US Must Move 'Decisively' To Avert 'Extinction-Level' Threat From AI, Gov't-Commissioned Report Says

The U.S. government must move 'quickly and decisively' to avert substantial national security risks stemming from artificial intelligence (AI) which could, in the worst case, cause an 'extinction-level threat to the human species,' says a report commissioned by the U.S. government published on Monday. Time: 'Current frontier AI development poses urgent and growing risks to national security,' the report, which TIME obtained ahead of its publication, says. 'The rise of advanced AI and AGI [artificial general intelligence] has the potential to destabilize global security in ways reminiscent of the introduction of nuclear weapons.' AGI is a hypothetical technology that could perform most tasks at or above the level of a human. Such systems do not currently exist, but the leading AI labs are working toward them and many expect AGI to arrive within the next five years or less.

The three authors of the report worked on it for more than a year, speaking with more than 200 government employees, experts, and workers at frontier AI companies -- like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic and Meta -- as part of their research. Accounts from some of those conversations paint a disturbing picture, suggesting that many AI safety workers inside cutting-edge labs are concerned about perverse incentives driving decisionmaking by the executives who control their companies. The finished document, titled 'An Action Plan to Increase the Safety and Security of Advanced AI,' recommends a set of sweeping and unprecedented policy actions that, if enacted, would radically disrupt the AI industry. Congress should make it illegal, the report recommends, to train AI models using more than a certain level of computing power.

The threshold, the report recommends, should be set by a new federal AI agency, although the report suggests, as an example, that the agency could set it just above the levels of computing power used to train current cutting-edge models like OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini. The new AI agency should require AI companies on the 'frontier' of the industry to obtain government permission to train and deploy new models above a certain lower threshold, the report adds. Authorities should also 'urgently' consider outlawing the publication of the 'weights,' or inner workings, of powerful AI models, for example under open-source licenses, with violations possibly punishable by jail time, the report says. And the government should further tighten controls on the manufacture and export of AI chips, and channel federal funding toward 'alignment' research that seeks to make advanced AI safer, it recommends.

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