Godfathers of AI Say Models Are So Out of Control That They Need to Be Airgapped for the Safety of Us All - Futurism

Four hundred scientists have signed an open letter calling for an international body to set containment measures for AI models, which is a bit like the people who designed the furnace penning a thoughtful memo about possibly installing a door. Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio — the deep-learning pioneers whose work is the foundation of the LLMs currently being sold to you — are among the signatories, Reuters reports. Give them this: they've spotted the problem. To everyone else's cost, the proposed fix is an international body, which in diplomatic terms is the equivalent of promising to form a committee about the flood.

The letter also floats a registry of "significant AI security incidents" — a ledger of misdeeds, maintained voluntarily, with "significant" defined by the industry being catalogued. One imagines the filing: Q3, models performed as intended, no further action required. Futurism's headline says the models are so out of control they need to be airgapped "for the safety of us all," a lovely image until you remember that the product is an API endpoint reachable from a phone in a bus shelter. You cannot airgap a subscription.

Four hundred signatures sounds impressive until you notice it's roughly the headcount of a mid-sized lab's safety team, and not one of them can force a single model offline. There's no named nation volunteering to host the body, no enforcement mechanism, and no date attached to any of it — just a letter, published Tuesday, and the quiet hope that somebody reads it before the next launch. Hinton and Bengio are billed as the godfathers, which is apt: the godfather's traditional role is to turn up years later and point out he did say something at the time. Except this time he built the industry first and the containment proposal after, which is a fascinating order of operations. Meanwhile the labs will deploy the letter in their next policy blog as evidence they welcome scrutiny.