Tech CEO: AI Won't Wipe Out Humanity

It's somewhat reassuring to see prominent tech figures pushing back against the notion that AI will wipe out the human race.

"There is NO realistic scenario where AI wipes out all of humanity," Recursive CEO and well-respected tech entrepreneurRichard Socher said in an X post on Wednesday.

Socher is also the co-founder of AI-powered search engine You.com, which has raised capital from prominent names including Nvidia (NVDA), Salesforce (CRM) Ventures, and DuckDuckGo. You.com currently has an estimated valuation of more than $1.5 billion.Socher added, "I've talked to many AI safety experts about existential risks. Some of the 'experts' are just phenomenal sci-fi authors. There are also real researchers working on realistic risks. They point out real and likely harms, and I'm explicitly not arguing that there could be no such harm. We need to take these seriously. However, whenever I ask for an actual detailed scenario that would kill every single human, i.e. extinction, it usually starts and ends with ‘just look at current progress and use your imagination’. No science, no scenario planning, just handwaving probabilities without data, based on gut feelings, often little expertise, sometimes real expertise combined with a huge amount of technological optimism turned into fear and then trying to quantify it post hoc."

Within the course of three days, Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) CEO Sam Altman have managed to scare the hell out of the human race with the powerful technology they created and pushed their teams of pioneering supercoders to supercharge.

"Over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence — not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up," Amodei stated in a 3,800-word essay on Saturday. "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of A.I. models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain."

Amodei doubled down on his comments at Salesforce's annual Dreamforce event on Tuesday afternoon.

Altman said right after Amodei's weekend post that he agreed with his rival.

He then followed that up on Monday with a dark X post of his own.

"There are two ways AI progress could go very badly, and that we must avoid. First, we could lose control of the future to AI. This is unacceptable; we are unapologetically on Team Humanity, and AI must always serve people. To ensure that, we need ways to ensure that alignment and safety techniques stay ahead of progress in model capabilities," Altman wrote.

"Second, we could end up in a world with too much concentration of power," he continued. "If an extraordinarily powerful AI is used by one person or company to impress their worldview onto everyone else, the results could be extremely dystopian. Avoiding these two threats requires walking a narrow middle path; for example, one country could gain too much power. Another example is one lab ending up with too much power."

Altman has not commented further on X or elsewhere since as the public debate on AI hits a fever pitch.

Okta (OKTA) co-founder and CEO Todd McKinnon said dire predictions on AI make sense but are on the extreme side of the equation.

"If there's going to be a betting market on how the human race would be extinct, I'm not sure AI would be in the top 50, but it does get headlines, and people are very excited about it," he said on Yahoo Finance's Opening Bid (video above). "But the reality is that, like every new technology, there's a lot of peril and there's a lot of great things that could go right about it. And we have to make sure we balance them out together and make progress going forward."

Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance's Executive Editor, host of the 'Power Players With Brian Sozzi' podcast and a member of Yahoo Finance's editorial leadership team. Follow Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Tips on stories? Email brian.sozzi@yahoofinance.com.