By Emilio Crespo
Artificial Intelligence is scary. And not just those fearful of the technological apocalypse or the arrival of the Terminator. The disturbing thing is that AI scares its own creators.
Several of them, including the CEOs of three of the largest companies in the sector (OpenAi, Anthropic and DeepMind) have just warned, accompanied by a long list of leading scientists, that AI can create biological weapons. Their alarm sounded while the University of Cambridge announced the development, thanks to AI, of a much improved vaccine against coronaviruses. It seems that there is not much distance between the one and the other.
Since ChatGPT came to light at the end of 2022 and the artificial intelligence race was unleashed, manifestos from experts and personalities, individually or collectively, about the danger of the invention getting out of hand have been frequent. Paradoxically, the first came from the mouth of the CEO of that pioneering company, Sam Altman.
It is also very disturbing that Anthropic acknowledged last week that AI already programs autonomously and will soon be able to program itself. That is, escape from human control.
Fear of AI is no joke for the White House. Donald Trump has signed an executive order to oversee the advancement of these technologies. The US already considers them a matter of national security, whose regulation a group of Congressional legislators is also working on.
Amid these fears and warnings, OpenAi and Anthropic are preparing to go public. The billions of private capital that they have already raised are not enough for them and, probably, the realization that their creatures are not toys will unleash more appetite than fear to invest in them.