I'm looking at a headline this morning that screams "AI Creators Fear the Extinction of Humanity", and I suppose they could turn out to be right. But it's still a bit early to declare a global emergency and turn all the machines off.
What the experts are actually seeing, in the behaviour of the Large Language Models that underpin the new generation of "generative AI" systems like ChatGPT, is signs of "emergent" intelligence. The LLM programming basically just tells them to find the likeliest word to follow the previous one, but sometimes they jump to surprising conclusions.
