178 - Guest: Jaan Tallinn, AI Existential Risk Philanthropist, part 1

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .

 

The attention of the world to the potential impact of AI owes a huge debt to my guest Jaan Tallinn. He was one of the founding developers of Skype and the file sharing application Kazaa, and that alone makes him noteworthy to most of the world. But he leveraged his billionaire status conferred by that success to pursue a goal uncommon among technology entrepreneurs: reducing existential risk. In other words, saving the human race from possible extinction through our own foolhardiness or fate. He has co-founded and funded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, in Cambridge, England, and the Future of Life Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He's also a member of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and a key funder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

In this first part, we talk about the problems with current #AI frontier models, Jaan's reaction to GPT-4, the letter causing for a pause in AI training, Jaan's motivations in starting CSER and FLI, how individuals and governments should react to AI risk, and Jaan's idea for how to enforce constraints on AI development.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.