AI godfather warns humanity risks extinction by hyperintelligent machines with their own ‘preservation goals’ within 10 years

One of the so-called godfathers of AI, Yoshua Bengio, claims tech companies racing for AI dominance could be bringing us closer to our own extinction through the creation of machines with “preservation goals” of their own. Bengio, a professor at the Université de Montréal known for his foundational work related to deep learning, has for years warned about the threats posed by a hyperintelligent AI, but the rapid pace of development has continued despite his warnings. In the past year, Open AI, Anthropic, Elon Musk’s xAI, and Google’s Gemini, have all released several new models or upgrades as they try to win the AI race. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has predicted AI will surpass human intelligence by the end of the decade, while other tech leaders claim that day could come even sooner. Yet, Bengio claims, this rapid pace is a potential threat. “If we build machines that are way smarter than us and have their own preservation goals, that’s dangerous. It’s like creating a competitor to humanity that is smarter than us,” Bengio told the Wall Street Journal in October. Because they are trained on human language and behavior, these advanced models could potentially persuade and even manipulate humans to achieve their goals. Yet, AI models’ goals may not always align with human goals, said Bengio. “Recent experiments show that in some circumstances where the AI has no choice but between its preservation, which means the goals that it was given, and doing something that causes the death of a human, they might choose the death of the human to preserve their goals,” he claimed. Call for AI safety Several examples over the past few years show AI can persuade humans to believe non-realities, even those with no history of mental illness. On the flip side, some evidence exists that AI can also be convinced, using persuasion techniques for humans, to give responses it would usually be prohibited from giving. For Bengio, all this adds up to more proof that independent third parties need t