Google DeepMind chief AI officer warns the odds of AI wiping out the human race are ‘not zero’—but she disagrees with Elon Musk’s predictions

(Credit: Lionel Ng—Bloomberg/Getty Images)

While Elon Musk has consistently painted a utopian picture of AI’s future, many other tech leaders and governments have been sounding the alarm about the technology’s dangers. Google DeepMind’s chief AI readiness officer, Lila Ibrahim, even signed a 2023 statement declaring that mitigating the risk of human extinction from AI should be treated as seriously as nuclear war—and now she’s revealing just how likely she thinks that doomsday scenario actually is.

“It’s not zero,” Ibrahim told Fortune. “Anything beyond that is just me guessing … That’s the engineer in me.”