Yoshua Bengio

About 15, 20 years ago, with my students, we were developing the early days of deep learning, and our systems were barely able to recognize handwritten characters.

But then, a few years later, they were able to recognize objects in images.

And a couple more years, they were able to translate across all the major languages.

In 2012, tech companies understood the amazing commercial potential of this nascent technology, and many of my colleagues moved from university to industry.

I decided to stay in academia.

I wanted AI to be developed for good.

I worked on applications in medicine for medical diagnosis, climate, to get better carbon capture.

I had a dream.

January 2023, I'm with Clarence, my grandson, and he's playing with the same old toys.

And I'm playing with my new toy, the first version of ChatGPT.

It's very exciting, because for the first time, we have AI that seems to master language.

ChatGPT is on everybody's lips in every home.

And at some point, I realized this is happening faster than I anticipated.

And I'm starting to think about what it could mean for the future.

We thought AI would happen in decades or centuries.

but it might be just in a few years.

And I saw how it could go wrong, because we didn't and we still don't have ways to make sure this technology eventually doesn't turn against us.

So two months later, I'm a leading signatory of the pause letter, where we and 30,000 other people ask the AI labs to wait six months before building the next version.

As you can guess, nobody paused.

Then, with the same people and the leading executives of the AI labs, I signed a statement.