The Godfather of AI wants an FDA-style approval system for the technology - Business Insider Africa

Geoffrey Hinton — Nobel Prize, 'godfather of AI', a CV doing an enormous amount of heavy lifting in this headline — went on a podcast called Smart Girl Dumb Questions and proposed that AI companies be required to convince a regulator their products are safe before releasing them, the way the FDA handles drugs. 'That seems like the very least we should have for AI,' he said. The very least, indeed: a pre-market safety gate for a technology currently shipped on a Tuesday afternoon with a blog post, a pricing tier and a waitlist. Note the verb, though. The companies do the convincing — rather like letting the fox draft, chair and minute the henhouse review.

An approval regime is only as strong as the appetite to refuse somebody, and that appetite is currently nil — as former regulators and analysts told us recently, laws that already govern AI are simply being ignored, which hints the missing ingredient was never a rulebook. An FDA for AI would need staff, a statute and the willingness to say no to the largest company in the room. Hinton has proposed the building. He has not proposed the bouncer. And the comparison flatters everyone involved: drug approvals involve years of trials whose failures are loud enough to reach a courtroom, whereas an AI release involves a blog post and a benchmark chart.

Then, in the same conversation, the line that ought to have stopped the tape: 'We're beginning to get recursive self-improvement because AI is being used to make AI better in many different ways.' That is the godfather of AI, on the record, saying the thing he has spent years warning about has started — delivered as a subordinate clause between the weather and the FDA. If that sentence is true, a pre-approval queue staffed by people who cannot inspect a training run is not the very least we should have. It's a fire extinguisher bolted to a volcano.