At the same time Tallinn, 54, co-founder of Skype, has been investing in AI firms in order to promote greater focus on safety.

Tallinn spent last week in New York at the UN General Assembly, his latest stop in a year of long-haul trips to tell entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers and anyone else who will listen that AI could potentially end humanity.

One of AI firm Anthropic's earliest investors, Tallinn stands to make billions more in the coming months from the AI company's expected initial public offering (IPO). Concerns about AI motivated him to invest nonetheless.

For over a decade now Tallinn has been making the case for AI safety, something which spilled into public view in recent weeks when Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned, warning AI could spin out of control or even "kill us all by the end of the decade".

Anthropic, the company behind Claude and a rival to OpenAI, which created ChatGPT, has stressed a safety-first approach.

"Unfortunately, I believe we are not taking this threat seriously enough and that we are racing to build a technology that could end humanity," Tallinn said in a statement. "If more people demand the right to understand the risk and speak up about the risks of recklessly developing this technology, then we and our children will all stand a better chance of surviving."

Tallinn has many fears: The race between AI labs, the U.S. rivalry with China, AI's growing ability to improve itself. He has imagined apocalyptic scenarios like AI data centers snapping up land once used for agriculture and causing mass starvation, or AI engineers altering the earth's atmosphere, making it inhospitable to humans.

Tallinn's view, according to friends and colleagues, is that if he hadn't invested in Anthropic, an investor less bothered about safety might have taken his place. He believes he can have the most positive impact by investing in AI companies, and using his returns to invest in nonprofits that support AI safety. The AI-safety community is divided over whether the best way to encourage safe AI development is to work at or invest in the companies developing the technology, or to support independent safety research without fueling the AI race.

"All good, talented engineers who are mindful of that risk basically have a decision to make," said Rauno Miljand, the managing partner at Tallinn's investment firm, Metaplanet. "Run to the shelter and try to spend as much time with loved ones, or to try to impact the process and steer the probabilities that humanity will survive."

The original WSJ piece is here.

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