Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) co-founder and one of the biggest names in the cryptocurrency space, Vitalik Buterin, sounded a cautionary note on the ills of "Superintelligent AI" and urged people to push back against those rooting for it.
What Happened: The man behind the world's most-invested blockchain network called superintelligent AI systems "risky" in an X post.
He went one step further and remarked, "No $7T server farms plz," an obvious dig at OpenAI chief Sam Altman's ambitious $7 trillion investment plan to achieve the company's artificial general intelligence goals.
My current views:
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) May 21, 2024
1. Superintelligent AI is very risky and we should not rush into it, and we should push against people who try. No $7T server farms plz.
2. A strong ecosystem of open models running on consumer hardware are an important hedge to protect against a future where...
A strong advocate of decentralization in technologies, Buterin's criticism was also directed at the concentration of power in the AI industry. He batted for an ecosystem of open models running on consumer hardware rather than a few central servers controlled by a small cohort of conglomerates.
"Such models are also much lower in terms of doom risk than both corporate megalomania and militaries," Buterin asserted.
Why It Matters: Buterin's remarks come amid Altman's aggressive push to secure a massive $7 trillion in funding in his quest to build artificial general intelligence–a disruptive AI technology broadly more capable than humans at a range of tasks.
However, the capacity needed to build a model of such scale has been deemed out of reach in the current scenario.
That said, Altman has expressed a firm commitment to building the technology, regardless of the financial implications.
Buterin's latest views come following his comment last week where he mentioned OpenAI's GPT-4 passing the Turing test – a benchmark for evaluating an AI system's humanness.
Photo by Alexey Smyshlyaev on Shutterstock.