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Tech giants, stop trying to build godlike AI
Tilting at the ill-defined holy grail of artificial general intelligence opens the door to unintended consequences.
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Technologists in 2025 have far more societal power than they did at the turn of the millennium.
PHOTO: AFP
Parmy Olson
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We have ChatGPT because Mr Sam Altman wanted to build a god. For all the buzz, the chatbot is only a prototype along the way to a loftier goal of AGI
When Mr Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015, he made it the non-profit’s goal. Five years earlier, Mr Demis Hassabis co-founded DeepMind Technologies, now Google’s core AI division, with the same AGI objective. Their reasons were utopian: AGI would create financial abundance and be “broadly beneficial” to humanity, according to Mr Altman. It would cure cancer and solve climate change, according to Mr Hassabis.
