AI Executives Call for Regulation and 'Kill Switch' Amid Fears of Existential Threat
Microsoft's CEO and President Brad Smith has called for a 'kill switch' to be implemented in AI systems, allowing them to be shut down quickly if needed. Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly, Smith said that companies behind AI models should have the ability to turn them off, as well as cloud infrastructure providers like Microsoft.
Smith's comments came on the same day that Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang appeared on The Ezra Klein Show, where he argued that companies will be able to eliminate any potential threat from their AI models through engineering. However, if they fail to do so, he suggested that 'we have to shut the labs down' because the cost to humanity would be too great.
Smith and Huang's comments are part of a growing call for regulation in the AI industry. OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently spoke before the United Nations, asking world leaders to establish safeguards for AI before it becomes so advanced that humans can no longer control it.