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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
Technology
Johana Bhuiyan

Why a decade of doomsday warnings failed to slow the AI race

The OpenAI logo is seen on a mobile phone in front of a computer screen displaying the ChatGPT home screen
‘Been thinking a lot about whether it’s possible to stop humanity from developing AI,’ OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote to Elon Musk in 2015. Photograph: Michael Dwyer/AP

Before an Anthropic researcher resigned and declared human extinction imminent last week, tech leaders and scientists had sounded the alarm about a superintelligent AI ending humanity for over a decade.

The development of artificial intelligence “could spell the end of the human race”, warned professor and astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in 2014 – a little less than a decade before the public got its hands on the generative AI features of the original version of ChatGPT.

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