Historic UN Security Council Briefing on AI

This afternoon at the UN Security Council, Yoshua Bengio, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Hugging Face CEO and Cofounder Clement Delangue gave back-to-back speeches.

I absolutely loved Bengio’s, agreeing with virtually every well-crafted word, and, with his permission, am reprinting his remarks in full, below.

The more surprising thing is that I agreed with almost all of what the other three said as well (and most of what followed, as many other speakers from around the world gave their own remarks).

Pretty much everyone converged on exactly the same things I keep harping on:

• The need for preflight safety testing.
• The need for transparency auditing.
• The need for liability.
• The need for global dialogue and international cooperation.
• The need for immediate action.

At this point, with leading scientists (like Bengio) and major CEOs all reaching consensus, there is no excuse not to start implementing them.

Here are Yoshua Bengio’s beautiful and important remarks. Humanity will regret it if we do not take heed.

The full session (which starts several minutes into the recording) can be viewed here. A transcript will be available at the same location.

The only real false note came from some self-congratulatory hype in the speeches of Altman and Amodei, especially Amodei’s. Amodei in particular overhyped a discovery announced early today, in enzymes, which Amodei prematurely tried to liken to the truly revolutionary gene editing system CRISPR. In reality, as , put it “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.”