Yoshua Bengio

There have been civil society organizations that have called for more resources.

Yoshua Bengio, who was one of the experts behind the code of practice drafting, I think he has called publicly for more resources for the AI office.

Very clear.

I completely agree.

And so there's now starting to be very strong momentum behind sovereign technology, um, and we're trying to contribute, right? Like I, I think the past 25 years have been...

I, I grew up, you know, in Canada, and Canada has played a huge part to the development of technology, some of the best computer scientists in the world, you know, uh, Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, they won the Nobel Prize.

They basically like invented AI as we understand it today.

Um, uh, and, and many of the, the technologies before, you know, BlackBerry and mobile, uh, innovation, that type of thing, and none of it succeeded, right? And I think the same is true of other countries as well.

And so Newport like doesn't really engage with the arguments in that piece, which people in the comment section called out.

And there are people like Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton who invented deep learning, and they are the most cited scientists in the world.

They have the Turing Award, and Hinton has a Nobel Prize.

And they also say that AI is an existential risk.

We as other people in the media, we as people with actual expertise need to call that out.

I, I interviewed Cory Doctorow last weekend, and he was talking about Cal Newport, and I have actually been watching more of his videos this week.

And so actually, as, as you're someone who's clearly followed him, um, I, I, I wanna put a couple of questions to you on this because I, I, I, I think we should be listening to Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton.

I'm very much on team this is a very big deal.

So we convene the AI Bio Global Forum, which brings together international biosecurity experts, policymakers, and the model developers themselves to identify risks, build safeguards, and really shape those governance approaches that we've been talking about.

And in July of last year, the forum drafted a statement that was eventually signed by more than 35 international experts, including people like Yoshua Bengio, who is widely considered one of the godfathers of AI, and former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark.

And it laid out three specific ways that AI bio capabilities raise risk.

First, they lower the barrier for a malicious actor to cause harm with biology.

And really, these digital public goods are like the key here.

And it's funny because I was just in Montreal and I debated with Yoshua Bengio, who's one of the creators of Modern AI, along with Jeffrey Hinton, another Canadian.

and he's kind of he's got the ai doomer thing he thinks that he's made god by accident and he's like we need to make sure that god is good and so we have to build a god that's a digital uh international digital public good we should have a consortium building ai and i'm like i don't think you've made god i think the idea that like teaching too many words to the word guessing machine will cause it to wake up and turn us into paper clips is like thinking that if we keep breeding these horses to run faster we're in danger of our mares giving birth to locomotives right i just don't think i don't think that like people are word guessing programs that know more words and can guess faster but it let's have a little pascal's wager say you're right Okay, well, we know what the most urgent thing is because we're not going to get to build digital public goods if Microsoft shuts down Office 365 for all the ministries in the world, right? So let's do that first.

And then if you're right and we still need to build some AI after that, well, first of all, the AI bubble will have burst so we can buy our servers at 10 cents on the dollar and hire as many applied statisticians as we want.

So we have the great British Canadian computer scientist, Geoffrey Hinton.

We have Yoshua Bengio.

They won the Nobel Prize for their work.

They basically invented deep learning, which is the thing that has given us the entire AI revolution that we're seeing now.

And I walked past the kitchen and I hear French, Quebecois French, Canadian French.

And I look over.

And it's Sammy Bengio, Yoshua Bengio's brother.

And I realized I was in the heart of Silicon Valley in what was at that time the most advanced AI lab on the face of the planet.