Google has apparently gone all-in on an artificial intelligence start-up company whose owners have admitted that their technology could wipe out humanity.
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has injected $2 billion into AI start-up Anthropic. Anthropic is generally considered a rival to Open AI, which is the company behind ChatGPT that has become well-known over the past year.
The Daily Mail reported that Anthropic’s CEO and co-founder, Dario Amodei, claimed earlier this week that AI has anywhere between a 10 and 25 percent chance of destroying humanity.
However, Amodei qualified his statement on the Logan Bartlett Show, saying, “If we can avoid the downsides then this stuff about curing cancer, extending human lifespan, solving problems like mental illness… I don’t think it’s outside the scope of what this can do.”
There has already been $500 million that Google has invested in Anthropic, with the remaining investment being provided over a period of time. This comes after Amazon invested $4 billion into Anthropic, per the Wall Street Journal.
Large tech companies are currently in a race to take control of the AI space, which some have suggested could be the latest stage in the technological revolution. While Google and Microsoft have previously supported OpenAI, Anthropic has quickly shown itself to be one of the biggest tickets in town for big tech companies.
Amodei was previously OpenAI’s vice president of research before going his own way to build something that could rival ChatGPT. Since he departed three years ago, Anthropic has become a company worth $5 billion.
Anthropic’s CEO was not shy in suggesting that there are serious potential consequences of creating such sophisticated AI, claiming that “[m]y chance that something goes really quite catastrophically wrong on the scale of human civilization might be somewhere between 10 percent and 25 percent.”
“That means there is a 75 percent to 90 percent chance that this technology is developed and everything goes fine.”
However, Anthropic has already been hit with a lawsuit by Universal Music Group and other major record labels on October 18 for apparently distributing copyrighted lyrics without a licensing deal, per the report.
The Daily Mail reported that Jason Peterson — the CEO of GoDigital Media Group — suggested that this is likely a clear-cut case of infringement, which he believes the courts will straighten out.
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