• Swindon & Wiltshire Tech
• Tuesday August 20 2024
• Author Name: Peter Davison

AI poses no existential threat to humanity, Bath Uni study finds

The plot of sci-fi classics The Terminator and The Matrix are unlikely to play out in real life any time soon, according to researchers at the University of Bath. At least not yet.

Researchers found that large language models like ChatGPT cannot learn independently or acquire new skills, meaning they pose no existential threat to humanity.

And while the models are likely to generate more sophisticated language and become better at following explicit and detailed prompts, but they are highly unlikely to gain complex reasoning skills.

But the research comes with caveats. Malign actors can still use AI – in its current form – to generate threats like fake news.

“The prevailing narrative that this type of AI is a threat to humanity prevents the widespread adoption and development of these technologies and also diverts attention from the genuine issues that require our focus,” said Dr Harish Tayyar Madabushi, computer scientist at the University of Bath and co-author of the new study on the ‘emergent abilities’ of LLMs.

Through thousands of experiments, the team demonstrated that a combination of LLMs ability to follow instructions (ICL), memory and linguistic proficiency can account for both the capabilities and limitations exhibited by LLMs.

Dr Tayyar Madabushi said: “The fear has been that as models get bigger and bigger, they will be able to solve new problems that we cannot currently predict, which poses the threat that these larger models might acquire hazardous abilities including reasoning and planning.

“This has triggered a lot of discussion – for instance, at the AI Safety Summit last year at Bletchley Park, for which we were asked for comment.

“But our study shows that the fear that a model will go away and do something completely unexpected, innovative and potentially dangerous is not valid.”

The research was conducted in collaboration with the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany, whose Professor Iryna Gurevych issued a note of warning.

“Our results do not mean that AI is not a threat at all,” he said.

“Future research should focus on other risks posed by the models, such as their potential to be used to generate fake news.”

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