Former Google CEO warns that humans should be prepared to turn off the power of AI at certain times.
On December 15th local time, Eric Schmidt, former CEO and executive chairman of Google, stated in an interview with foreign media that although the emergence of AI is a human achievement worth celebrating, when AI systems can achieve "self-improvement", humans "should seriously consider cutting off their power".
Schmidt said that the rapid development of AI systems may bring about "issues related to human survival": "Look at social media, it has brought such drastic changes to our country and the world. Imagine a smarter and more powerful technology that can be used for transmitting information, research and innovation, drug development, and various negative uses, including as weapons or for cyber attacks. All of this is happening very quickly
Schmidt pointed out that in his more than 50 years in the industry, he has never seen any technology demonstrate innovation growth as fast as AI. Perhaps in the next 1 to 2 years, there will be AI systems that can independently conduct research, known as "AI scientists". After reaching a certain stage of development, AI is like equipping everyone with a professional master who is on call, "but we don't know what this power will bring to everyone.
Schmidt has been publicly calling for people to pay attention to the potential dangers of AI. In this interview, Schmidt once again emphasized the importance of government regulation of AI, stating that in the current fierce AI competition, it is not ruled out that "a company may choose to skip all safety steps for speed and release AI models that cause real harm".
Schmidt also mentioned that governments and technicians should anticipate the worst-case scenario in advance and prepare backup systems that can supervise AI systems. This way, in the event that humans cannot control AI, AI can regulate each other.
According to the data, Schmidt served as CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011 and served on the board of directors until 2019. Currently, Schmidt ranks 46th on Bloomberg's billionaire list with a net worth of $36.5 billion, and he remains a shareholder of Google's parent company Alphabet, holding approximately 147 million shares of Alphabet stock.
It is worth noting that recently, current Google CEO Sundar Pichai expressed a very different view from Schmidt, believing that AI has already received sufficient regulation.
At the DealBook Summit held in New York in early December, Pichai expressed optimism about the potential impact of AI and believed that existing regulations already cover many AI applications: "For example, you cannot introduce a disease treatment method without all regulatory approvals. Just because AI is used in this process does not mean everything will change. So we must carefully consider whether any additional regulation is really needed
Just a week ago, facing a 12 day update plan from competitor OpenAI, Google announced the official launch of the new generation of big model Gemini 2.0, which is twice as fast as Gemini 1.5 Pro, with multimodal input and output and more intelligent agent functions, including programming assistants, data science agents, gaming partners, and more.