The statement, published by the San Francisco-based non-profit Center for AI Safety (CAIS), claims that mitigating that possibility should be “a global priority” on par with pandemics and nuclear war. It has more than 350 signatories. (The Logic)

Talking point: Canada-based machine-learning pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio have been among the most prominent—and well covered—figures calling for the development and deployment of AI to be better managed or regulated. (Hinton has been criticized for downplaying AI’s discriminatory impact on women and people of colour). The one-line CAIS statement includes the CEOs of Anthropic, OpenAI and Google DeepMind, which are advancing the large language models and generative systems that have drawn attention and sparked the fashion for letter-writing. Not all their peers see the existential risk as imminent. Focus on the real-world harms AI can create could be “washed out by concerns informed by science fiction, and extreme leaps and extrapolation of existing trends,” Aidan Gomez, CEO of Toronto’s Cohere, told The Logic last month.