model makers in China “may need to speed up their pace” to reach the level that they could “also feel the risks,” Xu said, according to Reuters, while acknowledging the need for balance. It shows how global debate has devolved in unhelpful ways.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.