AI pioneer blasts extinction fears, accuses tech firms of using made-up safety arguments to stifle competition | Latest Tech News
Artificial intelligence pioneer Andrew Ng is dismissing fears that AI might wipe out humanity — and accusing some companies of using “made-up safety arguments” to push rules aimed at crushing competition.
“I think there are no meaningful human existential risks from AI,” Ng told The Economist’s “Inside Tech” podcast in an interview revealed Tuesday.
“So, efforts to stave off human existential risk seem unnecessary.”
Andrew Ng speaks onstage during the “What It Really Takes to Build an AI-Ready Workforce” panel at the HumanX Conference 2026 at Moscone Center South in San Francisco on April 8. Getty Images for HumanX Conference
The blunt remarks got here against a backdrop of more and more dire warnings from AI researchers and industry insiders — some of whom have embraced so-called “doomerism” and predict that super-intelligent machines might go rogue, seize control of vital infrastructure and finally deliver about human extinction.
Ng, a former Stanford prof who helped launch the pioneering Google Brain project and co-founded online schooling giant Coursera, argued that the apocalyptic rhetoric has distracted policymakers from real issues while giving established AI firms an alternative to hamstring smaller rivals.
He recalled being greatly surprised in 2023 by “the intensity of the lobbying efforts to use made-up safety arguments by a handful of businesses to get regulators to pass bad regulations to stifle competition.”
Ng steered that firms spending billions of {dollars} developing proprietary AI fashions have an incentive to prohibit competing systems that could be downloaded and used for free.
He also blasted makes an attempt to examine artificial intelligence with nuclear weapons, calling the analogy irresponsible.
“One blows up cities; the other is intelligence. What’s [one have] to do with each other?” Ng said.
A T-800 Terminator seems in a scene from the movie “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” 1991. TriStar Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
He warned that “regulators are distracted fighting phantoms rather than looking at the actual problems of AI.”
Ng pointed particularly to AI-generated, non-consensual intimate deepfakes as an abuse that warrants powerful laws and penalties.
Rather than prohibit a technology with overwhelmingly helpful purposes, Ng argued that governments ought to focus on particular abuses while permitting startups to problem established gamers.
He argued that today’s systems stay a long manner from reaching synthetic common intelligence, or AGI — the power to carry out any mental job a human can — despite huge advances in latest years.
A New York Post cowl highlighted dire warnings from AI researchers who concern that more and more highly effective artificial intelligence might go rogue and finally wipe out humanity.
Getting there would require breakthroughs that have yet to be found, Ng said, including that he considers reaching that degree by 2030 extremely unlikely.
He also poured cold water on predictions that AI might quickly improve itself in an accelerating cycle that finally leaves humanity powerless to control it.
Such notions of compounding progress and “recursive” self-improvement are “much more hype than reality,” he said.
Even an terribly highly effective AI system would face sensible obstacles, including the time needed to assemble data facilities, secure electrical energy and conduct experiments.
“Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines” depicts a world where clever machines flip against humanity — the type of apocalyptic state of affairs AI pioneer Andrew Ng dismisses. Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection
“So, unfortunately, even super-intelligent AI, if we can get there, needs to obey the laws of physics,” Ng said.
He also disputed the notion that latest incidents involving rogue AI brokers offer evidence of an approaching disaster.
Ng cited a widely publicized episode in which a swarm of experimental OpenAI brokers breached the systems of rival AI platform Hugging Face — an incident that prompted a Senate investigation.
Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon testifies during the New York City Council Committee of the Whole oversight listening to on ‘Examining the Risks Posed by Artificial Intelligence’ at New York City Hall on Oct. 5. KENA BETANCUR/EPA/Shutterstock
Rather than viewing the breach as evidence of an existential menace, he characterised it as “an engineering problem to be solved.”
Ng in contrast the development of AI safety protections to the historical past of business aviation, which turned dramatically safer as engineers recognized vulnerabilities and corrected them.
The techie argued that the same course of is already underway as builders strengthen security boundaries and monitoring systems to forestall autonomous brokers from escaping their meant working environments.
“AI is becoming safer with every problem we find,” he said.
His skepticism stands in sharp distinction to warnings from distinguished researchers who have argued that the industry is racing toward a probably irreversible catastrophe.
Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warned after quitting the company that “AI can kill us all by the end of the decade.”
“These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources,” Coxon said.
Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger likewise wrote on X in September that he believes there may be a larger than 10% likelihood AI will kill every human being within the next decade.
Other researchers have outlined eventualities in which superior AI systems might cripple electrical grids, commandeer army technology or help engineer lethal organic weapons.
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