ML Pioneer Calls Superintelligence Fear a Performance

Michael I. Jordan is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2016, Science magazine named him the most influential computer scientist in the world. He now also works at Inria, France's national digital research institute, in Paris. In an October 13 interview with the French newspaper Libération, he called talk of an AI apocalypse "completely infuriating." He said "superintelligence" is a term from science fiction, not from science. He called the firings of AI safety researchers "a big moralizing show." And he called AI companies' calls for government regulation "theater."

According to Jordan, researchers who quit are often young and know little about engineering. He said many of them already hold stock options by the time they leave. He singled out Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneer of deep learning known for his warnings about AI risk. Jordan said Hinton has never built a company that offered a real service to real people. In his view, AI labs ask for regulation so they can look like "the good guys." At the same time, he added, these labs want full control over how the rules get written.