Today, the AI Extinction Statement was released by the Center for AI Safety, a one-sentence statement jointly signed by a historic coalition of AI experts, professors, and tech leaders.
Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio have signed, as have the CEOs of the major AGI labs–Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, and Dario Amodei–as well as executives from Microsoft and Google (but notably not Meta).
The statement reads: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
We hope this statement will bring AI x-risk further into the overton window and open up discussion around AI’s most severe risks. Given the growing number of experts and public figures who take risks from advanced AI seriously, we hope to improve epistemics by encouraging discussion and focusing public and international attention toward this issue.
Gates has been publicly concerned about AI X-risk since at least 2015, and he hasn't yet funded anything to try to address it (at least that I'm aware of), so I think it's unlikely that he's going to start now (though who knows – this whole thing could add a sense of respectability to the endeavor that pushes him to do it).