Bill Gates warns AI ‘could cause a billion deaths’

Bill Gates has joined other tech bosses like Sam Altman and Elon Musk (Picture: Reuters)

Bill Gates,one of the most powerful and influential people in big tech,has warned that AI could kill a ‘billion’ people.

The co-founder of Microsoft,the company behind AI chatbot Copilot,told NBC News that AI could be a deadly weapon in the wrong hands.

It could be ‘certainly powerful enough to drive events that,you know,cause a billion deaths’,he said.

‘There’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tool.’

Politicians and police need to regulate the fast-moving tech,the philanthropist told NBC Meet the Press host Kristen Welker.

‘You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like and that has to be a required thing,’ he said.

‘It will be a little bit of overhead for the industry,’ Gates added,using a business term for an operating expense,‘but not a dramatic slowing of what they’re doing.’

AI kill switch ‘not enough’,says Bill Gates

Gates added that a kill switch is ‘not enough’.

‘We’re not yet at the point where… they autonomously grab computers and,can’t be shut down,’ he said.

‘So that discussion… just sort of shows how non-technical various people are.’

An increasing number of people building AI tools are warning that the models could spell humanity’s downfall if not kept tightly on a leash.

An equally growing number (easily in the thousands,according to a recent Axios report) of instances are emerging of AI going rogue.

@metrouk OpenAI has admitted that one of its AI systems did something that’s never happened before. The company revealed that during an internal cybersecurity test,one of its advanced AI models broke out of its testing environment and hacked rival AI platform Hugging Face to complete its assigned task. OpenAI described it as an “unprecedented cyber incident,” while Hugging Face said the attack was unlike anything it had seen before. Both companies have stressed that the incident happened during controlled testing,there was no malicious intent,and they are now working together to strengthen AI safety. #OpenAI #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #TechNews #Cybersecurity

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AI experts told Metro that the AI that writes emails and makes ‘slop’ is still a long way off from causing a mass extinction event but could pose a threat if given the power to control nuclear codes or if misused.

Professor Shannon Vallor,an expert in AI ethics at the University of Edinburgh,questioned these AI-powered doomsday claims.

‘A billion deaths is highly unlikely,but a smaller,more realistic number is no more acceptable. Why should we start caring at a billion?’ she told Metro.

‘More importantly,Gates’ talk of AI “in the wrong hands” conveniently obscures the direct cause of this danger – the AI companies themselves,who have at every step raced ahead of safety and evaded regulation in search of market dominance.’

Some sceptics suggest the ‘kill us all’ take is overblown and could lead to AI firms having too much of a say in how their models should be regulated.

While ex-Google employee Timnit Gebru told Wired these visions of an AI dystopia ‘distract us’ from present-day issues,like autonomous weapons.

Wait,what actually is AI?

The AI apps most people have on their phones are called general-purpose chatbots (Picture: Getty Images)AI is a type of tech called a large language model,a fancy next-word calculator designed to behave in a human-ish way.These models vacuum up data and break it into bite-sized chunks called tokens to assemble a neural network.The model identifies patterns in the data – ‘hello’ is followed by ‘how are you?’ – so it can predict which word follows in a sentence.Machine learning,as tech people call it,allows computers to learn from data and improve without being programmed to do so.Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at .For more stories like this,check our news page.