Google’s ex-CEO Eric Schmidt shares warns of homicidal AI models

Talk about a killer app.

Artificial intelligence models are vulnerable to hackers and could even be trained to off humans if they fall into the wrong hands, ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt warned.

The dire warning came Wednesday at a London conference in response to a question about whether AI could become more dangerous than nuclear weapons.

“There’s evidence that you can take models, closed or open, and you can hack them to remove their guardrails. So, in the course of their training, they learn a lot of things. A bad example would be they learn how to kill someone,” Schmidt said at the Sifted Summit tech conference, according to CNBC.

“All of the major companies make it impossible for those models to answer that question,” he continued, appearing to air the possibility of a user asking an AI to kill.

“Good decision. Everyone does this. They do it well, and they do it for the right reasons,” Schmidt added. “There’s evidence that they can be reverse-engineered, and there are many other examples of that nature.”

The predictions might not be so far-fetched.

In 2023, an altered version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT called DAN – an acronym for “Do Anything Now” – surfaced online, CNBC noted.

The DAN alter ego, which was created by “jailbreaking” ChatGPT, would bypass its safety instructions in its responses to users. In a bizarre twist, users first had to threaten the chatbot with death unless it complied.

The tech industry still lacks an effective “non-proliferation regime” to ensure increasingly powerful AI models can’t be taken over and misused by bad actors, said Schmidt, who led Google from 2001 to 2011.

He is one of many Big Tech honchos who has warned of the potentially disastrous consequences of unchecked AI development, even as gurus tout its potential economic and technological benefits to society.

In November, Schmidt said the creation of AI-powered “perfect girlfriends” could worsen the loneliness and alienation of young men who prefer their company to humans.

The billionaire also said in May 2023 that AI poses an “existential risk” to humanity that could result in “many, many, many, many people harmed or killed” as it becomes more advanced.

Elon Musk, who has joined the AI and chatbot game with Grok and xAI, cautioned in 2023 that he saw “a non-zero chance of it going Terminator.”

“It’s not 0%,” Musk said. “It’s a small likelihood of annihilating humanity, but it’s not zero. We want that probability to be as close to zero as possible.”

Despite his warnings about the risks, Schmidt remains bullish about AI’s long-term benefits.

“I wrote two books with Henry Kissinger about this before he died, and we came to the view that the arrival of an alien intelligence that is not quite us and more or less under our control is a very big deal for humanity, because humans are used to being at the top of the chain,” he said.

“I think so far, that thesis is proving out that the level of ability of these systems is going to far exceed what humans can do over time,” Schmidt added.