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Computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, called one of the modern “godfathers of AI”, said that technology companies were building systems without proper technical and social guardrails.
Speaking to the Guardian, Bengio appointed historian Yuval Noah Harari and former Rolls-Royce chief executive Sir John Rose to the board of his AI safety laboratory.
Following public and political backlash,
Asked what the uproar shows about the state of the AI industry, Bengio said the situation across the sector is “not a complete free-for-all” but that it needs to be addressed.
“It is too unrestricted and, as leading AI companies are building increasingly powerful systems without proper technical and social safeguards, it is beginning to have more and more negative effects on people,” Bengio said.
Part of the solution, he said, was better governance, including placing ethical importance on company boards. As well as Harari and Rose, Bengio has appointed Maria Eitel, founder of the Nike Foundation – a philanthropic arm of the multinational sports conglomerate – as chair of his security lab, LoZero, which was launched last year.
Bengio earned the nickname “Godfather of AI” after winning the 2018 Turing Award, which is considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for computing. He shared it with Geoffrey Hinton, who later won the Nobel, and Yann LeCun, the former chief AI scientist at Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta.
Former Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven will be the first member of the NGO’s Global Advisory Council. Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, has been a leading voice of caution on AI development and recently published a book called Nexus outlining his concerns.
“This is not just a technical discussion for companies building frontier AI systems,” Bengio said. “It also depends on what choices are made about AI that we consider morally right.”
Bengio, a computer science professor at the University of Montreal, has secured $35 million (£26 million) in funding for LoZero. This scientist is building a system called AI that will work with autonomous systems – known as AI agents – and flag potentially harmful behavior.
“The entire creation of the board has been guided by the idea that we need a group of people who are highly credible in an ethical sense, who can help us deliver LoZero’s mission of providing technical solutions for reliable, highly capable, secure-by-design AI systems as a global public good,” Bengio said.
Last month, Bengio warned against giving AI rights, saying it was showing signs of self-preservation – a key area of concern for AI safety campaigners – and humans should not be prevented from pulling the plug on such systems.
